Ghosts of Karnak

by George Mann

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by George Mann

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  Also Available from Titan Books

  ALSO BY GEORGE MANN

  THE GHOST

  Ghosts of Manhattan

  Ghosts of War

  Ghosts of Empire (October 2017)

  NEWBURY & HOBBES

  Newbury & Hobbes: The Affinity Bridge

  Newbury & Hobbes: The Osiris Ritual

  Newbury & Hobbes: The Immorality Engine

  Newbury & Hobbes: The Executioner’s Heart

  Newbury & Hobbes: The Revenant Express

  Newbury & Hobbes: The Albion Initiative (August 2017)

  The Casebook of Newbury & Hobbes

  SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Sherlock Holmes: The Will of the Dead

  Sherlock Holmes: The Spirit Box

  Encounters of Sherlock Holmes

  Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes

  Associates of Sherlock Holmes

  Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes (August 2017)

  GHOSTS OF KARNAK

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783294169

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783294176

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  George Mann asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2016 George Mann

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For Lyla Foy, whose UMi provided the fuel.

  ONE

  Her name was Autumn, and like the season that had invested her with both name and temperament, her appearance heralded the onset of a fall.

  She’d been a pretty thing; all auburn curls and heels, her mouth a slash of wicked scarlet, her painted fingernails uniform and precise. She’d been twenty, twenty-two at most. She’d barely commenced her life, and now the city had taken it from her.

  Donovan crushed the nib of his cigarette between his fingertips, grinding the ash and embers until it burned, until the butt disintegrated, and he allowed it to dribble away in the wind. How had a young woman like this ended up lying with her face in a puddle in an alleyway?

  He dropped to his haunches, studying the shocked expression on her face; frozen, rigid, like an obscene photograph printed in a tabloid rag. She looked surprised. She hadn’t been expecting to die, then. Even after everything that had been done to her, she’d clung to the notion that she might somehow find a way out and live, that someone might rush to help her in her final moments, fend off her attackers and sweep her away to safety. And then the moment had come, and she’d been unprepared, terrified, alone. It was a hell of a way to die.

  “Ritual, then?”

  Donovan looked up to see Mullins standing a few feet from the body, rubbing his sweaty palms on the legs of his pants. His ample cheeks were flushed, and he kept glancing nervously at the corpse, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to stare at it, or run a mile in the opposite direction.

  Donovan sighed. “Well, given the fact they’ve carved bloody great icons into her flesh, it’s a safe assumption, Sergeant.”

  “Yeah, well, I suppose it is,” said Mullins, redundantly. He ran a hand through his hair; a nervous gesture Donovan had seen a hundred times before.

  “Listen, go take a look along the alleyway, see if you can’t find anything her attackers might have left behind; a knife, a cigarette butt, a footprint.” He knew the chances of turning up anything useful were minimal at best, but he couldn’t bear to watch the poor guy suffer any longer.

  Mullins nodded gratefully and hurried away. Donovan wondered if the woman reminded him of someone. He’d seen that happen before; watched the most stoic of officers go to pieces over the sight of a dead girl in a familiar dress. Things like that, they brought it all home, made you think it could have been you. That it might have been your wife, or girlfriend, or sister lying there in the gutter, legs splayed apart, stockings torn, blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth. The thought made Donovan grateful he and Flora had never thought about having kids. He was certainly old enough to be this girl’s father.

  He scratched at his new beard. It felt wiry and unfamiliar, and he was still unsure if he was going to keep it. Flora liked it, though; he could tell from the way he’d caught her looking at him in bed that morning, the little sideways glance when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. She’d practically sighed with relief when he’d stepped out of the bathroom, toweling himself down, with the thing still plastered over his face. Maybe he’d give it a few more days. Maybe the itching would stop.

  He sighed, took another cigarette from the packet inside his jacket, and pulled the ignition tab. The light was fading now, the long, red fingers of the sunset clawing at the Manhattan skyline, as if trying desperately to cling on. Soon the police trucks would be here with the surgeon, and the stretcher, and the dancing lights, and this poor woman would lose any shred of dignity she had left.

  Not that she had much.

  Donovan took a long draw on his cigarette, and then gently, cupping the back of her head, rolled her over onto her back.

  “You there?” he whispered into the mouth of the alleyway. “If you’re watching from the shadows, you can damn well get down here and help.”

  He waited a moment for a reply, but there was nothing. No subtle shifting of the light, no red glow of night-vision lenses, no quiet, measured observations. He wasn’t there.

