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Dedication

for Sifu

Once known, forever loved, never forgotten

Discover the Series You Can’t Put Down …

‘A high level of realism … the action scenes come thick and fast. Like the father of the modern thriller, Frederick Forsyth, Mariani has a knack for embedding his plots in the fears and preoccupations of their time’

Shots Magazine

‘The plot was thrilling … but what is all the more thrilling is the fantastic way Mariani moulds historical events into his story’

Guardian

‘Scott Mariani is an ebook powerhouse’

The Bookseller

‘Hums with energy and pace … If you like your conspiracies twisty, your action bone-jarring, and your heroes impossibly dashing, then look no further. The Ben Hope series is exactly what you need’

Mark Dawson

‘Slick, serpentine, sharp, and very, very entertaining. If you’ve got a pulse, you’ll love Scott Mariani; if you haven’t, then maybe you crossed Ben Hope’

Simon Toyne

‘Hits thrilling, suspenseful notes … a rollickingly good way to spend some time in an easy chair’

USA Today

‘Mariani constructs the thriller with skill and intelligence, staging some good action scenes, and Hope is an appealing protagonist’

Kirkus Reviews

‘If you haven’t read any Mariani before but love fast-paced action with a historical reference, maybe this one won’t be your last’

LibraryThing

‘A breathtaking ride through England and Europe’

Suspense Magazine

‘This is my first Scott Mariani book … and I totally loved it. It goes on at a good pace, and for me Ben Hope was brilliant, the ultimate decent good guy that you are rooting for’

AlwaysReading.net

‘Scott Mariani writes fantastic thrillers. His series of Ben Hope books shows no sign of slowing down’

Ben Peyton, actor (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Band of Brothers, Nine Lives)

‘A really excellent series of books, and would make a wonderful television series as well!’

Breakaway Reviews

‘Scott Mariani seamlessly weaves the history and action together. His descriptive passages are highly visual, and no word is superfluous. The storyline flows from beginning to end; I couldn’t put it down’

Off the Shelf Books

PROLOGUE

Afghanistan, February 1989

Rigby Cahill paused on the steep, rocky slope to catch his breath, condensation billowing in great clouds from his rasping lungs. The icy mountain wind burned his cheeks raw and his hands felt numb. Pushing sixty years of age, he wondered if maybe he was getting too old for this kind of stuff.

He and his team of Afghan diggers had climbed several hundred metres from the valley far below. The small convoy of vehicles that had brought them as far as they could up the mountainside looked like miniature models from up here. Abdul and the others halted for a moment while their boss stood panting and gasping a few moments longer. One or two of them exchanged private grins at the expense of the wealthy American guy who was paying them for this little expedition. Paying a lot of money, because this was by no means a safe place to be. The men were all carrying rifles as well as shovels and picks.

‘Give me a minute, guys,’ Rigby said. As he clapped his hands to get the circulation going again he gazed at the landscape around him, the same bleakly majestic scenery that had remained completely unchanged since Alexander the Great had marched his vast army though these same mountains, more than three hundred years before the birth of Christ. Even back in Alexander’s day this land had already been steeped in ancient history and soaked in the blood of countless dead. So many wars had been fought, so many had cruelly perished here. But Rigby understood the truth: that it was this barren, hostile, pitiless place itself that had been the ruination of every successive invading force, no matter how powerful, that had tried to make their conquest against it.

That was an intimidating thought for an outsider like Rigby Cahill, however well intentioned, who had made it his business to travel from a faraway land to disturb Afghanistan’s ancient secrets and wake up its ghosts. Hunting for lost antiquities was what he did for a living, whether it was relocating caches of stolen art from Nazi treasure trains, diving on sunken galleons off the coast of Sumatra or hacking through the South American jungle in search of Paititi, the fabled Incan City of Gold. He was no stranger to the sometimes hostile and dangerous corners of the world. And yet, this place haunted him. The looming white-capped mountains seemed to be watching, as though they knew something. The eerie moaning whistle of the wind made Rigby shiver with something more than cold.

He moved on, but only a few steps before he halted again, thinking he could make out a different sound half masked behind that of the wind. A distant crackling rumble. Like an earthquake, perhaps. Or a faraway clap of thunder? Craning his neck upwards he scanned the wintry pallor of the sky, a vast great dome above them, the cold sun directly overhead reflecting dazzlingly against the snowy peaks. He couldn’t see a single cloud. He glanced quizzically at Abdul, who shook his head with a knowing look and said, ‘Gunfire. The Mujahideen are not far away. We must be careful.’

