“What are the cops saying?” asked Nightingale.
“They’re giving all the credit to Amy Chen.”
“She deserves it.”
“Single-handedly found the kids and apprehended the culprits. Shot four of them, but the details on the shootings are vague at best. She’s a hero.”
“Amen to that.” Nightingale sipped his coffee. “It’s going to get messy, you know that?”
“In what way?”
“The whole keeping Satanism under wraps thing.” He gestured at the newspaper. “This can’t be good for business.”
“It could have been a lot worse,” said Wainwright. “If they had managed to open the door for Bimoleth, that would have been difficult to explain away. But you stopped them in time, they’ll come out of it as a bunch of deluded pedophiles who were using black magic as a way of embellishing their activities.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m going to be spending a ton of money making sure that happens,” said Wainwright. “A lot of victims are going to start coming out of closets. There’ll be girls claiming that Speckman raped them when they were under age. Kids who will remember Lucille Carr being in the room when they were being abused. A lot of nasty stuff is going to be found on their hard drives. The public are going to be more interested in that and they’ll soon forget the black candles and masks. All the Apostles are murderers Jack, and they were all involved in the abductions of the kids. They’re going to prison for a long time and being a pedophile in prison is a rough ride. I doubt any of them will be alive in two years.” He shrugged. “So all’s well that ends well.”
“And what about Bimoleth?”
“He stays in limbo.”
“Presumably he’ll try again.”
Wainwright shrugged. “The Grimoire went up in smoke. Abaddon is dead. He’ll find it difficult.”
“One thing for sure, if he ever does make it, he’ll come gunning for us.”
“Let’s cross that bridge if and when we come to it,” said Wainwright. He smiled. “For the moment, just be proud of the fact that you pulled it off.” He raised his whiskey glass in salute. “You thwarted a devil and you got away unscathed. There’s not many can say that.”
The plane pulled a slow bank to the east and then began to climb.
“Where are we going, Joshua?” asked Nightingale. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
###
About the Author
Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an eBook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan “Spider” Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. His eBooks have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US and he was voted by The Bookseller magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the UK publishing world. You can find out more from his website www.stephenleather.com and you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenleather.
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