The Armada Legacy

As Sam started detailing the plans for the following day, Brooke tuned out and drifted back to the thoughts that preoccupied her so much of the time, with the same mixture of emotions that always came flooding back whenever Ben was on her mind.

She wished he could have been here. He loved Ireland, would have been completely in his element here on the Donegal coast. Maybe she’d been wrong in coming without him – but the fact was, she’d been plain too nervous to ask him. The wrong signals, she’d worried. Moving too fast, trying to force things prematurely. Or something like that. She didn’t know any more. For a gifted and highly trained psychologist, it struck her how little she understood her own feelings.

Ben Hope. What an enigmatic, complex man he was. Even before they’d got together she’d been aware he had ghosts in his past, stuff you could never ask him about and which he kept fiercely private; so closed, and yet he could be so open, so warm and tender. Sometimes she felt as if he’d been there all her life; sometimes as if she’d never known him at all.

As she gazed out of the window at the rocky landscape flashing by in the car’s lights, Brooke wondered whether her troubled relationship with Ben would ever recover. It had started so blissfully, only to crash and burn so senselessly just when it was beginning to look as though it could last forever.

The crash had come in September. The autumn months had been a forlorn, empty time, drowning herself in her work; the Christmas holiday without him had been almost unbearably miserable. Then, slowly, slowly, over the last couple of months had dawned the prospect of a possible reconciliation. The phone conversations between her home in London and his in France were growing longer and more frequent. Sometimes he even called her.

It was still fragile, though, still just a tiny candle flame that might be snuffed out at any time. There were moments when Brooke thought he was holding something back from her; times when she could sense the tension between them, ready to flare up all over again. In their separate ways, they’d both been equally to blame for the split. What a couple of hotheads we are, she thought wryly to herself as she recalled the awful quarrel that had bust them apart. The worst thing was that, in the end, it had all been about nothing. Just a stupid, horrible misunderstanding.

‘The chopper will pick us up at the house and take us over to Derry Airport first thing in the morning,’ Sam was saying to her employer. ‘We arrive at Gatwick just after ten-thirty, then on to Málaga in plenty of time to make your meeting with Cabeza.’

Forsyte pursed his lips and gave a grunt of assent. Drifting momentarily back to the present, Brooke noticed the way he kept fingering the handle of the attaché case secured to his wrist by a steel cuff and a slim chain, and she briefly wondered what was inside that must be so valuable; but her curiosity waned rapidly as she turned back towards the dark window and resumed her own private thoughts.

A flash of white light caught Brooke’s eye. The road behind was no longer empty: the bright headlights of a car were coming up fast. No, she thought, twisting round to peer out of the rear window – not a car, but a van of some kind. Going somewhere in a real hurry, too.

Forsyte glanced back as the van’s main-beam headlights loomed close enough to fill the inside of the Jaguar with their glare. ‘Just some idiot,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘Pull in a little and let him past, will you, Wally?’

Wally shook his head in exasperation, then flipped on his indicator, slowed to just over thirty and steered towards the side of the narrow road to let the van by. The large vehicle noisily overtook them – a plain white Renault Master panel van, scuffed and spattered with road dirt – then cut in tightly at an angle and screeched to a halt, blocking the road.

Wally hit the brakes and the rear passengers were thrown forwards, except for Brooke who’d braced herself against the front passenger seat a fraction of a second before the emergency stop. Sam let out a little cry as her netbook went flying. ‘What the hell—?’ Forsyte shouted.

‘Fucking arsehole!’ Wally thrust the automatic gearbox into park and left the engine running as he climbed out of the car. ‘What’s your game, you bloody prick?’ he yelled, slamming his door shut and storming up to the stationary van.

The Renault Master’s doors burst open simultaneously. Wally stopped dead in his tracks and went quiet as two men jumped out and strode aggressively towards him. They were both wearing black balaclavas, and not because of the biting February wind.

Brooke’s blood turned icy at the sight of the weapons in the men’s hands: identical compact submachine guns, black and brutal with long tubular sound moderators attached to their muzzles. She’d seen weapons like those before.

So had Wally Lander, once upon a time, but his nine years out of the army had blunted his senses and all he could do was gape.

‘Oh, my God!’ Sam gasped. Forsyte stared in speechless horror, clutching his attaché case.

Neither of the masked men spoke a word. Instead, almost casually, they turned their weapons towards Wally and opened fire. From inside the car, the silenced gunfire seemed like no more than a rapid string of muffled thumps. Wally’s legs folded under him, then he collapsed lifelessly at the roadside. His blood was bright in the beams of the Jaguar’s headlights. Sam screamed in panic and clung onto Forsyte. ‘What do they want with us, Roger? Oh Jesus, they’re going to kill us!’

Brooke hesitated, but for no more than a second before she launched herself at the gap between the front seats and scrambled in behind the wheel. She wrenched the stick into drive, stamped the heel of her Italian designer party shoe on the gas and held it all the way down.

The Jaguar took off with a roar and a rasp of tyres. Clenching the wheel, Brooke had no choice but to drive grimly over Wally’s dead body with a sickening bump-bump.

