Being back here again for the first time since that summer brought back memories he’d thought he’d left far behind him: he and Roberta Ryder dodging bullets and chasing clues all over the Languedoc; the deadly running pursuit on which Usberti’s hired killers had led them; playing tag with Luc Simon and an army of police; finding Anna battered and unconscious after Bozza’s attack; the final bloody standoff with Bozza in an underground cavern buried deep in the heart of a mountain. And Ben remembered the kindness that Father Pascal had shown him when he’d turned up on the priest’s doorstep, badly hurt. The old man had been more of a father to him than his real one ever had. The memory sent a painful stab of guilt deep inside Ben as he replayed those images inside his head.
He should have done more to stay in contact. But keeping in touch with people who had been important in his life had never been one of his greatest talents.
If you ever find yourself in Florence, you must give me a call.
In the desert of life, you are my mirage.
Running off when people need you around is what you do best, after all.
Their voices echoed in his mind. He’d let them all down. For that, he was truly sorry.
Soon, his speeding headlights lit up a road sign for the village of Saint-Jean. Dawn was still a couple of hours away. He’d made good time.
The village was still more or less as Ben remembered it – a few new houses might have sprouted up at its edges, and more of the ancient red-tiled roofs were incongruously decorated with recent add-ons like solar panels and satellite dishes. He passed the drystone wall that had been painted with blood from his gunshot wound, then winding deeper into the village he passed the little church in which he’d prayed alone in the dead of night; then he saw the graveyard, and beyond it the slope of scrubland leading up the hillside where Pascal tended to his vines; and then he saw the priest’s cottage. The same old pale-blue Renault 14 was parked in the narrow, winding street outside. Ben’s spirits brightened seeing it, knowing it meant Pascal was at home.
He pulled the Alpina up at the kerbside and got out. Looked up at Pascal’s windows, dark and shuttered like every other window in Saint-Jean. The cold stillness seemed to hang over the place like a shroud, and he shivered. He didn’t want to wake Pascal, and thought about sitting a while longer in the car, but changed his mind, walked up to the door and knocked softly.
There was no response after a couple of minutes, so Ben made his way around the back, through the neat yard, past the henhouse. A goat bleated from somewhere in the darkness. The back porch was open. He creaked the door ajar and stepped into the narrow hallway. He smelled the rich cherry and vanilla tang of aromatic pipe tobacco that had soaked into every crevice of the old stone walls. An antique case clock ticked steadily, sonorously from within. He called out softly, ‘Father Pascal?’
‘Arrêtez!’ The voice behind him made him tense and whirl around. Yellow torchlight shone in his face and glinted off something that Ben instantly recognised as a wartime French service revolver. One that was pointed right at him.
Ben froze and put up his hands. Normally, when faced with a firearm aimed in his face, he would have done either one of two things: move in faster than a striking cobra and take control of the weapon, breaking the fingers of the person holding it. Or, if that wasn’t tactically favourable, he would have drawn out his own gun and fired first. And so far in his life, Ben had always been quicker.
But he wasn’t about to do either of those things when the person with the gun was a little old woman as frail as a sparrow, so frightened that the weapon was fluttering in her skinny hand. ‘Who’s there?’ she quavered.
‘Don’t shoot,’ he said in French. ‘It’s all right. I’m a friend of Father Pascal. My name’s Ben.’
The woman hesitated, then reached tentatively out and clicked on the wall light. She was in her seventies, with thinning grey hair, wearing a dressing gown topped by a shawl draped around her shoulders. Her eyes were reddened as though she’d been crying.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I saw the car lights. I thought perhaps they had come back.’
‘You thought who had come back?’
‘Those men. The men who—’ Her voice trailed off. She sniffed.
‘You don’t have to point the gun at me,’ Ben said, eyeing the antique revolver and her finger on the trigger. It might be a relic, but if it had been good enough to kill Germans in two world wars, he didn’t want to be on its business end. ‘I promise I won’t hurt you. Where’s Pascal? What men are you talking about? Is everything all right?’ But it obviously wasn’t. He sensed something was terribly wrong.
