Relics

by Relics (retail) (epub)

  Reed inserted the strip of metal back into the lock and began manoeuvring it again. It had taken him about forty-five minutes to shape the lock pick, fashioned from one of the bed springs, and, so far, that had been the easy part. When it came to picking locks, the older varieties were easy, but these newer, more resilient, devices were tough.

  The cell lock clicked back into place yet again, whilst his home-made key slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. ‘Shit!’ If he ever managed to get out of this place, he was resolved to spend the next couple of weeks saying Hail Marys.

  He picked up the fragment of metal and started over again. If anyone had ever told him that his early lessons in lock picking would serve him well as a man of God, he’d have thought them crazy, but then again, he had never envisaged becoming a priest.

  Reed wasn’t sure where he was born exactly, but it was in a Texas orphanage outside Dallas that he’d been brought up. All he knew was that his birth mother had become pregnant with him as a teenager and had placed him in care, unable to cope with the responsibility.

  Responsibility? The word made him ponder. In the past, he’d always imagined himself an inconvenient burden to her lifestyle, and that had been the reason she’d discarded him. But the simple truth, on reflection, was that a young girl with no family and no experience of life and fearful of the future had faced limited options in the 1950s. As time passed, he was able to forgive her for what had seemed like an extremely personal rejection, like taking offence at his very existence. As a result of his neglected childhood, the young Father Reed had turned into a considerable hellraiser, and, by the age of eighteen, the judicial system was beginning to take notice. At fifteen, he was boosting cars and selling them to chop shops. By seventeen, he was an enforcer for a local gang, ensuring that all the neighbourhood businesses paid their weekly insurance. That is if they didn’t want their shops burnt down. By eighteen, he was into everything from running numbers to loan sharking. And that’s when his crooked little empire came tumbling down.

  A rival from another gang had ties within the local police department and, on seeing how well the eighteen-year-old was doing, had decided to take it all for himself. Reed had wound up with a ten-year sentence for racketeering, though it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to him. The judge presiding over the case had recognised something in the young man standing in the dock, ‘a glimmer of hope’ as he had put it, and Reed was offered an alternative to jail – the United States Marines.

  The idea had seemed crazy at first, but then, after a month behind bars, Reed had a change of heart. Jail was not a place he would ever get used to, and one week later, he found himself in sunny Wyoming, decked out in army fatigues whilst being verbally abused by a hard-nosed drill instructor. It was a move that had changed his life.

  In the Marines, he’d found a family and the sense of belonging he had always craved. After eight weeks of basic training, he was fighting communists in Vietnam and, within months of that, was offered a position in the Special Forces, sniper division. The next seventeen years saw him deployed all over the world, from Cambodia to Somalia, and Reed had relished every moment.

  His comrades in arms were a mixed bunch: some loved the action, others simply loved to kill, but most were just proud to serve their country. Not him, though. For Reed, it was about doing the right thing, the good had to be safeguarded from the bad, and, to those that deserved it, he offered what his mother had never given him – protection.

  These were the principles that had guided him through the years, and they served him well until his deployment to Bosnia in ’93. The Serbian government under Slobodan Milosevic had set about systematically murdering every Muslim in the country in an operation ominously labelled as ethnic cleansing. It was Reed’s first posting to the country, and, even though the war was coming to a close, there were still numerous pockets of militant Serbs furious at the West’s intervention. His unit had been tasked with pacifying a company of twenty Serbian soldiers that had gone AWOL. The group had been terrorising villages in north Bosnia for months, raping or murdering every Muslim they found – and all in the name of Christian purity. In one case, they’d even cut off some kid’s balls and then forced him to perform fellatio on the pet dog – really sick stuff.

  The troop was led by a malevolent one-eyed ex-special force’s captain named Vladimir Ivenco, or, as the locals had named him, the Cyclops of Death. The only thing that seemed special about this guy was that he had his genitals blown off during a skirmish with British forces years earlier. Unable to enjoy the finer things in life, Ivenco had taken to debasement and torture as a way of satisfying his urges and feelings of resentment – a true sadist in every sense of the word.

