‘You’ll never get away with this!’ shouted another. ‘Do you know who we are?’
‘Sure, we do,’ Jeff told him. ‘And soon everyone else is going to know, too. Going to make quite a story.’
‘No!’ the man screamed, and made a break for the window. Wolf fired a burst from his MPX that stitched a ragged line of holes in the ornate wood panels and sprayed the guy with splinters. ‘Whoa, there, Brother. One more step and I’ll shoot your bollocks off.’
‘Hold them for a bit,’ Ben said.
Jeff replied, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To the island.’
Chapter 60
Fitz and the old man had watched in horror as the scene unfolded down by the lakeside and their Brothers were rounded up like cattle by the armed intruders.
‘This is intolerable! Do something!’ Van Brakel gasped, leaning hard on his stick and clutching his heart as though he was about to keel over and die. Part of Fitz wished he would; if it hadn’t been for the old man’s stubbornness they’d have reached the meadow by now, ready to meet the chopper. Which should be landing any moment now. Fitz scanned the sky again but all he could see was empty blackness.
Where was Salter?
Van Brakel was trembling and his wrinkled old eyes were bright with incendiary rage. ‘You let this happen, Fitzroy. I hold you personally responsible!’
‘Sir, may I remind you that I urged you to cancel the Gathering. You wouldn’t listen to me. Now we have to get out of here. Please. Quickly!’
At that moment running figures burst from the house, and the first shots sounded. For a few brief instants it looked as though the security guards were going to contain the dreadful situation. But the tide turned against them almost immediately. Fitz watched as two, three, four of them went down. Then he recoiled from the window as one of its panes exploded inwards from the impact of a stray bullet. Fitz felt the sting on his cheek, and touched his fingers to the blood where a shard had gashed him. The old man was just standing there. Fitz grabbed his arm and yanked him away from the broken window. ‘Come on! It’s too dangerous here!’
Fitz hustled the Grand Master from the room and virtually dragged him through the house towards the back exit, and the meadow beyond. He could only pray that they weren’t too late. The fear was growing on him that Hope’s army of attackers had already surrounded Karswell Hall and would grab them the moment they stepped outside. Then Fitz would have no choice but to shoot his way out. He wasn’t afraid of that. But you couldn’t fight if you didn’t carry a gun. Nowadays he relied on having others do that for him. And now those others were nowhere to be seen, and he was alone. The fear gripped him tighter.
That was when Fitz suddenly realised that the changing rooms weren’t far away, and remembered that at least two of the members kept illicit weapons stashed away in their private lockers. Unknown to them, Fitz had keys to each and every one, and routinely checked their contents.
‘This way!’ he rasped in Van Brakel’s ear, dragging him along.
‘Where are we going? I can’t walk any further!’
‘Yes, you can.’
Fitz was petrified that at any second they were going to run into Hope and his raiders. He ploughed desperately on until he reached the locker rooms. Finding the one he wanted, he fumbled for the key. His hands were shaking. The old man was gibbering and frightened and seemed to be suffering from breathing difficulties. This is all we need, Fitz thought.
He unlocked the dressing room door, shoved Van Brakel through it and pressed his frail body down onto the stool. He made for the locker, unlocked that too and reached inside. The changing room belonged to a retired police commander who had been a member of the Order for over twenty years. The gun he kept in his locker was a Colt .45 automatic. Maybe confiscated from a drug dealer or liberated from a police armoury. Fitz unclipped the heavy steel handgun from its holster and checked it. The magazine was fully loaded, seven rounds of hard-hitting forty-fives. It had been many years since he’d been an active combatant, before he joined the murky world of intelligence. But he had killed men in the past, and still knew how to use a gun.
Fitz jacked a round into the chamber, thumbed on the safety and tucked the pistol in his pocket. He felt a glow of confidence return. Let Ben Hope come and find him now.