The gun drooped in her thin hand, pointing at the floor. The old woman’s eyes filled with tears. And now Ben knew for sure, and he felt his own shoulders sag.
‘When?’ he asked.
‘Two days ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘There was an attack. At the church. The police think it was two intruders. Nobody knows. Nobody saw anything.’ She sniffed again, and shook her head. ‘Pascal … I knew him all my life. And now he is gone.’
Ben’s throat was so tight that he could barely speak. ‘What did they do to him?’
‘They beat him. They killed him, les salauds. The funeral is this morning.’
Ben was numb as he walked back to the car. He watched the old woman disappear inside her house, her head bowed. He sat and smoked, letting his mind become empty.
Dawn came; the sky lightened in gradual shades. A fog hung over the mountains in the background. The old woman reappeared, dressed in boots and a coat. If she was still carrying the gun out of fear that the attackers might return, it was hidden in a pocket. She let Pascal’s hens out and fed them, moving stiffly in the morning cold. Seeing Ben sitting there in his car, she came over with a sad smile and asked if he’d like to come inside for coffee. He said no, thanks, and apologised for having scared her earlier. He told her the men wouldn’t be back, and that she shouldn’t be afraid.
There was nothing more to say. Nothing more to do here. He’d be on his way, after the funeral.
At ten o’clock in the morning, Father Pascal Cambriel was laid to rest in the graveyard of the church of Saint-Jean where he’d spent so many years caring for his community. Many had turned out to pay their final respects to the much-loved priest they’d known all their lives. Ben stood at the back of the crowd and watched with a clenched jaw as the coffin went into the ground. There were tears and sobs. A younger priest drafted in from a neighbouring town said a few solemn words. Ben spoke to nobody.
He was the last to leave the cemetery. As he knelt alone by the fresh grave, he made his promise. Then, slowly, calmly, he walked back to the car and drove away, never to return to Saint-Jean.
Gentle, kind Pascal wouldn’t have approved of the vow Ben had taken at his graveside. But Pascal hadn’t lived in Ben’s world and had only the smallest understanding of what motivated evil men and the cruelty they were capable of. Those were things Ben understood very well indeed. And whoever was doing this, whoever was hurting his friends, he was going to track them down, and find them, and destroy every single one of them.
They wanted blood. They were going to get it.
Chapter 14
‘Gennaro, you are a gift from God.’
When Massimiliano Usberti had uttered those words six months earlier, he’d meant them literally. For a man of such profound religious faith as his, there had been no other way to describe an event so serendipitous. It was the act of Divine providence he had been praying for. Now that it had come, with it came the long-cherished opportunity to start putting his plans into action.
He’d been waiting a long time.
Life was quiet when you were a disgraced former archbishop. Too quiet. For years, Massimiliano Usberti had seen almost nobody, spoken only to the small band of faithful disciples who hadn’t abandoned him since his fall from grace. And what a spectacular fall it had been. The pain and humiliation of h
is rapid, sudden descent remained with him every waking moment. His private retreat, the villa set into its own four acres on the shores of Lake Como, was his only comfort, though for all its opulence it was a far cry from the magnificent Renaissance palace outside Rome that had been his main residence at the peak of his career as a senior archbishop.
Back in those halcyon days, it had seemed as if nothing could stop him. He’d been on track to become a cardinal. One day, perhaps even Pope. Anything, everything, he dared to dream felt within his grasp. Gladius Domini, the Sword of God, his brainchild, his life’s work, had secretly attracted powerful investors from every fundamentalist Christian enclave across the world and mighty friends in China and the USA. Its goal: to re-Christianise the globe and destroy once and for all the rising Islamic threat that was spreading everywhere like a cancer; to bring about a new golden age of holy crusade against the heathen menace in the East. Its mission statement was Necos eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. Or, in layman’s terms, ‘Kill ’em all and let God sort them out’.