They trekked onwards and upwards, dislodging rocks that tumbled down the slope. Now and then the crackle of distant gunfire still reached their ears, and the atmosphere was tense among the men. With the Soviets gone, the war was technically over; but the Afghan Mujahideen warriors were still everywhere, armed to the teeth and ready for action, while the political situation in general remained extremely unstable. Trouble was liable to erupt again at any time, and Rigby was painfully aware that time, itself, was a commodity he might not have much of.

It took them another half-hour or so of climbing before they finally reached the spot. Rigby checked his map once more and looked around him, orientating himself from his memory of last time he’d visited this place. That was ten years ago, back in 1979 just before the Russian tanks and troops had flooded into Afghanistan and made a mess of his plans, forcing him to abandon his search after such a tantalisingly promising start. All this time he’d been jumping with impatience to come back here and find out whether his instincts had been right, that the tentative discovery of the gold coins pointed to the existence of something far greater. If so, he could only hope and pray that nobody else had beaten him to it the intervening years.

This was it now. The moment of truth.

The men stood in a silent circle around him as Rigby crouched down and examined the ground. There were no particular landmarks anywhere, barely a wind-torn bush, nothing but rock; but he’d pictured this spot so many times in his mind during the past ten years that it was burned deep into his memory. Yes, here was the big stone under which he’d found the hollow containing the small but sensational cache of gold Alexandrine coins. His heart had been fluttering like a butterfly on that day ten years ago, just like it was doing now.

A decade of anxiety was at an end. In all these years, his discovery had remained safe. If he was right about what might lie buried here, then it was all his for the finding!

He nodded, barely able to contain his excitement. ‘This is the place,’ he said to Abdul, the only one of the digger team who spoke English. ‘Let’s get started.’

‘Right here?’ Abdul said, pointing straight down at his feet.

Rigby hesitated, casting his expert eye over the ground as though it were an X-ray machine that could discern the shapes of ancient city walls buried deep under all those tons of rock and dirt. Trusting his intuition he motioned to a slight mound a few yards away. ‘Let’s try over there instead.’ He directed them to spread out a little and dig in different parts of it, to scatter their risk of missing the right spot.

The men propped their rifles against boulders, unslung their packs, grabbed their shovels and picks and set to work. Rigby stood back and watched, but his impatience soon got the better of him and he grabbed a pick for himself and joined them. He was physically quite out of shape, as the climb had proved, but now his enthusiasm was unstoppable as he hacked and chipped breathlessly away. Gradually, they hollowed out the top of the mound and spread their efforts over the surrounding area. It was tough work and sweat stung Rigby’s eyes despite the cold. The distant gunfire seemed to have died away, though he was barely even aware of it.

Just when Rigby was beginning to doubt his judgement as to where they should be digging, his pick blade hit something hard that gave a dull clang unlike the sound of a normal rock. He kept working at it, pouring sweat and puffing like an asthmatic rhinoceros, and within a few more minutes he’d uncovered what appeared to be the corner of a stone block. He got down on his knees and carefully brushed away the loose dirt. The block’s straight edges were chipped and crumbled with age but beyond any doubt a manmade object. There was another one right beside it, some bits of the ancient mortar still visible.

He called to the workers and showed them what he’d discovered, and they all started digging energetically to uncover more of it. ‘Careful, careful,’ he kept urging them, even though none except Abdul could understand a word he said. ‘These stone blocks are over two thousand years old!’

The hours dragged wearily by. Shovel load by shovel load, boulder by boulder, they stripped away the rubble of two millennia and the first tantalising outline of the ancient walls revealed itself. The temperature had dropped a couple more degrees as evening approached, and Rigby’s teeth were chattering. The threatening gunfire in the distance was long gone by now, but that didn’t mean that the Mujahideen warriors wouldn’t be back. Many different units belonging to different factions patrolled these hills regularly, on foot, in jeeps or on horseback, bristling with weapons. These were lean, tough, battle-hardened, implacable men who’d known nothing but fighting and hardship all their lives. After years of bitter guerrilla war, with backing from their secret allies the CIA, they’d managed to defeat the might of the USSR. What enemy would they set their sights on next?

