Innocent Blood

Twenty-Six

They walked around the church of St John the Evangelist, occasionally shaking the corrugated-iron fencing to see if any of it was loose enough to pry free. In the end they concluded that they would have to force the padlock that was holding the gate closed.

‘Tire iron?’ suggested Nevile, and Frank unlocked the trunk of his car.

While Frank kept a lookout, Nevile inserted the tire iron into the padlock, and twisted. A police cruiser crept past, and one of the officers stared at Frank as if he suspected him of being a street-corner drug dealer, but Frank gave an exaggerated performance of checking his watch and frowning up and down the street, as if he were waiting for somebody who had let him down, and the cruiser kept on going. At last the padlock snapped like a pistol shot, and Nevile was able to scrape the door open.

They clambered over the rubbish until they reached the steps. Most of the stained-glass windows were broken, and there was graffiti on the doors. De Skul and Marmaduke had apparently been there, as well as Uncle Horrible and Señor Meat.

Together they climbed the steps. The doors were solid oak, and locked. Nevile laid his hands on them, his palms flat, and closed his eyes.

‘Any vibes?’ Frank asked him.

‘A lot. This is quite overwhelming. There’s so much hatred here, you wouldn’t believe it. I’ve never felt anything like this in any building before, let alone a church.’

‘You think that this is where they meet? Dar Tariki Tariqat?’

‘I’d be very surprised if it isn’t. My God . . . there’s so much pain here, so much suffering. So much desperation.’

Frank took a few steps back down. ‘The point is, how are we going to get in here?’

‘Let’s try around the back.’

They made their way down the narrow alley that separated the church from the tire-replacement workshop next door to it. They could hear drills and hammers and clanking jacks, and the banging of inflated tires. Halfway along the alley, Nevile said, ‘Let’s try this.’ There was a basement window covered with a screen of fine mesh. Nevile slid the tire iron underneath the mesh and it took only four or five wrenches to pull it away. He climbed down into the space in front of the window, and gave it a hefty kick with his heel. The glass smashed and Frank heard it tinkling into the basement.

‘You should have been a burglar.’

‘There’s not enough money in it.’

Nevile wriggled through the broken window and dropped out of sight. ‘It’s OK,’ he called. ‘It’s only about six feet down to the floor.’

Frank looked left and right to make sure that nobody was watching, then squeezed himself through the window and jumped down on to the basement floor. ‘Shit, I’ve cut myself.’ He looked up and there was a single shark’s tooth of glass left in the window frame, stained with his own blood.

‘Here.’ Nevile took a white linen handkerchief out of his pocket and deftly tied it around Frank’s thumb. ‘You can thank my mother. I was never allowed to walk out of the front door without a clean handkerchief and bus fare.’

As their eyes became accustomed to the darkness they could see that one side of the basement was stacked with folding chairs and other furniture, as well as painted panels draped in dust sheets. One of the dust sheets had slipped and the accusing face of Pontius Pilate was staring at Frank from behind the bars of a chair, as if he was imprisoned.

Nevile crossed the basement floor and opened the door. ‘Brilliant. I was worried it was going to be locked.’

They climbed the narrow brick steps that led up to the main body of the church. The pews had gone, the altar had gone, and the font had gone. From high up above, rows of diagonal beams of dusty sunshine fell along the aisle, forming a shining archway. Underneath this archway were stacked dozens of khaki metal boxes, as well as ropes and truck wheels and sleeping bags and bottles of water and other paraphernalia, including a portable diesel generator and a capstan lathe.

They walked slowly down the aisle. The pungent smell of nitrates was eye watering.

‘Look at this,’ said Nevile. ‘Cyclonite, IMI demolitions blocks, TNT, plasticized RDX. There’s enough explosive here to flatten twenty square blocks.’

‘I’m amazed there’s nobody on guard here.’

‘What for? Who’s going to go looking for an arms dump in a derelict church? I saw the same kind of thing in Belfast – an old country chapel that was stacked floor to ceiling with AK47s and Semtex. There was only a rusty old lock on the door, but we would never have found it without a tip-off.’

Frank examined another stack of metal boxes, some of them with their lids hanging open. ‘Detonators, fuses, switches, timers. And what are these?’

At the back of the stacks, there was a pile of at least a dozen navy-blue vests, with deep pockets sewn into them, back and front. Three of the vests had already had their pockets filled with large slabs of greasy, clay-colored material.

