The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  Faik lowered his head, vaguely aware that a veiled figure in a burqa and chador was approaching the car. He was desperate, he wanted to get out of the car to face the Wolfman and finish things, but he couldn’t, he was too exhausted, too feeble to help the doctor—

  The three rapid spits and the slap of bullets hitting flesh at close range made him look up. He had heard that sound before. He looked around and saw the Wolfman lying prone on the pavement with his arms flung out. Blood was emerging from holes in his shirt.

  “Don’t follow me,” came a voice that Faik recognized.

  He saw the figure in the black robe and headdress bend to scoop up the Wolfman’s pistol. “Get in the car, Doctor,” he said. The young men on the other side of the road were beginning to gather, staring at them. The killer had already disappeared around the street corner.

  The doctor opened the driver’s door and got in quickly. He started the engine and pulled out. Faik turned his head and saw a cluster of people around the dead Shadow.

  “Who was that?” the doctor said breathlessly.

  “Don’t ask me,” Faik said, twitching his head. He wasn’t going to admit that he recognized the killer’s voice—not to the doctor and not to any of the King’s men. He had no idea why his life had been spared in the basement and then saved on the street, but he had a nasty feeling that he’d have to repay the debt.

  In the meantime, he just wanted to eat and sleep. Then he saw again the face of the man who had killed Izady and the Wolfman—an inhuman, devilish face.

  Faik Jabar suddenly realized that he was nothing more than a pawn in a world full of pain and betrayal. He let out a sob for his lost innocence, and then another as the doctor, who had risked his life for him, gently squeezed his arm.

  The Soul Collector was in the back of her van, holding a torch over the notes she’d made. Over the previous twelve hours, she had staked out the homes of the SAS men known as Rommel and Geronimo. Although the men were no longer in the regiment, they still lived close to its base at Hereford—Rommel in the town itself and his comrade in a village ten minutes’ drive to the east. Geronimo didn’t have kids, so she would have to take his wife. She seemed to be the lazy type, who rose late and sat around the house drinking numerous cups of coffee. Like many middle-aged women who were losing their looks, she seemed to be locked in a world of her own—in the six hours the Collector watched her, she never once spoke on the telephone. As for Rommel, he had two girls under five and a boy who was in the second year of primary school. His wife looked exhausted and incapable of putting up much of a struggle.

  The woman turned a page and studied the timeline she had constructed. She was sure that the ex-SAS men would have set up a reporting system with their families—they would be aware of potential reprisals by Irish paramilitaries and foreign agents. That meant she had to snatch her targets as quickly as possible. Rommel’s and Geronimo’s people didn’t present a problem as they were close together. But she then had to get to Wolfe’s house in Warwickshire, a drive of at least an hour, before the alarm was raised. With the men far away, she was sure that would be long enough.

  Sara turned off the torch and smiled as she stretched out on the sleeping bag. Her knee banged against the steel box that contained her gear.

  She had everything she needed to kill, maim and incapacitate. Which of the three she used would depend on the circumstances. She was prepared for anything.

  Thirteen

  I was about five minutes’ walk from my flat when I realized that Karen would be going crazy. I’d changed the SIM card in my phone and only Andy knew the new number. I stopped at a public phone and called her office number. I got her secretary, so I hung up and tried her cell phone.

  “Matt!” she said. “Where the bloody hell have you been?”

  “Pardon?” I asked, playing the innocent.

  “Don’t mess me around. I’ve been ringing you for hours.” She paused. “Where are you?”

  Something about the way she asked the question made me suspicious. “Em, around and about. Hang on, I’ll call you back.” I broke the connection, retrieved my phone card from the machine and walked back toward Fulham Broadway Station. I had the distinct feeling that Karen’s interest in my location wasn’t casual. There was a good chance she’d been told to bring me in—technically, to protect me, but really to make sure I couldn’t take unilateral action against Sara. One thing I wasn’t going to be doing was calling her back. Not only could she put a trace on the phone—I wasn’t going to make that mistake again after Safet Shkrelli—but she might manage to talk me into seeing things her way. I couldn’t risk that, and I wasn’t going to leave Andy and the others to face Sara. I was her main target, and I didn’t intend to leave them in the lurch. The only way we would catch her was by me taking her on. Karen would never be able to allow that, even if she understood it.

