The nameless dead

Twenty-Six

The Soul Collector leveled the Kalashnikov at the bearded man. ‘Don’t even think about it, Apollyon.’

He had been stretching for the pistol in front of him, but instead straightened up and stared at the blonde woman. ‘Who are you?’ He turned to the motionless body on the arms of the inverted cross. ‘Why did you kill my…kill my sister?’

I wasn’t sure if Sara had recognized me. I hadn’t seen her look in my direction once. Maybe if he went for a weapon…

‘I killed her because I know what your sister, known in the business as Abaddon, was capable of,’ she said, pointing the pistol at me. ‘Keep still, Matt. I’ve got two eyes, remember?’

‘Wait a minute,’ Apollyon said. ‘You know the business? Who the fuck…’ He broke off, his jaw dropping. ‘It can’t be. You’re the Soul Collector.’ He looked like he’d just eaten a large piece of bad seafood.

Sara nodded. ‘I’m glad to see my latest facial reshaping passed muster. Right, then. I don’t care why you tried to take me out in Pittsburgh-I’m guessing you were pissed off I was getting all the best jobs-but you had your chance and you blew it. Personally, I’d have waited till my target was stationary, though I suppose the shot was tempting. You want to tell me what was going on here before I interrupted?’

The man called Apollyon-the name made me think of Pilgrim’s Progress, but it was a long time since I’d read that turgid text-confirmed what I’d worked out from the copy of the Antigospel I’d read: that he and his sister were the rightful heirs to the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant, and that he and his companions had taken the places of members, now dead, who had been loyal to the new Master. I glanced at Rothmann, who was sitting with his knees tight together, his eyes fixed on Sara. He didn’t seem to know her.

‘What was your sister doing outside the compound?’ Sara asked.

Apollyon gave a hollow laugh. ‘She was hired to blow away this piece of shit.’ He glanced at Rothmann. ‘We thought that was pretty funny, considering I was going to fuck him up at the rite, but she took the job anyway. That way, we got two bites at his cherry.’

‘I saw her in Maine,’ Sara said. ‘What was she doing there?’

‘She was told to sit on that guy’s ass,’ he replied, angling his head toward me. ‘Matthew John Wells. He’s one of the Kraut’s zombies. The idea was he would lead her to him, which he more or less did.’

‘More or less,’ the Soul Collector repeated, turning to me. ‘Whose side are you on here, Matt?’

I held her gaze. ‘Nobody’s, least of all yours.’

She laughed. It wasn’t a sound that boded well, either for me or anyone else in the barn. ‘Who’s your friend?’ She waved the pistol at Quincy. ‘And don’t pretend he’s a stranger. I saw him with you in Portland.’

So she’d been on us from the beginning. I wondered how, but that wasn’t important. Quincy had started to speak for himself. He rattled off his name, rank and unit.

‘Very impressive,’ Sara said, glancing at the bearded man. ‘Your church got a policy about black people? And how about you, Heinz Rothmann?’ She turned to the Master. ‘Nazis view blacks as animals, don’t they?’

Neither of them answered, which was a bad idea. The Soul Collector stepped toward Rothmann and stuck the muzzle of her Glock into his forehead.

‘All right,’ he said, his voice uneven. ‘Blacks are subhumans. What do you care?’

She leaned toward him. ‘I’m a professional killer. I don’t have time for politics.’

‘This isn’t just politics, darlin’,’ Apollyon drawled. ‘You’re in the South now.’

Quincy used the distraction to spring forward, his arms outstretched and clutching at Sara. Her eyes flicked round and she loosed off two shots. He collapsed with a crash and didn’t move again. I moved toward him, and then a rattle of automatic fire started from the side wall. Sara went down like a felled tree. I put my arms round my head.

After the shooting stopped, I looked up cautiously. There was no sign of the bearded man or of Rothmann. I crawled over to Quincy and laid hands on him. His chest was a slick of crimson.

‘Leave him, Matt.’

Sara was sitting on the floor, the pistol pointed at me. She didn’t seem to have been hit, but she was stretching her back and frowning. She got to her feet awkwardly.