  Two United Nation units had already been sent to bring him in, but he and his vile gang were always one step ahead. There was talk amongst Reed’s unit that someone inside the UN was tipping the group off, but it was never proved, and, after three months of failed ambushes by the UN peacekeepers, many were starting to believe they would never get rid of him. As one UN commander had so elegantly put it, ‘With the tracking equipment we have, this bastard should be easier to nail than a Bangkok hooker. So what the fuck is going on?’

  Two days later, Reed and his team had been assigned and were already deep inside Bosnian territory. It took just under two weeks to catch up with the group of renegades, simply following the carnage from one village to the next. They had massacred hundreds of villagers in ways that, even to this day, he still found hard to accept. Reed’s unit eventually caught up with them in a small village, near the town of Travnik, where the murderous soldiers had been camped outside its church all morning. About forty residents were holed up inside, and its priest, Father Zivota, had been trying to negotiate with the Serbian leader for a peaceful solution. The village was 90 per cent Muslim, but the priest had made no distinction when it came to saving human lives, and this was the first time the Serbs had attacked a Catholic church for by now most of the soldiers were becoming indifferent to the idea of killing Muslims and Christians alike.

  Zivota had kept these animals at bay for over six hours with nothing but his dog collar and words to combat twenty armed men with assault rifles, grenades, and the experience to use them, yet he had held the attackers off. When Reed’s unit arrived, it wasn’t a moment too soon because the Cyclops of Death had reached the end of his patience, and it was just a matter of minutes before the situation turned into a bloodbath. What had impressed Reed most was how this little man, no more than five feet tall, had held the brutes off for so long, even slapping the Serbian captain across his face and berating him for such treatment of his fellow man. Honestly, it was the bravest thing Reed had ever witnessed, this ability to hold off total carnage by just the power of belief and conviction. For the first time in his life, he had realised that you didn’t have to carry a gun in order to prevail and that anything was possible with God by your side.

  He and his unit had taken down every one of the Serbians in under fifteen seconds, and all the villagers had survived. That single event had changed Reed’s thinking for good, and once back on US soil, he had resigned his commission in order to join the clergy. That was twenty years ago, and he’d never regretted his decision even once, saving more lives with faith and words than he had ever succeeded in doing at the end of a gun barrel.

  With one last flick of his wrist, the cell door made a metallic click and gently swung open. ‘Thank the Lord for unsavoury skills,’ he whispered, gratified by his achievement. Another couple of tries, and he would have given up for sure. Reed made for the exit door further along the corridor, and finding, to his relief, that there was no lock, he pressed his ear up against its cold, steel surface and listened. After a few seconds of silence, and satisfied there wasn’t an ambush waiting for him on the other side, he quietly opened the door and headed on into the gloom. The room he now found himself in was almost pitch-dark except for a solitary light suspended from the ceiling, illuminatin
g everything within its reach with an eerie orange glow. Reed’s gaze travelled around the room, finally settling on the silhouette of a side lamp perched on top of a table just a few feet away. He made his way over and, after some fumbling, located the switch. The intense brightness from the small halogen bulb made him recoil for a moment, his vision suffused with red spots.

  Despite the bare stonewalls, the room was furnished rather cosily with thick, navy-blue Saxony carpets throughout, and a handsome oval conference table about eighteen feet long surrounded by costly-looking wooden chairs with white satin coverings. At the head of the table, a red leather Victorian spoon-back chair stood imposingly, and behind it, two steel doors had been set into the stonework. To his right, a massive wooden noticeboard covered the entire upper half of the wall, giving the room a classroom feel, and although it was now void of any notices, he could see signs of it having been in use.