The light was beginning to fail by the time Rigby’s men had unearthed the rectangular shape of a large stone slab, broad and long enough to be the floor base of a significant building. There was no longer much doubt in Rigby’s mind of what they were looking at, but he still needed the final proof.

It wouldn’t be long before he had it.

Through a five-inch-wide crack in the floor slab, Rigby shone a torch to see that beneath it was a hollow chamber of indeterminate size, partially collapsed. As he angled the light this way and that his heart leapt at the unmistakable glimmer of gold from within. Abdul was poised at his shoulder, peering intently through the crack and seeing what he saw. The Afghan’s normally laconic expression filled with excitement.

Now, their tiredness completely forgotten, they set about widening the crack to get at what was inside. ‘Gently, gently!’ Rigby said over and over. ‘Don’t do any more damage than you have to!’ Using crowbars they carefully worked at the gap until it was possible for the most slightly built of them, a fourteen-year-old boy called Safi, to slip through and drop down into the hollow space below. Rigby was worried that the chamber might collapse and bury the boy alive.

The casket was much too heavy for young Safi to bring up, so they had to lower a rope with a sling attached and haul it up through the gap, swaying and swinging precariously as it inched upwards. Rigby was hoarse from repeatedly urging caution. At last, the casket was through the gap, grabbed by eager hands that set the swinging golden oblong box carefully down on the ground. At the same moment there was a cry from inside the chamber, and for a heart-stopping instant Rigby thought something terrible must have happened to the boy. But no, Safi had found another casket!

The second casket was soon joined by a third, then a fourth, all laid out in a row. By the light of torches and lanterns Rigby knelt on the ground and used a brush to wipe away the filth of millennia to reveal the royal seal of Alexander the Great cast in gold on the side of the first casket.

This was it. The final, irrefutable proof he’d hoped to find. He bowed his head, almost weeping with emotion as thousands of years of history seemed to flash in front of him. He murmured, ‘My God. We found it. We found it.’

The men were hopping from foot to foot with excitement. Rigby took out a penknife and gently, oh so gently, prised open the seal of the first casket lid. As the lid came up, he breathed in the air that had been trapped inside for some 2,300 years.

But nothing could have totally prepared him for what the casket contained. He reached in a trembling hand and came out with a fistful of glinting gold. Coins, jewellery, figurines. Magnificent objects from the time of Alexander. More, far far more, than had ever been found in one place before now. It was unbelievable. Dizzying. He’d come here simply in the hope of uncovering the Alexandrian lost city of Zakara. This was a hundred times – no, a thousand times – beyond what he could have dreamed of. And for all they knew, there could be dozens more caskets buried inside the chamber.

By now Safi had come up from the hole and was standing behind Rigby’s shoulder, Abdul at the other, staring at the loot like hungry hawks. As they all watched, Rigby opened the second casket. It was even fuller than the first. Then the third.

Rigby had tears in his eyes. He couldn’t tear his gaze away.

Abdul’s initial excitement seemed to have died down, and he was looking thoughtful. He muttered, ‘Who does this belong to?’

‘It belongs to Afghanistan,’ Rigby told him. ‘To your country. It’ll be the finest exhibit in the state museum in Kabul.’

Abdul shook his head. He said softly, ‘No.’

Rigby wasn’t quite sure he’d heard right. ‘What do you mean, no?’

The clack of a rifle bolt in the darkness. Rigby’s blood froze. He turned slowly to see the muzzle of the weapon pointing in his face, held by Safi.

Abdul said, ‘No. It belongs to us.’

Chapter 1

Ben Hope often reflected on all the bad things he’d done in his life. The failures, the mistakes, the disappointments, the times when he hadn’t managed to achieve what he’d set out to do, or had fallen short of the rigorous standards he expected of himself. The people he’d hurt, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Whatever his professional track record might indicate about his character and integrity, however many personal sacrifices he’d made in the pursuit of doing good, and in spite of his history of saving lives and bringing justice to the wrongdoers of this world, there were moments when all he could see about himself was fault and weakness, and his mind was preyed on by remorse and self-blame over the path he’d taken in his life.