‘Move,’ she said. ‘You’re coming with me.’ She went over to the woman she’d called Abaddon and pulled the rucksack off her.

I glared at her, my hands wet with Quincy’s blood. ‘Fuck you, you murdering bitch.’

She smiled weakly. ‘Good spirit, Matt. You’ll be needing that. Now move.’

I followed her to the door and down the passage to the exit. I heard the roar of an engine, then a pickup careered out of the compound. Farther away, there was the sound of another vehicle.

‘Apollyon must have left a friend outside,’ Sara said, looking around. ‘Looks clear. Come on, we’ll take whatever we can.’

We went toward the gate, where there were several vehicles. The first, a large SUV, had two flat tires. The second was a small sedan. Sara told me to drive. Neither of us spoke. I was still smarting from her casual execution of Quincy, the poor bastard. I’d liked him and could have done with him watching my back.

After about a quarter of an hour on a narrow track through the dark forest, she stopped me at a clearing. There was a bulky SUV behind some bushes. This time, she got in the driver’s door, after guiding me to the other side.

‘Put out your hands,’ she ordered, raising the Glock.

I did so with a display of reluctance, and she quickly tied my wrists together with high quality rope.

‘Why don’t you just kill me?’ I asked, finally finding my tongue.

She smiled. ‘Oh, there’ll be plenty of time for that later. Right now, I’ve got a job to complete.’

‘What’s that? Putting a bullet in your competitor Apollyon’s head?’

‘That’s not a job, that’s pleasure.’ She was pressing the switches on what looked like a location monitor. ‘There we are.’ She pointed to the screen. ‘Wherever they go, we’ll be on them.’

‘You bugged him?’

‘More correctly, I bugged the vehicle that brought you here.

‘How did you know Apollyon would take it?’

‘I disabled as many of the others as I could. I didn’t know he was going to be here, but I always make contingency plans.’

There was something weird going on that I couldn’t put my finger on. ‘Who did you think would use that vehicle?’

She laughed. ‘Did the crazy ritual do something to your brain, Matt? Who do you think? Abaddon wasn’t the only assassin with a contract to execute Jack Thomson, aka Heinz Rothmann. I’ve got one, too.’

I wondered if I’d stay alive long enough to see the fucker who’d destroyed my family get his come uppance.

Sir Andrew Frogget was enjoying himself. Not only had his Washington lawyers warned the FBI off, but he had passed an extremely successful day at Routh Limited’s U.S. office. The morning was taken up with new business. The hedge funds with the closest links to the American political establishment all maintained personnel in D.C., and most had shown interest in the portfolio of recent start-ups that he had brought. Already, he had commitments for almost sixty percent of the funding required. On his return to London, he would pass the rest over to the experts, but he always liked to break the back of the work himself; he had learned in the army that commanders must undertake more than their share of the spadework.

That wasn’t all the army had taught him. He thought back to the Gulf War in 1991, remembering the desert road filled with burnt-out vehicles and charred bodies. It was then that he had realized not only the U.S.’s over whelming power, but the ruthlessness that came with it. He had engineered a transfer to Washington as military attache and begun to build up the contacts he was still using. Many of them were involved in military operations, of course. The original directors of Routh, a collection of narrow-minded pencil pushers, had been dubious about the ethical side of such investments, but he had replaced them with people who shared his view that economic prosperity was rooted in superior firepower. The war to expel Saddam Hussein and its aftermath had illustrated the truth of that perfectly, even if the victors were less competent at rebuilding society than defeating a hostile regime.

Sir Andrew looked at his watch. His lady wife would be expecting him to call, but he wasn’t going to do that. Annabel had become tiresome about his frequent foreign trips and wanted constant reassurance that all was well. He had other things on his mind, not least the progress he had made in his afternoon meetings. Even though Jack Thomson, the founder of Woodbridge Holdings, had disappeared after the massacre in the cathedral, Routh Limited had not given up on him. Some of the backers had expressed concern, but almost all were still on board, and he was convinced the others would come round. That was worth another glass of vintage Dom Perignon.

He had just poured it when the doorbell rang. One of his local friends had loaned him his apartment in Adams Morgan for the evening, asking no questions-which was just as well. The girl who appeared on the screen by the door looked even younger than her handler said she was. Frogget’s throat was dry, despite its recent lubrication by the champagne, and his heart was beating as it had done when he had led night raids into Iraq.

