I didn’t know what to say. There is no answer to a statement like that. Eventually I asked him, “Would you be willing to take her back?”
His face twisted up and his voice was a broken whisper. “With all my heart.”
I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Be at my office at six-thirty this evening.”
Chapter Seventeen
At five-fifty-five I was ready in my drawing room in my downstairs apartment. I still had a dull ache in my head, and my ribs had turned a nasty blue-black color, but on the whole I didn’t feel too bad. The worst feeling I had was the vague sick feeling in my gut, and I was taking care of that with the occasional shot from a bottle of Bushmills I had on my drinks tray.
At six o’clock precisely the doorbell rang and I let del Roble in. He was wearing a loose, linen summer jacket with big pockets, and he was holding an attaché case in his hand. He looked as though he hadn’t slept much recently. I was glad. His long face was sunken and he had dark rings under his eyes, and his sallow skin looked olive green. He stood staring at me. “Have you got it?”
I pointed to the drawing room and said, “Sit down.”
He stepped in and looked around, as though he were searching for hidden traps. Then he stepped over to one of the armchairs and sat. I poured a measure of whiskey into a glass and handed it to him.
“You look as if you need it.”
He sipped it and put it down. “Have you got it?”
“Yeah, I have it. What about the transfer?”
He put the attaché case on his knees and flipped the catches. There was a laptop built into it. I handed him a piece of paper with the details of my account in Belize, he looked at it once, rattled at the keyboard then turned the case for me to see what he had written. I looked and smiled. Ten million sterling poised to drop into my account. That’s a nice thing to look at. He said, “Before I execute the transfer, I need to see it.”
I went to my dresser and pulled open a drawer. I took out the black box and showed it to him. He went real still and his eyes dilated wide. He swallowed hard and I saw the involuntary twitch of his hand. I put the box on the dresser beside me and shook my head. “Uh-uh. Not yet, del Roble. First there are some things I need you to clear up for me.” His tongue flicked at his lips and he glanced at me. “That wasn’t the deal.”
“Get it clear, Seraph. There is no deal. You’re committed. You and I both know if I had demanded four times as much you would have paid it. You need this box like you need the air you breathe. That means there is no deal. You do as I say and if I’m happy, you get to walk out of here with the box and whatever the hell it contains. Now, I say we chat, so we chat.”
His eyes were going wild and now I could see a pulse throbbing in the side of his head. I let a smile ride up the side of my face and said, “What’s the matter, Father? You losing your faith in your fellow man? You think I don’t want the ten million you have poised to send me?”
A pale smile flickered in his eyes. The smile of a man who thinks he understands that all humans are as limited in imagination and worth as he is himself. “What do you want to know?”
“Who are you?”
“You know. I have told you…”
“You lied.”
He flicked his lips again. “I didn’t lie. I am who I said I was.”
I put the box back in the drawer and sat in the chair opposite him. I picked up my drink, crossed my legs and waited. He closed his eyes and sighed.
“I am Serafino del Roble.” I held his eye. “I am employed as a consultant by the Vatican, and I am a consultant to the Opus Dei.” He hesitated. “I am the High Seraph of La Hermandad de la Cabra, a secret fraternity, beyond religion, that wields a great deal of political, temporal power…”
“Thanks to your blackmail schemes?”
“Only partly, but yes.”
“Partly. So what’s the other part?”
He threw his hands in the air, appealing to a god he didn’t believe in. “Dios! It is too complex for you to understand!” I raised an eyebrow and he made a gesture of helplessness that was suddenly very human. “Very well, joder! But you will not believe me! We are the repository of ancient wisdom, knowledge and technology that dates back more than fifteen thousand years. Long before the interglacial began! We are hybrids, Liam. Hybrids. Part human, part Ael—”
“Oh, come on, del Roble! You expect me to swallow that bullshit?”