Where he sat slumped on the stool in the corner, Van Brakel was panting and wheezing like a consumptive. The dead-fish skin of his face rippled with fury and hatred. Pointing a bony finger at Fitz he rasped, ‘I’ll have you killed for this, Fitzroy. Thanks to your incompetence a hundred years of tradition and faith have been destroyed. I’ll have you torn apart and your head placed on a spike. I will drink your blood, and crows and rats will feast on your rotting flesh. Do you hear me?’
Fitz turned and stared at him. ‘Yes. I hear you. And do you know something? I’ve had enough of listening to your whingeing and your threats. For years I’ve carried you, protected you, kissed your shrivelled old arse. You and your precious Order would have been taken down a long time ago if I hadn’t been there to watch over your affairs. So you will show me some respect, and you will shut your stinking hole of a mouth, or I will ram this gun right down your chicken neck throat and blow your guts out of your rear end, and I’ll smile doing it. Understand?’
Van Brakel shrank away from him, the fury in his eyes diminishing to pinpoints of fear. Fitz held his glare on the old man for a moment longer, then pulled out his phone and redialled the number for Salter.
The chopper pilot picked up on the second ring. Fitz expected to hear the background noise from inside the helicopter as Salter took the call through his headset, but he could hear nothing. This was bad. His heartbeat quickened with rising anxiety.
‘Where are you?’ Fitz demanded. ‘What’s the delay?’
Fitz’s thumping heart plunged into his shoes at Salter’s reply.
‘Uh, there was a problem with the aircraft. Fixing it now. Hey, these things happen. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’
‘Hurry up!’
Chapter 61
The detailed engineering and architectural plans on Tristan Dudley’s phone had given Ben a good idea of the layout of the crypts and hidden chambers beneath Karswell Hall. Now he followed the map in his head that he’d memorised earlier that day, and tracked through the house in search of the entrance to the tunnels.
According to the plans, the subterranean network carved out by Crowley and his disciples connected to the house via a wine cellar. After some hurried searching he found the iron-studded door to the cellar, secured with a stout lock that took five shots from his pistol to mangle into a twisted lump of useless metal. He kicked the door and it swung wide open on creaky hinges. The smell of dankness and decay came up from the cellar to greet him as he ran down a flight of stone steps, activating his weapon light to show the way. He saw flashes of dingy brickwork and the remnants of old wine casks piled up. A rat scuttled into a pile of debris at his approach.
Ben stalked through the cellar, gun at the ready. He noticed the tracks that had scuffed a broad path across the flagstone floor, the way a hunter picks up on a maneater’s spoor leading towards its lair. He followed the tracks. At the far side of the cellar, where the end wall would have been, a stone archway loomed above him. He cast the quivering white beam of his weapon light across the inscription carved into the arch in Gothic script: AVE SATANAS, DOMINUS ET MAGISTER TENEBRIS. Hail Satan, Lord and Master of the Darkness.
Ben passed under the archway and moved on. The same strange sickly-sweetish odour he’d sensed earlier in the house was wafting from the mouth of the tunnel, much stronger now. It smelled like death. Like the rancid breath from the jaws of hell. It made him feel nauseous as he jogged fast into the darkness, shining his bright white beam right and left to light the way.
The tunnel was long and deep and its walls were round and smooth. Ben had to wonder at the thousands of tons of concrete that must have gone into the building project. On he ran, passing doorw
ays and secondary passages on both sides of him. He ignored them. Dudley’s plans showed that the main shaft of the crypt cut arrow-straight from the house, plunged deep underground beneath the lake and then narrowed to an upward shaft that emerged on the wooded island. He was following in the footsteps of the same grim journey made by the many innocents gruesomely murdered there by the Pandemonium Club in the name of their gods.
After he’d come a certain distance the drip from a crack in the ceiling told him he was under the lake. All he needed now was for the concrete to give way and fifty thousand tons of water to come crashing down on top of him. He hurried on, feeling small and vulnerable. Now at last his light hit solid blockwork up ahead, and he saw the twist in the shaft where it shrank in width and a steep stairway led diagonally upwards to the right.
