The Nameless Dead (23 page)

‘Did they win?’ he asked.

She ignored that and sat down on one of the beds. ‘I’ve heard something that disturbs me.’

Sebastian kept a smile on his lips, hoping that the somersault his stomach had just taken wasn’t obvious. If Valerie Hinton had found out about the stunt he was pulling with Matt Wells, he’d be in deep shit.

He stayed on his feet. ‘What’s that?’

‘Sit down,’ she said, refusing to allow him a dominant position and locking eyes with his. ‘You’ve been playing hardball with Sir Andrew Frogget.’

‘So?’

‘So stop. Right now. That’s an order.’

Sebastian looked down, aware that by breaking eye contact he had handed the field to her. He needed to find out how much she knew. ‘His company worked for Heinz Rothmann—who, I would remind you, tried to take out the President and most of the cabinet.’

‘Routh Limited is off-limits, Peter. I’m serious.’

‘What’s the CIA’s interest?’

Valerie Hinton gave him a brief smile. ‘That’s way above your pay grade, Peter. Just do what I say. I’ll leave first.’

He watched her go. During the fifteen minutes that the established protocol required him to wait before leaving, he thought about the order. The CIA had been interested in Rothmann from the beginning. He had been told to pass all his case notes to the agency as soon as the Nazi’s involvement in the attack on the President was confirmed. Thankfully they hadn’t used the information in a way that would implicate him—at least, not yet.

Sebastian had been working as a CIA informant for years, ever since he was caught screwing a woman with links to a drug gang in Puerto Rico. He’d have been shit-canned by the Bureau if the CIA hadn’t buried his involvement, but he’d been blackmailed into keeping them advised of all his activities. So why were they so interested in Rothmann? Did they want to use his conditioning process? The Agency had a history of mind control experiments. Then again, did they imagine they could they get away with using a method developed by the children of a Nazi doctor who had worked with Mengele at Auschwitz, and had nearly assassinated the President?

The answer to that was obvious.

The real question was, could anyone stop them?

‘N
o, Matt.’ The female voice was tender, but authoritative. ‘No.’

Suddenly I was reunited with my body. I stopped in midthrust, the knifepoint a few inches from Quincy’s throat. I let the weapon drop to the floor.

‘Karen?’ I said, a wave of joy breaking over me as I turned to find her. The realization that I had remembered her name, that she was no longer one of the nameless, came at the same time as I saw Rothmann advancing toward me. He struck me several times on the face before I raised my arm to protect myself.

Karen. She wasn’t here, but she had spoken to me.

‘Schalk!’ Rothmann screamed, tearing off the hyena mask. ‘Kill the negro now!’

Bolts of electricity galvanized nerves all over my body, but my consciousness didn’t rise up like it had before. The conditioning wasn’t working anymore.

‘Screw you,’ I said, lowering my head and charging him. There was a satisfying impact and I heard the breath shoot out of his lungs. I landed on top of him, sat up and punched him on each side of his face. That didn’t
go down too well with his congregation. I looked up as they started to yell, and then move toward the platform with the inverted crosses. Guards in blue denim were heading my way as well, their weapons raised. I only had one option.

‘Stop!’ I yelled, my hands tightening on Rothmann’s throat. ‘Stay where you are! I can crush his windpipe in a split second.’

That arrested their progress. There were guns trained on me, but even the highly conditioned guards were hesitant. I pressed my thumbs down harder and locked eyes with Rothmann. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to join Karen wherever she was—the sound of her voice had made me even more desperate to see her again. The bastard beneath me squirmed and bucked like a dying fish, his eyes bulging. He knew exactly how serious I was.

A loud report took everyone by surprise. The guard nearest to me sprawled forward, his head an eruption of atomized bone and brain matter. More shots felled the young man and woman on either side of me. Then the barn was filled with screams and the rattle of automatic weapons fire. I had let go of Rothmann at the first shot and rolled behind him. He was gasping for breath, his hands at his throat. I could have finished him with a single blow, but I had another priority—getting Quincy Jerome and Mary Upson off the crosses. Quincy’s was nearer so I went to him first, picking up Nora Jacobsen’s knife on the way.

I stood on the cross’s horizontal bar, avoiding Quincy’s bound wrists. Bullets flew past as I reached for the rope that held his ankles. It was thick and had been dipped in something tarry, so it took me some
time to saw through the strands. When I was almost finished, I got down and started on the ropes on his wrists. I looked at the pandemonium in front of me as I was cutting. There were bodies on the floor. People were on their knees clutching wounds. The guards seemed to have taken a beating from members of the congregation, some of whom had seized their weapons and used them against the men and women in blue denim.

