This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008235925

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008235932

Version 2020-01-22

Join the army of fans who LOVE Scott Mariani’s Ben Hope series …

‘Deadly conspiracies, bone-crunching action and a tormented hero with a heart … Scott Mariani packs a real punch’

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

The Ben Hope series

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Louisiana, May 1864

Built in the Greek Revival style, encircled by twenty-four noble Doric columns and standing proud amid a vast acreage of plantation estate, the mansion was one of the grandest and most aristocratic homes in all of the South. Its dozens of reception rooms, not to mention the splendid ballroom, had hosted some of Clovis Parish’s most celebrated social events of the forty years since its construction, positioning Athenian Oaks, as the property was named, at the very centre of the region’s high society.

On this day, however, the stately house was silent and virtually empty. Deep within its labyrinthine corridors, a very secret and important meeting was taking place. A meeting that its attendees knew very well could help to swing in their favour the outcome of the civil war that had been tearing the states of both North and South apart for three long, bloody years.

Of the four men seated around the table in the richly appointed dining room, only one was not wearing military uniform: for the good reason that he wasn’t an officer of the Confederate States Army but, rather, the civilian owner of Athenian Oaks.

His name was Leonidas Wilbanks Garrett. A Texan by birth, he had risen to become one of the wealthiest landowners in Louisiana by the time he was forty. Now, fifteen years on, the size of his fortune and spread of his cotton plantation were second to none. As was the workforce of slaves he owned, who occupied an entire village of filthy and squalid huts far out of sight of the mansion’s windows.

But it was by virtue of L.W. Garrett’s renown as a physician and scientist, rather than his acumen for commerce, that the three high-ranking Confederate officers had made the journey to Clovis Parish to consult him. For this special occasion they were majestically decked out in full dress uniform, gleaming with gold braid. The most senior man present wore the insignia of a general of the C.S.A. He had lost an eye at the Second Battle of Bull Run and wore a patch over his scarred socket. He had also lost all three of his sons during the course of the conflict, and feared that he would have lost them for nothing if the Yankees prevailed.

A bitter outcome which, at this point in time, it seemed nothing could prevent. Since the crushing defeat at Chattanooga late the previous year and the subsequent appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as General-in-Chief of the Union forces, the turning point seemed to have come. Rout after rout; the tattered and depleted army of the South was in danger of being completely overrun.

‘Gentlemen, we stand to lose this damn war,’ the general said in between puffs of his cigar. ‘And lose it we will, unless saved by a miracle.’

‘Desperate times call for desperate measures,’ said the second officer, who was knocking back the wine as fast as it could be served. He was a younger man, a senior colonel known for his fiery temperament both on and off the battlefield. The last cavalry charge he had personally led had resulted in him having his right arm blown off by a cannonball. It had been found two hundred yards away, his dead hand still clutching his sabre. He now wore the empty sleeve of his grey tunic pinned across his chest, after the fashion of Lord Nelson.

‘Indeed they do,’ the general agreed. ‘And if that yellowbelly Jeff Davis and his lapdog Lee don’t have the guts to do what’s necessary to win this war, then by God someone else must step in and do it for them.’

This provoked a certain ripple of consternation around the table, as it was somewhat shocking to refer to the President of the Confederate States of America, not to mention the revered General Robert E. Lee, hero of the South, in such harsh language. But nobody protested. The facts of the matter were plain. The dreadful prospect of a Union victory was looming large on the horizon. Leonidas Garrett, whose business empire stood to be devastated if a victorious Abraham Lincoln acted on his promise to liberate all slaves in North America, dreaded it as much as anyone.

After another toke on his cigar and a quaff of wine, the general leaned towards Garrett and fixed him with his one steely eye. ‘Mr Garrett, how certain are you that this bold scheme of yours can work?’

‘If it can be pulled off, which I believe it can, then my certainty is absolute,’ Garrett replied coolly.

The third senior officer was the only conspirator present at the top-secret gathering who was yet to be fully convinced of Garrett’s plan. ‘Gentlemen, I must confess to having great misgivings about the enormity of what we are contemplating. Satan himself could scarcely have devised such wickedness.’

The general shot him a ferocious glare. ‘At a time like this, if it took Beelzebub himself to lead the South to victory, I would gladly give him the job.’

The objector made no reply. The general stared at him a while longer, then asked, ‘Are you with us or not?’

‘You know I am.’ No sir, no display of deference to a man of far superior rank. Because rank was not an issue at a meeting so clandestine, so illicit, that any and all of them could have been court-martialled and executed by their own side for taking part. What they were envisaging was in flagrant contravention of the rules of war and gentlemanly conduct.

Silence around the table for a few moments. The dissenter said, ‘Still, a damned ugly piece of work.’

