‘Very well, Professor, then let me say how excited I am by your offer. I can assure you that your film crew will be allowed access to every section of the Meteora monasteries.’
‘That is good to know,’ Carter replied, not missing a beat even though he still did not have the faintest idea what Contos was talking about.
‘Will you be doing any filming today?’
‘No, no, today is just to do a recce, scope the place out, as it were, before we start.’
‘Very good,’ Contos replied, with no sign of his enthusiasm waning as he rested his elbows on the table. ‘I must tell you that your documentary on Meteora alone is going to be of great benefit to us, but when your office mentioned the donation to be made by Cambridge University, I was…well, stunned.’
‘Not at all, Mr Contos. It seemed the least we could do, considering the access we are being given.’ Carter found himself actually enjoying this role-playing and he had to stop himself from indulging in further amateur dramatics.
‘Don’t be so modest, Professor. Two hundred thousand pounds is, without doubt, one of the most generous donations we have ever received.’ The mention of such a large sum of money left Carter looking shocked, and Contos’s eyebrows suddenly contracted. ‘The donation is still on offer?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s just… I thought it was three hundred thousand.’
This new amount mentioned had Contos beaming from ear to ear. ‘Three hundred thousand! I just don’t know what to say.’
‘Neither do I,’ Carter replied shakily, and he forced a smile, deciding that it was perhaps best now to move on to the real reason he was here, given that there was not a cat’s chance in hell he was going to hand over that amount of money, even if he had it to spare…which he of course didn’t. ‘My office said you would have something for me. A package?’
The request had Contos’s eyebrows lowering again, and he looked bemused. ‘A package?’
‘Yes, a package…maybe some pages, of the vellum variety.’
It was clear that Contos now had no idea what he was talking about and he shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I think I do,’ boomed a voice behind them, and Carter swivelled in his seat to see the cold eyes of Vlad staring at him from the half-open doorway. ‘In fact I’m sure of it.’
Carter froze with an involuntary gulp as Vlad made his way inside, followed by two smartly dressed women in black suits and ties. He then approached the desk with one hand outstretched.
‘I’m Mr Hodgkinson, part of a delegation from Cambridge University.’
Contos stood up and warmly shook Vlad’s hand. ‘It’s a pleasure, Mr Hodgkinson. I was just telling Professor Harker how excited we are about the making of the documentary and your donation.’
Vlad towered over Carter, who now shrank back deep into his seat, looking extremely uncomfortable.
‘Professor Harker, of course. Nice to see you again.’
Carter smiled nervously as the two women took up position on either side of his chair, with one firmly gripping his left shoulder.
‘I was expecting your colleague to be with you, Professor.’ Vlad licked his lips. ‘What a shame… I mean for you.’
The uncomfortable silence that followed was now broken by Contos. ‘Would anyone like some coffee or tea?’
Vlad continued to eye Carter menacingly for a few more moments, then he turned to face their host with an overfriendly smile. ‘A coffee would be delightful, thank you.’
Contos turned around and began heading towards the coffee table, but only made it halfway before one of the women calmly strode forward, pulled something from her pocket and slipped it over the man’s head and around his neck.
An unpleasant gurgling sound arose from Contos as she tightened her grip on the garrotte and he scrabbled frantically at his neck, where the wire was already slicing through, while his legs began to kick up in the air. The woman maintained her grip and, as his legs began to buckle, she pulled him downwards until the top of his spine was pressed against her crouching knee, so as to increase the pressure around the stricken man’s neck.
Carter was now breathing heavily and beginning to sweat profusely. As Contos’s convulsions began to subside and his body went limp, Vlad craned his neck towards him. ‘I want to know where your friend is, “Professor”?’
Possible answers raced through Carter’s mind as he felt the sour breath of Vlad on his cheek. ‘I don’t know…the Templars got him.’
Vlad stood back up and crossed his arms as the garrotte-wielding woman now abandoned Contos’s corpse and resumed her position next to Carter, the wire noose still in her hand dripping droplets of blood onto the light-blue carpet beneath them.
‘Mmm, if that’s true, then it looks like we’re going to have to take out our frustration on you instead,’ Vlad declared, looking distinctly annoyed by the news. ‘And that means you’ve got a date with an electric cattle prod, doesn’t it, porky?’
Chapter 34
A small group of young twenty-somethings stumbled excitedly past the all-night café at the end of an enjoyable and alcohol-fuelled night of fun, looking like they did not have a care in the world. Jostling with each other and cracking jokes, they barely registered the man sitting patiently at one of the outside tables with a look of sheer boredom, while tapping a single euro coin against its glass surface. John Shroder paused in his tapping to watch the group pass before resuming his boring coin play. He had been sitting here waiting for his Interpol contact for several hours, and although such a wait was to be expected due to the last-minute request for a meeting, he was becoming extremely restless.