He slid off the chain and opened the door.

‘Hello, my dear.’

The girl gazed up at him, eyes wary above cheeks inexpertly daubed with rouge.

‘Come in. Have you ever had champagne?’

She batted her eyelashes at him and then took out the gum she had been chewing. ‘Where shall I put this?’

Sir Andrew extended a hand to receive the sticky pink mass. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, the nerves in his hand tingling as if he’d grasped a live wire.

The girl sat down on the sofa, her thin legs apart, and gazed at him impassively.

When the door was broken down ten minutes later, the knight of the realm was naked, as was his companion. Peter Sebastian and Arthur Bimsdale didn’t bother to conceal their disgust.

‘How can you be sure Apollyon took Rothmann with him?’ I asked as Sara drove down the deserted country road, her eye flicking on and off the location monitor. ‘He could easily have killed him in the forest.’

‘I killed his sister. He’s using Rothmann as bait to lure me out.’

‘So let him go.’

‘I can’t do that. I have a reputation to maintain.’ She glanced at me. ‘Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of time for me to deal with you later. You’re not one of Rothmann’s pathetic devil-worshippers, are you?’

‘Your sister was into Satanism.’

That wasn’t such a smart thing to say. She gave me an armor-piercing look.

‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you did to Lauren,’ she said, her voice full of menace. ‘But she was my half sister, while my brother was the real thing.’

‘Who called himself the White Devil,’ I said, deciding I had nothing to lose. ‘And you call yourself the Soul Collector. You’re the pathetic devil worshippers, not me.’

There was a thud as she hit a raccoon that suddenly loomed up in the headlights.

‘I don’t worship anyone, Matt,’ Sara said, licking her lips as if there was blood on them. ‘I just terminate people for money.’

‘And gratification,’ I added, trying unsuccessfully to work some give into the rope on my wrists.

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not anymore. The excitement’s worn off.’ She looked at me. ‘Though in your case…’

I turned to the front. She had become even more frightening since I’d last seen her-stony and pale-faced, like a devil sickening on sin.

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Sara said, with false excitement. ‘You must have become a father again. Boy or girl?’

The words hit me like a sledgehammer. Bottling up the deaths of Karen and our son had been bad enough, but the idea of talking to my ex-lover about them was agonizing.

‘Come on,’ she said, blinking as if a large insect had just bitten her, ‘do tell.’

‘They’re dead.’

She hit the brake and the heavy vehicle screeched to a halt. ‘What did you say?’

I lowered my head. ‘You heard me.’

‘For God’s sake, what happened?’

I tried to keep silent, but I couldn’t. ‘Karen…she had to have an emergency Cesarean. They…neither of them made it.’ My eyes were damp, but I was determined I wouldn’t cry in front of Sara. ‘They think…you see, Karen and I were both…brainwashed by Rothmann and his sister. They think the drugs may have been behind what happened.’

Sara sat motionless, her hands on the wheel.

‘I’m sorry, Matt,’ she said, after a time. ‘I really am. Nobody deserves that.’

‘You fucking hypocrite. You’re going to kill me.’

‘I meant I’m sorry about Karen and the kid.’ She paused. ‘What was it, the child?’

‘A…a boy.’ I tried to remember the name we had chosen for him, but it was still gone.

She looked at me. ‘You’re going after Rothmann, too, aren’t you? They let you out of…wherever…to track the fucker down.’

I nodded, keeping my eyes off her. I felt sick. Telling my ex-lover about Karen and our son seemed the worst kind of betrayal, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself.

The Soul Collector slid the stick back into Drive and moved forward, checking the monitor. ‘Well, we’d better make sure our target doesn’t get too far ahead,’ she said, with what might once have been tenderness.

I didn’t know what to think. Working with Sara meant that Rothmann had no chance of escaping, no matter how deadly the man who had taken him was. But she had killed Quincy without an iota of compunction. After she’d dispatched Rothmann, she would treat me in exactly the same way.

At least that would send me down the shadowy road to join my named and nameless dead.