‘I’m more interested in knowing if we can make it work,’ said the one-armed colonel.

‘It isn’t a new idea, by any measure,’ Garrett said. ‘Such tactics, though brutal, have been used in warfare throughout history. Trust me, gentlemen. We have the means to make it work, and if successful its effect on the enemy will be catastrophic. It will bring the North to its knees, cripple their infrastructure and force those Yankee scumbellies to surrender within a month. But I must reiterate,’ he added, casting a solemn warning look around the table, ‘that not a single word of this discussion can ever be repeated to anyone outside of this room. Not anyone, is that perfectly clear?’

Throughout the meeting, a young female negro servant dressed in a maid’s outfit had been silently hovering in the background, watching the levels in their wine glasses and meekly stepping up to the table now and then to top them up from a Venetian crystal decanter. Nobody acknowledged her presence in the room, least of all her legal owner, Garrett. As far as he was concerned she might simply have been a well-trained dog, rather than a human being. A dog, moreover, that could be whipped, chained up to starve, or used as target practice without compunction or accountability at any time, just for the hell of it.

Like Garrett, none of the three Southern-born officers gave an instant’s thought to the possibility that this young slave girl could be absorbing every single word of their discussion. And that she could remember it perfectly, so perfectly that it could later be repeated verbatim. Nor did any man present have any notion as to who the negro servant woman really was. Her role in the downfall of their plan was a part yet to be played. Just how devastating a part, none of them could yet know either.

‘So, gentlemen, we’re agreed,’ the general said after they’d spent some more time discussing the particulars of Garrett’s radical scheme. ‘Let’s set this thing in motion and reclaim the South’s fortunes in this war.’ He raised his glass. ‘To victory!’

‘To victory!’ The toast echoed around the table. They clinked glasses and drank.

Her duty done, the slave humbly asked for permission to excuse herself and was dismissed with a cursory wave, whereupon she slipped from the room to attend to the rest of her daily chores. Though if any of them had paid her the least bit of heed, they might have wondered at the enigmatic little smile that curled her lips as she walked away.

Chapter 1

Ben Hope had often had the feeling that trouble had a knack of following him around. No matter what, where or how, it dogged his steps and stuck to him like a shadow. If trouble were a person, he’d have felt justified in thinking that individual was stalking him. If he’d been of a superstitious bent he could have thought he was haunted by it, as by a ghost. Whatever the case, it seemed as if at every juncture of his life, wherever he went and however he tried to steer out of its path, there it was waiting for him.

And it was here, pushing midnight on one sultry and thus-far uneventful September evening in the unlikely setting of a tiny backstreet liquor store in Clovis Parish, Louisiana, that he was about to make trouble’s acquaintance yet one more time.

If the most recent round of airport security regulations hadn’t made it more bother than it was worth to carry his old faithful hip flask across the Atlantic among his hand luggage, and if the bar and grill where he’d spent most of that evening had stocked the right kind of whisky to satisfy one of those late-night hankerings for a dram or three of the good stuff that occasionally come over a man, then two things wouldn’t have happened that night. First, there would have been nobody else around to prevent an innocent man from getting badly hurt, most probably shot to death.

Which was a good thing. And second, Ben wouldn’t have been plunged into a whole new kind of mess, even for him.

Which was less of a good thing. But that’s what happens when you have a talent for trouble. He should have been used to it by now.

It was nine minutes to midnight when Ben walked into the liquor store. It was as warm and humid inside as it was outside, with a lazy ceiling fan doing little more than stir the thick air around. An unseen radio was blaring country music, a stomping up-tempo bluegrass instrumental that was alive with fiddles and banjos and loud enough to hear from half a block away.

The sign on the door said they were open till 2 a.m. Ben soon saw he was the only customer in the place, which didn’t surprise him given the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the street. Maybe they got a rush of business just before closing time.

The entire store could have fitted inside Ben’s farmhouse kitchen back home in Normandy, but was crammed from floor to ceiling across four aisles with enough booze to float a battleship. A glance up and down the heaving displays revealed a bewildering proliferation of beer and bourbon varieties, lots of rum, a smattering of local Muscadine wines and possibly not much else. He was resigned to not finding what he was looking for, but it had to be worth a shot.

Alone behind the counter sat an old guy in a frayed check shirt and a John Deere cap, with crêpey skin and lank grey hair, who was so absorbed in the pages of the fishing magazine he was reading that he didn’t seem to have noticed Ben come in.

‘How’re they biting?’ Ben said with a smile over the blare of the music, pointing at the magazine. The friendly traveller making conversation with the locals.

The old timer suddenly registered his customer’s presence and gazed up with watery, pale eyes. ‘Say what, sonny?’ He didn’t appear to possess a single tooth in his mouth.