  ‘What are you up to, Rocca?’ Reed muttered as he made his way over to the nearest bookshelf and thumbed through the wide array of titles. The books on this shelf ranged from atlases to hotel guides, all except one. It was a thick, leather-backed personal notepad with the name Dr Michael Rouesse, DDS, gilded on to the cover in silver lettering. Reed flicked through the pages only to find them empty, and although the name meant nothing, he recognised the initials. He’d seen them often when visiting the Vatican’s dentist.

  DDS stood for doctor of dental surgery.

  Why would Cardinal Rocca have need of a dentist down here?

  An unsettling thought entered his mind as he recalled the Dustin Hoffman film Marathon Man, one of whose characters was an ex-Nazi dentist played with terrifying realism by the late, great Laurence Olivier. His character had worked in the concentration camps during the World War II and many years later had begun to ply his trade of oral torture once more whilst involved in a quest for stolen diamonds smuggled out of Germany. The film had given him nightmares as a kid, and the thought of a sociopathic dentist operating down here in this sinister place made him uneasy, to say the least.

  Reed took a deep breath to calm his nerves and told himself how ridiculous he was being. Whatever was going on here, it had nothing to do with a crazed oral-hygiene specialist brandishing a dental syringe and mouth mirror. No, this was something else altogether. Something worse.

  Along the sides of the room, every metre or so, were glass-fronted refrigerators containing a variety of food and drinks. Reed swung open the door of the nearest one and selected a small carton of orange juice. He’d had nothing to drink since just before meeting Cardinal Vincenzo earlier that morning and was now severely parched. Tearing open the top, he downed the contents in one go and then placed the empty carton back in the fridge. The sugar rush gave him a new clarity of thought, and his curiosity was replaced with an immediate sense of urgency.

  I need to get out of here now.

  As Reed began making his way towards the nearest exit, the four strip lights above him suddenly flickered into life and footsteps could be heard on the other side of the door. Without hesitation, he dived under the stout conference table, dragging his robe with him and out of sight. Seconds later, the door opened, and two men entered, immersed in conversation. Although Reed could only see them from the waist down, he recognised one of the voices immediately. It was Cardinal Rocca.

  ‘We are ready to move at a moment’s notice, and once we have the relics, there’s no obstacles left in our way. It will be time to give back to the world what has been denied it for so long. Now watch this.’

  The sound of grinding gears resonated through the room, making the floor vibrate heavily, and Reed peered up to see the noticeboard covering the wall opposite slowly rising into a slot in the ceiling above. The screen disappeared entirely, revealing a plate-glass window of equal dimensions.

  ‘Well, Genges, what do you think?’

  The Magi prince offered a satisfied grunt. ‘My men did a fine job here, eh? It’s good to finally see the results of two months’ secret construction.’

  Cardinal Rocca raised a thin slender finger. ‘Our men, dear Brother.’

  The younger sibling gave a submissive nod. ‘Yes, of course. Now, please allow me to inspect the fruits of our toil.’

  Rocca gave a brief nod and disappeared into the room beyond, followed closely by Genges. Reed pulled himself out from under the table and peaked through the glass observation window. The room beyond was similar to a private hospital suite, with grey carpets, magnolia walls, and a host of flashing monitors he wasn’t familiar with. Over to one side, a waist-high wall jutted out, concealing something. Whatever it was, both men were now staring down at it intently.

  Reed quietly made his way to the far end of the window, eager to see the object of the men’s intense scrutiny, but it was impossible without getting too close for comfort. Regardless, Reed had seen enough. He slid back under the conference table and was slowly beginning to make his way over towards the other door, when a voice called out from behind him.

  ‘So you must be the ex-Marine my brother told me about. You’re not very stealthy, are you?’

  Reed looked up to find the barrel of a 16 mm Beretta aimed directly at his forehead.

  ‘You’re a bad lad, breaking out of your cell, tsk, tsk,’ Genges mocked sarcastically, cocking the gun with his thumb. ‘What are we going to do with you, I wonder?’

  Reed crawled out from under the table and stood up, holding his arms high, before noticing on the younger brother’s face the same manic look that he had already seen on Cardinal Rocca’s earlier. Damn, he thought, how many of these crazies are there?

