The Armada Legacy

Chapter Forty-Six

No alarm was raised as Ben and Nico crossed the open ground to the compound gates. No guards appeared to challenge them. Up close, they could see that the tall iron gates were buckled and bent, as though they’d been rammed violently open from the inside. There was nothing to stop anyone walking straight in.

Ben worked the bolt on his rifle, but even as he chambered the round he knew he wouldn’t be needing it. Not here, not now.

‘It’s weird,’ Nico muttered. ‘Last time I was here, this place crawled like a fucking rats’ lair. Where’d they all go?’

Ben said nothing. He would almost rather have been shot at. Every step nearer the cluster of buildings deepened his conviction that something terrible had happened here: something that his instincts told him was connected with Brooke.

The acrid stink of the burned-out section of the house wafted across the compound on the warm breeze. He knelt, examining the vehicle tracks on the hard-packed earth. There were dozens of them, made by knobbly all-terrain tyres and dug in hard, leaving furrows, as though one four-wheel drive after another after another had gone speeding out of the gates in such a tearing hurry that nobody had bothered closing the place up behind them, or even leaving anyone to guard it. The tyre tracks all led out of a large square building with doors like those of an aircraft hangar. The doors gaped open. Ben shone his light inside. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight. He tried to imagine the kind of emergency situation that would make a high-security fortress like this empty itself so completely. Possibilities filled his head. None of them was reassuring.

Through an archway and along a short path flanked by flowerbeds, and they were at the grand entrance of the main house. It too was hanging open, as unguarded as the front gates. Ben tensed, darting his gaze all around him. Was he walking straight into a trap here? Had Serrato somehow been alerted that they were coming?

But if it was a trap, it was taking a long time to spring. Nico muttered something in Spanish as they walked into the huge marble-floored entrance hall. Ornamental plants and colourful flowers spilled from decorative urns. Paintings adorned the walls. The hallway was surrounded by doors. Ben stepped across to one of them, his rifle ready, and pushed it open. He switched on the light and found himself staring into a large empty salon with a grand piano at the far end.

Across the hallway, Nico called softly, ‘I think you need to see this, man.’ Ben shut the salon door and stepped over to see what Nico wanted to show him. He was pointing inside another empty room, one that was decked out with wood panels and leather furniture.

‘The picture,’ Nico said.

Ben looked where he was pointing, and saw with a cold shiver the gilt-framed oil portrait of the woman he’d instantly have taken for Brooke if he hadn’t known better by now.

‘Alicia,’ he murmured.

‘I told you, man. She’s like a sick fantasy for him.’

And that sick fantasy was the only thing keeping Brooke Marcel alive. But where was she? Ben raced through the ground floor, flinging open door after door, flipping lights on in room after room with his finger on the trigger.

Nothing. Between them they combed methodically through the house as far as the sweeping crimson-carpeted staircase. Nico motioned towards it with a questioning look. Ben nodded. The two of them started making their way upwards, barely breathing, listening hard for any tiny sound and hearing nothing. There seemed to be no sign of life – but Ben would open every door in the whole damn place before he’d be satisfied there was nothing here to find. ‘Split up,’ he whispered to Nico. ‘Yell if you find anything.’

‘I find anything, you’ll hear more than yells,’ Nico said, brandishing the revolver.

‘Be careful. Meet you back here in five minutes.’

Alone, Ben followed his nose through the opulent passageways towards the source of the burnt stink, so much stronger up here. Within minutes, he’d found it.

The suite of rooms had clearly been a luxurious one before the fire had ravaged it and turned it into a blackened shell. It had taken several fire extinguishers, their empty canisters discarded about the floor, to quell the blaze. The worst of it seemed to have been concentrated in the bedroom, where he found the charred remains of a four-poster bed. The curtains had been burned away from the open windows. The steel bars bolted to the outside were covered with soot.

Had Brooke been here? Ben’s intuition told him so. But his emotions were so badly frayed that he didn’t know if he could trust it. He searched through both rooms for some kind of trace of her. Lying on what was left of the bedroom rug was a scorched piece of clothing of some kind. He picked it up. It wasn’t anything he recognised as Brooke’s. It was the remains of a silky negligee or nightdress, most of the thin material blackened and burned away. Whose had it been? Alicia Serrato had been dead for some time. Had it been intended for some other woman? For Serrato’s captive?

As he let the ruined garment slip from his fingers, Ben felt broken glass crunch under his boot. He knelt down, poked around in the ashes and picked up a sliver of glass. He wiped the soot away carefully with his finger. The piece of glass was printed ‘HANEL’, the C missing. He sniffed it and caught the faint whiff of perfume.

Ben tossed the piece of glass back into the ashes and stood up with death in his heart. He’d come so far, and Brooke was still lost to him. Time was slipping through his fingers like fine sand.