It had to be thirty years since the last time anyone had called Ben ‘sonny’. Abandoning the fishing talk, which wasn’t his best conversation topic anyway, he asked the old timer what kinds of proper scotch he had for sale. Whisky with a ‘y’ and not an ‘ey’. Ben had never quite managed to develop a taste for bourbon, though in truth he’d drink pretty much anything if pushed. He had to repeat himself twice, as it was now becoming clear that the storekeeper was stone deaf as well as toothless, which probably accounted for the volume of the music.

Finally the old timer got it and directed him to a section of an aisle on the far end of the store. ‘Third aisle right there, walk on down to the bottom. Hope you find what you’re lookin’ for.’ The Cajun accent was more noticeable on him, sounding less Americanised than the younger locals. A sign of the times, no doubt, as the traditional ways and cultures eroded as gradually and surely as Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.

Ben said thanks. The old man frowned and peered at him with the utmost curiosity, as though this blond-haired foreigner were the strangest creature who’d ever stepped inside his store. ‘Say, where you from, podnuh? Ain’t from aroun’ here, that’s for damn sure.’ Ben couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called ‘partner’, either.

‘Long way from home,’ Ben replied.

The old timer cupped a hand behind his ear and craned his wrinkly neck. ‘Whassat?’ They could still be having this conversation come closing time. Hearing aids obviously hadn’t found their way this far south yet. Or maybe the oldster was afraid they’d cramp his style with the girls. Ben just smiled and walked off in search of the section he wanted. The storekeeper gazed after him for a moment and then shrugged and fell back into squinting at his magazine.

Following the directions, Ben soon found the range of scotches at the bottom of the last aisle, tucked away in what seemed a forgotten, seldom-frequented corner of the store judging by the layers of dust on the shelf. He began browsing along the rows of bottles, recognising with pleasure the names of some old friends among them. Knockando, Johnny Walker, Cutty Sark, Glenmorangie and a dozen others – it wasn’t a bad selection, all things considered. Then he spotted the solitary bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask single malt, one of his personal favourites for its dark, peaty, smokey flavour.

It had been sitting there so long that the bottle label was flecked with mildew. He took it down from the shelf, wiped off the dust and weighed his discovery appreciatively in his hand, savouring the prospect of taking it back to his hotel room for a couple of hours’ enjoyment before bed. The precious liquid had come a long way from its birthplace on rugged, windswept Islay in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, for him to stumble across here in Southern Louisiana of all places. Maybe this was something more profound and meaningful than mere serendipity. Enough to make a man of lapsed religious faith start believing again, or almost.

Ben was carrying the bottle back up the aisle as though it were holy water when, over the blare of the music, he heard raised voices coming from the direction of the counter. As he reached the top of the aisle he saw a pair of guys who had just walked in.

One was big and ox-like in a studded motorcycle jacket with a patch on the back showing a gothic-helmeted grinning skull and the legend IRON SPARTANS MC, LOUISIANA. He was slow-moving and wore a calm smile. The other was a foot shorter, wiry and wasted in a denim vest cut-off that bared long, skinny arms with faded blue ink. He was agitated and angry, eyes darting as if he’d snorted a tugrope-sized line of cocaine.

The pair might have been regular customers, but Ben guessed not. Because he was fairly sure that, even in the Deep South, regular customers didn’t generally come storming into a place toting sawn-off pump shotguns and magnum revolvers.

Great.

The armed robbers were too intent on threatening the storekeeper to have noticed that the three of them weren’t alone. Ben retreated quickly out of sight behind the corner of the aisle and peeked through a gap between stacks of Dixie beer cans.

The hefty ox-like guy had the old timer by the throat with one large hand and the muzzle of the sawn-off jammed against his chest in the other. The storekeeper was pale and terrified and looked about to drop dead from heart failure. Meanwhile the small ratty guy tucked his loaded and cocked .357 Smith & Wesson down the front of his jeans, perhaps not the wisest gunhandling move Ben had ever seen, and vaulted over the counter to start rifling through the cash register. He was yelling furiously, ‘Is this all ya got, y’old fuckin’ coot? Where’s the rest of it?’

The old man’s eyes boggled and he seemed unable to speak. The disconcertingly calm guy with the shotgun looked as if he couldn’t wait to blow his victim’s internal organs all over the shop wall. It was hard to tell who was more dangerous, the little angry psycho or the big laid-back one.

Ben puffed his cheeks, thought fuck it, counted to three.

Then he sprang into action.

Six minutes to midnight, but the evening was only just getting started.

12 След.

The Rebel’s Revenge

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SCOTT MARIANI The Rebel’s Revenge

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Chapter 1

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SCOTT MARIANI
The Rebel’s Revenge