After receiving a reply from his contact on the inside, he had left the apartment – and Carter, who was still waiting for his message from Winters – and caught a flight to Nuremberg in southern Germany, followed by a short taxi ride to the chosen meeting place at this café. During the preceding hours he had resisted any urge to call his two new partners, as agreed, but as the time rolled on he was finding it increasingly difficult to hold off from making a call. His main cause for concern was not Harker, because the man had been in enough scrapes to know how to look after himself; David Carter was another thing altogether. An unknown quantity with little experience in such matters, and because Carter had been assigned the most delicate and dangerous job of all three of them it was making the MI6 agent anxious. It was very likely he was walking straight into another of Winters’s traps and it was this thought that was playing on Shroder’s mind the most. Still, the man had guts to even accept his ‘mission’ – as the ex-don had kept calling it – but the idea of him walking unprepared into a trap was something that was now gnawing at Shroder’s innards.
It was with this growing sense of foreboding that Shroder was preoccupied when a hand suddenly tapped him on the shoulder.
‘John,’ a voice said quietly, and Shroder looked back to see the one face he had been waiting for since his arrival here.
‘Andrew,’ Shroder replied, standing up to shake his contact’s hand. ‘Good to see you, and thanks for meeting me.’
Andrew Campus gave Shroder’s shoulder a friendly squeeze and then sat down opposite him, letting out a deep sigh. ‘Sorry for taking so long, but you caught me in the middle of something.’
‘Not a problem, Andrew. I know you’re busy… Nothing too hectic, I hope?’
‘You know the life, John. When is it not?’ Campus replied with a wry smile. ‘There was a flag raised at Interpol, regarding a fugitive. A man had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and his wallet contained ID for the man we’ve been looking for, so off I went.’
‘Was it a solid lead?’
‘My friend, the only thing solid about it was the turd the drunk bastard had shat in his pants.’
‘What?’ Shroder replied, with a confused laugh.
‘Turned out that the wino’s day job is picking pockets, and by complete coincidence he’d lifted the fugiti
ve’s wallet earlier in the day and then proceeded to get blind drunk on the contents before being picked up by some local police working the night shift. What were the odds? I tell you, life is without doubt stranger than fiction.’
At forty-two, Andrew Campus was a seasoned Interpol veteran and one of the few to have worked within the organization for so long. Born and raised in the UK, initially serving in the London Met, this man with short brown hair and the physique of a military drill instructor had jumped at the chance to transfer to Interpol. It was not a conventional career path but Campus came from a police family which had served for generations, and their well-established contacts within law enforcement were something he had made the most of. He had wound up eventually in the narcotics and human-trafficking section of the organization, where he had excelled, and this was the very reason Shroder had contacted him.
‘That’s a shit outcome,’ Shroder observed and added, grinning, ‘literally.’
Campus laughed out loud and, in doing so, released some of the pent-up frustration of a futile night’s work. ‘I tell you, John, even when we do catch a big fish, another larger, meaner and more violent one takes its place. Makes me feel like I’m forever on a damn treadmill.’
‘Actually, it’s one of those big fish I’m currently interested in,’ Shroder explained, wanting now to get to the point, given how many hours he had been waiting.
‘Who?’
‘Jacob Winters.’
The very name elicited a spark of enthusiasm in Campus’s eyes, and the Interpol agent leant forward cautiously. ‘I know him – or at least of him.’
‘I need to know anything you have,’ Shroder prompted, encouraged by this answer.
Campus mulled over the request, then without any hesitation in his voice, he folded his arms and sucked in a deep breath. ‘He pops up here, then disappears there. In fact we’ve taken to calling him the mole.’
‘Do you have anything other than a nickname?’
‘He’s a genuine man of mystery,’ Campus declared, stroking his bottom lip. ‘Appeared from nowhere some months back with a fully operational syndicate that has established links with most of the major crime families in Europe – including the Russians, and you know how ruthless they are. He’s heavily into narcotics, mostly crack cocaine and heroin, as well as the usual bread and butter of organized crime: prostitution, gambling and extortion. The interesting thing is that, from what we can tell, he has no criminal history up until recently, and no previous indication of a budding organization either. Like I said, he just popped up, and astonishingly quickly took over rackets everywhere, and made them his own like in a bloody cooperate takeover.’
This was nothing that Shroder did not already know and he found himself edging towards acquiring information on the man rather than his deeds. ‘When did he first appear?’
‘You should know that better than me, John, as it was your office that was the first to clock him.’
‘Really?’ Shroder replied, genuinely surprised at the fact.
‘Yes, some German national was offering arms – and not any old calibre, but nuclear. The seller got entrapped in a MI6 sting operation and gave up the Winters’s name as being the supplier. Of course, that’s just gossip, nothing official.’
‘Always is,’ Shroder said, now extremely curious. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He died in custody. I don’t know the details but his arrest led to revealing Winters’s links in the narcotics web and all the other lovely trades he’s involved in. That’s where I came in, and Interpol have been building a case against him ever since.’
‘A case?’ Shroder spluttered, almost choking on the words. ‘Something as big as that is going to take years to put together.’
Campus said nothing at first and just raised his eyebrows, but as Shroder craned forward with an insistent expression, the Interpol agent began to nod. ‘There is something else…something you may want to see.’
