The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (52 page)

Darius walked underneath him. “Save yourself, then. If you’re the favored one, save yourself.”

The pressure on his neck was immense, and Viktor already felt light-headed. His eyes roved the cemetery in desperation. He had played his last card, and played it well, but the set, and the match, were going to Darius.

Viktor saw the light of confidence appear once again in Darius’s eyes, and Viktor felt his last hope slipping away. It was appropriate, he thought, that he should die in this place, at Eve’s side. He could think of no place better.

Viktor kicked his legs, praying the rope would snap or the tree limb would break. His movements only tightened the noose. He gurgled and choked as the oxygen seeped out of his body, and the conscious world began slipping away.

Darius’s eyes regained their brightness, his face returned to that of a messiah. He raised his arms and then pitched forward, his back arching as he fell. Viktor saw the hilt of a knife protruding from between his shoulder blades.

Darius screamed again, this time in agony. He managed to rise to his elbows, his shrieks punctuating the moans of the crowd. With a final reserve
of will, Viktor lifted his eyes to where the knife must have originated, and saw Grey atop the wall above the circle of crypts. As Viktor watched, Grey swayed and pitched forward, falling to the path below. He didn’t get back up.

Viktor yanked on the rope, a final desperate act, but the rope held tight as the last ounce of air left Viktor’s lungs.

G
rey spat dirt, struggling to retain consciousness as colored spots swarmed his vision. He tried to push to his elbows and failed, his movements as feeble as a baby bird’s. A cold sweat slicked his palms.

For a moment his vision cleared, and he saw Viktor hanging from the tree, convulsing at the end of the rope. Grey made another futile attempt to rise, then tried to croak out a plea for someone to help Viktor. No sound left his throat, and he could only watch in despair.

He saw Darius pulling himself along the ground as if he couldn’t move his legs, he saw people whirling in confusion, he heard sirens and megaphones. The sirens and megaphones surprised him, and for a second he thought he was hearing trumpets at the gates of heaven. Then he saw a squadron of policemen rushing through the cemetery, towards the circle of tombs.

At the vanguard of the police force a man in a full-length wool coat was pointing at Viktor and shouting. Now Grey knew he was having a deathbed vision, because the man looked exactly like the assassin in the photo Viktor had texted Grey, the man who had pursued Viktor across the globe.

Grey felt utterly drained of energy, aching for water as if he had just crossed the Sahara on foot. He knew his dehydration was a very bad sign. He had lost far too much blood. With a torpid gathering of his will he focused on the scene atop the mound above him, watching his friend swaying back and forth under the tree branch, his fingers clinging to the rope around his neck, his face completely white.

Grey saw movement at Viktor’s side. He shifted his gaze in time to see Anka slip out of her guard’s grasp. Grey felt a moment of elation, thinking she would help free Viktor.

Instead, she ran past him without so much as a sideways glance, rushing straight to Darius. As she approached, Darius reached up to her with an outstretched hand, the bottom half of his torso dragging along the ground like a snake’s. Grey’s knife was still embedded in his spine.

Grey watched Anka lean down and rip the knife out of his back. Darius screamed. She raised the knife over her head, and Grey got a glimpse of her face, twisted beyond all recognition, a mask of rage and hate. She thrust the knife downward, first in Darius’s back and then in his face, again and again and again, with so much abandon that a few of her thrusts missed him completely. Darius stopped moving, but she continued stabbing, her arm whipping up and down like a mechanized toy gone berserk, blood spattering her face.

Grey looked towards Viktor again. His fingers had dropped to his side, and his face looked empty, a marionette hanging limp above the ground. Grey moaned Viktor’s name as the colored spots returned. Right before his vision blurred, he thought he saw men rushing to help Viktor, but they might have been with Darius.

He heard screams and shouts from the crowd, gunshots, more bellowing from the megaphone, and then the sounds merged into a roar of white noise. A shadow formed over Grey, coalescing into the figure of a man. Grey’s vision cleared for a split second, and again he saw the face of the man who had pursued Viktor. Grey tried to move or yell for help, but his legs and voice failed him.

“I’m with the Swiss Guard,” the man said, his voice thick and distant to Grey, as if traveling underwater. The man waved his hand above his head and said something about an ambulance and trying to stay conscious, but then colored spots faded to black, and Grey was falling down a long and sunless tunnel.

Grey woke to pressure on his face and the sound of concerned voices. He felt as if his mind were outside of his body. He thought he heard Anka’s voice somewhere above him, and he had the hysterical thought that he was traveling to the astral plane to meet her.

As the fog cleared from his vision, he realized he was still lying where he had fallen. The odor of sulfur from spent gunpowder had settled on to the loamy smell of the cemetery. A medic placed an oxygen mask over his mouth, then multiple hands eased him onto a stretcher. He heard the medic tell someone to apply a tourniquet before they moved him. Looking up, he saw the tree and the rope, but there was no sign of Viktor.

