The Cross (24 page)

Chapter Forty-Six

VIA Headquarters, London

Not even Ash had been prepared for what had happened when he opened the lid of the attaché case and revealed the cross nestling there against the rich red velvet.

For one moment of horrified utter disbelief, Queck and Kelby had stood there with their mouths hanging open, frozen like two rabbits caught in the beam of a hunter’s lamp.

There had been no blinding flash of light, no cataclysmic explosion. The cross simply lay there inert in its soft bedding. But whatever power it contained was now suddenly released from inside the lead casing and radiated outwards with an invisible force that felt to Ash like a giant pulse of electrical energy. It hit the two speechless vampires and blew them apart, disintegrating and obliterating them before his eyes.

And through the open metal door from which Kelby had emerged, all Ash could hear now was a chaos of shrieking and screaming as the power of the cross made itself felt throughout the building. He grabbed it from the case and held it tight in his fist, the cold milky smooth stone suddenly filled with a crackling, thrumming energy that seemed to burn in his right hand. With the left, he reached back inside the attaché case, and from one of its zippered compartments he took the miniature digital camcorder Gabriel Stone had given him and switched it on.

With the cross raised high and the camcorder at chest height, Ash strode through the steel doorway and into the VIA office space – and the wholesale devastation began for real. If there had been anything left of them, he would have been scrambling over the bodies of the fallen in piles waist-high. All that remained instead was fine grey dust that lay strewn across the floor, over desks and computer terminals, and a few burnt tatters of clothing that floated gently through the air like cinders.

Now he could understand the significance of this thing, and the reason his new patrons had gone to such lengths to make sure that they acquired it. Very little had ever surprised him in his life, even less impressed him – but the sensation of omnipotence that coursed through his veins as he marched through the building, effortlessly destroying everything in his path, made him laugh out loud with sheer joy.

Beyond the range of the cross’s power, dozens of screaming vampires were fleeing in desperation. A squat male in a grey suit was clawing frantically at a window catch, trying to open it and launch himself out, when Ash strode up within range of him and he burst apart with a scream that barely had time to make it out of his lips. Two others who were obviously guards of some kind were vaporised before the one with the pistol could draw it from its holster and the other could shoulder his semi-automatic shotgun. Their firearms clattered to the floor amid a cloud of dust.

Ash paused briefly to thrust the cross into his belt and pick up the fallen shotgun. Its short barrel was shrouded with a fat tubular silencer. Useful. He checked the breech, then pressed briskly on with his clear-out of the building.

Doors that weren’t locked, he crashed open with a kick. Those that were, he blasted one-handed off their hinges with the shotgun. There was no need to use the gun on his quarry. Anything in his path that tried to crawl away into hiding was annihilated simply by his presence.

He had the whole layout of the upper two floors of the building clearly pictured in his mind from the diagram he’d been shown at The Ridings. As he reached the far side of the fourth floor, he swiftly made his way to the lift that led upwards to the fifth – home to the offices and conference rooms where, as Gabriel Stone had told him, the treacherous Federation intelligence chiefs planned and monitored their nefarious operation to degrade and oppress the vampire race.

Personally, Ash didn’t give a shit about the politics. He was here for one thing only, and he set about his purpose the way a shark went after its prey. He stepped into the lift and pressed the button for the upper floor.

The top floor of the building was filled with a mayhem of screaming and panic as VIA personnel stampeded away from the source of the terrible power they could feel steadily approaching. There was no way out, nowhere to run.

Not without the proper authority. Behind locked doorways marked ‘AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY’, in the section of the VIA top floor to which few vampires had ever been allowed access, Olympia Angelopolis gathered up her trailing robes and fled wildly down the neon-lit corridor. The sensation that filled her body was horrific, making her gibber with terror. ‘Out of my way!’ she screamed at one of her bodyguards as he burst out of a doorway to her left and tried clumsily to shield her. Pressing both hands against his chest, she sent him crashing violently backwards against the wall and leaped over him. Before he was able to scramble back on his feet, his whole body spasmed into a massive convulsion and he let out a roar of agony.

The cross bearer was getting closer with every passing second.

More guards were emerging from doorways along the corridor, glancing about them in helpless, panic-stricken confusion. ‘Stand your ground!’ Olympia screeched at them, pointing back in the direction of the energy source. ‘Your duty is to protect your Supremo!’

