The Last Judgement

by The Last Judgement (retail) (epub)

  Harker and Chloe gazed intently at one another, with only their stares to offer comfort, as Winters now settled snugly into his chair.

  ‘I must congratulate you, Alex, on your sterling performance over the past few days,’ he continued, with a sarcastic smile and a slow clap of his hands. ‘You have gone above and beyond what I expected of you, and the fact that you made it all the way to this island, and to me, is a feat in itself, given the contempt you are now held in by your former friends.’

  There were so many questions Harker wanted to blurt out, but he said nothing because it was clear that Winters wanted – no, needed – to explain it for himself, and was now taking great pleasure in doing so.

  ‘Your Templar friends, once your allies, want you dead. Your name is now high on Interpol’s most-wanted list after you absconded from Mont-Saint-Michel, leaving a dead helicopter pilot in your wake, amongst others. And meanwhile the person you love most in the world is here by my side and in my clutches.’ Winters looked over and raised his eyebrows up and down slowly. ‘I have no doubt we can find a good use for her, once our business here is concluded.’

  The salacious insinuation already had Harker springing forward before the sound of something metallic clicked into place and a thin blade pressed up against his throat, stopping him in his tracks. He glanced to his side to find Vlad with his arm raised towards him and the almost foot-long blade protruding from under his sleeve and now held tightly against Harker’s windpipe.

  ‘What!’ Harker gasped as he recognized the unique piece of weaponry, and a cold sweat began to form on his brow along with an increasing feeling of dread. The arm-sword was a spring-activated blade strapped to a person’s forearm, which shot out above the top of one’s hand and thus was used as an extension of the arm. It was deadly if you knew how to wield it, and there was only one group of people who still used it.

  ‘You’re Templars!’ he gasped.

  Winters laughed so loud that he began to cough, till he drew a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped up the thin line of drool seeping from one corner of his mouth. ‘Hold on, I want to enjoy this,’ he croaked, wiping the last remaining drops. ‘Alex Harker, the confusion and fear you must be feeling right at this moment is extremely heart-warming and satisfying to me, and I don’t mind saying so.’ He placed the soiled handkerchief back in his pocket, closed his eyes and raised his face to the concave ceiling up above. ‘How wonderful it is to have you here before me, with your life in tatters, your friends wanting to kill you and everyone else wishing they had never known you – as I am sure Mr Carter here would agree.’

  Carter uttered a muffled groan as Winters continued to revel in his achievement.

  ‘This is exactly how I imagined it, with you sporting that dumb, lost look and knowing that everything you are and possess now belongs to me. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Professor Alex Harker, a man with no future and now at his lowest ebb. Truly a sight for sore eyes, for mine at any rate, thanks…to you. Tell me, Alex, before we get going, would you like to meet the Devil in person?’

  Harker said nothing, because it really didn’t matter. Winters was obviously going to do whatever he wanted, and offering a reply would just mean receiving more of the man’s inane and insulting banter.

  ‘Of course you would,’ Winters continued, wheeling himself backwards as one of the guards made his way to the pod and gripped the strip of plastic covering. ‘Everyone loves meeting celebrities – and they don’t get more famous than this one, do they?’

  That familiar tone in Winters’s voice was back, but as hard as he tried, Harker could still not place it. As the guard unzipped the covering, he focused his attention on what lay behind it.

  With it now completely unzipped, the guard slowly pulled the covering back to reveal the face of a man squinting into the light. He was naked except for a pair of plain white linen boxer shorts, and his arms and legs were held in place by thick rubber restraints attached to the interior of the capsule. His pale white body glistened with sweat and a feeding tube inserted down his throat was held in place by thick tape across one cheek. The man’s torso was covered in multiple thick scars resulting from a whole host of wounds and, as the guard pulled away the tape and gently tugged at the mouth nozzle, a foot of tubing slid out from his throat, causing the prisoner to cough wildly.

  Long white strands of damp hair hung from his scalp and Harker already knew who he was looking at even before the eyelids fluttered open. The realization had Harker slumping back against Vlad’s chest and, as he gazed into those unique pupils, his mind became fuzzy and blank even as the impossible was made real. ‘But you’re dead!’

  Sebastian Brulet, previously Grand Master of the Knights Templar, stared back through those distinctive star-crossed pupils of his and managed a weak smile before collapsing against his restraints. He hung there for a few moments before the guard released him and then laid him out on the floor face down, as Harker, his mind now racing, turned to look at Winters, who had a gigantic grin plastered across his face.