Without another word, he got out of his seat and began making his way across the road. Shroder dropped a couple of euros onto the coffee table and followed him with a renewed skip in his step.
They did not need to go far, just fifty metres away from the all night-café to a quaint-looking residential building with a red wooden door, whereupon Campus pulled out a Yale key from his pocket and let himself in.
‘This is convenient,’ Shroder remarked, surprised by the proximity of whatever Campus wanted to show him.
‘Why do you think I asked you to meet me at that café?’ Campus replied before ushering Shroder inside and then onwards into a small lounge located at the front of the house. ‘I live here.’
The room was exactly what one would expect of a single working man. There were no paintings on the walls and just a three-seat black leather sofa with side tables supporting lamps on either side of it, while in the corner a new sixty-inch HD Panasonic flat-screen television on a bracket protruded from the wall.
‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ Shroder commented sarcastically at the décor, or lack of it.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Campus said dismissively with his eyelids drooping, ‘the rest of the house is a lot nicer, believe me.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Shroder replied as Campus reached behind the sofa and pulled out a small cardboard box that had been taped shut. He placed it on the sofa and then pulled a narrow switchblade from his pocket, which he tossed over to Shroder.
‘Go on.’ He nodded. ‘Open it and see for yourself.’
Shroder paused and shot him a wary look.
‘You’re getting skittish in your old age, John. Don’t worry, it won’t bite.’
With a shrug, Shroder cautiously made his way over to the brown box and flicked open the switchblade before picking up the container and gently shaking it.
‘I warn you, it’s not pretty,’ Campus cautioned him.
Shroder glanced back and offered an unconcerned smile. ‘Takes a lot to get under my skin,’ he said, and began to cut away at the red tape covering the box’s corners. ‘Damn it, Andrew, how long have you known me?’
Shroder felt something hard being prodded into his lower back and instantly his whole body went stiff, before collapsing in a heap on the floor – as, above him, Campus brandished a blue plastic Taser in his left hand.
‘Not long enough, it would seem, John.’
Chapter 35
Harker winced as he rubbed against the square bandage underneath his shirt, which he had applied to himself from the first aid kit the pilot had provided him with upon entering the Cessna jet. His trip back to Bastia airport had proved mercifully uneventful, even if he had spent much of the short trip glancing nervously in the rear-view mirror for any signs of being chased. His paranoia had led to constant visions of the rabid serial-killing family closing in behind him and doing everything they could to run him off the road and thus silence him, as they had originally planned. With every new car headlight that had appeared in his mirror, he had pushed the stolen Porsche faster, and by the time he had reached the airport turn-off he was having to make a concerted effort to ease off on the accelerator. Getting pulled over by the police in a stolen car, along with the discovery of a minor knife wound to his chest, would have entailed more problems than he could handle.
Having a British EU passport had subsequently made access to his waiting jet a breeze and, with few other commercial flights on the tarmac that night, he had been in the air within minutes and heading to the address that Corsica’s very own version of the Manson family had provided him with.
Harker resisted another urge to scratch at his wound and instead pulled out the piece of paper that Sofia had grudgingly given him back at their mansion. The address comprised map coordinates identifying a small island lying off the south-east coast of Greece and, as far as Harker could make out, it was in private ownership. That the same small island had been removed from Google Maps was to his mind already a reason to be concerned but, after some further quick Google researc
h, the discovery that the small sea-girt rock had once been home to a leper colony only added to his feeling of unease. Despite the fact that it had been abandoned for over fifty years, this information only served to heighten the morbid and mysterious nature of the place that would soon be hosting the occult ceremony that Jacob Winters had orchestrated.
With everything Harker had already witnessed, the once fanciful notion of raising the dead seemed now all too real, but the idea that the Devil himself was about to make an appearance and initiate a new world order was something he was still not ready to countenance, even if the idea did have his stomach performing the bolero in anticipation.
Harker gazed out of the window into the dark night sky and pondered the realities he was being forced to confront. His earlier life in the priesthood had instilled in him the very tangible concepts of good versus evil but, despite believing in God, Harker had always viewed evil as something lying within the hearts of men and women, and not as some extraneous entity watching over us all.
He swiftly batted away these philosophical notions to one side because, although thought provoking, they were as of this moment completely redundant. This was primarily about Chloe, and how to get her back, and this was the only question that mattered.
Harker retrieved his iPhone and, for the third time since taking to the air, he dialled in John Shroder’s contact number. As before, it went to voicemail, so he hung up and then tried Carter’s number, but got the same response. He dumped the mobile onto the seat next to him and let out a frustrated sigh. Where the hell were they? This whole plan had been formulated to give him enough time to locate Winters, and now here he was with the man’s whereabouts and unable to let anyone else know it. As he racked his brain for a way to resolve the issue, an idea sparked in his mind. If he could not reach them, then perhaps it was time to reach out to someone else. Harker grabbed his mobile and dialled in a number he knew so very well.
The Last Judgement Page 26