The guards shakily drew their weapons as Olympia stumbled away from them, almost tripping over her robes in her desperation to escape. She savagely ripped away the trailing material and ran on, crashing through another doorway that said ‘NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY’.

The place she was heading for was one of the VIA London Headquarters’ most closely-guarded secrets, known only to the highest Federation elite. Leading from a secure doorway on the top floor all the way to ground level by means of the building’s air-conditioning shafts, the escape hatch had been built in 1985 – the same year that the newly-formed agency had taken over the lease of the building. Great pains had been taken to keep it hidden from the owners and the legal firm downstairs. Its sole purpose: to protect its VIVs in the event of exactly this kind of contingency. The Federation rulers had never ruled out the possibility of an organised attack – though they hadn’t anticipated one of such extreme lethal brutality. They’d been caught off guard, and all Olympia could think about as she raced towards the secret doorway was reaching the safety of her Federation main headquarters haven in Brussels. She
had
to get back there. She
must
survive, at all cost.

Her vision was punctured by the muffled report of a silenced shotgun and the crash of a door bursting open, followed immediately afterwards by the screams of her bodyguards echoing through the passageways. The Supremo was almost there now. The doorway just a few yards ahead was marked with the same fanged skull-and-crossbones symbols as the labels on Nosferol containers . . . but then the sound of lurching footsteps and a deep groan behind her made her spin round with a gasp.

It was one of the bodyguards. Half his body was blown away, the rest pitifully melted and blackened, one arm gone, a withered leg trailing behind him. ‘He’s coming!’ he rasped through the unrecognisable ruin of his face, then collapsed at her feet.

Olympia felt the approaching energy of the cross wash over her and buckled up in pain. With a wail of effort she staggered the last couple of steps to the door and stumbled against it, reaching frantically to clap her splayed palm to the scanner panel on the wall. Her mind swam in a haze of rising darkness as the device seemed to take forever to scan and analyse the data. The agony was intensifying. Olympia screamed.

The cross was getting closer.

All Ash found at the foot of the locked door was a charred mess of vampire remains and some tatters of clothing. He poked about in the cinders with the shotgun muzzle, then raised the gun up and blasted a round of 00-buck into the electronic lock. Nothing. The door held. He shrugged, turned and started retracing his steps back through the corridors of the top floor.

Nothing stirred in what, just minutes earlier, had been the centre of VIA operations. All that remained of the destroyed vampires was a fine, chalky dust that billowed up in clouds at Ash’s passing, hung drifting on the air and then slowly settled in his wake. The cross had cooled to the touch and now it was just an ordinary, inanimate lump of stone.

Ash turned off the camcorder. It had witnessed all there was to see. He rode the lift back down to the deserted fourth floor and returned to the security ante-room, where he dumped the shotgun on Queck’s desk and replaced the cross and the camcorder inside the attaché case, shut the catches and rolled the combination locks.

On his way out of the Schuessler & Schuessler building, just another legal eagle on his way home after a long day at the office, Ash took out his phone.

‘It’s done,’ he said quietly, walking back towards the BMW.

Gabriel Stone sounded pleased. ‘Excellent. Proceed without delay to phase two, while the enemy is still off guard. The aircraft is waiting. Make haste.’

‘Brussels,’ Ash muttered to himself as he revved the BMW and went skidding out of the car park. He wondered what it was like in Brussels.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Bal Mawr Manor

‘Spectro-what?’ Dec interrupted.

Returning to the library to talk, the three of them had found the grandiose room empty – Knightly had disappeared somewhere to sulk, or to call his agent. The tall bay windows were growing steadily darker as the last rays of the sun sank into the sea. Slumped in one of the deep armchairs, Joel had closed his eyes as he listened to Chloe’s account, but he’d been attentive to every word. So had Dec, perched on the arm of another chair with one foot hopping nervously, knitting his brows in concentration.

‘Spectroscope,’ Chloe repeated. ‘This lab guy I was telling you about, Fred Lancaster – he used it to test what the cross was made of, and it turned out that it was some kind of rock that didn’t come from here. Not from this planet, I mean.’ Going back through it all had freshened the grief and she had to dab her eyes every so often with a tissue as she talked. ‘So, he and Dad got excited that they’d found something really amazing. It was Fred Lancaster’s idea to call the local press about it. That’s how it got in the news.’