When the crash had come, thanks to the combined efforts of Usberti’s enemies, the blooming flower that had been Gladius Domini had been trampled into the dirt. All but a handful of his powerful friends in high places had deserted him in the wake of the disaster. The investors had dropped him like a hissing stick of dynamite and run a mile. His dreams had crumbled into ashes as he escaped imprisonment by the skin of his teeth, letting minions like the hapless Severini take the fall in his place.
And so, with his power hugely diminished, his ambitions crushed and his once-substantial wealth slowly eroding, Massimiliano Usberti had become a virtual recluse. No longer the proud, physically imposing, leonine man he once had been, he grew scraggy and wrinkled and started paying less attention to his personal appearance. He lost interest in food and gained a little too much interest in strong spirits. His beloved motor yacht, in which he’d once merrily sailed the sparkling blue waters of Lake Como, no longer held any joy for him. He would sometimes be confined to his bed for days on end by fits of black depression from which not even his new assistant, a devoted young priest called Silvano Bellini who had joined his shrivelled retinue a few months earlier, could rouse him.
When he did take Bellini’s advice to get some fresh air and exercise, all he could do was pace restlessly about the lakeside estate, brooding and muttering to himself. Indoors, he became glued to the internet, obsessing over the state of the world. Was he the only one who could see how desperately, now more than ever, God’s guiding hand was needed to avert the catastrophic decline of civilisation? The more he scoured the web for fuel to feed the fire burning inside him, the more evidence he saw of the entire globe’s descent into ruin: heading faster and faster towards utter degradation as the situation that had seemed untenable even at the height of Gladius Domini’s glory days now seemed to spiral ever further into complete chaos.
Usberti was convinced that the age of Sodom and Gomorrah was returning in modern times exactly as prophesied in Scripture, bringing with it a plague of abominations that were the sure signs of the approaching apocalypse. The holy institutions of family and marriage breaking down. Promiscuity and drugs, pestilence and mental illness everywhere, perpetrated and encouraged by a subculture of corrupt intellectual elitists who had turned their back on God’s wisdom and taught others to follow their disgraceful example. Men marrying men now, heaven help us. What next, sheep and goats? As if that perversion were not gruesome enough, barely a day seemed to pass without Usberti wanting to throw up at the sight of yet another aberrant bearded transsexual being fêted by the online media. The Western world was in the throes of lunacy, celebrating bestial sin and surrendering to all manner of vile unnatural passions and self-obsessed neurosis, even as the invading enemy hordes came flooding through their open borders: a never-ending army of so-called refugees bringing with them a wave of crime, rape and violence perpetrated against the decent Christian people who had welcomed them into their lands. Roaring in like a rogue wave, the heathen invaders were set to colonise all of Europe and beyond, one nation after another. The weak, ineffectual puppet governments of those countries, paralysed by the spell of political correctness and terrified of committing what the propagandists defined as a ‘hate crime’, would simply stand back and do nothing, until the faithless and dissolute West ultimately fell to the invasion of Islam and Shariah law.
Needless to say, Usberti had seen the whole ugly mess coming a long time ago; nobody had wanted to listen to his warnings and now it was almost too late to stem the tide. It was left to a brave few to fight back, and Usberti yearned to take his place at the head of a righteous campaign to restore sanity and godliness to the world. But what could he do? His money was dwindling, his influence was dead and his name was a joke.
However badly his frustration over the state of human affairs consumed him, it was his bitter hatred of his personal enemies that ate deepest of all into his soul. He spent hours daily plotting all kinds of bitter revenge against those who had engineered his downfall. One in particular: Ben Hope.
Ben Hope.
Even the sound of the name made Usberti want to spit bile. For years, the only thing that sustained him was to dream about the terrible things he would do to the despicable swine who, more than anyone, had destroyed his future. Not just Hope, but all the others too: a list of names that Usberti recited endlessly in his mind and often wrote down by hand, scratching the letters so deep that his pen would wear right through the paper and mark the surface of his desk.