‘Hey – don’t go near those,’ warned Nevile. ‘They’re tailor-made waistcoats for suicide bombers. Ten pounds of plastic explosive in each pocket, filled with ball bearings.’

‘Jesus,’ said Frank. ‘They must be totally crazy, these people. Out of their heads.’ But as he looked around he realized that these boxes of explosives had not been assembled because of anybody’s insanity, and somehow that made it much more frightening. This was nothing to do with madness; this was plain, unadulterated hatred. He began to understand what Nevile had felt when he laid his hands on the doors outside, and sensed that this was a place of evil.

‘I think it’s time we called the police,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Not in here. Not with a cellular phone. Not unless you want to end up in eighteen million matching pieces.’

They started to walk back toward the basement. As they did so, they heard the rattling of keys. They turned around to see the main church doors opening and a tall young man step inside. He had long straggly hair and a beard, a hawk-like nose, and he was dressed in a loose linen shirt and worn-out jeans. He stopped when he saw them, and frowned.

There was a brief moment when none of them moved. But then the young man pushed his way back through the doors, and disappeared. Frank went after him. He ran down the length of the church, bounded down the steps outside, tripped, and crashed into the corrugated-iron fencing. He was just in time to see the young man escaping out into the street.

He followed, even though he had bruised his shoulder and twisted his knee. By now the young man was almost halfway along the block, loping toward Fairfax Avenue, his hair flying behind him. Frank had to run like Long John Silver – dot one, carry one – and his knee was so painful that he couldn’t help himself from shouting out ‘shit!’ with every step he took. But he had always kept up his tennis, and he was fit enough, and by the time the young man had reached Fairfax Frank was gaining on him.

The man ran into the street, holding up his hand to stop the traffic. But without warning a taxi came speeding across the intersection and struck him a glancing blow with its side mirror. There was a shout and a screech of tires. The young man tumbled back into a parked pickup, staggered, and then fell sideways on to the pavement. He was still trying to climb back on to his feet when Frank came bounding around the front of the pickup and seized his shirt.

‘OK, Jesus. Got you!’

‘His name’s John Frederick Kellner,’ said Lieutenant Chessman, finishing his chicken taco and smacking his hands together. ‘Twenty-six years old, a web designer from Redondo Beach. He refuses to tell us anything, but we’ve been talking to his mother and his twin sister.’

‘Did they have any idea of what he was mixed up in?’ asked Frank.

‘He was always involved with radical politics, ever since he was at high school. Animal rights, Stop the War, No More Nukes – that kind of malarkey. But his mother hasn’t seen him for nearly a year.’

‘What about his childhood?’ Nevile asked.

‘His father walked out when he was five, apparently, and he was sent to live with his uncle and his aunt from the age of seven. He was removed from their custody shortly after his thirteenth birthday because his uncle was suspected of abusing him. Until April of last year he was receiving regular treatment at the Westwood Center for clinical anxiety.’

‘Another victim of abuse, then,’ said Nevile. ‘It looks as if my theory is correct.’

‘He hasn’t admitted to being a member of Dar Tariki Tariqat,’ said Lieutenant Chessman. ‘But he is an abuse victim, yes, and he did have access to explosives that we are ninety-nine percent certain belong to Dar Tariki Tariqat – so, yes, I guess your theory seems to be panning out, so far as it goes.’

They were sitting in Lieutenant Chessman’s office at the Hollywood police station on North Wilcox Avenue. All around them was chaos. Phones rang incessantly, people were shouting and arguing, and the corridors were crowded with harassed police officers and jostling news reporters. Television vans were double parked in the street below, and all the doors were guarded by officers from the SWAT team. Kellner was being questioned under tight security by successions of police detectives, as well as special agents from the FBI and intelligence officers from the CIA.

Frank, Nevile and Lieutenant Chessman were still talking when Police Commissioner Marvin Campbell appeared on the six o’clock television news looking groomed and glossy and deeply relieved.

‘Of course it’s still too soon for us to be counting chickens, but today the forces of law’n’order struck a crushing counter blow against the terrorists who have been threatening our city, our freedom of expression and our very lives.

‘Bomb experts have already removed large quantities of explosives from St John the Evangelist Church for forensic testing. However, we are in very little doubt that their chemical composition will match the residue from the recent bombings at The Cedars, Universal, Fox, Disney and Warner Brothers.’

Commissioner Campbell declined to disclose exactly how the store of explosives had been discovered. ‘Let me simply say that the Los Angeles Police Department, in association with the FBI and other agencies, have contributed investigative work of the highest order – a unique combination of down-to-earth diligence and almost miraculous inspiration.’