Ben leaped up the steps three at a time and could smell fresh air coming from above. Emerging onto flat ground, he was surrounded by gnarled branches and thick foliage that filtered the moonlight into dappled patches. The mouth of the tunnel was just a short distance from the foot of the statue of Thoth, which towered above him like a giant, taller than the trees. At Thoth’s feet was the stone altar to which sacrificial victims were tethered before they met their deaths. He crept towards the back of the altar, weaving around the dying fires that gave off their last gasp of acrid smoke, and spotted the body of one of the men Tuesday had shot lying inert in the bushes. He stepped over the corpse and hurried around the crumbling stone edge of the sacrificial altar to where the woman was still hanging tethered by her wrists.
She was awake but woozy from drugs and shock. Her face was streaked with tears and her wrists were chafed from the coarse rope binding them to the steel rings set into the stone. The white dress and the side of her face were spattered with the blood of the High Priest. It could so easily have been her own, if things had gone differently. He slung the MPX behind his back and picked up the dead High Priest’s dagger. Clambered up onto the altar beside her and reached up and started sawing at the rope. Her eyes rolled and tried to focus on him, and she tried to speak but all that came out was a ragged sob.
‘It’s over,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
‘Am … am I safe?’
‘Yes, you’re safe. Nobody is going to hurt you any more, I promise.’
‘W-who—?’
‘My name’s Ben. You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to.’ The first rope parted and her right wrist flopped down. He supported the weight of her body against his own to take the strain off while he attacked the other rope. Her hair was damp with tears and blood and he could feel her quaking as she began to cry. Through the tears she managed to say her name. ‘I’m Chrissie … Chrissie Cassidy.’
‘Hold on, Chrissie.’ The second rope gave and he gently let her fall into his arms. ‘You don’t have to walk. I’m going to carry you back.’
She murmured, ‘Are you the police?’
‘No, but I’m going to make you safe.’
‘Those men … They …’
‘Don’t you worry about them. They’re never going to harm anyone again.’
He lifted her down from the altar and carried her back through the trees towards the tunnel shaft entrance. She was slender and not too heavy, but he’d have carried her if it ripped every tendon in his arms.
This could have been Grace, if these lunatics had taken her alive. And he might not have been here to save her. That thought was unbearable to him.
Ben reached the steps and hurried down them, careful not to stumble and drop her. At the bottom of the steps he turned into the main shaft and broke into a fast trot back towards the house. The return journey seemed like a longer way and it was hard to hold the weapon light steady while carrying her. He clasped her tight and tried not to shake her around too much as he ran, but she didn’t seem to care. She was as trusting and limp as a child in his arms, drifting in and out of consciousness, now and then murmuring things that he didn’t understand. Then he realised that she was saying, ‘Baby … baby.’
It hit him with a jolt. He paused in his step and let some light shine over her face. ‘What?’
She looked up at him and made a supreme effort to form the words clearly. ‘There’s … a baby. Heard … crying.’
Ben’s blood chilled. ‘What baby?’
She was fading again. Her eyes were closing.
He thought perhaps she was imagining it. Shock and drugs mixing up her mind. The alternative was too unthinkable. He shook her and said, ‘Chrissie. Tell me about the baby.’
Her eyes fluttered open again and she whispered, ‘They have it. Keeping it.’
‘Where?’
She pointed further down the tunnel. ‘There.’
‘Show me.’ Ben ran on. The light beam jerked and wobbled ahead of them. His footsteps rang rapid-fire off the walls, but inside his heart was beating faster. They reached a side passage on the left that he’d passed on his way out, and she pointed again. ‘That … way.’
Ben turned into the passage. It was low and narrow and its confined space made the deathly stink in the air seem stronger than ever. His light picked out a pair of doors set deep into the passage wall to his right, some fifteen feet apart. The nearest door was made of heavy riveted steel and had no visible lock, just a heavy bolt holding it shut from the outside. The door on the left was taller and wider, made of oak that looked a hundred years old and marked with strange carvings.
‘Chrissie, I have to put you down for a moment. Okay?’
Her eyes flared in fear. ‘Don’t leave me!’
