"But you will," Grobius said. It was not a question.
"Yeah, all right." He twirled the bottle in his fingers for a moment. "It was in the museum that it all went to shit. We'd followed the blueprint you'd given us--worked a treat, too. Everything was just where it was supposed to be--including the door leading to the vaults underneath the building. We blew the door, no problem. Went down the stairs to the first vault and kept right on going past it. Same for the second. You'd said the book was in the third vault, so that's where we headed.
"Scrodin, the explosives bloke, blew the combination lock. Took more juice, that did, than the one upstairs, but he got it done. Then we pried the vault open."
Hawkins took another long draw from the bottle of water. Then he sat there a moment longer, as if hoping that someone would interrupt him. No one did.
"Way I figure it, they had some kind of state-of-the art nerve agent inside the vault, all ready to go. Saddam probably had his boffins make it up special. One of those 'weapons of mass destruction' that wanker Bush is always goin' on about. The stuff must have been under pressure, because it dispersed into the hall pretty damn quick once we'd got the vault door open."
"How do you know that?" Pardee asked him. "Nerve gas would surely have been invisible to the naked eye."
"I know that, because it killed every man on the team in the next ten seconds, before we even had time to get into the bloody vault."
"And you alone survived to tell the tale," Grobius said. He might have been discussing pork belly futures. "Why is that?"
"Because I kept my gas mask on, that's why. We'd all put them on upstairs, in case there was something wired to the hallway door. Nothing. It was stuffy underground, and the other guys took their masks off so they could breathe better. Hell, the only reason mine was still on was, I was so busy thinking out the next move that I forgot about it."
"Did you attempt to render assistance to your fallen comrades?" Grobius asked.
"Waste of time. The gas killed them in a few seconds. Nasty stuff, nerve gas, and works pretty damn quick. And I know dead men when I see 'em."
"No doubt," Grobius said. "So then..."
"So then I went into the vault, found your fuckin' book, wrapped it in that pretty tapestry there, and got the hell out. Sir."
Grobius nodded. "What about the bodies of the others?"
"What about 'em? I had the book, and that was the objective. I wasn't about to carry corpses out with me, even if I was able to, which I wasn't."
"That raises a security issue," Grobius said.
"No, it doesn't. Look, we were all dressed as locals, with first-class forged ID, along with a few other bits for credibility--letters from somebody's mother, an address book written in Arabic, stuff like that. Sure, their prints are on file someplace, most likely. The Iraqis might eventually get positive IDs from Interpol, if they push it. Or the Yanks, who I guess are in charge now. But so what? Job's done, mission accomplished, and all that. A whole lot of stuff got lifted from that museum. Nobody's going to get upset about some old book."
Grobius gave a grudging nod. "Possibly."
Hawkins scratched his unshaven chin. "You know, I read Arabic pretty well. Wouldn't have been much good for you on this job if I didn't."
Grobius just looked at him.
"I took a quick look through that little volume there, just to be sure I had the right one. The script's old, not the sort of Arabic they use nowadays. I couldn't make sense of most of what I saw. But the cover says it's the Book of Shadows by some bloke called Abdul Alhazred."
"Did you have some point you wished to make?" Grobius asked softly.
"Nah, it's just that that name rang kind of a bell, when I first saw it. Wasn't this Alhazred the one that wrote the Necronomicon?
"The Necronomicon is a myth," Pardee said. His right hand had found its way into his pocket. "Product of the fevered imagination of that pulp writer, Lovecraft. It never existed, nor did its putative author, this Alhazred. That's not an uncommon Arab name, you know."
Hawkins shrugged. "If you say so. But I've heard people talk about that Necronomicon sometimes, as if it was real."
"People talk about Atlantis, too, I understand," Pardee said with a tiny smile. "And Excalibur, as well as the Holy Grail. They aren't real, either."
"Yeah, you got a point there."
"There have been fakes of this Necronomicon over the years. But Mister Grobius doesn't purchase fakes, nor works written by fictional characters."
