The Babylon Idol

Chapter 10

The letter left Ben stunned. He clutched the thin sheets tightly in his hands and read them again, twice, word by word, in case he’d somehow misunderstood or mistranslated.

He hadn’t. The message couldn’t have been clearer. Fabrizio Severini, repentant sinner, acting on a mystical revelation from God, was warning him that his old enemy Massimiliano Usberti was coming back for revenge.

And with those three pages of elegant handwriting, it was as though the planet had suddenly flipped its magnetic polarity, turning everything upside down.

For the thousandth time since that morning, Ben revisualised the awful memory of the shooting. The details were exactly the same, yet everything was completely different. In his mind’s eye he pictured the two of them standing by the fallen tree: Ben cutting, Jeff close by waiting to grab the next section of log and toss it on the pile. Then, like an extreme slow-motion replay: the bullet closing in from nowhere. The blood spray. Jeff falling. The entire nightmare sequence happening a fraction of a second after the gust of wind that had buffeted them with a fresh snow flurry. A gust of wind that could very easily have diverted the trajectory of the bullet just those few critical inches and caused it to hit…

The wrong target.

It seemed so obvious to him now that Ben was furious with himself for not having thought of it before. As a trained sniper himself, it had been drilled into him long ago that even a 10mph gust of sidewind, coming in right-to-left from three o’clock or left-to-right from nine o’clock, could blow a medium to long-range rifle shot far enough off course in either direction to spell the difference between a hit and a miss. Even the most experienced rifleman could be caught out by a sudden change in windspeed and direction. At a range of three hundred yards, the deviation could be a full seven inches left or right depending on which way the gust blew. At five hundred yards the shot could veer off by up to twenty inches or more; and at a thousand yards it could be off by over fifty inches, missing the bullseye by a whole four feet. And that was the data for a ten-mile-an-hour gust. A stronger wind could affect the shot even worse.

The realisation made Ben’s mind reel. Because if Severini’s warning could be believed in any way, it meant that the bullet hadn’t been meant for Jeff at all.

It had been meant for him.

He was clutching the letter so tightly in his hands that the paper ripped. He let the torn pieces fall to the desk as his mind raced and filled with questions. Had the sniper known he’d hit the wrong man? Was it possible that the gust of wind, whipping in a fresh snow flurry between him and his distant target, could have obscured the view through his scope just long enough to mislead him? He pressed the trigger; he saw a man go down; he packed up his kit and hurried from the scene, running back to his hidden vehicle, getting on the phone to report back to base that his mission was accomplished.

Whereupon, the assassin might have gone after the next target on his list.

Ben looked down at the torn letter. You must do all you can to guard yourself from him. Not only yourself, but every one of those virtuous, wholly innocent individuals who played a part in his downfall.

The next question that flashed into Ben’s mind was: what other names were on the hit list?

He could think of four apart from his own. Four people whom Usberti would have blamed and never forgiven for their involvement in the affair. The first and most obvious was INTERPOL Commissioner Luc Simon, Ben’s main ally in bringing down Gladius Domini.

The next was Roberta Ryder, who had become entangled in the intrigue through no fault of her own and become Usberti’s target for assassination and kidnap, narrowly escaping with her life.

Then there was Father Pascal Cambriel, the elderly French priest who had sheltered Ben and Roberta at his humble village home after Ben had been shot, and ended up playing a key role.

And lastly there was Anna Manzini, the scholar and expert on the history of the Cathars, who had helped Ben unravel the bizarre background behind Usberti’s obsession with alchemy and after whom Usberti had sent his murderer Franco Bozza, to butcher her in her villa near Montségur in southern France. Like Roberta, Anna Manzini had had a close call and only just survived.

Usberti’s henchman Franco Bozza was out of the picture now. Ben had seen him get shot in the throat and die right in front of him. But the world was full of eager professional killers hungry for work, at the right price. And Massimiliano Usberti was a rich man, from an aristocratic family with enough property and investments to shield him from even the most catastrophic financial loss. If Severini was right, the fallen archbishop had his own twisted reasons for wanting to get even with all four people on the list, and the means to carry it out.

If Severini was right. If, if, if.