  ‘Now do you know who I am?’ Winters asked as he curled a finger towards him. ‘Come closer, Alex,’ he continued and, at a wave of his hand, Vlad drew his arm-sword away from Harker’s neck and pushed him closer.

  ‘Closer,’ Winters said, as Harker was thrust down until he was merely centimetres from the old man’s face. ‘Tell me, my friend, do recognize anyone?’

  Harker stared down into Winters’s cold dark eyes and, although there was something familiar, he still could not grasp it. It was like one of those TV pranks where a celebrity dons a face mask and pretends to be someone else. You cannot for a moment recognize them, but when you look directly into their eyes, there is something familiar you just can’t place, and so it now was for Harker. He spent the next few seconds scanning Winters’s pupils, and was about to shake his head when something clicked. He wasn’t sure what it was, maybe a flickering of the eyelid or the colouring of the irises, but in a single instant, and as his synapses sparked and made the connection, he suddenly knew.

  Harker jolted backwards and into the waiting arms of Vlad, who once again slipped the arm-sword blade under his chin and held him fast as Winters began to smile and raised his arm and extended a crooked index finger out in front of him.

  ‘I see you.’

  With his mind buzzing, Harker glanced over at Chloe, who had a knowing look on her face and clearly knew already what he had just discovered. Suddenly so much of what had happened during the past few days began to fall into place and to make sense.

  But that was impossible, it could not be. Yet here he was, in some form, and as Harker tried to get his head around it, the initials of Jacob Winters’s name lit up in his head brightly and he suddenly felt sick to his stomach. ‘J.W.,’ he murmured, struggling to reconcile the fact that Brulet was still alive after being thought dead for over six months, but this…this was beyond crazy.

  John Wilcox, one-time pope of the Catholic Church and also head chieftain of the Magi, glared up at Harker with a grimace, then he clamped his brown teeth together firmly. ‘You didn’t really think you would get away from me that easily, did you?’

  Chapter 40

  ‘It’s impossible. I saw you die,’ Harker protested, struggling against Vlad’s arm-sword which had once again been swiftly pressed against his throat. ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Wilcox replied with apparent disdain at the mention of his demise, ‘but I am not the only one you have seen resurrected recently, am I?’

  With thoughts of the two decomposing priests he had encountered, Harker shook his head soberly. ‘No, but they looked a lot better than you do.’

  His sarcastic quip was met with pressure from Vlad’s blade, but Wilcox looked neither bothered nor angry.

  ‘Being brought back to life is not without its consequences, sadly, but given the miraculous nature of such a thing, it is a price worth paying. Please, Vlad, take off his cuffs. I don’t think Alex is going to ma
ke any fuss. Not unless he wants his friends here killed on the spot.’

  Vlad fiddled with the cuffs and, after releasing him, threw them over to one side of the stage and stepped back from Harker, who began rubbing his wrists and stretching his aching shoulders.

  ‘By “miraculous”, you mean your judgement by…the Devil.’ Harker struggled to say the word and was met with a blank stare from Wilcox.

  ‘Please, Alex, you didn’t really think that cock-and-bull story had any basis in reality, did you?’

  ‘With everything I’ve seen so far, I’m not sure what to believe.’

  ‘Well, how delightful,’ Wilcox replied. ‘What one will believe, when out of the loop, as it were, never ceases to amaze me, so allow me the pleasure of enlightening your feeble little mind.’

  Now that Harker knew it really was John Wilcox underneath all that dead skin and wrinkles, he could see that, although his appearance had been terribly altered, the man’s narcissistic character had not changed one bit. He was just as much a self-serving, megalomaniac pain in the arse as he had always been.

  ‘Now I want to tell you a story and I want to enjoy it, even if the first part is something I would be happy to forget.’ Wilcox’s tongue made a clicking sound and he let out a wheezy sigh. ‘Let us start at the beginning or, to be accurate, the end…of my life.’ The leader of the Magi shuffled in his chair and, once comfortable, he raised his hands like a conductor about to begin a performance. ‘When your albino freak of a friend, Sebastien Brulet, dishonourably stabbed me in the throat with my own blade.’ Wilcox glared down at Brulet’s sprawled out, motionless body. Noticing that Harker was already taking a step towards his old friend, Vlad moved in between them and waved a finger menacingly.