"Sure, no offense," Hawkins said. "Just asking."
"None taken, I'm sure," Pardee said. "Well, if that's everything... He looked toward Grobius, received a nod. "I'll just see you to the door, Mister Hawkins."
"Enjoy your money," Grobius said, in a voice that was expressionless as his face.
Pardee returned a few minutes later. "One of the Turkish guards is dead," he said. "They tried to take the case away from Mister Hawkins on his arrival, and he objected. Most efficiently, I may say."
"Make sure that the Turk's family gets enough money to keep them quiet." Grobius looked at the book resting at the foot of his bed. "I was beginning to think we would never get our hands on this."
"Those stories our people planted about weapons of mass destruction did the trick, as I predicted. Bush was just looking for an excuse. He should be grateful to us for providing one."
"I doubt he'll write us a thank-you note," the old man said, then looked up at Pardee. "And speaking of excuses..."
"Hawkins was lying, of course. I could see the deception rising from him like smoke. He killed the others, probably as soon as he was sure he'd found the book."
"Ruthless bastard," Grobius said, with what may have been a touch of admiration. "Greedy, too. Still, he's saved us a certain amount of trouble."
Pardee nodded. "He's left himself as the only loose end."
"Wait until he's well away from here to snip it off."
"Of course. I'll go see him tonight."
"Good. Now, have someone notify O'Rourke that I want the plane ready to fly out tomorrow morning at seven," Grobius said. "We're going home. There's a great deal to do."
Miles Hawkins got to bed a little after 2:00am. He'd found a room in a medium-priced hotel within sight of the Blue Mosque. Hawkins might be officially a wealthy man now, but the money was stuck in his Barbados account until morning. Tomorrow he could go to a bank, arrange a wire transfer of a half million or so, and then start spending it. Get a decent hotel room, for starters. Maybe even in that palace where Grobius and his trained cobra, Pardee, were staying. Then Hawkins remembered the security man he'd killed, and thought maybe another hotel would be a wiser choice.
He'd had enough wiggle room left on his Amex card to pay for this place, and enough ready cash to afford a bottle of good champagne and a medium-priced whore, who'd left half an hour ago. Well, at least the booze had been worth the price.
Hawkins downed the last mouthful of the champagne straight from the bottle, went into the tiny bathroom to take a piss, then crawled into the creaking bed. He hoped he wouldn't be sharing it with any of the local insect life, which was one reason he had chosen this place and not something more down-market. In the Middle East, the cheaper the hotel, the bigger the bugs.
Even though he was still charged up from the recent experience of becoming a multi-millionaire, fatigue, combined with the alcohol, soon prevailed. Hawkins fell into a deep sleep, and found that Pardee was waiting for him.
Hawkins was back in the vault under the Iraqi National Museum. He had just killed Scrodin, the last member of the team. Hawkins's pistol was effectively silenced, so the other three had died in the hallway without a lot of noise. They were all still half-deaf from the explosion that had blown the vault's door, anyway. The three in the hall had been easy to dispatch from behind, one quick shot each to the back of the head.
Scrodin had actually seemed surprised when he'd looked up from the glass case containing the book, to find Hawkins's pistol pointed at
the middle of his forehead. But the surprise lasted only a second, and then Scrodin was sprawled on the floor, dead like the others.
So far, the dream was an accurate reflection of what had really happened. But then, as Hawkins was using the stolen tapestry to wrap around the Book of Shadows, he heard a familiar voice say from the vault entrance, "Most efficiently done. My congratulations." Hawkins's head snapped up, and he saw that Grobius's man Pardee was standing in the doorway, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. In his dream, Hawkins was so dumbfounded that he never even tried to raise the gun.
"You're quite the cold-blooded bastard, aren't you?" Pardee said conversationally as he approached Hawkins. "Quite the credit to Her Majesty's Secret Service. After four murders in as many minutes, I'll wager your hand isn't even shaking."