He heard shouting and a woman shrieking to his right. Two policemen were forcing Anka down the narrow pathway in handcuffs, about to pass beside his stretcher.

Anka noticed him as they approached, and her screams turned to sobs. Despite her wild hair and blood-soaked face, her beauty was still in such contrast to the chaos around her that she made the cemetery look like a movie set, her sculpted features too perfect for the reality of the situation.

She dug in her heels and looked right at Grey, the madness and terror draining from her eyes. A tear streaked down her cheek, dripping over the petite curve of her nostrils.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “I had to do it.” A deep shudder rolled through her. “He found me that night, watching the ceremony from the oak tree. He made me do things, made me drink blood and eat…” her eyes slid downward. “He made me do them again and again, and I couldn’t get away.”

She was passing right beside him now. The officers squeezed her past Grey, and she twisted to keep him in her vision. “Don’t you understand?” she said. “He read the grimoire. No cell could have held him. I had to do it.”

Grey felt a chill at her words, a coldness settling inside him that had nothing to do with the temperature outside.

Her eyes bored into his. “Bring me the book, Grey. I won’t let it change me, I promise.” She was almost to the entrance tunnel, her last words poisoned darts cutting through the floodlit cemetery. “We could be together.”

Then she was gone. He closed his eyes as the medic finished wrapping his wounds and whisked him out of the circle of tombs.

T
he hospital door eased open, and Grey shifted in his bed to see Viktor enter the room carrying takeout from a Japanese restaurant, his broad neck covered by a swath of bandages. Grey had similar bandages on his thigh and arm, and was still attached to a bank of instruments monitoring his return from the precipice of severe blood loss. He knew if the police and medics had not arrived when they did, he would have entered hypovolemic shock. Instead of sneaking in sushi, Viktor would be lying six feet under in a grave next to Grey.

Though he had been told Viktor was alive, he had not yet seen him. Grey realized just how glad he was to see a friendly face, though even Viktor’s impassive features looked wan, drained of emotion. Grey eased to a sitting position and eyed the bag of takeout with the kind of desperation that results from eating British hospital food for two days straight.

“You know me well,” Grey said.

Viktor spread his hands. “You’re a simple man.”

“True.”

“Not in the slightest.” He helped Grey arrange the bedside tray. “But when it comes to the senses, we can all become simple.”

Grey clacked the chopsticks. “Was that a jab at me for trusting Anka?”

“It was a jab at myself.”

“For what?”

“For everything,” Viktor said. “My apologies for the delay. After my release I debriefed Jacques and came straight here. Texting him was a smart move.”

Grey worked the utensils with practiced flair, shoving sashimi into his mouth. “I figured an order from Interpol would be more effective than me trying to explain that insanity to a British cop over the phone.”

“Indeed. But how did you find us in the first place?”

In between bites Grey summarized the events of the past few days. Viktor pursed his lips and listened. “Well reasoned,” he said. “And my utmost gratitude.”

Grey waved a hand. “Call us even for the sushi. So what was Darius’s big surprise? A Mayan-inspired cataclysm? Jesus conspiracy theory?”

“According to Jacques, the police found a computer station in one of the tombs, manned by a hacker Jacques tells me is wanted for international cyber attacks.”

“Those guys don’t come cheap,” Grey said. “But after the balance sheets I saw, that wouldn’t have been a problem. What was he doing?”

“Preparing to broadcast a live feed on the Internet, via a virus that would hit the world’s major news sites and interrupt their programming with a DVD prepared by Darius.”

“I’m afraid to ask,” Grey said.

“How familiar are you with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church?”

“I saw
Angels & Demons
.”

Viktor cracked a smile. “Technically the hierarchy is quite flat: the pope, a couple of thousand bishops, and a few hundred thousand priests. But among the bishops there are powerful archbishops and cardinals, with a wide sphere of influence. The confiscated DVD exhibits sexual acts being performed by a number of the Western world’s most powerful archbishops and cardinals.”

Grey whistled. “How many?”

“Many.”

“With who?”

“The faces of the other participants were digitally obscured,” Viktor said, “and Jacques’s people haven’t been able to unscramble the images. But he tells me it was one man and one woman, sometimes alone with the priests, sometimes together. Occasionally a minor was also involved; it appears Darius was accounting for a variety of proclivities. Jacques tells me the images were… quite graphic.”

“Did the woman have blond hair?” Grey said.

“She did.”

Grey wiped his mouth. “Something like that could bring down the Church.”

“So thought Darius.”

“And you don’t? Some of the highest-ranking members of a celibate order broadcast over the Internet performing threesomes with a minor?”

Viktor started to pace, stopping to look out the window. “Have the recent molestation scandals—evidence of which was found in the Vatican’s own archives—brought down the Church? How many arrests at the higher levels have been made, how many parishes have been closed? No, this DVD would have made headlines worldwide, been discredited, a few reprimands made, and business at the world’s wealthiest entity would have proceeded as normal.”