by Paul Johnson
I didn’t know if he had been expecting applause or other forms of approbation, but they didn’t come. The faithful were silent, their faces strangely impassive. I wondered how many of them had been brainwashed by the Rothmanns’ conditioning process and how many were just old-fashioned religious lunatics.
‘We gather here for the great annual rite, at which we renew our vows to Lucifer and pledge ourselves to the increase of his glory in the months to come. Your Master has already made preparations to strike a blow that will bring the misguided government of this land to its knees. With your participation, the Antichurch will gain the power it deserves.’
Again, the congregation remained silent. Perhaps they had been told in advance, but it didn’t look that way because Rothmann was looking from side to side as if he was trying to elicit a response. There was a long pause before he got going again.
‘And now, for the greater glory of Lord Lucifer, I bring you the new ritual that has been promised-a ritual that will bring us all closer to the life of the underworld-closer to death! Once a year, Our Lord requires self-coffining. Our sister here will give herself to Lucifer.’
There was a wave of what seemed to be discomfort across the faithful, but Nora Jacobsen wasn’t waiting. She went to the empty cross, grasped it with one hand and then stabbed herself in the chest with the knife she was holding in the other. Her body dropped with a crash into the coffin that lay underneath.
Mary Upson’s shrill cry split the air. Rothmann strode over to her and beat her with his whip until she was reduced to sobbing. The congregation remained quiet but, again, I sensed they were unhappy. So did Rothmann. He picked up the bloody knife that had fallen from Nora Jacobsen’s hand and headed for Quincy. I was held down by the guards when I moved.
‘Members of the Antichurch,’ the Master yelled, ‘here is an example of the races that are destroying this country. Watch as his animal heart is removed!’ Then he turned to me.
I felt a tingling over my skin even before he spoke, which showed how much power he could exert. When it came, the word was almost superfluous.
‘Schalk!’ Rothmann screamed. ‘Schalk! Execute the negro!’ The crowd roared its approval.
The trigger affected me immediately. The part of me that was beyond his control-the part that still remembered the ones I had lost-separated from my body and rose above the people in the hall. I watched as the guards allowed me to stand. I walked stiffly to the man in the hyena mask, my right hand extended. There was nothing I could do from my vantage point. I moved toward the cross from which Quincy was suspended. I tried to scream, tried to distract my corporeal self, but no sound came. The congregation had fallen silent. Transfixed, I raised the knife and then plunged it straight toward Quincy’s defenseless throat.
Peter Sebastian had spent most of the last two hours talking to the Bureau’s people in Houston. He had finally pressed the panic button at 5:00 p.m. Either Matt Wells or Quincy Jerome should have been in touch during the afternoon. He had called and sent text messages to their cell phones, but there had been no reply from either of them. He knew that the signals from their tracking implants might have been poor in the Big Thicket, so he gave Wells and Jerome a few more hours. That now looked like a mistake.
Houston’s people in the vicinity had also lost contact, having held back to allow Matt and the sergeant a clear run at the Antichurch. By the time they found the tree to the east of Warren with the inverted cross carved on it, there was no sign of anyone in the vicinity. Quincy Jerome had attached a positioning device to his BMW. That led them to a clearing south of Warren. The vehicle was empty. Agents were spreading out across the area, but it was dark and there was little chance of sightings.
Sebastian had considered sending Arthur Bimsdale to Texas to keep an eye on things, but decided against that. His assistant would be of more use in Washington, especially since Sebastian himself had an urgent appointment that evening. As usual, he hadn’t been given much notice. The message on the secure site that he accessed every midday was as terse as ever, providing only a time-8:00 p.m.-and a location-Room 13 in the Happy Trails Motel, a mile north of Middleburg, Virginia. He had never been there before. Checking his road map, he saw it was about thirty-five miles west of D.C. He’d allow himself an hour. Arriving late was not an option.
