The Babylon Idol

Chapter 9

The letter was handwritten on three thin sheets of headed Bollati prison paper. The first thing that caught Ben’s eye was that it was in Italian, a language he spoke less fluently than French but in which he nonetheless could hold his own pretty well. The second thing he noticed was the handwriting itself, a fine flowing italicised script that very few people could produce any more, and which clearly showed its author as being someone of a certain age and education.

At the top of the first page the November date, a few days earlier than the postmark on the envelope, told him that it had been written while he, Jeff and Tuesday were fighting for their lives in Africa. No indication of the writer’s identity, so Ben flicked over to the last page and ran his eye down to the bottom. His eyes narrowed in surprise when he saw the signature.

The letter’s author was one Fabrizio Severini.

A name Ben recognised immediately. It flooded his mind with memories from years back, returning him to a chapter in his life when he’d still been working freelance as what people in that little-known trade called a ‘K&R crisis consultant’. The K and R stood for kidnap and ransom, which had been Ben’s particular area of expertise in those days. When vulnerable, innocent people — many of them children — were taken by ruthless criminals looking to extort money from their loved ones, and when the conventional avenues for getting them back had been tried and failed, it had been Ben’s job to employ his own specialised means to hunt the kidnappers and bring the victims home as unscathed as possible. The kidnappers had rarely come out of it unscathed themselves. It had been a dangerous business for them once Ben was involved.

Dangerous for Ben, too. And the strange mission that had indirectly brought him into contact with Fabrizio Severini had been one of the most hazardous of them all. What had started as the race to save the life of a child had led Ben through some unexpected twists and turns before placing him in conflict with one of the most tenacious, ruthless enemies he’d ever encountered, a man named Massimiliano Usberti.

Usberti was a rogue senior Italian archbishop who controlled a secret and powerful Christian fundamentalist cult called Gladius Domini: Sword of God. Its brainwashed members, branded with a tattoo to show their allegiance, were prepared to kidnap, torture or assassinate anyone who stood in Usberti’s way. One of Usberti’s trusted inner circle had been a psychopathic killer called Franco Bozza. Another had been his close aide and personal secretary, Fabrizio Severini. Ben had worked alongside the only law enforcement officer he’d ever trusted, the intensely cerebral, sharp-witted and fiercely driven Parisian cop Luc Simon to bring down Gladius Domini. In the process, Ben had been shot, almost stabbed, come within a whisker of being crushed by a speeding train, and been very nearly incinerated in a burning mansion. All more or less run-of-the-mill stuff for him. He’d also found love, not lastingly, in the form of the American scientist Roberta Ryder.

During the final shakedown that brought the cult to its knees, Massimiliano Usberti had been arrested while many of his cronies, Severini included, had fled for the hills. But Severini had proved much less wily than his leader: INTERPOL had scooped him up just a few weeks later, while over the next few months — pretty much as Ben had expected might happen — Usberti had used his influence in high places, his power and his wealth, to oil his way out of trouble. In the end Usberti had walked away from the affair a free man — albeit disgraced, broken and barred from ever again regaining his old position in the church.

When the news had broken that the charges against Usberti had been controversially dropped, Ben had already been moving on with his life and becoming involved in the hunt for a missing girl abducted by an international child sex trafficking ring.

For a while afterwards he’d toyed with the idea of going after Usberti to deliver some natural justice where the courts had failed. But he’d reluctantly given up on the plan. If anything untoward had happened to the former archbishop, Luc Simon — by then promoted from the Paris police to a desk at the INTERPOL HQ in Lyon — would have known about it, instantly put two and two together and jumped on Ben with all the force of his new position. Ben had thought about it less and less over time, and eventually let the whole thing fade from his mind. It wasn’t a perfect world. The bad guys sometimes walked: you just had to deal with it.

If there was any consolation, it was that not all of Gladius Domini’s surviving members had got off so lightly. Quite how Usberti had managed to get Severini to take the fall for him, Ben would never know and had long ago stopped caring. But the prison notepaper in his hands was certainly proof, if nothing else, that Severini’s plunge had been a spectacular and enduring one. Ben wondered how many more years the man had left to serve.

That wasn’t all Ben was wondering as he returned to the start of the letter and began reading, translating from Italian as he went. Why on earth was Fabrizio Severini, a man he’d never even seen in the flesh, writing to him after all this time? He was about to find out.