I got Quincy’s upper body free and pulled him away from the cross. That broke the last strands of the rope on his ankles and he slid to the ground in my arms.

‘Keep your head down,’ I said, then turned to Mary.

To my surprise, she was already down. The black-robed figure in the gargoyle mask was leading her to the door, bending low and brandishing a long knife. I was about to go after them, when a line of shots appeared in the wooden floor ahead. I looked around desperately for a weapon. The nearest was by the side of a dead guard, but I was warned off that by more well-directed gunfire. Someone wanted me to stay where I was. Who was taking such care to tie me down, but not to hit me? I peered out at the crowd. Someone had pulled the rear doors of the barn open and people were disappearing into the night.

Rothmann got to his feet unsteadily and stumbled toward the nearest exit. He was warned off in the same way, bullets kicking up splinters from the wooden floor in front of him. He yelped and sank to his knees. He didn’t have the air of a master now. I found that the desire to revenge myself on him physically had completely gone. That didn’t mean I was going to let him
escape justice—assuming I myself got out of this alive.

Gradually the gunfire died down. Through the cloud of discharged smoke, I made out six people still standing. Four of them were naked, three men and a woman, one other man was pulling on the clothes he had stripped from a dead guard, and the remaining one, a woman, was fully dressed. She was carrying a machine-pistol in one hand and a pistol in the other. None of the guards seemed to have survived.

‘Got any idea what’s going on?’ Quincy asked. He was still dazed from his time on the cross.

I shook my head. ‘I think we might be about to find out.’

The man who had got dressed pointed the naked people in the direction of the various exits. They took up positions there, pulling clothes from the bodies of guards. They were all toting weapons. Then he joined the armed woman and they embraced.

‘Touching,’ Quincy muttered. ‘Even assholes have feelings.’

I had slipped the knife under my body and was trying to get it into my pocket.

‘Throw the blade over here,’ the woman said, pointing the pistol at me.

I did as I was told, holding her gaze. She was tall and well-built, and she looked seriously comfortable with firearms. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail and she had a small rucksack on her back.

‘You,’ she said to Rothmann. ‘Sit down and stop sniveling.’

He obeyed instantly, his hands over his now shrunken organ.

The man was also tall, with a full beard. He was carrying a shotgun and there was a combat knife in the belt he had put on.

‘The Antichurch returns to its rightful leaders,’ the woman said.

‘Indeed, sister,’ the man said solemnly, eyeing Rothmann. ‘Shall we string up the heretic?’

‘Of course. The true Antigospel requires that traitors be sacrificed to the Lord Lucifer.’

Rothmann made a high-pitched noise.

‘Have you anything to say before sentence is carried out?’ the man said to him. He had a strong Southern accent.

‘I…I wish to beg forgiveness,’ Rothmann said, groveling before him. ‘When I revived the Antichurch, I had no idea that Jeremiah Dodds had a brother. Or that he set up his church in opposition to the original cult.’

The woman stepped forward and brought her boot down on Rothmann’s right hand, making him yelp in agony. ‘Jeremiah Dodds was a heretic,’ she said, pressing down harder on his fingers.

‘Besides, you sent people to kill us,’ the man added, bringing the muzzle of the shotgun close to Rothmann’s ear. ‘They killed several of the faithful before we gutted them.’

‘You mind telling us who you are?’ Quincy asked. He was still lying prone and had lifted his head.

‘Yes, I do mind.’ The woman pointed her pistol at him. ‘We don’t pay no heed to niggers.’

I might have known that the original Antichurch would be a racist organization.

The man laughed emptily. ‘Sister Abaddon, I see
three crosses. What d’you say to hanging all three of these sorry creatures up and turning their insides out?’

She smiled beatifically at him. ‘That would be a truly wonderful way to celebrate the Lord Lucifer’s triumph, Brother Apollyon,’ she said, moving toward the rope that I’d cut from Quincy.

Her head disintegrated before she got there, the blast of the shot reaching my ears an instant later. The woman was thrown forward, her arms hooking over the horizontal bar of the cross and her head thumping against the vertical. Four more shots dispatched the people at the doors.

‘Drop your weapons!’

The voice from the center of the barn was loud and clear. I watched as the bearded man complied and a figure in black combat clothes came toward us. It was a woman with short blond hair and high cheekbones.