Everything depended on whether Ben could trust this crazy letter from a recovering mental patient living under massive psychological stress, who based his claim on a direct communication from heaven above. Either the guy was a nut, and Ben could throw the letter away, or he was for real, and Ben needed to act on it. There was very little middle ground between those two options, and no room for mistakes. He had to know more before he could let himself jump to conclusions. He swivelled his chair around to face the computer terminal on the desk. The sleeping screen flashed into life and he started urgently hitting keys.

The name Fabrizio Severini threw up a smattering of search engine results that were mainly old news archives related to the fall of Gladius Domini and the subsequent police investigation, the arrests, the court cases, the sentencing, the scandal that had rocked the church and drawn all kinds of censure from the Vatican. Ben didn’t see anything he hadn’t seen before.

But then he found something new.

The item was a cursory, low-key article from the Italian current affairs website La Repubblica, too insignificant to have been picked up by other news agencies. It took Ben only a second to read it: an announcement of the recent suicide of the disgraced former senior Church official Fabrizio Severini, found hanged in his cell at the Istituto Penitenziaro Bollati in Milano. Checking the reported date of his death, Ben saw that it had happened just three days after the postmark on the envelope. The letter might not even have reached Le Val by the time Severini’s body was discovered.

Ben didn’t know what to make of it. Had someone got to Severini, as he’d seemed to resign himself to the fact that they might? Or had the demons in his own mind got to him in the end? Again, it was impossible to tell.

Undecided, Ben ran another internet search, this time keying in the name Massimiliano Usberti. The computer did its thing, spat out its findings, and Ben found himself being taken back to La Repubblica and a report dated from just over six months earlier.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he muttered to himself.

The piece ended with a line or two about the private funeral ceremony that had taken place at Usberti’s family estate, where he had been laid to rest in the ancestral chapel.

If Ben felt any satisfaction from the news of Usberti’s death, it was swamped by his utter confusion about what was going on here. Sitting back in his chair he lit another cigarette and closed his eyes as he tried to puzzle it out logically. Le Val hadn’t existed when Ben and Usberti’s paths had crossed; so, for Severini to have traced him there and known where to address his letter, he must have been allowed some limited internet access by the relatively relaxed system at Bollati, and been able to Google Ben’s name just as Ben had done with Severini’s. The bookish, educated ex-clergyman was just the kind of inmate who would spend a lot of time in the prison library, enjoying the privilege of keeping up with what happened out there in the world.

Was it believable, then, that he wouldn’t have learned of his hated former employer’s death? Could such an important piece of news have gone unnoticed? Or had he been aware of the facts, but preferred to listen instead to the imaginary voices in his head telling him otherwise? Ben could well imagine that to be the case. If his suspicion was right, and if Severini was really nothing more than a poor raving lunatic racked with guilt and suffering from hallucinations and delusions, the letter was worthless junk and Ben was left with nothing.

It was rare for Ben to be lost for ideas, and even rarer for him to feel the need for another man’s counsel in a moment of crisis. But with his best friend in a coma and his mind jangling with confusion and fatigue, he badly needed to reach out to someone he could trust. He took out his battered old leather wallet, thumbed through the collection of business cards inside, and found the one that bore the blue-and-gold emblem of INTERPOL. He reached for the phone and dialled the direct line number on the card.

The evening was wearing on, but calling at this late hour didn’t matter. Luc Simon wasn’t the kind of guy to clock off when the factory whistle blew. He ate most of his meals at his desk, and probably slept there most nights: his wife would no doubt have confirmed that, before she’d got sick of being married to a ghost and left him for someone who could pay her a little more attention.

Luc’s phone answered on the second ring. ‘Bureau du Commissaire Simon.’

Ben said, ‘It’s me.’ He was about to say more, when he realised that the voice on the line was quite different from the smooth Gallic tone of Luc Simon’s. This man sounded older, coarser. And even more worn out with exhaustion than Ben felt.

‘Who’s calling?’ the voice asked.

Ben gave his name. ‘I was looking for the commissioner. This is his direct number, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is,’ the voice said, wearily, maybe slightly suspiciously.

‘Is he there? It’s okay. My name’s Ben Hope — he knows me. Check me on his database if you want.’

A silence. Then, ‘He’s not here. He’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ For Luc to have gone home before midnight would have been a record. For him to have left his job would have been unthinkable. ‘Gone where?’

The second silence on the line was heavier than the first, and it brought a chill that went down Ben’s spine and told him something was wrong.

‘If you know Commissioner Luc Simon,’ the voice said, laden with sadness, ‘then I regret to inform you that he is dead.’