  Donovan balanced his cigarette on his bottom lip, and leaned over, studying the woman’s face. There was a mark on her forehead, carved into the flesh with the tip of a knife. The blood had run, mingling with the water to form glossy streaks, but the symbol was just about visible. It appeared to be a circle or disk, resting inside a pair of horns.

  There were other marks, too—one just below the soft cup of
her throat, above the curve of her breasts, depicting what looked like a small bird with a long beak, and another on her forearm, a neatly carved succession of nested shapes—a circle inside a square, inside a triangle, inside a larger circle.

  Donovan chewed the end of his cigarette. She’d been alive when they’d cut her. He knew that much about corpses. He could tell from the way the blood had swelled to the surface, how the skin had puckered. She’d probably screamed, too. The pain would have been excruciating. He’d have Mullins check that out as well, talk to anyone in the nearby apartments in case they’d heard anything. Trouble was, they probably heard women screaming out here every night. It was that kind of neighborhood.

  Mullins had already taken her purse; Donovan would take a proper look at that back at the station. He checked her hands, though. There were rings still on her fingers. Impressive rings, too, with big rocks. She’d been going up in the world, keeping company with someone who could afford expensive presents. The rings meant something else, too—this wasn’t just a robbery, with someone trying to cover his tracks or get a cheap thrill from carving her up. Whoever had done this had left her purse, and three rings totaling in the hundreds of dollars. Whoever was responsible—whichever sick bastard Donovan was going to have to find—had targeted this woman for a reason. The symbols were a message. Donovan’s first job was to discover for whom.

  He saw the lights before he heard the shrill cry of the sirens, and stood, pluming smoke from his nostrils. Two police trucks and a surgeon, just as he’d anticipated. He’d been playing this game for too long.

  “Mullins?” he said, cupping his hand around his mouth and calling down the alleyway. “You found anything?”

  “No, sir,” came the muffled response. “Nothing worth mentioning.”

  “All right, then get out here and brief the others. I want her bringing straight to the morgue, and I want Dr. Vettel’s eyes on her. No one else. Only Vettel. She’s not going to like it, but when she’s done working up a lather on the holotube, tell her that I owe her one.” He flicked ash from the end of his cigarette, watching as Mullins emerged from the other end of the alleyway, wearing a sullen expression. “You got that?”

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  Donovan nodded. Uniformed men were jumping out of the trucks, spilling out into the road in a veritable tide of blue.

  Shame they couldn’t have been here when she needed them, he thought. He knew he wasn’t being fair, that he was grouchy and tired and needed a drink, but then what had happened to the woman wasn’t fair, either.

  He rubbed his palm over his face. There’d been too many girls recently. Maybe it was starting to get to him.

  Mullins was already talking to Parkhurst, one of the uniformed boys, issuing instructions about getting the body brought back to the morgue. Donovan decided not to bother him. He’d see him back at the station.

  Turning up the collar of his coat, he walked past the parked police trucks, their lights still flashing wildly, and cut down a side street, emerging onto Fourth Avenue. Cars sailed by on the wet road as if skating on mirrors, their tires stirring up puddles close to the sidewalk. Steam curled from a nearby standing pipe, and overhead, the silvery shaft of a searchlight from a police blimp danced across the rooftops, making ghostly shapes amongst the stark silhouettes of water towers and billboards.

  Donovan flicked the butt of his cigarette into the gutter, where it fizzed for a moment in a puddle before going out. He figured that was some kind of metaphor for his day.

  He took a deep breath, then set out for the station.

  TWO

  If the splintered ribs weren’t enough, now he was bleeding from a gash above his left eye, and he had an awful, dawning notion that his lung was about to collapse.

  The Ghost tried to roll onto his side, but even that set off a series of blooming explosions in his head; tiny bursts of fairy lights, dancing before his eyes.

  He sucked at the air, and then wished he hadn’t. His chest burned. Not just the usual, taken-one-too-many-punches sort of pain, either—this was excruciating. The sort of pain that made you think twice about trying to breathe again. He decided that might be his best course of action—to feign death and hope the thing that had done this to him would lose interest in the fight.

  His cheek was pressed against the wet concrete. He twisted his head.

  It hadn’t given up yet. He wouldn’t be that lucky.

  The Ghost rolled as the Enforcer took a lumbering step, its gauntlet splintering the paving slab where his face had been just a split second earlier. Tiny fragments of concrete peppered his face, drawing stinging beads of blood.

  He leapt up, trying to catch his breath. The thing was relentless. He’d already buried upwards of a hundred flechettes in the pilot’s flesh, but still it lumbered on, undeterred.