  I sent Andy a text message—we’d agreed to keep calls to a minimum. He said he’d followed Doris Carlton-Jones to a bridge club in Beckenham. I told him to stay on her. It was just possible that Sara would have arranged to meet her birth mother. Then I had a thought. Maybe she was also keeping an eye on Doris Carlton-Jones. She knew what Andy looked like. I texted him again, telling him to keep out of sight as much as possible, and not to go back to my flat.

  On the bus into the center, I thought about what I was doing. Dropping out of sight would piss Karen off and it might anger Sara, too. There was no right way to act. I thought about leaving the country and making it clear to Sara that I’d done so. Would that stop whatever devious plan she was working to? I knew it wouldn’t. She was implacable and relentless, and I was sure she’d spent the last two years honing the skills that the White Devil had introduced her to.

  I hit several cash machines, using different accounts each time, and then went to a computer shop that I hadn’t used before on Tottenham Court Road. I emerged with a laptop and a wi-fi card. Then I headed for the first hotel on the list I’d memorized. It was a cheap place in Bloomsbury, with clanking water pipes and dingy rooms, but the clerk was happy to be paid in cash and didn’t ask for identification. I signed in as Mr. R. Thompson and gave an address in Leeds. Both were real, as I’d checked the local telephone directory—it wasn’t a good idea to make things up, given the heightened security situation in London.

  I locked the door and set up the laptop on a rickety table. I’d got the techies in the shop to initiate the system, so I was ready to roll. I logged on and checked my e-mails. There was nothing unexpected. I went to Rog’s ghost site to see how he and Pete were getting on. They were making progress, but it was slow.

  I got back to thinking about the cryptic clue I’d been sent. There were under six hours to go. I was suddenly plagued by doubts about Katya being the target. Why would Sara go for a woman I’d only met briefly? Also, she could hardly have come up with a more difficult target, given how seriously a gangster like Safet Shkrelli would take security. Then again, I told myself, it would be just like Sara to choose an unlikely victim, and just like her to take on almost impossible odds. I hoped Shkrelli had paid heed to my warning. I’d liked Katya. She hadn’t lost her human warmth, despite the horrors she’d been through. Maybe that was why the gangster had chosen her. But was it really her name in the puzzle?

  I looked at it again. “The sun set by the westernmost dunes of Alexander’s womankind.” The sun. Apollo? Oddly enough, I didn’t know anyone of that name. Who else was associated with the sun? Louis XIVth of France had been known as the Sun King. Again, I didn’t know anyone called Louis, first or second name. I logged on to one of the search engines and came up with a list of sun-gods—Sol, Ra, Shamash, Inti, Surya Deva. I couldn’t link any of them to a recognizable person, unless I was expected to warn every person named Sol or Solomon of imminent death. Then there were all the newspapers with “sun” in their titles. I didn’t see how they might fit in to the rest of the clue. I thought about the dunes again. The westernmost dunes. In the U.K., that would mean Cornwall
—there were plenty of beaches there, as well as a burgeoning surfing scene. Cornwall. I didn’t know anyone by that name. Shit, this was getting me nowhere.

  Then I remembered the name and initials the sender had used to sign off. Flaminio. That was an obvious link to John Webster’s play The White Devil. I’d initially assumed that meant Sara had written the message. But Flaminio was a male name. She would surely have used the name of Vittoria, the main female “white devil” in the play. As for D.F., I couldn’t make any link between those letters and Webster’s play. I began to have the feeling that I was playing a game with rules I only vaguely knew. Then I ran D.F. through a search engine and came up with the protagonist of a play by another writer born in the 16th century—Christopher Marlowe’s vainglorious but ultimately tragic Doctor Faustus. Why would Sara—or anyone else—cast themselves as the man who made a pact with the devil and ended up in hell?

