But Ben wasn’t looking at the house, because his attention had become fixed on the strange spectacle taking place by the lakeside. A large crowd of people, fifty or more, had gathered at the foot of the lawn and spread out in orderly fashion near the water’s edge. Every one of the crowd wore a long black hooded robe that shrouded them from head to toe. Their faces were covered by masks. Ben narrowed his eyes. Animal masks. No, bird masks, with beaks. They looked like the eerie seventeenth-century plague doctor figures from a Paul Fürst engraving.
Ben muttered under his breath, ‘What the hell?’
‘Keep watching,’ Wolf said, though he obviously had no desire to watch it himself.
Ben watched, and listened. From the assembled crowd came the sound of chanting. The voices were male. It reminded Ben of the religious plainchant of Gregorian monks, except it wasn’t in Latin but in some other language that he couldn’t identify. He asked, ‘Why are they all looking across at this island?’
‘You’ll see.’
A moment later, the darkness of the island was lit up bright by a pyrotechnic display of fiery explosions, making the screen flare. In the flickering dance of the flames Ben was suddenly able to make out the shape of a huge statue or effigy that stood near the island’s edge. The statue had the head of an ibis-like bird with a long, curved beak resembling the beaks on the masks of the hooded figures watching from the opposite shore.
Ben blinked. He turned to Wolf. ‘This is a joke. It can’t be for real.’
‘Oh, it’s real, all right. But it gets better.’
Now some figures appeared on the island, and the camera shot zoomed closer for a better look at them. The zoom lost some definition, but the image remained clear enough to see. The figures were wearing robes like those of the crowd. With them was a third figure who was dressed very differently. She was young, slender, blond-haired and clad in a flimsy white dress, and from the way they clutched her tightly by her bare arms she was obviously their captive. She looked dopey, as though stupefied by drugs. Ben was wondering if this was some kind of weird fetishistic sex ceremony. He asked, ‘Who is she?’
Wolf replied, ‘You mean, who was she? How the hell do I know?’
Ben went on grimly watching. A cold prickle was spreading down his spine. He felt as though the phone screen was drawing him in, sucking him inside a nightmare. The figures holding the woman pushed her against the base of the statue and tethered her wrists so that her arms were spread wide. More flames erupted over the trees. The chanting of the crowd was intensifying.
Next, a new figure emerged as if from nowhere. He wore a crimson robe and a headdress with curled horns like those of a goat. The object he clutched in his left hand looked like some kind of ceremonial staff or sceptre. The thing in his right hand glittered in the firelight. It was a long-bladed dagger. He held it dramatically up in the air, facing the crowd across the water, then turned and took a step towards the woman, brandishing the blade.
Ben looked at Wolf. Words were hard to find. He just said, ‘They didn’t.’
Wolf replied simply, ‘They did.’
When the first cut appeared on the girl’s flesh and the blood began to flow, Ben felt sick and wanted to look away. But he kept watching, even as the horned man in the crimson robe slashed the girl’s throat wide open. Then, mercifully, the video footage dissolved into a flurry of movement and it was over.
Wolf said, ‘That’s when I couldn’t take it any more. I ran and kept running. I left my whole life behind at that moment, and I haven’t looked back.’
Chapter 17
Ben was still holding the phone, unable to say anything. Wolf held out his hand for it, and Ben gave the phone back to him. He was happy to return it. Wolf turned it off and dropped it back inside the zippered pouch on the holdall.
‘This is what you saw,’ he said.
Wolf nodded. ‘Now you know.’
‘You saw it with your own eyes.’ As if somehow Ben could find a way for this not to be true.
‘I told you it was bad, Ben. You should have listened to me.’
‘It’s not a fake.’