He hurried away from the burnt-out room and tracked back through the corridors in search of Nico. ‘I’m in here,’ the Colombian called through an open doorway. Ben walked in to find him standing at a broad leather-topped antique desk rifling agitatedly through a sprawl of papers and documents. Behind him was the open door of a high-security wall safe.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Guess who left here in too much of a hurry to lock up his safe?’ Nico said, sifting roughly through more papers and tossing them on the floor. ‘For me, this is like being in Satan’s den, man.’

‘We have to move. Brooke’s not here.’

Nico seemed not to have heard him. ‘Thought maybe I could figure out where the sonofabitch’s gone. Instead I found this shit. You know what this is?’ Nico snatched up a glossy transparent folder. Ben saw that inside it was an old manuscript of some kind, heavily ornamented in red and gold and calligraphed in ink, frayed by dampness around the edges but otherwise perfectly preserved.

‘It’s the land grant from the King of Spain,’ Nico said. ‘This is what it’s all about, what the motherfucker’s been working towards all this time. Look at this other stuff. It explains everything.’

Weariness had suddenly gripped hold of Ben’s whole body. He flopped in a chair and let the rifle slip out of his fingers to the floor. He felt too weak and drained even to sink his head in his hands and cry for sheer frustration.

‘See?’ Nico was saying, holding up more papers. ‘Old genealogical records, family trees, going back centuries. Serrato’s been collecting this stuff for years. It’s got the stamp of the National Historical Archives in Madrid, dated seven years ago. You go back to 1588, you see the surname appear for the first time. Serrato, the old Serrato, was a Spanish sympathiser who took care of this Lady Anne Pennick, the wife of the English spy dude, after he’d been executed and she’d run to Spain. Guess the English were still hunting for her, so she entered into this guy’s protection and took his name. She was pregnant with her dead husband’s son. The kid grew up with the name Serrato.’

‘Serrato was the legitimate heir to the land,’ Ben muttered, but his mind was far away.

‘Right. He must have found out that the lost land grant was aboard the Armada ship that sank near Ireland. Been looking out for years hoping someone would find the wreck. Then along comes this guy Forsyte. Here’s all the news clippings that Serrato was keeping. He’d been following the salvage operation right from the start, just waiting to get his hands on the land grant knowing that all he had to do to stake a claim was work on the right government contacts here in Peru. And all the correspondence between his lawyers and some scum-sucking politician called Vargas is right here in this file. But the best part’s this.’

Nico snatched up a sheaf of printouts and held them out with a flourish. ‘Oil test reports, dating back more than four years. This is why he wanted that land so bad. Half a million of acres of worthless jungle? I don’t think so, man. More like half a million acres of the richest untapped oilfields in the whole Amazon lowlands. No wonder Serrato went to so much trouble getting hold of the land grant. It could make him a fucking billionaire ten times over. Nothing was gonna stop him.’

Oil, Ben thought. It did explain everything. Having already learned what lay underneath his ancestral land, Serrato must have been desperate to obtain from Roger Forsyte the only proof in the world that he was the heir to it. When Forsyte turned him down, believing he could score a better deal elsewhere by using the rediscovered documents to unmask a whole list of unsuspected English traitors from the time of the Spanish Armada, Serrato had then sent his people in to work on Simon Butler and find alternative ways of getting what he wanted.

‘Brooke just got in the way,’ Ben said out loud.

‘And she just happened to be a dead ringer for Serrato’s wife,’ Nico replied. ‘Wrong place, wrong time.’ Suddenly he tensed again, half-turned towards the door and then looked sharply at Ben with a frown creasing his brow. ‘You hear that?’

‘I heard it,’ Ben said. Suddenly alert and filled with energy again, he snatched up the rifle and pressed off the safety catch. Nico scooped the Colt Python from the desk. They both moved quickly for the doorway.

Out in the corridor, they heard it again. The distinct sound of voices, whispering furtively in Spanish. Ben and Nico spaced out with their weapons ready and their eyes glued to the corner up ahead from beyond which the voices were getting closer.

Five figures approaching. Ben saw them an instant before Nico did. As he stepped quickly round the corner and levelled the rifle into a close-range aim he could see that he hadn’t run into a squad of Ramon Serrato’s top goons.

Three men, two women. They must have heard the sound of intruders in the near-deserted house and, with all the guards gone, banded together to confront them. Two of the men were wearing white smocks, like chefs, both in their sixties and armed only with a kitchen knife between them. Tagging along behind them was a young kid of about seventeen, with dazed-looking eyes and the bemused grin of a simpleton. The younger of the two women was a tiny cowering thing who let out a shrill gasp when she saw the two intruders appear in the corridor ahead. The only one Ben might have been concerned about was the brute-featured woman in a maid’s uniform. She had hands as meaty and rough as a longshoreman’s, and in them was a small-bore shotgun that she had pointed from the hip.