‘I swear, I won’t.’ He laid her gently on the floor. Slid open the bolt of the first door and pushed it. It opened with a groan and the smell of human confinement hit him like a slap. He shone his light inside and knew exactly what he was seeing, because he’d seen things like it before. It resembled the most sordid Third World shithole prison cells he’d seen during his days of rescuing prisoners and hostages with the SAS. The bare walls were dripping with mould and condensation. A metal plate was bolted into the stonework, from which hung a length of chain with manacles attached. There was no bunk for the prisoner to sleep on, not even a bucket to serve as a toilet.
The pile of female clothing on the floor told him this was where they’d been imprisoning Chrissie. This was where the High Priest and his assistants had come to strip her and put her into the white sacrificial dress, before leading her up to the island, and her death.
Ben withdrew from the cell and moved across to the second door, fifteen feet down the passage. It had no bolt, just a giant black steel ring turn-handle. The images carved into the wood made his flesh crawl. One was of the bird god Thoth. The other above it depicted the head of a horned goat, with red stones for eyes that glittered evilly against the beam of his light.
Ben grasped the ring handle and shoved the door open hard.
And that was when he heard the baby crying.
Chapter 62
Ben felt cold and utterly numb as he stepped inside the cell. Except it wasn’t a cell. It was a chapel devoted to the sick, twisted religion that was practised down here in the crypts beneath Karswell Hall.
The room was dimly lit by burning torches on the walls, whose flames flickered and hissed and gave off the pungent, nauseating odour he’d been able to smell all over the house. If this was their version of church incense, it was like none other he’d ever known. The floor was cold, hard white marble inlaid with a red circle twenty feet in diameter. Inside the circle was the same Satanic pentacle design that was carved on the door. The circumference of the circle was ringed with black candles in tall silver holders. At its centre was a low altar, just a pair of stone plinths supporting a slab that was mottled purple and black with layers of dried blood. Two items were laid on the altar. One was an ornate silver chalice. The other was a short sword with a hilt in the shape of an ibis’s head and a curved blade that gleamed in the firelight.
But as terrible as those things were, they weren’t
what Ben was staring at as he stepped inside the chapel. He was looking at the cage atop a stone table nearby. Its bars were black metal, crusted with filth. Inside the cage was the crying baby.
Ben had seen a lot of bad things in his life. But never anything quite so sickening as this. Now he understood what Bartholomew Van Brakel had planned to be the special event of tonight’s anniversary celebration. The ritual murder of Chrissie Cassidy had been just for openers. Afterwards, the inner elite of Van Brakel’s cult were going to repair to their underground Satanic church and cut open this poor infant and spill its blood into the silver chalice. This was their ultimate tribute to their deities, the defiling of the most innocent and helpless kind of little life.
Ben muttered out loud, ‘Oh, holy Jesus’, and the burning torches seemed to flicker in protest, as though it offended them for that name to be uttered here in this place. Ben’s hands were shaking as he opened the cage and lifted out the naked, squirming baby boy. He was still tiny, probably no more than a few weeks old although Ben knew nothing about these things. The kid was wailing loudly, clutching and waving his little fists and kicking his legs, eyes screwed shut and cheeks mottled red. Ben wondered where he could have come from: an unwanted birth, or a kidnap, or even a donation from some unhinged devotee of the Pandemonium Club. It didn’t matter; like Chrissie, the little man was safe now. Ben held the baby close and ran from the chapel, never wanting to see anything like it ever again.
Chrissie was asleep outside in the passage, overwhelmed by the trauma of her experiences. Ben would now have to carry both of them. Quickly stripping off his shirt he made it into a sling that would hold the infant securely against his chest. He bent down and scooped Chrissie up over one shoulder. Then left this awful place forever, and kept on running.
The ground floor of Karswell Hall felt like a welcome respite after the horror of the crypts. Jeff was waiting outside the banquet room. He’d been expecting Ben to turn up with the rescued woman, but his eyes shot wide open at the sight of a baby. It wasn’t often Jeff Dekker was struck virtually dumb. ‘No,’ was all he could say. ‘No fucking way.’
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