The masked men hurled themselves out of the way. There was a jarring impact as the car slammed into the angled side of the van; a rumpling of plastic and the screech of metal grinding on metal as she forced her way through the gap, the Jaguar’s wheels spinning wildly and revs soaring to drown out Sam’s screams and Forsyte’s indistinct roar of fury. Then, suddenly, the way was clear and Brooke could see the open road stretching ahead in the headlight beams. She’d made it.

But then the strobing muzzle flashes lit up the rear-view mirror and she felt the steering wheel go heavy in her hands as a flurry of gunfire blew out the back tyres. There was nothing she could do to prevent the car skidding out of control and veering across the road. Brooke caught a glimpse of a large grey rock looming in front of the car – then a crunching collision, and the airbag exploded in her face, dazing her.

Running footsteps. Voices. The next Brooke knew, the Jaguar’s doors were opening and there was a gun at her head. She turned to face her attacker. His eyes were cold and hard in the slits of the balaclava.

‘Get out, bitch,’ he said.

Chapter Two (#ulink_d56107ca-de71-5c92-929d-fcd5140901e9)

Three days earlier

‘I’m telling you, Brooke, it’s going to be great,’ Sam insisted for about the fifth time in twenty minutes. ‘You can’t possibly miss it. Seriously.’

That was Samantha Sheldrake all over. She’d always been the pushy one, ever since their university days. It was easy to see how she’d managed to land the position of PA to one of Europe’s most dynamic multi-millionaire entrepreneurs, the head of the Southampton-based company Neptune Marine Exploration.

‘I don’t know,’ Brooke replied, stretching out on the rug and wiggling her bare toes in the warmth of the open fire as she cupped the phone between shoulder and ear. The remains of a TV dinner for one were cooling on a tray nearby. Another solitary end to another dull day, with just an unexpected phone call from the northwest coast of Ireland to raise her spirits a little. ‘Seems a long way to go for a party,’ she said. ‘And you said yourself it’s for company personnel.’

‘Rog—’ Sam caught herself, ‘ – Sir Roger won’t mind if I invite a guest. Get you out of London. It’s so grey and dismal there at the moment.’

It had only been a minor slip, but Brooke had picked up on it and wondered whether Sam’s relationship with her boss might be a little closer than she liked to let on. Brooke kept her observation to herself, and said, ‘Get me out of London for what? So I can come and see the grey ocean instead?’

‘Hey, we’re talking about Donegal,’ Sam insisted. ‘Even the drizzle is beautiful. I should know, I’ve spent most of the last few months here. Besides, I told you, this is no ordinary party. First there’s going to be this brilliant media event at a very swish country club – you’ll be blown away – more than three hundred delegates – all arranged by yours truly.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Naturally. And then we’re all heading back to the house, where the fun starts for real. Sir Roger’s sparing no expense. You should see the manor house he’s rented – it’s like a chateau, and the party’s going to take over a whole wing. You’ve never seen so much champagne in your life, I kid you not.’

‘Remind me again what we’re celebrating?’

‘Does the “we” mean you’re coming?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Well, it’s only the grand unveiling of one of the most important historic sunken treasure salvage operations of the last twenty years,’ Sam said, with only a trace of smugness. ‘The recovery of the sixteenth-century Spanish warship the Santa Teresa has been Neptune Marine Exploration’s biggest coup since Sir Roger founded the company.’

Brooke smiled into the phone. ‘Now you sound like one of your own public relations blurbs. What’s the wreck of a Spanish warship doing off the Irish coast, anyway?’

‘Did I not tell you all about this when we were in Austria?’

Sam and Brooke had spent a few days in Vienna before Christmas. Brooke had been too preoccupied by her troubles with Ben to enjoy the short break very much. ‘Maybe you did,’ Brooke said. ‘Refresh my memory.’

‘Come to Donegal and you’ll learn all about it.’

‘I have to tell you, Sam, mouldy old boats are not exactly the most fascinating thing in my life right now.’

‘Oh, come on.’ Sam paused, and Brooke could tell from the momentary silence that she was hatching some new plan. ‘Why don’t you bring a friend along?’ Sam went on slyly. ‘As in, a very special friend? You know who I mean. That’s if things are, you know, back on an even keel.’

‘Ben?’ Brooke hesitated, a little thrown by the suggestion. ‘That might not be such a great idea. Things are still a bit …’ Her words trailed off uncertainly.

‘I knew it. He’s treated you like shit, really. When was the last time you set eyes on him?’

Brooke said nothing. She reached up to finger the slender gold chain she wore around her neck. Ben had bought it for her in Paris soon after they’d got together. She’d been wearing it nearly constantly ever since, although she sometimes wondered why she was so attached to it now that their relationship was meant to be finished.

‘I’ll tell you when it was,’ Sam went on. ‘It was when he came to pick up that horrid little mongrel he left you with. Am I right?’

‘Scruffy’s not horrid,’ Brooke protested lamely.

‘There you go again. Being nice. You’re too good for that guy. He’s using you, can’t you see it?’