The corridor was suddenly filled with cries and shouts. Ben and Nico yelled ‘Drop the weapon!’ simultaneously. The hatchet-faced woman might have toyed with the idea of letting blast with her shotgun, but only for an instant as she found herself peering down the muzzles of Ben’s .300 Win Mag and Nico’s Colt, both steadily and unflinchingly trained on the wide gap between her eyes.

She dropped the shotgun and stepped back from it, raising her hands. The cook with the knife did the same. Ben and Nico advanced, keeping their weapons trained on them. ‘In there,’ Ben said, motioning with the rifle barrel towards a doorway. For the first time he noticed that the brute-faced woman had a raised weal on her cheekbone that was turning purple, as if she’d recently been in a fight. With a surly look, she followed the rest of the servants through the door into an unused bedroom. Ben and Nico herded them up against the far wall. Ben bolted the door.

‘We came here for Serrato,’ Nico said in Spanish. ‘You fuckers tell us where he is, you walk out of here alive. Or else—’ He drew his finger across his throat and stuck his tongue out. It had a remarkable effect. The two cooks exchanged frightened glances. The waiflike servant girl was ready to collapse in a faint. Only the simple-minded young guy, who was grinning as though this were all some kind of game, and the brute-featured woman, who was scowling with hatred at Ben and Nico, didn’t look scared.

Ben returned the woman’s gaze. Something about her was oddly familiar, but he couldn’t place it. It wasn’t her face – he’d have remembered exactly where he’d seen a face like that before. It was something else; a strange kind of déjà vu.

‘Somebody better start talking pretty soon,’ Nico warned them, thumbing back the hammer of his Colt. The simple-minded kid was suddenly beginning to understand the situation and his lip had started to quiver.

That was when Ben realised with a shock what it was that was familiar about the woman. It wasn’t her. It was what she was wearing. Round her thick neck was a little gold chain, simple and plain and yet distinctive enough to him that he’d have recognised it anywhere, even on this ugly brute. It was the same little neck chain that Brooke had chosen in the jeweller’s shop in Paris – the one she always wore.

So Brooke had been here after all.

Feeling suddenly weak at the knees he lowered the rifle and reached out with his left hand to grab hold of the neck chain. ‘Where did you get this?’ The woman protested, tried to wriggle away and snatch the chain out of his fingers. ‘That doesn’t belong to you,’ he said. ‘You stole it, didn’t you? You took it from the woman who was here. Give it to me.’

The woman hesitated, then reluctantly took off the chain and thrust it into Ben’s hand. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded.

One of the cooks finally found his tongue. ‘Desaparecido,’ he said. Gone. El jefe, the boss, had gone too. It had been after the fire.

Ben reached into his pocket, flipped open his wallet and took out the photo of Brooke. ‘Is this her?’ he asked.

The two cooks and the young servant girl all nodded in unison. ‘Si, si,’ the simple-minded kid blurted out in his slurred voice. ‘La Señora Alicia!’ The young servant woman shook her head wistfully at the mention of the name. ‘No, Guillermo, la Señora Alicia está muerta!’

Under pressure, the servants explained between them that the fire had started the night before last. The rumour was that the woman had stolen a truck and made her escape while the men were putting it out. Not long afterwards, the boss had gone after her, taking everyone with him except a handful of poor staff. How could they cope on their own? The boss had been gone nearly two whole days. What would happen to them if he never returned?

Ben slipped Brooke’s photo back in his wallet with a shaking hand. Now he knew for sure. He’d found her, but he’d been too late. Forty-eight hours too late.

Instantly he started blaming himself. Thinking of how he’d wasted time over Cabeza in Montefrio, how he’d needlessly delayed in Chachapoyas, how he could have saved time by waiting for the storm to end and taking the floatplane from the Potro boat station.

‘Where did she go?’ Nico asked the servants. ‘Where’d your boss go after her?’

Shrugs, blank expressions. ‘Out there,’ said one of the cooks, waving at the dark window.

Nico looked at Ben. ‘How in hell could she have escaped? These guys are more tooled up than the Peruvian army.’

‘I found a smashed perfume bottle in the room where they were keeping her. That stuff’s highly flammable.’

‘You mean she set the place alight herself?’

‘That would be just like her.’

‘Holy shit.’ Nico shook his head. ‘Hate to say it, man, but if she’s out there all alone in that jungle, she doesn’t stand a chance.’

‘She wouldn’t have escaped without some kind of plan in mind,’ Ben said, thinking hard.

‘Need to be one hell of a smart plan if she wants to get away from Ramon Serrato and his whole hunting party. It’s been forty-eight hours. If he finds her, man, you know what he’s gonna do. She’s worse than dead.’

Ben felt his resolve tighten like a fist. ‘Not if I find her first,’ he said.