Free The Armada Legacy by Scott Mariani

the other end. ‘Gather you’ve got a bit of trouble. Sorry to hear it. Anyway, I’ve dug up the info you asked for. Not a word to anyone, mind, or it’s my arse. It’s only because it’s you.’
    ‘Appreciated,’ Ben said. ‘Fire away.’
    ‘All right. Neptune Marine Exploration took out a comprehensive K&R policy four years ago with Rochester and Saunders. Apparently they’d had a near miss with Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden while hauling up some shipwreck or other, and got jumpy in case they were less lucky the next time. Deal was brokered by that greedy bastard Ronnie Galloway.’
    ‘I don’t know him. What’s the coverage?’
    ‘Twelve million. That’s pretty much all I can tell you.’
    ‘It’s plenty. I owe you one, Mike.’
    ‘Or two. Good luck, mate.’
    Ben ended the call. He knew the name Rochester and Saunders well. Operating from a glittering glass tower in central London, they were one of the top players in their field and provided kidnap and ransom insurance services to high-risk corporate employees, VIPs and other potential kidnap targets all over the globe.
    As Ben had known all too well for too many years, kidnap and ransom was a booming industry, not just for those who did it but also for those who could claim to offer protection from it. Long before he’d given up active field work to move to France and set up Le Val, he’d now and then been hired as a freelance negotiator by the insurance companies, to maintain contact with kidnappers, obtain the crucial proof of life, smooth along the negotiations and do everything humanly possible to ensure the early release, unharmed, of the hostages.
    Occasionally, other ways and means – more or less peaceable, more or less legitimate – became necessary to get them out. In those cases, the insurance companies were no longer involved. Nobody was, not officially. Those contingencies, and the direct action needed to resolve them, had been Ben’s particular area of expertise.
    A lot of K&R operatives had come from a military background – some, like Ben, from 22 SAS and other Special Forces units; Mike Starkey had been a twenty-year veteran of the London Met before switching careers. Many of the guys knew each other well, and because their work tended to take them to the world’s concentrated kidnap and ransom hotspots, their paths often crossed, frequently in the seedier bars and nightclubs where criminal informants and other undesirables tended to hang out. Theirs was a strange, closed and often clandestine community, made more so by the fact that in some countries getting paid to help secure the release of kidnap victims was considered tantamount to profiting from the kidnap itself. Some negotiators burned out from the stress, some ended up on the wrong side of the rails completely, or dead, or kidnap targets themselves. Some simply got tired of the life and ended up behind a desk.
    Mike Starkey had been one of those. Nowadays he filled a cushy, safe little niche as a broker in London, the world’s K&R capital, acting as middleman between the clients desperate for kidnap protection insurance and the underwriters who collectively raked in over £150 million a year in return and were extremely reluctant ever, ever to part with a penny of it in the not-uncommon event of a claim. Business was soaring year on year and guys like Starkey were happily surfing the wave.
    Some critics partly blamed the meteoric rise in the popularity of K&R insurance for the terrifying worldwide growth of the trade in human misery, on the grounds that the insurers were only fuelling potential kidnappers with greater financial incentives than they’d ever enjoyed before. It was a point of view Ben privately couldn’t disagree with.
    ‘Was that the call you were expecting?’ Amal asked as Ben put the phone away.
    Ben nodded. ‘A contact in London.’
    Amal waited for more, and when it wasn’t forthcoming he said, ‘Are you always this talkative and open with