Soon afterwards, a tiny white dot appeared on the sea and grew rapidly larger until Ben could make out the splash of foam from the motorboat’s bows and the faces of the two men on board. A few yards from the shore, its pilot cut the motor and let the boat glide to a halt in the shallow water. Ben didn’t recognise him, but the second occupant was familiar enough. Stinker gave a leer as he climbed out and crossed the wet sand towards Ben. The black rubber butt of a 9mm protruded from the holster in his waistband. ‘Been a good little doggy?’ he said.
‘Good as gold,’ Ben told him. ‘You flossed today?’
Stinker’s face reddened. He motioned for Ben to hold out his leg, took a key from his pocket and bent down and roughly undid the ankle tag.
‘Let’s go,’ the pilot said, and fired up the outboard.
Ben splashed over to the boat and climbed in, his leg feeling strangely light after getting used to the lump around his ankle for three days. The pilot steered the burbling boat around and away from the shore. ‘Pickup complete,’ Stinker said into his phone. ‘We’re on our way.’
Ben sat quietly as the motorboat rode over the sea and Little Cayman shrank into the distance behind them. For the first few minutes of the journey, Stinker eyed him with suspicion; then, realising Ben wasn’t going to be any trouble, he grinned smugly to himself and looked away.
That was when Ben slipped his hand in his pocket, took out the small package he’d carefully double-wrapped in kitchen roll, and laid it on the seat next to him. He started unwrapping it.
Before Stinker could take notice of what he was doing or react in any way, Ben had stepped across the boat towards him, drawn back his elbow and punched the pointed end of the four-inch sliver of broken Red Stripe bottle hard into the side of his neck, just below the ear.
Stinker would have let out a scream, but Ben’s hand was over his mouth and once the razor-sharp glass sawing rapidly across his throat had sliced through the gristle of his trachea, he had no air to make a sound. Ben moved out of the way of the blood spray. He let the man’s upper body flop backwards over the side and held onto his belt long enough to grab his phone from his pocket and the pistol from its holster.
The pilot hadn’t heard a thing over the noise of the outboard, but sensing the rock of the boat he turned to see what was happening behind him. Ben shot him twice in the head and heaved his body into the water with Stinker’s. The motorboat’s wake turned frothy red. It wouldn’t be long before the sharks turned up.
Taking over at the wheel, Ben used Stinker’s phone to make a call. ‘It’s me. Everything ready?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The beautiful, stately three-masted hundred-metre sailing yacht had cost her present owner just a shade over eight million pounds. She was capable of twenty knots under a full spread of canvas, more if her massive auxiliary engines were brought to bear. At the moment, though, her loose-hanging sails crackled in the soft breeze and cast a welcome shade over the deck as she stood at anchor just out of sight of Little Cayman.
Lounging in that shade, sipping on tall iced drinks, chatting and laughing, most of them casually attired in shorts and sandals and polo tops or florid Hawaii shirts, were nine of the world’s publicly least-known but most influential power-brokers: the senior committee of the organisation known only as Tartarus. Their ages ranged from early fifties to late seventies; between them they possessed over three and a half centuries’ worth of experience at the highest, most secretive level of international politics, and the kind of knowledge that could tear a government down and reduce its country to rubble overnight. With the recent exception of Hayden Roth, not one of them had personally discharged a firearm at a living human being for many years — yet the total of the victims they’d claimed during their careers couldn’t easily be counted.
‘Excuse me one moment, gentlemen,’ said Roth. He carried his clinking gin and tonic over to the chrome rail that lined the deck, and looked at his watch. The boat should arrive soon, he thought. His eyes shaded from the sun by the brim of his Panama hat, he scanned the blue horizon. No sign of it yet. Had there been some delay?
At that moment, his phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘Jenner, where are—?’
‘Jenner’s indisposed at the moment,’ Ben said on the other end of the line.
Roth was too thunderstruck to utter a reply.
‘Look up,’ Ben told him. ‘Due south. You should be able to see me. I’m that little yellow speck in the sky.’ He had to talk loudly over the thrumming rumble of the single radial propeller engine a few feet above him. From where he was sitting behind the Supermarine Sea Otter’s mass of dials and gauges, he could just about make out the majestic sails of the Hydra far below. He eased the joystick, bringing the aircraft down in a shallow dive closer to the waves.
‘Hope? What … y-you were supposed to meet the boat,’ Roth stammered.
‘I did,’ Ben said. ‘But there’s been a slight change of plan.’ He checked his readings: air speed, engine speed, flaps; the altitude gauge spun freely as the Sea Otter dropped another hundred feet, almost skimming the waves. She was so heavily laden that it would take all her power to get her up again. But that wasn’t Ben’s idea.
The Hydra was coming closer with every second. Ben could see the little matchstick figures on the deck. ‘Is that you in the dinky straw hat, Roth?’
‘Hope, what the hell are you doing?’ Roth’s voice growled on the end of the line.
‘I told you I was coming on board,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what I’m doing.’
Things might have been different if Hayden Roth hadn’t made one mistake: that night at the disused military base, he’d let it slip that it would be a CIC flight taking Ben to Little Cayman.
From there, the new plan had hatched quickly in Ben’s mind. In the bathroom of the Gulfstream he’d used a pick-pocketed ballpoint to write a message to Tamara on the inside of his cigarette packet, asking her to get back to Grand Cayman as quickly as she could, and giving her the coordinates to fly Nick’s Sea Otter to Little Cayman and meet him on the shore outside Palm Tree Lodge. A hastily-scribbled footnote said: ‘BRING DRUMS SPARE AVGAS. MANY AS POSS.’
On the outside edge of the cigarette packet Ben had written in block capitals the words: “FOR TAMARA MARTÍNEZ, FROM BEN HOPE. URGENT!!”, and below them the secret phone number on which she could be contacted. When he’d used his smoking ploy on board the Trislander later that day to get the attention of Jo Sundermann, the CIC flight attendant, he’d held the cigarette packet out in such a way that she was sure to see what was written on it. From the look on her face as she’d taken the packet, he’d been sure that she’d call the number. Tamara would surely realise that the message could only have come from Ben, and once she returned to Grand Cayman and Jo Sundermann showed her the cigarette pack, she’d recognise the unusual brand from the night they’d sat in her kitchen.
As to whether Tamara would respond to his call for help in time — that was something Ben could only hope for.
The first day of his captivity at Palm Tree Lodge had passed without anything happening. As the second day had dragged on, Ben had grown steadily more and more anxious and painfully aware of the far too many weaknesses in his plan: Jo Sundermann might have binned the cigarette pack without calling Tamara; or maybe Tamara hadn’t answered her phone; or maybe she’d been too frightened to help. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Towards sunset on the second day, just as he was starting to become despondent, Ben’s heart had leapt at the rumble of the approaching aircraft and he’d hurried outside to see the bright yellow Sea Otter touch down on the water and taxi towards the shore.