  Genges nodded towards the door leading back to the empty cell. ‘C’mon, there’s a good boy.’

  Reed did all he could to quell the sense of despair overwhelming him, but only one positive thought came to mind: At least there’s no sign of a dentist!

  Chapter 35

  ‘Alex, can you hear me?’

  Harker jerked his head fiercely upwards, but the pain in his chest immediately forced him back down again.

  ‘Take it easy, my boy. You’re safe and sound.’

  He rubbed at the swelling on his temple and winced. Everything was still a bit hazy, and he couldn’t quite remember where he was or, for that matter, why his clothes were drenched. But he did recognise the face hovering above him. ‘Doggie?’

  Dean Lercher knelt beside him, also dripping wet from head to toe but with a wide smile on his lips. He let out a deep sigh of relief, loosening the soggy red tie around his neck. ‘Thank God! For a moment there, I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up.’

  Harker raised his head, more gently this time, and glanced down at his chest, which was aching more with every passing moment. His white Oxford shirt had been ripped open, and, across his torso, a thick black bruise was developing nicely in the shape of a seat belt. ‘Damn, what a mess!’ He tried grasping Doggie by the arm, but his hand remained floppy and unresponsive, slipping instead back down to his side. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You saved both of us. Hellish close thing, my friend, but we made it.’ He gestured to a group of motor boats that were frantically circling the still sinking tail section of the Templar’s jet. ‘Although the plane is a definite write-off.’

  Suddenly, everything came flooding back to Harker in one painful flash: the plane journey, Lusic, the crash landing, and, with it, an enormous sense of relief. ‘I crash an aircraft better than anyone I know.’

  The dean let out a deep bellow of laughter. ‘That you do, my friend. That you do.’

  For the first time since coming round, Harker suddenly became aware of the shocked-looking group of people, all dressed in expensive designer clothing, who were jostling to get a better view of the spectacle unfolding. ‘Where exactly are we?’

  ‘You were knocked unconscious during the crash,’ Doggie explained, briefly glancing over his shoulder at an inquisitive group of onlookers and offering them a courteous wave, ‘but I managed to drag you out before the jet sa
nk, and then I paddled water until this tourist boat showed up. By the time I’d got us clear of the sinking fuselage, the boat was already waiting to haul us on-board. We were only in the water for a matter of minutes.’

  ‘It sounds like I should be thanking you,’ Harker offered as the dean donned the proud expression of a yeoman.

  ‘Well, yes, you could say I played my part in this rather incredible adventure.’ He paused and leant in closer, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘But when we regale people with our heroic story, let’s miss out the part where I cry like a baby.’

  Harker shot him a wink. ‘It’s funny, but I don’t remember that bit. Now help me up, will you?’

  Doggie nodded appreciatively and gently pulled Harker to his feet, not letting go until his woozy friend had steadied himself against the side rail.

  ‘Take it easy, Alex. You took one heck of a bump to the head – and that’s the second time in the space of a few hours. You’re lucky to be standing upright at all.’

  Harker patted his friend’s shoulder reassuringly and turned to gaze out across the calm, black waters of Lake Bracciano. The lights of the various villages surrounding the massive inactive volcano were brighter than any of the many thousands of stars hanging in the night’s sky overhead, and he found himself gasping at such simplistic beauty. Thank God for those, he thought, for no villages meant no boats, and without a rescue, they could have easily drowned. Doggie was a terrible swimmer at the best of times, and frankly he was amazed that his old friend had managed to get out of the sinking plane by himself, let alone with Harker in tow.

  Harker remained at the side rail, taking another moment to appreciate still being alive before surveying the vessel that had helped make it so. The boat they stood on was actually more of a ship: over one hundred feet long, with two huge internal engines spewing out thick jets of water that were now propelling them speedily towards the shore. The chipped paintwork and yellowing perspex betrayed the vessel’s age, but to Harker, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.