‘No, it’s not a fake,’ Wolf snapped irritably. ‘How could you fake something like that, except in a horror movie?’ Then he sighed. ‘Look. I understand what’s going through your mind. You don’t want to believe it, just like I didn’t want to believe it either. Because what you just saw isn’t normal. These people aren’t normal. They’re sick. They’re evil. And that’s coming from a guy who’s done some pretty horrible shit in his life. I thought I was an evil fucker. Thought I was the one who’d sold his soul. And then I saw what they did that night, and I realised that maybe there was still some hope for me, after all, because maybe there was still a tiny bit of good left inside this fucked-up heart of mine and I wasn’t beyond redemption. That’s when I knew I had to get out.’
‘Was it …’ Ben tried to formulate his words. ‘Was it a religious ceremony? Is that what we just watched?’
‘You mean, as in, are those bastards worshipping the fucking Devil?’ Wolf spread his hands. He’d had longer to think about it, and had formed his conclusions. ‘What does it look like to you? The guy with the horns? A bunch of robed and masked maniacs chanting in tongues while they watch some poor girl get butchered? Look up the spring equinox. I did. You’ll see it’s a big date on the calendar, if you’re into witchcraft. Wicca. Black magic. Occult ritual. Call it what you like. And that creepy statue with the body of a man and the head of a bird. What kind of fucked-up evil shit is that?’
‘It’s Thoth,’ Ben said.
‘It’s what?’
‘Thoth. He was an ancient Egyptian god of writing, knowledge and magic. Features in the Book of the Dead.’
‘Seriously, man. How. The. Fuck. Would. You. Know. That?’
‘Because I studied theology before getting into the army. I was planning on entering the Church, at one time. But we didn’t just learn about the Christian religion.’
Wolf looked at him as though he’d said he came from the Andromeda Galaxy. ‘You’re kidding me. The Right Reverend Ben Hope. Get the fuck out of here.’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Jaden.’
‘Okay, Your Excellency. Tell me why these sicko scumbags would make human sacrifices to an Egyptian god.’
Ben shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. I think there are some associations between Thoth and black magic. Astrology, mysticism, Tarot, stuff I know nothing about.’
‘No shit,’ Wolf breathed. ‘Well, whatever it is, it’s fucked up.’
Ben fell silent as he tried to get his thoughts together. ‘I don’t get it. Why were you there? How are you even connected to these people?’
Wolf explained.
‘Like I told you, I was on a job that went wrong. Just bad timing. It was a place outside Brighton. Nice house. Expensive. They usually are, because in that world poor folks don’t generally matter enough to kill. It was that afternoon. I’d been told the guy would be alone. But it turned out his kids had come to visit. His ex-wife dropped them off, with the nanny or au pair or whatever.’
Ben remembered the rule. No kids, no women.
‘So I hung around and waited for the right moment,’ Wolf went on. ‘I thought maybe the kids would only stay a few hours, but they didn’t. When evening came and the guy left the house and drove off, I followed him. I’d no idea where he was going, just thought that maybe I’d get a chance to finish the job I’d started. Sometimes you have to go off-script. Improvise a little. I’ve always been good at that.’
‘Go on,’ Ben said.
‘He was in a real rush. I followed him all the way into Surrey, right out in the sticks, to this big house.’ Wolf pointed at the holdall where the phone was, and Ben understood that he was talking about the house in the video.
Ben asked, ‘Where is this place?’
‘Karswell Hall, that’s Karswell with a K, a country estate a few miles from Guildford. It was late by the time we got there.
I slipped into the grounds and watched from the trees. Cars were arriving and being waved through the gates by a security detail. Some kind of event was going on. I assumed, a social gathering of some kind. High-level stuff, VIPs, rich people. And that’s when I saw them.’
‘Saw who?’
‘They were in a chauffeur-driven Roller. It was just a fluke that I got to see inside the rear cabin, when the driver stepped out to check a tyre and the inside light came on. Two men in the back. One old, really old, looks all wizened and shrivelled up. Always carries a bird-headed cane. Come to think of it, the bird’s head looks a lot like the statue on that damned island. And the beaked masks. What did you call it?’