“No. No! It is what I told you. You cannot swallow it! You cannot even understand it! You are not ready to understand it. You are a stupid, grunting animal! But we wield power you cannot begin to understand. Power and technologies that to your ignorant, mammalian species are like magic!”
Suddenly I was listening. I was remembering the hallucinogenic experiences I’d had in Çalares. I said, “Okay. You are the High Seraph of the Brotherhood of the Goat. What does that mean?”
“We are”—he cast around, shaking his head, looking for a point of reference that I could grasp—“or we control, the Illuminati! The Masons! The Bilderberg Group—and more! We engineer your world, your evolution, your development. We make your Napoleons, your Hitlers, your whole history! And you goggle and talk about us in whispers, and in disbelief. The gods! The angels! Elves, daemons, devils! Aliens!”
He stopped and rubbed his face. The more he spoke, the more human he was looking. “We come from another species, Liam. We have inhabited this world millions, hundreds of millions of years longer than you. But the climate has not favored us for a very long time.
“Sixty-five million years ago, there was an event. Surface life was almost extinguished. The planet began to cool and eventually we had to go underground, inside the planet, where it is hotter, and the air had less oxygen and more carbon dioxide. Your mythology is full of it—Agharta, Shamballa…
“But we need the surface for many things. We are scientists, so we developed ways of staying connected and exploiting the surface. We created you. We created hybrids who can span the two worlds. Your mythology is the story of our experiments.” He stared at me a while. “Sacred to us is the cross of the serpent and the goat. It was magic.”
I watched his face. He actually seemed to believe this bullshit. Maybe to reach the heights he had reached in world affairs, you needed to be this far out of your mind. He read my expression and said, “You asked. If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”
I sighed and nodded. He had a point. With more than a hint of irony, I said, “Okay, del Roble. So, in order to influence the development of humanity and world affairs, and to write the next chapter in human history, you set Rupert up with Mary-Jane Carter.”
His tongue flicked at his lips. “Mary-Jane is… We weren’t interested in Rupert Ferguson. We were interested in his uncle.”
“Yeah, you had him seduced and brainwashed. Then you got him to change his will so he left everything—”
He cut across me. “No, he did not leave us everything.”
I nodded. “Not the box. So you used Mary-Jane again, this time to get the box from Rupert.”
“We had to.”
“How do you figure that?”
“There are certain things on this earth, Liam, which cannot belong to one person or another. They are too important. Their impact on”—he paused and shook his head—“on life is too far-reaching.” He pointed at the dresser. “What is in that box is one of those things. Rupert and his uncle should never, never have had possession of it.”
“What gives you the right to decide who gets to have what and when?”
“It’s our job. That’s who we are. We are Ael. May I have the box now?”
I nodded, stood then went to the dresser. I pulled out the box and stood in front of him. “Execute the transfer.”
He hesitated only a second, then he hit the button and showed me the screen. I watched the money leave his account and settle happily in mine. Then I turned and walked to my chair and sat watching him turn green, with the box sitting on my lap. I glanc
ed at the clock. It was six-twenty p.m. and I was hoping that Rupert would be punctual. Del Roble said, “Give it to me.”
“Not quite yet, del Roble. I’m nearly done. Then you can have the box and whatever is in it with my blessings. First, tell me this. Did you have your boys do a job on my safe in this apartment?” He looked at me like I was nuts. I said, “I didn’t think so. It was too professional.”
At that moment the doorbell rang. He turned and stared at the door then at me. Something was happening to his eyes. He hissed, “What is this now?”
I called, “Come in, Rupert. The door’s open.”
A very strained, but slightly soberer Rupert walked in. He saw del Roble and frowned. Del Roble glared and got to his feet. He was looking very sickly. “What are you playing at, Murdoch? You are going too far!”
“Sit down, del Roble. You have no choices and no options here.” I waved Rupert to a chair and added, “I believe you two have met already.”