Pardee was standing right in front of Hawkins now, and in his eyes Hawkins could see something that made him want to scream.
"Neither is mine. See?" Pardee held up his right hand, which was as steady as a boulder. But then, instead of lowering it, he plunged it straight into Hawkins's chest. Through the skin, the sternum, the fifth and sixth ribs, all the way to the heart. Yet there was no rent in Hawkins's flesh, no blood gushing from what should have been a terrible wound.
Pardee smiled, the way a shark seems to, just before it bites your leg off. "Give my regards to your friends," he said. "I'm sure they'll be eager to see you." Then he squeezed--hard.
The hotel maid discovered Hawkins's body in the morning. Getting no response to her knocking, she'd let herself in to do the work she was paid for. Seeing Hawkins in the bed, she'd at first assumed he was asleep, and started to withdraw quietly. Then she'd gotten a look at his face.
The medical examiner's verdict, rendered two days later, was "death from cardiac arrest." Doctor Kerim hesitated briefly before signing the form that would officially close the book on this dead Briton's life. Clearly, the man's heart had stopped beating while he lay asleep. Equally obvious, there was no sign of external trauma to suggest that death had been anything other than natural.
And yet Doctor Kerim was troubled, a little. The man had been comparatively young, and very fit. What's more, his arteries had been almost clear of the cholesterol deposits that are usually associated with heart attacks. And the doctor had seen, over the years, many others who had died in their sleep. Their faces were usually blank, untroubled, as if death had come during the night and courteously declined even to wake them. Nothing in Dr. Kerim's experience allowed him to explain the expression of terror that had been stamped on the man's face when he'd been brought in.
Well, such mysteries were not Dr. Kerim's business to solve. He signed the death certificate, dropped the clipboard onto the corpse's chest, and rang for his assistant. It was time to forget about this death, and move on to the next.
I
GENESIS
Chapter 1
Quincey Morris stood alone in the shadows of a decaying eucalyptus tree and wondered if this was the night he was going to die.
Morris was not by nature a pessimist. Indeed, he had an innate faith in the ultimate power of good over evil. But thinking morbid thoughts before beginning a difficult job was his way of guarding against complacency, which was as dangerous to someone in Morris's line of work as it would be to a lion tamer or trapeze artist--with the same fatal results likely to follow.
Except in Morris's case, death might not be the end of it.
The house he was watching from 200 feet away was built in the Spanish Mission style that Morris always thought of as Southern California Tacky. The property was surrounded by a high concrete wall that would have done any movie star's home proud. But the man who lived there now was no movie star.
Bet he could be if he wanted to, Morris thought. Horror movies, maybe. Jason and Freddie, watch out, 'cause the real thing's in town, now, y'all.
Morris had researched the subject, as he always did before carrying out one of these specialized home invasions. He knew that Lucas Fortner was an occultist of mid-level skill and above-average malevolence. He was said to have spent a year in Budapest, studying black magic under the infamous Janos Skorzeny. A year with Skorzeny made Fortner dangerous. Five years would have made him too deadly to mess around with.
In the moonlight, Morris could just make out the jagged bits of glass that had been set into the top of the stone wall. He knew that the glass was coated with viper venom (Black Mamba, supposedly) that was reapplied weekly--more often, during the rainy season--to keep its potency up.
Morris checked his watch and saw that it was just after 4:00am. Time to go. There were still two hours of darkness left to skulk in, but midnight was long enough past so that some of the Powers guarding Fortner's place would be at less than their full strength.
Morris would not have approached that house at midnight for all the gold in a rapper's teeth.
He patted his pockets to assure himself that all his gear was where it should be, then started across the street. He did not cross in a straight line, but angled to the left--a path that would take him to the property of Fortner's neighbor, a producer at DreamWorks Studios with absolutely no connection to the occult. Morris had checked. He always checked. He was a professional.