‘Thoth.’
Wolf scowled in disgust. ‘Right. Anyway, the other guy, you wouldn’t call him young, but he’s not as old. Probably in his mid-sixties.’
‘You know these men?’ Ben asked.
‘My bosses,’ Wolf replied with a nod. ‘The old guy, I don’t know his name. Only laid eyes on him the one time before, at an agency meeting years ago at this posh pad outside London, and he didn’t speak a word. All I know is, he’s a top dog. Maybe the top dog.’
Wolf explained that the other man was someone with whom he’d had the occasional contact over the years. He described to Ben how the ‘assets’, freelance outsiders like himself, were largely kept at a distance from the organisation. They didn’t even know the name of the agency they worked for. It was all highly secretive, with departments within departments. The killers very seldom met one another, except for when they needed to work in teams. Likewise, they seldom had personal dealings with their bosses. Most of the time, when a job came in they were notified by phone, intelligence material was provided by dead drop, and payments were made in cash deposited in lockers or passed on by strangers. Only in particular cases, when the bosses deemed it necessary to meet in person, did face-to-face briefings and debriefings take place, and then only if the asset in question was a trusted member of the circle. Wolf had been one of their top assets, loyal, reliable and utterly efficient.
‘I’ve probably met him four, five times over the years,’ Wolf said. ‘He handed me out certain jobs that were considered to be of an especially sensitive nature. Political hits.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Good, because I ain’t telling.’
Ben asked, ‘What’s his name?’
‘Curnow. That’s what I know him as, but of course it’s not his real name. Nothing about these people is real.’
Except for ordering the deaths of their unsuspecting victims, and slaughtering young female captives in the woods, Ben thought. ‘You say he’s in his mid-sixties?’
‘Thereabouts. Hard to say.’
‘Describe him to me.’
Wolf thought for a moment, recalling the details. ‘There’s nothing all that distinctive about the guy, physically. Not tall, not short, not fat, not thin. Hair receding, but what he’s got left of it is quite thick, curly and kind of scruffy-looking. He wears glasses with a heavy black frame and seriously thick lenses that make his eyes look huge. His ears stick out, and he’s got a big nose with thread veins all over it, like he drinks too much. Got a wart the size of a pea next to his nose, too. Not too pretty.’
Wolf had always been highly observant. He hadn’t lost his touch.
Ben said, ‘That’s him. That’s Saunders.’
Chapter 18
Wolf said, ‘Seriously? Curnow is Saunders?’
‘You just gave a perfect description of the man I met on the plane,’ Ben told him. ‘So now we know two of his aliases. Still doesn’t tell us his real identity. But it’s a start. What happened then?’
‘The chauffeur got back in the Roller, they were waved through the security check, and followed the line of other cars out of sight to wherever they were all parking. Must’ve been a couple dozen vehicles at least. But I didn’t hang around watching. I made my way through the grounds around the back of the house as the guests started gathering inside. To the side of the house is all woodland. I found a spot in the trees where I could get a pretty good view through the windows.’
‘What were they doing in there?’
‘Nothing extraordinary, not at first. It was a black-tie event. Maybe fifty guests. All men, not a single woman. That’s not so unusual in those circles. A lot of these posh dos are boys-only-club affairs. Cigars and strippers and all that. Or at least, that’s what I thought.’
Ben stopped him, wanting to get it clear in his mind. ‘Let me understand this correctly. The man you had been following, the target you were supposed to kill earlier that same day – he was at this gathering too?’
Wolf nodded. ‘He’s one of them, obviously. When his wife and kids turned up that afternoon, he looked pissed off. Probably thinking about the night’s entertainment he might miss because of his unexpected visitors.’
‘He’s one of them, but they wanted him dead?’
‘If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have called me in.’
‘Okay. What then?’