Rupert stood hesitating with his hand, unsure whether decorum and good manners called for them to shake or not. When he saw the look on del Roble’s face, he just mumbled, “Why, yes. At the…err, club—”
I cut across him. “That’s right. You introduced Miss Carter to Rupert, didn’t you, Seraph? In fact, Rupert, we were just discussing that.” I turned to del Roble. “Sit.”
He sat.
I turned to Rupert and saw that his eyes had fallen on the box on my lap. I leaned back and studied the expression on his face. There was almost nothing to study, except that what little color there was had completely drained away. His eyes looked dull and lifeless. I said, “You recognize this?”
He nodded and his eyes shifted to the floor. “Yes, I do. It belonged to my uncle. It was given to him by…” His eyes strayed. Del Roble was staring at him. His neck seemed to have swollen and his face was becoming a mask of rage. He hissed suddenly. “Yes? By whom? Who gave it to him?”
“It was a friend of his.”
“And what was this friend’s name?”
“I—”
I cut in gently, “It’s okay, Rupert. It was his lover, wasn’t it? The woman he went out there for. The woman who drew him into the Hermandad.” He nodded. I could feel del Roble scowling at me. I said, “It was Sinead Tiernan, wasn’t it?”
He nodded again and del Roble exploded to his feet. “That thieving snake! That slithering, treacherous gray snake! I swear that I will kill her!”
I snapped, “Sit down!” He was trembling and I wondered for a minute if he was going to have a stroke. I said, “Haven’t you done enough killing, del Roble?”
He turned and spat at my feet. “That’s rich coming from you, Murdoch!”
He had a point, so I ignored it and turned back to Rupert.
“When your uncle died, he left most of his things to the Hermandad, as del Roble had told him to do. But the box was one of the few things he left to you.”
He nodded again. “Yes.”
“You told me that when Mary-Jane Carter disappeared, nothing went missing with her, but that wasn’t strictly true, was it? The box also went missing.”
Rupert’s face hardened. “I also told you that anything she might have taken with her, she took with my blessing. Why can’t you understand that, Murdoch? I am in love with Mary-Jane and as far as I am concerned, she is my wife and entitled to everything I own!”
Del Roble made an unpleasant spitting noise. I ignored him and nodded. “Except that it isn’t that simple, Rupert. You see, it wasn’t Mary-Jane who took the box.” His head snapped up at me. I could feel del Roble’s eyes burning into the side of my face. I went on, “It was Pete Strickland, the yegg, the professional safebreaker, working on del Roble’s instructions, and in cahoots with Mary-Jane.”
Del Roble was on his feet again, turning unpleasant shades of green and red and shouting at the top of his voice, “This is intolerable! Enough of this. Enough! I have paid you. Give me back the box. It belongs to us!” His voice petered out as I held up the box and began to extend it toward Rupert. He said, “What are you doing?”
I said, “Sit down.”
He sat, slowly. I said to del Roble, “Was it you who had Strickland shot?”
His face flushed again. “In the name of all that is holy! What is the point of all these questions? No! No! No! No! I did not have Strickland shot! What would be the point? If he had lived, I would now have the box!”
There was a deathly silence in the room. It was the answer I had expected, but I wanted Rupert to hear it from del Roble.
I said, “Is the penny beginning to drop, Rupert? Sinead had stolen the box from the Hermandad and given it to your uncle for safekeeping. There was no fear of losing it because she knew she could manipulate him at will. Somehow del Roble discovered Hugo had it, and he employed Mary-Jane to get it back. He didn’t realize Mary-Jane and Sinead were together. And Mary-Jane got Sinead to recruit her old pal Strickland in Çalares, to help her pull the job on Rupert.” I turned to del Roble. “How am I doing?”