If Bimsdale was surprised by his departure from the office, he didn’t show it. His assistant had proved himself to be perfectly capable of working unsupervised, even if this operation was a lot more sensitive than anything he’d dealt with in the past. It wasn’t ideal, but Sebastian had no choice. The worst of it was that he would be turning off his cell as soon as he left the Hoover Building, even though that was contrary to standing orders. There were other priorities for him.
Driving onto I-66 from the Beltway, Sebastian thought about Matt Wells. Had he blown it by using an amateur? He still didn’t think so. The fact was, Rothmann was bound to want Wells back, both to find out what he knew and to complete the conditioning process. The Englishman might have been aware of those factors, but he seemed only to want revenge for his family. That was why it was so essential that they kept track of Wells before he managed to strike at Rothmann. Sebastian himself needed to catch Rothmann to justify the Director’s faith in the operation. That was now looking in serious jeopardy.
In the last five miles, he took a circuitous route to the motel, stopping several times to see if he was being tailed. He wasn’t, at least as far as he could ascertain. He had developed a talent for countersurveillance over the years, among other things checking his car for bugs every morning before he left home. His wife had found him doing that once, but he’d scared her off by saying he was looking for bombs. It was two minutes to eight when he drove into the motel’s parking lot. He parked as far from reception as he could and took in the scene. Number thirteen was at the end of the long building, deliberately chosen for that reason. Resting his hand on the butt of his Glock, Sebastian walked to the door. There seemed to be no one around.
He knocked twice, paused, and then three times more. The door opened immediately and he went inside. The room was in darkness until the chain was applied to the door. A small light on the dresser came on.
‘Peter.’
‘Valerie.’
He looked at the middle-aged woman. This time she was dressed as a soccer mom, in matching blue sweatshirt and pants. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore no makeup.
‘Did they win?’ he asked.
She ignored that and sat down on one of the beds. ‘I’ve heard something that disturbs me.’
Sebastian kept a smile on his lips, hoping that the somersault his stomach had just taken wasn’t obvious. If Valerie Hinton had found out about the stunt he was pulling with Matt Wells, he’d be in deep shit.
He stayed on his feet. ‘What’s that?’
‘Sit down,’ she said, refusing to allow him a dominant position and locking eyes with his. ‘You’ve been playing hardball with Sir Andrew Frogget.’
‘So?’
‘So stop. Right now. That’s an order.’
Sebastian looked down, aware that by breaking eye contact he had handed the field to her. He needed to find out how much she knew. ‘His company worked for Heinz Rothmann-who, I would remind you, tried to take out the President and most of the cabinet.’
‘Routh Limited is off-limits, Peter. I’m serious.’
‘What’s the CIA’s interest?’
Valerie Hinton gave him a brief smile. ‘That’s way above your pay grade, Peter. Just do what I say. I’ll leave first.’
He watched her go. During the fifteen minutes that the established protocol required him to wait before leaving, he thought about the order. The CIA had been interested in Rothmann from the beginning. He had been told to pass all his case notes to the agency as soon as the Nazi’s involvement in the attack on the President was confirmed. Thankfully they hadn’t used the information in a way that would implicate him-at least, not yet.
Sebastian had been working as a CIA informant for years, ever since he was caught screwing a woman with links to a drug gang in Puerto Rico. He’d have been shit-canned by the Bureau if the CIA hadn’t buried his involvement, but he’d been blackmailed into keeping them advised of all his activities. So why were they so interested in Rothmann? Did they want to use his conditioning process? The Agency had a history of mind control experiments. Then again, did they imagine they could they get away with using a method developed by the children of a Nazi doctor who had worked with Mengele at Auschwitz, and had nearly assassinated the President?
The answer to that was obvious.
The real question was, could anyone stop them?
Twenty-Five
‘No, Matt.’ The female voice was tender, but authoritative. ‘No.’
Suddenly I was reunited with my body. I stopped in midthrust, the knifepoint a few inches from Quincy’s throat. I let the weapon drop to the floor.