The tears began to roll more freely as she described what had happened next. ‘And it was really all my fault,’ she sniffed.

‘I wish I’d never brought that thing back. How was I supposed to know? How could I?’ A sob burst from her throat. She covered her face with her hands.

While she broke off for a moment to collect herself and blow her nose, Dec got up and reached out an uncertain hand to touch her shoulder. ‘You couldn’t have known, Chloe,’ he muttered softly. ‘You can’t blame yourself, so you can’t.’

The memory of the murder scene was fresh in Joel’s mind, but he chose not to mention it to Chloe – just as he preferred to keep to himself that his opinion of Thames Valley Police Inspector Murdo Williams, heading up the hunt for Matt Dempsey’s killer, was even lower than hers. With a guy like ‘Murder’ Williams in charge, she was pretty much on her own.

‘What
is
this thing?’ Chloe asked Joel when she was able to talk again. ‘This cross of – what did you call it?’

‘Ardaich,’ Joel said. ‘It’s called the cross of Ardaich. My grandfather spent years of his life hunting for it. He left a notebook when he . . . when he died. In it were a set of clues that helped me find the cross, in Venice. It had been hidden there, for centuries maybe, underneath an old church.’

‘So your grandfather was a
vampire hunter
?’

Joel nodded. ‘He wanted to destroy them all. It was his life’s work.’

‘And this cross of Ardaich. You’re saying it’s like some kind of ultra-special weapon against them?’

Even in the gloom of the darkened library, Joel’s acute vision could read the hard look of disbelief in her eyes. ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he said seriously. ‘I don’t know why. But it seems to have some incredible power over . . . over them.’ He’d almost said ‘over us’. ‘It’s existed in their folklore for – well, I don’t know for how long. They’re very afraid of it. Even to go near it is lethal to them.’

‘Vampires have
folklore
?’ Chloe shook her head, then was silent for a few moments. ‘Okay, let’s imagine for a moment that this isn’t just totally insane, but what you’re telling me is actually true. It still doesn’t make sense that some deranged psychopath who believes he’s a vampire would want to steal this famous cross that apparently all vampires know is so harmful. It’d be like . . .’ she searched for the right analogy ‘. . . like Superman looking for a lump of Kryptonite, even though he knew it could kill him. Or am I missing something?’

‘It’s a good question,’ Joel said. ‘I can’t tell you the answer.’

A long silence fell over the three of them, so that the only sound in the room was the crash of the distant surf. Dec was watching Chloe with a look of deep concern as Joel sat very still and his mind raced to figure out the puzzle. He needed to know more about this Ash. Fishing out his police BlackBerry, in seconds he was looking up online news items about the killer. The whole internet seemed to be on fire with the story.

It was as he was speed-scanning a BBC article about the jailbreak that Joel drew in a sharp breath. ‘I think I might have something here,’ he said. Inwardly, he was cursing himself for not having noticed it before.

There had been no survivors among the prison staff, but prisoners who witnessed the massacre had given descriptions of the gang of three who had, incredibly, managed to break into one of the country’s most secure prisons, spring an inmate from his solitary confinement cell and walk out free. One of the gang had been a woman. Dark and sexy, clad in red. Another a huge black guy.

Joel didn’t need to read any more to know who the third one had been.

Thinking furiously, he remembered what Tommy had told him back in Southampton: how millions of people out there would do just about anything for the rewards of eternal life and unlimited power. Rewards that only a vampire could give them.

And now it was suddenly all making horrible sense: the jailbreak, the attack on Chloe’s father, the theft of the cross, the things Tommy had said about the vampire rebellion against the Federation. All of it.

‘What?’ Chloe said.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said out loud. ‘I think I understand.’

‘
What?
’ asked Dec.

Joel turned to Chloe. ‘Ash didn’t steal the cross for himself,’ he told her. ‘He was hired to do it. By a vampire called Gabriel Stone.’

Chloe stared and said nothing.

‘Stone!’ Dec exclaimed.

Joel nodded. ‘There are things going on that you don’t know about, Dec. I don’t have time to go into it all right now, but there’s a war going on, a war between vampires. Stone wants to use the cross to destroy his enemies. Except he can’t handle it himself, can’t even go near it. He needed a human to get it for him. A killer, a raving maniac, someone obsessed with the idea of being a vampire. What wouldn’t a man like that do to actually
become
one? Well, that’s the deal that Stone offered him.’