‘The chance of getting to finish the job that night was looking more and more remote, but I hung around just in case. Thought maybe if the guy wandered outside on his own for a smoke, or went back to his car to get something, I might be able to move in. I’d have killed him without making a sound. Made him disappear like he’d never been there.’
‘Spare me the details. Just tell me what happened.’
Wolf went on, ‘I’d have waited and watched all night, if I’d had to. As it turned out, I only had to wait half an hour or so. Just before twelve, the guests all disappeared. I wondered what was up. Then right on the stroke of midnight, the lights in the house all went out and next thing I knew, the guests were all filing outside, wearing these robes and masks, like you saw. I thought I was seeing things. They made their way in a weird kind of procession down the back lawn towards the lakeside and gathered there, all facing towards the island in the middle of the lake. Then it started. You know the rest.’
‘You saw nothing else?’
Wolf shook his head. ‘After they killed the girl I sprinted back to my car. Unluckily for me, I got tagged by a security camera hidden in the woods. Caught red-fucking-handed like an idiot. Which is what now makes me a target. I guess I know too much. They might even have guessed that I managed to snap their little theatre show on film.’
Ben remembered the way Wolf’s London apartment had been ransacked as though someone had been searching for something important. Now he understood what they might have been looking for. He asked, ‘The old man with the cane. Was he one of the spectators by the lake?’
‘He was there, all right. Limping along with the rest of the bastards.’
‘What about the other one – Curnow, or Saunders, or whoever he is?’
‘I can’t know for sure, Ben. That’s kind of the point of the robes and masks, isn’t it? For all I know, Curnow was the sicko in the red robe and the horns who cut that poor girl’s throat. All I can say for certain is he was at the house. They’re in it together, the whole bunch.’
Ben’s thoughts flashed back to Grace, and for a horrifying instant he imagined her being kidnapped and whisked off to Karswell Hall to be tethered to a statue and slaughtered like a sacrificial lamb.
He said, ‘We have to stop them, Jaden.’
Wolf shook his head emphatically. ‘To hell with that. No way. Forget it. I told you, I’m out of it. I’ll never go back. And I especially won’t ever go back to that place.’
‘So you’d rather spend the rest of your life kidding yourself that you’re safe up here in your Spanish mountain paradise? Because you’re not. If I’m not the one who carries your head back to your former masters, then someone else will. They’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.’
‘So reassuring. You really know how to cheer a guy up.’
‘Here’s the good news,’ Ben said. ‘You’re not alone. You and I have a common purpose here. Until these people are taken down
, we both have an awful lot to lose. Likewise, we have everything to gain, if we play this right.’
Wolf weighed it up in his mind. At first he seemed reluctant to admit to himself that Ben was making sense. ‘So what are you saying, that we should team up together? Just like old times?’
‘Not quite like old times,’ Ben said. ‘Back in the day, we were just obeying orders. This time, it’s personal. Protecting what’s important to us. For me, it’s Grace and my sister. For you, your freedom and your future.’
Wolf smiled uncomfortably, and the moonlight glittered on his gold teeth. ‘You and me versus the bad guys. Going up against the forces of evil like Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker. That your idea?’
‘Not quite how I pictured it.’
‘Back into the game, just when I thought I was free of all that kind of shit, forevermore.’
‘I can’t do this on my own,’ Ben said.
‘Maybe that’s the real reason why you decided against killing me.’
‘On balance, you’re probably worth more to me alive than dead,’ Ben replied. ‘Just about.’
‘Thanks, buddy.’
‘And I seem to recall that you were pretty useful in a fight, once upon a time.’
‘Hell of a fight you have in mind, too,’ Wolf said. ‘You want to take them down? All of them?’
‘So hard, they won’t know what hit them. But it won’t be easy.’
‘Of course not,’ Wolf said. ‘You never did take the easy way.’
‘So what do you say, Jaden? Are you with me? One last time?’
The Demon Club Page 10