‘Karen?’ I said, a wave of joy breaking over me as I turned to find her. The realization that I had remembered her name, that she was no longer one of the nameless, came at the same time as I saw Rothmann advancing toward me. He struck me several times on the face before I raised my arm to protect myself.
Karen. She wasn’t here, but she had spoken to me.
‘Schalk!’ Rothmann screamed, tearing off the hyena mask. ‘Kill the negro now!’
Bolts of electricity galvanized nerves all over my body, but my consciousness didn’t rise up like it had before. The conditioning wasn’t working anymore.
‘Screw you,’ I said, lowering my head and charging him. There was a satisfying impact and I heard the breath shoot out of his lungs. I landed on top of him, sat up and punched him on each side of his face. That didn’t go down too well with his congregation. I looked up as they started to yell, and then move toward the platform with the inverted crosses. Guards in blue denim were heading my way as well, their weapons raised. I only had one option.
‘Stop!’ I yelled, my hands tightening on Rothmann’s throat. ‘Stay where you are! I can crush his windpipe in a split second.’
That arrested their progress. There were guns trained on me, but even the highly conditioned guards were hesitant. I pressed my thumbs down harder and locked eyes with Rothmann. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to join Karen wherever she was-the sound of her voice had made me even more desperate to see her again. The bastard beneath me squirmed and bucked like a dying fish, his eyes bulging. He knew exactly how serious I was.
A loud report took everyone by surprise. The guard nearest to me sprawled forward, his head an eruption of atomized bone and brain matter. More shots felled the young man and woman on either side of me. Then the barn was filled with screams and the rattle of automatic weapons fire. I had let go of Rothmann at the first shot and rolled behind him. He was gasping for breath, his hands at his throat. I could have finished him with a single blow, but I had another priority-getting Quincy Jerome and Mary Upson off the crosses. Quincy’s was nearer so I went to him first, picking up Nora Jacobsen’s knife on the way.
I stood on the cross’s horizontal bar, avoiding Quincy’s bound wrists. Bullets flew past as I reached for the rope that held his ankles. It was thick and had been dipped in something tarry, so it took me some time to saw through the strands. When I was almost finished, I got down and started on the ropes on his wrists. I looked at the pandemonium in front of me as I was cutting. There were bodies on the floor. People were on their knees clutching wounds. The guards seemed to have taken a beating from members of the congregation, some of whom had seized their weapons and used them against the men and women in blue denim.
I got Quincy’s upper body free and pulled him away from the cross. That broke the last strands of the rope on his ankles and he slid to the ground in my arms.
‘Keep your head down,’ I said, then turned to Mary.
To my surprise, she was already down. The black-robed figure in the gargoyle mask was leading her to the door, bending low and brandishing a long knife. I was about to go after them, when a line of shots appeared in the wooden floor ahead. I looked around desperately for a weapon. The nearest was by the side of a dead guard, but I was warned off that by more well-directed gunfire. Someone wanted me to stay where I was. Who was taking such care to tie me down, but not to hit me? I peered out at the crowd. Someone had pulled the rear doors of the barn open and people were disappearing into the night.
Rothmann got to his feet unsteadily and stumbled toward the nearest exit. He was warned off in the same way, bullets kicking up splinters from the wooden floor in front of him. He yelped and sank to his knees. He didn’t have the air of a master now. I found that the desire to revenge myself on him physically had completely gone. That didn’t mean I was going to let him escape justice-assuming I myself got out of this alive.
Gradually the gunfire died down. Through the cloud of discharged smoke, I made out six people still standing. Four of them were naked, three men and a woman, one other man was pulling on the clothes he had stripped from a dead guard, and the remaining one, a woman, was fully dressed. She was carrying a machine-pistol in one hand and a pistol in the other. None of the guards seemed to have survived.
‘Got any idea what’s going on?’ Quincy asked. He was still dazed from his time on the cross.
I shook my head. ‘I think we might be about to find out.’
The man who had got dressed pointed the naked people in the direction of the various exits. They took up positions there, pulling clothes from the bodies of guards. They were all toting weapons. Then he joined the armed woman and they embraced.