  I had a bad feeling about this. It looked like Sara might not have written the message. Was I being pursued by a male who had, in some way, done a deal with the devil? Everyone made compromises, everyone did things they didn’t want to for some temporary gain. Then I remembered what Karen had said about the book I’d written: The Death List was in effect a pact with the devil and, by writing it, I’d lost part of my humanity. Maybe Sara, or someone else, was hinting at that.

  I got up and smacked my hands together. It was just after eight. I had four hours to come up with a name. Katya was still a possibility, but I wasn’t convinced about her anymore, despite the connection with Alexander Drys.

  I went back to the computer and started from scratch. The sun. Could the message be a series of opposites or pairs? “The moon rose far from the least eastern grains of—” Whose? Alexander the Great’s father Philip? His chief enemy Darius? His soul mate Hephaistion? I let that go. And mankind instead of womankind? So the target was a male? Going back to the beginning, I didn’t know anyone called Moon, apart from the long-dead drummer of the Who. “The moon rose…” Rose was a common enough name. I’d once done a radio program with a chicklit author called Rose Jones. I found her e-mail address on the Internet and sent her a message suggesting she keep a low profile. After I’d done that, I realized that she didn’t fulfil the new criterion of being male. If that was right…

  And so I went on, driving myself up the wall with abstruse ideas and unlikely solutions, as the clock steadily ticked toward twelve midnight.

  Karen Oaten stopped in front of the police barrier tape in the street in Hackney. The uniformed officer with a clipboard recognized her and lifted the cordon so she could drive in. The area that had been shut off was lit up by bright lights powered by a generator.

  “Here we go again, Amelia,” the chief inspector said.

  “Yes, guv.” Detective Sergeant Browning got out of the car quickly, enthusiasm all over her face.

  Oaten smiled, remembering when she’d been like that. She accepted a bag of protective gear from a CSI and began to pull the contents on.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” said Detective Superintendent Ron Paskin, still looking vast in his white coverall.

  “Certainly is,” Karen replied. “What happened this time?”

  “No one’s talking, at least not yet. This is Shadow territory. The man on the pavement over there is a Shadow, too.”

  “Jesus. This is going to turn really nasty.”

  Paskin nodded. “Hello, DS Browning,” he said. “Would you like a transfer to Homicide East?”

  “No chance, Superintendent.”

  “There’s plenty of action here.”

  The sergeant smiled. “Even more at the VCCT.” She went over to the body.

  “Only if you actually take these cases,” the policeman said to his former subordinate.

  “Are you asking me to?” Oaten asked.

  Ron Paskin shrugged. “Not yet. Though I reckon this killing is connected with the other ones in this area.”

  “Any evidence of that?”

  “The cartridge cases are similar to those found in the basement. Ballistics will prove that one way or the other.” He pointed toward an open door. “And there’s blood on a bed and on the floor upstairs. There are ropes up there, too—they’ve been cut. Someone who was tied down got cut loose.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Hard to tell. According to the pathologist, the victim was shot three times in the chest at close range, at between five and six o’clock this evening.”

  Oaten looked around the houses. “And no one saw or heard anything?”

  “Oh, they saw and heard, all right. They’re just not telling us. Don’t worry, we’ll find out. I’ve got Turkish-speaking officers. They’re going around now.”

  A man in his thirties with rings around his eyes came up. “You’re not going to believe this, guv.”

  “DCI Oaten, meet DI Ozal. He’s one of the Turkish-speakers I was telling you about.” Paskin looked at his subordinate. “Go on, then. It isn’t every day you get the chance to show how smart you are to the senior investigating officer of the VCCT.”

  Ozal gave Karen a wary glance. “No, guv. Well, I managed to get a couple of the lads to talk. They won’t give formal statements, but I’ll work on them.”

  “What happened, then?” Paskin asked impatiently.

  “Like I say, guv, you’re not going to believe this. The guy on the ground’s the Wolfman.”

  The superintendent whistled through his tobacco-stained teeth. “So that’s what he looks like.” He turned to Oaten. “You remember him?”