‘Let me get this right,’ Chloe said slowly. ‘My dad’s killer
wanted
to be a vampire, so a
real
vampire hired him to steal the cross in return for making him one.’

‘We say “turning”,’ Joel said. ‘I mean, that’s the term that’s used.’

‘Listen to him, Chloe,’ Dec implored her, desperate to make her believe. A sudden flash of inspiration lit up his face. ‘All right. Listen. I can
prove
to you that vampires exist.’

She raised an eyebrow.

‘Don’t move. Stay right there.’ Dec jumped up, ran out of the room and came back a few moments later carrying one of the many laptops that Errol Knightly had lying around Bal Mawr. Flipping it open, he clicked on the desktop shortcut that took him straight to the home page of Knightly’s website. A couple more clicks, and the video clip from Romania was starting to play. ‘Wait till you see this,’ he said with relish, setting the machine down on Chloe’s lap. She was about to shove it away in protest, then relented with a sigh.

Joel hadn’t forgotten the real reason he’d ridden all this way west. He rose from his chair and walked around behind Chloe to watch the laptop screen. Her neck was just a few inches away. He could hear the beating of her heart as though it were his own.

No, Joel. No.
He cleared his throat and tried to focus on what Dec was showing them.

‘This is the eighth time I’ve seen it,’ Dec said excitedly, pointing at the screen. ‘Can’t wait to see the rest. Hold on. There, now. Look. Look. See the vampire? See the frigging teeth on the bastard? Watch, watch. Any minute now and that Federation woman’s going to walk down them stairs and blow the fucker to hell.’

Neither Chloe nor Joel replied. They were both staring at the unfolding images with completely contrasting expressions: hers was one of undisguised contempt, his one of growing anticipation.

‘Here she is,’ Dec said, pointing. ‘See?’

Joel barely heard him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the screen as the unmistakable figure of Alex Bishop came walking down the cellar steps. ‘I have to find her,’ he whispered. ‘I have to talk to Knightly.’

Chloe had seen enough. ‘This is bullshit,’ she muttered. ‘Come on. Any third-rate media student with a Photoshop program could fake this, easy.’

‘No way they could fake
that
,’ Dec protested, pointing to the screen where the vampire was being cut down by the gunshot, his body peeling instantly, horribly, apart. ‘Jesus, look at it.’ Just then, hearing the door opening behind him, he looked up. ‘Errol, I was just showing them the clip.’

Knightly strolled into the library, glancing out of habit at the mirrors behind the door before his gaze landed on Chloe. ‘I’m so glad you decided to stay,’ he said, beaming warmly; he was obviously prepared to forgive her earlier remarks to him. ‘I’ve sent Griffin out to the local supermarket to fetch some extra goodies for dinner. Is it safe to say we’ll have the pleasure of your company?’

From the glow in his face, Joel could tell that Dec had been hoping much the same thing. Chloe didn’t seem to share their sentiments, however. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ she said.

‘Errol, this is my friend Joel I was telling you about,’ Dec said, working to cover his disappointment.

Knightly turned to Joel with wide eyes. ‘The one with—’

‘The one with the cross,’ Dec said.

The glow in Knightly’s face had suddenly drained away to nothing. ‘You must tell me about it. You must show it to me.’

‘He doesn’t have it any more,’ Dec said. ‘He lost it in Romania.’

‘You were in
Romania
?’ Knightly marvelled, as if Romania were galaxies away. ‘And you actually
destroyed
a—’ He caught himself before he went any further. Flushing furiously, he said, ‘Not being a professional at the job, I mean. You’re lucky to be alive.’

Joel was searching for an answer when the faint sound his sharp senses had picked up a few seconds earlier distracted him and he glanced towards the library’s bay windows. It was the rhythmic thump of rotor blades in the distance, growing steadily louder.

It wasn’t long before the noise entered the range of human hearing and Dec followed Joel’s gaze with a frown. Within a few seconds it had grown dramatically louder, and now it was filling the room. The window panes began to thrum in their frames. Dazzling white light shone through the bay windows and illuminated the bookcases at the far end of the library.

‘Jesus,’ Dec said, shading his eyes. ‘He’s a bit close, so he is.’

‘Must be the coastguard helicopter,’ Knightly said. ‘They sometimes fly over.’

‘It’s not flying over,’ Joel said. ‘It’s coming in to land.’