And yet, for all that, in his more reflective moments even he had to admit that he must have done some good things too. Because every now and then, according to the laws of fate, or karma, or whatever obscure metaphysical forces were responsible for the allocation of recompenses and just deserts, as the case may be, an unexpected reward came to him that he couldn’t otherwise have deserved.

One such reward was close beside him at this moment, as the pair of them stood there alone on the empty, windswept beach, clasping hands, listening to the crash and boom of the waves breaking on the shore and watching the glimmering orange ball of the sun dip gradually over the sea.

Neither one of them spoke until the sun had finally vanished behind the horizon, the distant cloud banks like a mountain range glowing in a dramatic blaze of crimsons, golds and purples. Then the colour slowly faded, the spectacle died away and the chill of dusk began to set in.

She leaned her head against his shoulder and tenderly squeezed his hand. ‘Our last sunset,’ she said.

‘It didn’t have to be,’ he replied.

‘You know it did, Ben.’

Her name was Abbie Logan, and she’d been part of his life – pretty much his whole life in fact – for the last six weeks. They had met by chance in her native Australia, and then a romantic impulse (not something that often occurred in Ben’s daily existence) had prompted him to invite her to come back to France with him.

Half English, half Irish on his mother’s side, he had moved around a great deal in his past, both during and since his military days; but for some years now he’d been settled in a quiet corner of Normandy, a place called Le Val. Abbie had never been to Europe before, never known anywhere outside of the Northern Territory in which she’d been born and raised.

Their time together had been among the happiest that Ben could remember: showing her some of his favourite haunts, walking around the ancient woods and rolling green fields that surrounded Le Val, swimming in the sea, hiking in the hills, introducing Abbie to some of the local cuisine, and generally enjoying one another’s company to the utmost. They’d managed to compress six months’ worth of intense romance into as many weeks, and sometimes it had seemed to him that it could go on forever. But after a lot of heartfelt discussion, the two of them had come to the mutual acceptance that this couldn’t be the love of their lives. Abbie had her own life to return to, her own direction, her roots in her beloved Northern Territory and the responsibility of running the successful air charter business she’d inherited from her late father. As much as she’d treasured every moment of her time here with Ben and would never forget it, this just wasn’t her world. And so the time would soon be coming for them to part ways. One final night together, and she’d be leaving in the morning.

‘I’m going to miss you, Abbie Logan,’ he repeated for the hundredth time that day, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and drawing her in tight. She brushed a lock of blond hair away from her face and smiled up at him with a twinkle of those impossibly blue eyes.

‘I’m going to miss you too, Ben Hope,’ she replied. ‘Until the next time, eh? Australia’s not that far to travel, for a globe-trotting adventurer like you.’

‘You just try to keep me away,’ he replied.

But they both knew in their hearts that tomorrow morning would probably be the last time they would see each other. Ben ached at the thought of losing her. But what else could he do? Propose marriage? He could imagine her response: ‘Why spoil a good thing, Ben?’ And he’d have had to agree.

Abbie had travelled to France in unlikely style, on a private jet belonging to Ben’s sister’s business corporation, Steiner Industries. It wasn’t exactly a typical mode of transport for Ben either, and how that situation had come about was a long story. Whatever the case, despite being a keen pilot with a passion for aircraft and a particular admiration for Ruth’s sleek white Bombardier Global, Abbie had staunchly refused to be indulged in such privileged luxuries for the return trip. Early next morning he drove her the twenty kilometres from Le Val to the airport at Cherbourg, where her commercial flight was due to depart at ten. Neither of them wanted a big emotional farewell. By unspoken mutual consent no sloppy sentiments, and especially not the dreaded words ‘I love you’ or anything like them, were to be expressed. She gave him a tight hug, a last quick kiss, and then she was gone.

He stood outside the terminal and lit a Gauloise in the mid-morning sunshine as her plane took off. He watched it until it disappeared into the distance, then crushed out his cigarette, turned his back and walked slowly with a heavy heart to his BMW Alpina.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said to his German shepherd, Storm, who was waiting for him in the back of the car. The seats were all nicely matted with black, tan and golden dog hair. He thumped his tail happily and made a little whimper.

‘You liked her, didn’t you?’ Ben asked him.

Thump, thump.

‘Yeah. Me too. Between you and me, buddy, I think I liked her a little too much. Anyway, let’s go home.’

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