‘In other words,’ Nevile said dryly, ‘they had bugger all to do with it.’

During the course of the next few hours, Dar Tariki Tariqat unraveled at the seams. FBI computer experts went through John Kellner’s PC and found that three years ago he had logged on to an online discussion society calling itself Whipping Horse. Ostensibly, Whipping Horse was a support group for the victims of any kind of abuse – child molestation, domestic violence, bullying, rape or sexual harassment. Unlike any other support group, though, it didn’t offer comfort and friendly advice. It offered something far more exciting and liberating: the chance to get even.

Abuse victims were encouraged to strike back at the people who had made their lives a misery. They could do this in a small, irritating way by constantly ordering pizzas – or taxis, or mail-order goods – for their one-time tormentors, day after day, week after week. Or they could get more serious and infect their office computers with pictures of child pornography. Or they could jeopardize their careers by calling their companies and suggesting that they had been operating some kind of illegal kickback.

Trash Their Treasures! the website urged. ‘Vandalize their houses, dig up their lawns, set fire to their cars. After everything they’ve done to you, it’s nothing more than they deserve. And society should be punished, too, for turning a blind eye while you suffered.’

Members of Whipping Horse who had taken their revenge on their abusers were asked to report back to a secure email address, describing exactly what they had done, ‘in full, grisly detail, please! So that we can all enjoy how you made the bastard(s) squirm!’ Those who had carried out the most extreme acts of retribution would be invited to join an ‘inner sanctum.’

‘The inner sanctum will regularly meet to devise effective punishments for abusers of all kinds, and also for those who abuse by omission, by trying to pretend that abuse does not exist, and that life is all happiness and sunshine. For the first time, victims of abuse can show the world what it is like to have your life damaged beyond human repair, and your very soul taken away from you. For the first time, victims of abuse are being offered a path in the darkness.’

Dar Tariki Tariqat. In the darkness, a path.

At nine twenty-seven the following morning, Frank was woken by the phone ringing. It was Nevile.

‘They’ve found a list of Dar Tariki’s members. They include all the people who volunteered as suicide bombers. Richard Haze Abbott, Alexander Sutter, the man and the girl who blew up The Cedars – everybody. The police have been able to make two or three arrests, but at least seventeen of them must still be in hiding someplace. Presumably the ones who are going to carry out the next nine bombings.’

‘Do they have any idea who’s behind it?’

‘Not so far. The FBI have been talking to John Kellner all night, apparently, but they don’t think he knows who’s behind it.’

‘Maybe you should to talk to him, so that you can feel his aura.’

‘I did suggest it. But the police are being more than a little cagey at the moment – not answering my calls, stuff like that. I don’t think they’re very happy that it was you and me who found that stash of explosives. They don’t want the Times coming out with “Brit Mystic and TV Gag Writer Crack Terror Campaign.” Wouldn’t do much for their lustrous reputation, would it?’

Frank ran his hand through his sleep-tousled hair. ‘So tell me, who bombed The Cedars?’

‘An artist called Gerry Francovini, twenty-six years old, from West Hollywood. And a girl of twenty-four called Tori Fisher, from Palo Alto originally. She was a model or something.’

‘Not much more than kids themselves.’

‘True. But it still doesn’t excuse what they did.’

‘I don’t really care about who they were, or why they did it. What I want to know is who put them up to it.’

The next call came ten minutes later, from Astrid. ‘Do you want to meet me this afternoon?’ she asked him.

‘Why don’t I buy you lunch? I’ve been staying with my sister but I’m moving into the Franklin Plaza, and the room won’t be ready till three.’

‘I’m sorry, Frank. I promised to have lunch with my friend.’

‘Can’t you put her off?’

‘I’m sorry. I’ll see you about three thirty, OK?’

‘Astrid – before you hang up, I wanted to ask you something about your ring. You know, the one that your father gave you – the emerald. St John the Evangelist’s birthstone. I mean, it was such a coincidence—’

Before he could say any more, she cut the connection. Frank stared at the receiver for a long time, almost as if he expected it to speak to him, and tell him the answer to everything he wanted to know. But then Carol called up the stairs that breakfast was ready, so he hung up and went to take a shower.

I may miss Margot, but it’s Astrid that I really want, he thought as he soaped himself. The smell of her skin, the curve of her hip. The slight seductive droop of her eyelids, as if she’s dreaming. So Nevile thinks she’s dangerous. That only makes her all the more exciting.