‘What the fuck now?’ Quincy said, in a low voice.

My heart went into overdrive. She didn’t look like she used to and she sounded like a native New Yorker, but I recognized her gait instantly.

Sara Robbins had collected plenty of souls already. And now she was coming for ours.

Arthur Bimsdale was finding his boss hard to fathom. If he’d been in charge, he’d have gone down to Texas as soon as Matt Wells and Quincy Jerome disappeared from the tracking grid. Every effort was being made by the Houston field office to pinpoint their locations, but Peter Sebastian would normally have been on the spot to concentrate the local agents’ minds and coordinate their
efforts. When Bimsdale had suggested he go alone, Sebastian had told him he’d be better employed handling the operation from headquarters. That was patently not the case.

His boss had returned to the office around 10:00 p.m., giving no explanation of where he had been. He had turned off his cell phone during his absence—Bimsdale knew this because he’d called him with Houston’s latest negative update. Why the secrecy? Department heads, like all agents, were supposed to be contactable at all times. The look on Sebastian’s face, however, had discouraged questions or comments. He received the news from Texas with a distracted air.

‘Arthur, email me everything we’ve got on Routh Limited. Do a search on Sir Andrew Frogget, too. See if our guy in the London embassy’s got any new shit.’

‘New shit?’ Bimsdale repeated uncertainly.

Sebastian gave him a drained look. ‘As far as I recall, his record’s clean. Too clean. I want to know everything about him. In particular, I want to know what his weaknesses are.’ He raised a hand. ‘Don’t say anything, Arthur. I know he was decorated in the first Gulf War, I know he spends his weekends with underprivileged children. Now dig me some dirt!’

Bimsdale did as he was told. It didn’t take him long. Ferris, the senior FBI agent in London, had picked up a hint of something rotten in the state of Frogget. Apparently his wife was suffering from depression, code in British high society for their marriage being on the rocks. On the face of it, the Routh chairman wasn’t a big enough celebrity to attract the attention of the tabloid press, but he employed a notoriously devious publicity agent. That attracted Bimsdale’s attention and he asked
Ferris to sniff around. An hour later, the agent called back. Nothing had ever been proved, but there was a faint rumor that Sir Andrew had paid off the parents of a twelve-year-old girl after he was found alone with her.

Peter Sebastian was less excited by that piece of news than Bimsdale expected, but he finally authorized twenty-four-hour surveillance on the knight.

After dealing with that end of things, Arthur went back to his desk and contacted Houston.

Sara Robbins had a Glock 19 in one hand and an AK-47 rifle in the other—she had taken both weapons from a sentry near the gate of the compound. She had dispatched him by cutting his throat with the plastic knife she favored. Things had worked out very well, not least because the painkillers had kicked in. On her way toward the location, identified by the bug she had attached to the pickup carrying Matt, she caught sight of a shadowy figure behind the tree line. That individual had provoked the guards by throwing a grenade into the open space in front of the buildings. When they came out to check, the intruder followed them back to the gate and killed them. Sara had been twenty yards behind, making no sound. After arming herself, she had gone toward the large barn—the intruder had stood at the door, and then slipped inside. Sara used her knife on the tires of the nearest vehicles and cautiously entered the building. She took cover behind a heap of firewood, to the rear of a group of naked people. A dead guard had been dragged there, his killer now sheltering behind an antique tractor.

It was when that individual turned to the side that
Sara recognized her profile. It was the woman from Maine—the one she had got rid of outside the diner. That wasn’t too much of a surprise, though knowing who she was and who she worked for would be nice.

It turned out to be irrelevant. Sara watched the insane ritual and tried to work out what Matt was doing. He seemed to be in thrall to a naked man in a hyena mask, and almost attacked the black man with a knife. Then the shooting had started, and in the chaos that overtook the next few minutes, the bulk of the surviving congregation had thundered past Sara to the rear exit, leaving the wounded and dead behind.

Sara only recognized the tall man carrying a shotgun when he got up on the platform with the crosses. It was the beard that had deceived her. The last time she saw him, he had been clean-shaven. He had tried to kill her then and, by doing that, had signed his own death warrant—her professional standing as an assassin required all attacks on her person to be answered with maximum prejudice.

Stretching her back to dissipate the pain that had begun to bite again, the Soul Collector took aim at the woman who had been irritating her since Portland. Soon, it would be time to settle accounts with the hired gun known as Apollyon and, of course, with her former lover. The lives of the black man and of the people guarding the doors were of no consequence whatsoever.