‘Touching,’ Quincy muttered. ‘Even assholes have feelings.’
I had slipped the knife under my body and was trying to get it into my pocket.
‘Throw the blade over here,’ the woman said, pointing the pistol at me.
I did as I was told, holding her gaze. She was tall and well-built, and she looked seriously comfortable with firearms. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail and she had a small rucksack on her back.
‘You,’ she said to Rothmann. ‘Sit down and stop sniveling.’
He obeyed instantly, his hands over his now shrunken organ.
The man was also tall, with a full beard. He was carrying a shotgun and there was a combat knife in the belt he had put on.
‘The Antichurch returns to its rightful leaders,’ the woman said.
‘Indeed, sister,’ the man said solemnly, eyeing Rothmann. ‘Shall we string up the heretic?’
‘Of course. The true Antigospel requires that traitors be sacrificed to the Lord Lucifer.’
Rothmann made a high-pitched noise.
‘Have you anything to say before sentence is carried out?’ the man said to him. He had a strong Southern accent.
‘I…I wish to beg forgiveness,’ Rothmann said, groveling before him. ‘When I revived the Antichurch, I had no idea that Jeremiah Dodds had a brother. Or that he set up his church in opposition to the original cult.’
The woman stepped forward and brought her boot down on Rothmann’s right hand, making him yelp in agony. ‘Jeremiah Dodds was a heretic,’ she said, pressing down harder on his fingers.
‘Besides, you sent people to kill us,’ the man added, bringing the muzzle of the shotgun close to Rothmann’s ear. ‘They killed several of the faithful before we gutted them.’
‘You mind telling us who you are?’ Quincy asked. He was still lying prone and had lifted his head.
‘Yes, I do mind.’ The woman pointed her pistol at him. ‘We don’t pay no heed to niggers.’
I might have known that the original Antichurch would be a racist organization.
The man laughed emptily. ‘Sister Abaddon, I see three crosses. What d’you say to hanging all three of these sorry creatures up and turning their insides out?’
She smiled beatifically at him. ‘That would be a truly wonderful way to celebrate the Lord Lucifer’s triumph, Brother Apollyo
n,’ she said, moving toward the rope that I’d cut from Quincy.
Her head disintegrated before she got there, the blast of the shot reaching my ears an instant later. The woman was thrown forward, her arms hooking over the horizontal bar of the cross and her head thumping against the vertical. Four more shots dispatched the people at the doors.
‘Drop your weapons!’
The voice from the center of the barn was loud and clear. I watched as the bearded man complied and a figure in black combat clothes came toward us. It was a woman with short blond hair and high cheekbones.
‘What the fuck now?’ Quincy said, in a low voice.
My heart went into overdrive. She didn’t look like she used to and she sounded like a native New Yorker, but I recognized her gait instantly.
Sara Robbins had collected plenty of souls already. And now she was coming for ours.
Arthur Bimsdale was finding his boss hard to fathom. If he’d been in charge, he’d have gone down to Texas as soon as Matt Wells and Quincy Jerome disappeared from the tracking grid. Every effort was being made by the Houston field office to pinpoint their locations, but Peter Sebastian would normally have been on the spot to concentrate the local agents’ minds and coordinate their efforts. When Bimsdale had suggested he go alone, Sebastian had told him he’d be better employed handling the operation from headquarters. That was patently not the case.
His boss had returned to the office around 10:00 p.m., giving no explanation of where he had been. He had turned off his cell phone during his absence-Bimsdale knew this because he’d called him with Houston’s latest negative update. Why the secrecy? Department heads, like all agents, were supposed to be contactable at all times. The look on Sebastian’s face, however, had discouraged questions or comments. He received the news from Texas with a distracted air.
‘Arthur, email me everything we’ve got on Routh Limited. Do a search on Sir Andrew Frogget, too. See if our guy in the London embassy’s got any new shit.’
‘New shit?’ Bimsdale repeated uncertainly.