  The pilot had once been a man, but although it still had the shape and form of a human being, he could see from the dead look in its eyes that any sense of humanity had long ago been driven out by the pain and madness of being incarcerated in such a diabolical machine.

  The Enforcer suit was an exoskeleton, of sorts—a bulky, armored frame that encapsulated the pilot, who hung suspended at the heart of it like a puppet. Thick metal rods formed a series of braces, standing proud of his limbs, giving him bulk and presence. This outer skeleton was affixed to his body by means of a series of shorter rods, which were sunk into his flesh, screwed deep into his bones. Its fists were heavy plated gauntlets, which hung almost to the floor, and each leg was supported by a brace of pistons, helping to manage the weight and generate speed.

  The man’s head was exposed, deep within the chest of the exoskeleton, a knot-work of wires and cables protruding from the base of his skull. His expression was slack and unemotional, and his stare seemed vacant and disinterested. The Ghost supposed the man must have been pumped so full of drugs that he simply couldn’t feel the ragged holes in his chest, inflicted by the Ghost’s flechette gun. He was more machine than man, now—a living tank, firmly set upon the Ghost’s destruction.

  The Enforcer swung at him, its immense fist striking him like a wrecking ball and throwing him up and back. He flipped under the force of it, spinning head over heels and crumpling into the side of a nearby tenement building. Something else snapped in his chest, and he slid to the ground, spitting blood.

  This wasn’t going very well at all. The thing was going to kill him, and he had nothing left. He was out of weapons, and out of ideas.

  Groaning with pain, he clawed at the wall, dragging himself to his feet. One more punch like that and he’d be out for the count. Worse, if the thing managed to pin him against the wall, it would crack his skull like an egg.

  He looked up, trying to see through the fog of blood in his eyes. One of his goggles was cracked, fracturing the sky. He peered through the haze, looking for an escape route, an opportunity for a temporary reprieve.

  There. He spotted a platform on a fire escape, about twenty feet above him, out of reach of the Enforcer. He fumbled inside his coat, trying to find the ignition cord for his boosters. The Enforcer was getting closer, pulling back its fist for another strike.

  His fingers closed around the cord. He yanked down, hard, and felt the kick of ignition at his heels. The Enforcer leaned in, its massive fist closing on the Ghost’s head, just as the power level reached critical and the Ghost shot up on a bright plume of flame. He swung his arms out, catching hold of the railing and taking himself up and over. He came down hard, landing on the platform with a resounding clang. He cut the power to his boosters, and sunk to the ground, drawing ragged breath.

  Below, the Enforcer struggled to extract its fist from the wall, pulling hunks of the building loose in a shower of dust.

  The Ghost pulled himself up into a sitting position. He could feel bubbles of blood popping in his left lung as he breathed. He tried not to think about the pain.

  The Enforcer was still down there, furiously trashing a parked motorcar as it
tried to figure out a way to reach him. He had to stop it. Somehow, he had to find a way. The Reaper couldn’t be allowed to have these things running around the city.

  The Ghost had heard stories about the mob boss using the machines to strong-arm other mobsters into bending their knee, decimating their forces and subsuming them into his own growing network. There’d been reports of bank raids, too, in which men piloting enormous machines had simply smashed their way into the vaults and taken thousands of dollars’ worth of gold deposits, battering aside any resistance from civilians or police.

  The Reaper—so called, the Ghost was given to understand, because of the number of executions he had ordered—was building a powerbase here in the city, and soon there would be no one left, not even the police department, with the resources to take him on.

  The Enforcers were a symptom of this, a virus in the system. And the city was sickening.

  The world shuddered. Or at least, the building he was resting against. With a sigh, the Ghost shuffled to the edge of the platform on his knees and peered over, just as another blow shook the wall at his back, and caused the iron frame of the fire escape to rattle and creak.

  The Enforcer was punching handholds in the side of the building and hauling itself up after him. He watched in amazement as it swung its arm up for another blow, burying its gauntlet deep in the brickwork and levering itself higher. Soon it would be level with the fire escape.

  The weight of the thing must have been tremendous. He could see the pilot straining, neck muscles popping as the machine thundered higher. Its feet scrabbled at the ruins of the wall, but could find little purchase. It was taking all of the strain on its arms.

  It was determined; he’d give it that.

  Hurriedly, the Ghost checked his pockets. He’d already used his flare, he’d emptied all of his flechettes, and he wasn’t carrying any explosives. The only weapons he had left were his fists and his booster jets. Neither would do him any good—if he tried to fly close enough to the Enforcer to burn the pilot with his boosters, he’d be putting himself in its reach. If it got hold of him, he’d be dead in seconds.