  She nodded. “The Wolfman was in the frame for a string of killings and near-fatal assaults on behalf of the Shadows. We never managed to lay a finger on him when I was here.”

  “That’s not all, guv,” Ozal said, his face flushed with excitement. “He was shot by someone wearing the burqa and chador. That means the Wolfman was killed by a woman—and she used a silenced weapon.”

  Karen Oaten raised a hand. “Hold on, Inspector. How do you know it was a woman?”

  Ozal looked like he’d been asked if the earth went around the sun. “No man would wear those garments, Chief Inspector.”

  Oaten looked at him. “Maybe not in your community. But that wouldn’t stop a non-Muslim.”

  “Who said anything about non-Muslims?” Paskin put in. “The killer could have been a Kurdish woman with a relative who was a victim of the Wolfman. Anyway, what else did they see?”

  “A couple of men came out of that house.” Ozal pointed to the open door. “One of them, in his twenties, was only wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and there was blood all over his legs. He had a bandage on one hand, too. The other was older, with a mustache. He was supporting the first one. Neither appeared to be armed. The Wolfman came running along the road, shouting, after the younger guy got into a green car, probably an Astra. When he got close, the woman…the person in the burqa and chador passed close by. No shots were heard, but the Turk hit the deck. Then the man with the mustache got into the car and they drove off.”

  “Did anyone get the registration number?” the superintendent asked.

  Ozal shook his head.

  Oaten and Paskin exchanged looks.

  “The young man had a wounded hand,” the chief inspector said. “Maybe he was the survivor from the basement.”

  “A Kurd, then, like the dead man?” Paskin said. “Since he had blood on his legs, the Wolfman had probably been working on him.”

  Karen Oaten rubbed her forehead. “When you’ve got the paperwork done and the tests from the blood on the bed are in, let me know. If they match that found in the basement, I’ll talk to the AC. Obviously we’d have to take this murder and the previous one. I’ll see if you can keep handling the groundwork.”

  Her former boss nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “Let’s just hope there aren’t any more killings,” Oaten said.

  Paskin grunted. “That’ll be a squadron of pigs I can hear flying over.”

  DI Ozal, a devout
Muslim, looked at him in disgust.

  Andy Jackson was getting seriously pissed off with hiding behind the seats in the van. He liked action, not skulking. More than once, he’d had to stop himself going over to the bridge club and dragging Doris Carlton-Jones out. He reminded himself that people in the U.K. found most Americans to be extremely polite. Most Americans hadn’t grown up in the back streets of New Jersey’s most underprivileged city.

  It got dark, and still Sara’s birth mother was playing cards. Andy wondered if money was involved. Maybe she’d be there all night trying to win back her stake. And now it was getting cold in the van. He considered turning on the engine so he could let the heating blast out. No, that would make it obvious that there was someone inside. He stuck his hands into his armpits to warm them up. It was either there or his groin.

  He wasn’t even able to look forward to a night in Matt’s well-heated luxury apartment, as the text message had told him to hit the first hotel on his personal list. Matt was obviously busy and Andy didn’t want to disturb him. He’d be working on that puzzle. Andy still wasn’t sure how seriously to take it. Sure, if Sara had owned up to sending it, they’d know to watch out. But why would she hide behind those other names? And why was she giving Matt a clue in the first place? That wasn’t her style, as she’d shown with Dave. The only heads-up they’d been given was the call to Matt. That didn’t give them any time to stop her. So why all this bullshit now?

  A triangle of orange light appeared on the grass in front of the bridge club. Andy leaned forward and watched as people came out. He caught sight of Doris Carlton-Jones. He pulled himself over the seat backs and got behind the wheel. The woman was walking toward her car, which was parked farther up the street. Andy started the van’s engine and checked his wing mirrors. He’d been doing that regularly since Matt’s warning that Sara—or some sidekick—might also have been watching Mrs. Carlton-Jones. Anything was possible, but he wasn’t convinced about that. Sara was too smart to hang around her mother.