The producer's grounds were of interest to Morris for a couple of reasons. One was that the exterior wall was considerably shorter than Fortner's, and free of broken glass, venom-coated or otherwise. The other reason involved an ancient oak tree on the property--the one that rose up tall and stately a mere ten feet from the wall separating the producer's grounds from Fortner's, with several of its branches overhanging Fortner's property.
Morris scaled the producer's wall with little difficulty, swung his legs over the top, and dropped lightly to the ground on the other side. He stood crouched among the plantings and flowers, all his senses alert. There were supposed to be no guard dogs on the property, and no human security either, but you never know these things for sure until you're on the scene. Morris spent the next two minutes absolutely still. He saw no movement except the flowers and shrubbery swaying in the gentle breeze, heard only the drone of crickets and cicadas, smelled nothing except for mimosa and sweet jasmine. Then he straightened slowly and began to make his careful way across the grounds.
As he approached the oak tree, Morris took from his pocket a gemstone, about the size and shape of an almond, that his witch friend Libby Chastain had given him. He stopped, held the stone in his open palm, and waited.
If Fortner had decided to hedge his bets by placing some kind of protective spell on his neighbor's trees, that gemstone would glow bright red.
The stone retained its pale blue color. The tree had not been ensorcelled.
Morris slipped on a pair of thin leather gloves to protect his hands, then began to shimmy up the trunk of the great oak. After ten feet or so, he was able to reach the lowest branches, which made his ascent easier. He continued climbing until he reached a branch that seemed thick enough to bear his weight. He crawled out about half its length, then hung from it with both hands, listening hard for the telltale crack that would betray weakness in the limb. But it held him without complaint.
This was important. The second worst thing that could happen tonight was for the branch to give way while Morris was on his way onto Fortner's property.
The worst thing would be for that branch to break while Morris was trying to get out.
Sitting on the branch now, with his back carefully braced against the trunk, Morris uncoiled from around his waist a twenty-foot length of rope. It was the kind of line that mountain climbers use, except that Morris's had been dyed jet black.
He crawled slowly along the branch, pausing every few seconds to listen for any sign that the thing was going to give under his weight.
Now he was just over the wall that stood between the producer's grounds and Fortner's. The deadly shards of broken glass grinned at him in the moonlight.
Three feet further, and Morris carefully tied one end of his rope arou
nd the branch, using the knots that he had practiced a hundred times while blindfolded.
From between the leaves, Morris could see Fortner's house, a sprawling, two-story structure. No lights burned in the windows, which was unsurprising. Fortner was away in San Francisco for three days, having left that very afternoon. Morris had watched him board the plane, and waited for it to take off, just in case. The man lived alone, which meant there should be no human presence in the house tonight.
Which did not mean, of course, that the place was unguarded.
Morris stayed on the branch for the next ten minutes, watching Fortner's house and grounds. Finally he decided that whatever might be protecting the property, he wasn't going to learn about it from the safety of the producer's tree.
Morris lowered the rope to the ground inside Fortner's wall. He twitched it a few times, to see if anything below would react to the movement. Nothing.
Wrapping his legs around the rope, Morris used his gloved hands to control the speed of his descent. A few seconds later, he was on the ground, watching and listening before moving on.
Morris was halfway to the house when he picked up movement out of the corner of his eye.
He froze, then slowly turned his head to get a better look. Whatever was out there, it was keeping to the shadows. And it was big.
Morris thought about some pictures he had seen in People or someplace about movie stars and their exotic taste in pets. One well-known actor had a leopard, shipped all the way from Africa. Another, who had played Tarzan in several films, was photographed next to the cage containing his pride and joy--a Bengal tiger. Some states had laws about that sort of thing--but not, apparently, California.
If members of the Hollywood crowd could get any of the great predator cats, then presumably Fortner could, too.
The creature moved again, revealing a hint of black fur in the moonlight. A black panther? Fortner would probably enjoy the symbolism of such a sentry. And the damn thing would be dangerous, too. All leopards were formidable, whatever their color. And once they had tasted human flesh...
Evil Ways (Morris and Chastain Investigations) Page 2