Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) Read Online Free Page A

asked.
    ‘Because I have a gun,’ Ben said. He unslung his bag from his shoulder and took out the staple gun he’d bought that morning. A pressed-steel box with a spring-loaded squeeze mechanism. Handy for all kinds of jobs around the home. And outside it.
    The Romanians stared at him. Ben aimed the stapler at the Slavic one, squeezed the handle with a
clack
, and the tiny steel staple went pinging through the air to bounce off his big chest.
    That was all the provocation the Romanians needed. They both went for him at once.
    Four seconds later, both were stretched out side by side on the floor. The dark one was still conscious, but Ben fixed that with a tap to the head with the toecap of his boot.
    ‘
Ya ilahi
,’ Abdel gasped, staring down at the inert bodies and wringing his hands. ‘Look what you did.’
    Next, Ben took out the big roll of tape, then the scissors, followed by a thick black marker pen. He cut off lengths of tape and used them to bind the Romanians’ wrists, ankles and knees together. When they were securely trussed up and gagged with more tape over their mouths, he asked Abdel for a sheet of paper.
    Abdel tore a blank page from a cash book. Ben scissored it into two halves. Using the marker pen he wrote on one half of the paper the greeting
SALUT
, in big blocky capital letters. On the other he wrote the Romanian gang leader’s name.
    Hello, Dracul.
A clear enough message, sufficiently simple for even the lowliest kind of thug to comprehend, and opening the way to the next phase of Ben’s plan. The bodies had to be correctly arranged left to right for it to read properly, but that wouldn’t be a problem.
    Then Ben used the staple gun to tack each half of the paper in turn to each of the men’s foreheads. The hardened steel staples punched out with enough force to drive into wood or plaster, and had no problem biting into bone. They’d need to be prised out with a screwdriver.
    Clack. Clack.
    Abdel could hardly look. ‘You can’t do this,’ he said.
    ‘I just did,’ Ben replied.
    ‘They’ll come back. It’ll be worse than ever.’
    ‘Trust me, a bunch of miserable cowards like this will leave you alone after today.’
    Ben let himself out of the shop, telling Abdel to lock up after him and go and open up the back. Two minutes later, Ben had driven round to the shop’s rear entrance, reversing up the narrow alleyway where delivery vans did their drop-offs, and found Abdel standing nervously by the back door. Ben went inside, grabbed one of the unconscious thugs by the ankles and dragged him like a sack of potatoes out to the back, then hefted him into the boot of the Alpina. Then he did the same with the other, and slammed the lid shut on them.
    ‘Now, give me that address and number,’ he said to Abdel.
    Five minutes later, he turned down the dingy backstreet, past litter bins overflowing with garbage and crumbling walls daubed with obscene slogans and gang marks, and pulled up outside the two-storey corner building in which Abdel had said Dracul and his crooks were holed up. It certainly looked like their kind of place. The ground floor was a disused copy shop with boards for windows, plastered with flyers advertising the services of call girls. The upper windows were grimy and curtained and there was no sign of movement up there, but someone was home. A black Mercedes was parked at the kerbside below, and behind it a white Range Rover. No matter what kind of scummy ratholes gangsters seemed content to live in, they always kept their cars spick and span.
    Ben parked the Alpina on the corner, killed the engine and got out, taking his bag. The only person in sight was a junkie stumbling along at the end of the street. Thudding music was coming from the crummy apartment block opposite, pulsing like a headache. A dog was barking somewhere. The wail of a baby, the angry yells of a man and woman arguing. Those weren’t the only things Ben could hear. By now, the two thugs inside the boot