Those filthy pigs thought he was finished. They thought they had stopped him. How wrong, how oh-so-very wrong, they were. And how pitifully they would all squeal for his mercy when he was restored to his former power, one day.
One day.
But he knew that could never happen. Oh, he had the means to take his revenge, all right. He wasn’t broke, not yet, and he still commanded the loyalty of followers who would do whatever he asked. Neither his personal assistant Silvano Bellini nor his administrator Pierangelo Volpicelli were coarse or brutal men, but Usberti had made sure he surrounded himself with others who were exactly that: men such as Ennio Scorceletti, known simply to his associates as ‘the big man’, along with Renato Zenatello, Federico Casini, Aldo Groppione, Luca Iacono, Maurizio Starace and half a dozen others who lived in barrack-style accommodation on the estate, were uncompromisingly vicious thugs from a variety of criminal backgrounds. The hulking Scorceletti was a staunch Catholic who had beaten his estranged wife to death with a hammer after she left him for another woman. Zenatello, a former carabiniere, had done time in prison for his role in the murder of four Afghan immigrants. Convicted rapist Groppione had performed similar tricks against a Nigerian asylum seeker and his wife, killing them in their car outside Fermo with a hunting rifle. Iacono was a computer hacker by trade, who had proved his fealty to God by setting fire to a mosque in his home town of Naples.
The list went on.
For all of these men, the primary appeal of their employer’s brand of Christian fundamentalism was that they could vent as much hatred as they liked against homosexuals, Muslims, atheists, liberals and other filthy servants of Satan. They each loved nothing more than being sent on a vigilante mission of faith-inspired violence in the sure knowledge that they were consolidating their places in heaven. Some of them, like Scorceletti, had been recruited into the ranks of Gladius Domini back in the glory days, before the fall; if anything, Usberti’s topple from grace had only intensified the fierceness of their loyalty to him. He had only to give the order, and he could unleash all manner of bone-breaking, razor-slashing nastiness on those he dreamed of punishing.
So many sleepless nights he’d spent working out his vengeful plans, he knew exactly what form the punishment would take. But as much as he yearned to give the order, he knew that the moment he took any such action against his list of enemies, his involvement would be so transparently obvious to even the most obtuse law enforcement official that he’d be instantly
whisked away to prison for the rest of his life. And however much he detested the scum who had brought him down, he wasn’t prepared to give up what little freedom and luxury remained to him.
Then how could he strike back at them? He couldn’t think of a solution. It would take a gift from the Lord above to make it happen. Every day he got down on his knees and prayed for Divine help in making his plans possible. Had he not been a loyal servant of God all his life? Didn’t he deserve just one break?
Usberti seldom ventured from the privacy of his sanctuary. That summer, however, he had taken a rare road trip to visit his last surviving relative, an uncle who lived in a luxury residential clinic for the elderly not far from Assisi in Umbria.
Usberti’s reasons for travelling four hundred kilometres to see the old man, on whom he hadn’t laid eyes in at least thirty years, were by no means sentimental: Fortunato Usberti was two months shy of his hundredth birthday, reportedly possessed barely an organ in functioning condition, had completely lost his marbles and was as rich as Croesus. His devoted nephew therefore felt obliged to rekindle the somewhat lapsed relationship between them, in the hope that the ailing Fortunato might consent to leaving him a little something when he shuffled off to a better place, which with any luck wouldn’t be too long away. This is what it’s come to, Usberti seethed on the journey south.
A double disappointment awaited him in Umbria. On arrival at the rest home he found his uncle disturbingly alive and plenty chipper enough to molest the nurses, while now so senile that he didn’t even know he had a nephew, let alone one he recognised. Usberti didn’t stay long. He got back in the Mercedes and instructed his driver to get him out of here. Soon afterwards, as they passed through a small village, Usberti spied a little church and felt the urge to go inside. Maybe the Lord would grant him some new miracle.
The Babylon Idol Page 8