He shrugged. “Mary-Jane was to fix things up for Peter so that it was easy for him to get hold of the box. She switched off the alarms, told him where the box was kept in the safe and arranged for her and Rupert to go out for dinner. Peter went in and got hold of the box as arranged and took it home with him to Kensal Rise. They were then both supposed to bring it to me, but they didn’t show. Eventually Mary-Jane telephoned to me and said that she had made ‘other arrangements’ and wanted an insane sum of money for the box.” He barked a nasty laugh. “What she meant was that she had killed Strickland and wanted to sell back to the Brotherhood what already belonged to the Brotherhood.”
There was a horrible, strangled noise from Rupert. I turned to him and saw his face buried in his hands. I watched him a moment and turned back to del Roble.
“Who told you to be at the Triborough Bridge?”
He spread his hands. “Who else? Mary-Jane. Afterward she told me that she had arranged for you to make the drop because she was afraid to do it herself. But now she regretted that, as she was even more afraid of you than of me. She warned me to be careful, that you were dangerous, unscrupulous and unpredictable, and you might try to take both the money and the box. I have to say, she proved to be only too accurate.”
I smiled. “So it was you screaming in the back of the car.”
He ignored me. “Then the story was that you had got hold of the box and wouldn’t let it go. Finally, she came to see me and told me she had found a way of getting the box from you. She was going to arrange a meeting.”
“You, me, her.”
“Correct, and you would bring the box. Again, she warned me to be careful of you, that you were liable to spring tricks.”
“So she telephoned me then left for the beach house.”
“Yes.”
“But then she phoned you again and said there had been a change of plan. That she had got hold of the box somehow, but I was going to turn up and try to pull a fast one—tell you I had the box. She said you should play me along, take me to the beach house then you could both take care of me together.”
He was watching me carefully, frowning. He said, “Yes, that’s exactly what she did. How did you know?”
I ignored his question and went on. “But you thought you’d be smart. You couldn’t be sure which one of us had it—which one to believe. So you thought you’d get me out of the way on the Divine Mercy while you had a chat with Mary-Jane. If she didn’t have it, you’d deal with her quietly then get your pet Zoltan to persuade me to tell you where it was. If she did have it, you’d just get Zoltan to feed me to the sharks.”
He was giving me an odd look. He shrugged and said, “Yes, I thought I’d made that clear.”
I had to ask him. I said, “How many people are you prepared to kill to get hold of this box, del Roble?”
His face twisted into a mask of the most absolute contempt. He spat, “Millions! Billions! And we will kill billions before the century is out! Ho
w many billions do you think we’ve killed already? Your species is dross! An infection on the face of this planet! You don’t deserve the gift of life!” He leaned forward deliberately and spat at my feet. “Don’t fucking moralize at me, Murdoch! You haven’t the faintest conception of what that box contains! You haven’t the faintest notion of its value.” He pointed at the box in my lap with a trembling finger. “The contents of that box are worth your life, mine and everybody’s in this room, a thousand, thousand, thousand times over!” He sneered and gestured at me with his open hand. “Your pathetic little life is nothing compared to what is in that box!” Then suddenly he was screaming, “Mary-Jane Carter, nothing but a whoring gray lizard! Those punks you and she so readily disposed of, scum! Hairless apes! How dare you moralize at me!”
Suddenly he was on his feet. He hurled his attaché case at me. It struck me hard in the chest. As I raised my hands to protect myself, he lunged at me and snatched the box from where it lay in my lap, screaming, “Give it to me! Give it to me! The gods damn you! Give it to me!”
He backed away, hugging it to his chest, staring wildly around the room. I took the attaché case and placed it on the floor beside me. Rupert was staring at him. I said, “Go ahead. Open it. You are welcome to whatever’s inside it.”
He had an insane smile on his face and he was making weird whistling noises from his throat. His hands were trembling so badly that he could barely hold the box still. Eventually he found the sensor on the underside and the lid lifted silently. Then his eyes boggled and he stared at me as the box tumbled to the floor. His neck swelled and his head thrust forward. “Where is it? What have you done with it? Where is it?”
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