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s fine,’ Wilcox scoffed. ‘Believe me, he’s been through worse, but I will get to that. Now where was I… Ah yes, my unfortunate death. My memory is a little bit fuzzy after that, but I do remember the highly unpleasant sensation of choking on my own blood, before everything went black.’

  For the first time Harker detected a sliver of humanity in Wilcox as his eyes dulled in contemplation of that event, and he almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  ‘At the time I didn’t think about what might come next,’ Wilcox continued, now regaining his composure. ‘I was far too busy dying, but what I can tell you is that I remember nothing more until I saw a distant white light, which came closer and closer, and then – wham! – I was staring into the face of Vlad here, with my wounds all healed but my body decrepit.’

  Wilcox seemed to drift off into a daze, as though the simple recalling of such a terrible personal experience was consuming him. So it was Vlad who now dutifully spoke up.

  ‘You and your Templar zealots thought they had destroyed all of the Magi, right there and then in the destruction of our base at Macuira National Park. But, as always, your greatest weakness is your optimism. Not all the houses of the Magi were present that day. There was another, the most powerful one. My own house. La casa degli assassini.’

  ‘The house of assassins,’ Harker murmured through taut lips. Brulet had once mentioned them as among the most fearless and dangerous of all those who composed the Magi and, as he stared in to Vlad’s soulless black eyes, he believed it.

  ‘Yes. As the first line of the Magi defence, we were the last to arrive at Macuira, and only once everyone else had arrived safely. Unfortunately, by the time we did arrive by helicopters, the whole mountain had been brought down, and all those heroic troops gathered from all nations were nothing but a blip on the horizon.’

  Vlad paused a moment to look over at Wilcox, who was staring into his lap with a glazed expression. ‘That’s when we retrieved the body of our Lord, took as many others as we could carry, and stole away into the sunset.’

  Vlad was clearly hamming the story up, and in doing so revealed that both he and Wilcox shared a certain tendency for the dramatic, but to Harker it still seemed like a highly unlikely scenario. ‘How could you have managed that? The whole mountain collapsed in on itself. Everyone was crushed, and during the clean-up there were very few bodies intact to even recover.’

  Vlad raised his hand and gave Harker a good slap across the back of the head. ‘You idiot, do you honestly think the Magi would go through all that time and effort of building a subterranean city without putting in suitable exits? The whole place had a number of escape routes in place and, although many died when the whole thing went down, some of them made it out.’

  Vlad leant closer to Harker, with his arm-sword still extended and hanging at his side. ‘You yourself and Dr Stanton managed to escape, didn’t you?’

  With all the destruction the Magi’s HAARP weather project had caused to their base, Harker had not even considered that anyone might have survived and, given there were emergency services and the Venezuelan military on site within the hour, it seemed unlikely. But clearly not impossible, and Wilcox was proof of that. ‘OK, then how about Sebastian? The last time I saw him he was engaged in a fight to the death with one of your henchmen, McCray, and the whole place was collapsing around him.’

  The mention of Brulet woke Wilcox from his daze and he leapt back into the conversation. ‘Yes, Sebastien Brulet, he is one tough bastard, I will give him that. He killed Captain McCray and then, while fleeing to find another way out, he came upon some of my subordinates dragging my lifeless body towards an exit route. He was one of the last to make it out as the mountain crumbled inwards. He even helped carry my body, as he tells it.’

  Harker looked down at the man mentioned, still lying on his front and barely moving, and it stung him to think that while he and Chloe had been helicoptered to safety, Brulet had been fighting desperately for his life.

  ‘That bastard took down three of my men before we managed to subdue him, and later on he even managed to escape during our stopover in the UK.’ Vlad administered a sudden hard kick to Brulet’s thigh, which was greeted by nothing more than a moan. ‘But he was never completely out of our sight. Do you know he made a dash to join two of his friends and their baby boy in some hick country village – thinking it a good place to lie low I suppose – but we tracked him there and had him transferred back to this island in no time.’

  This mention of a family living in a country village had Harker worried, and he had to suppress a rising sense of panic. Had Brulet’s first instinct been to check on the safety of the Christ child, and his adopted parents, before all else? Not wanting to draw any attention to them, Harker had made very few visits , but if something had happened there, he would have been among the first to know. ‘What did you do to them?’

  ‘You mean the family?’ Vlad replied, curious as to why Harker should care. ‘Nothing, as there was no need to invite any unwanted attention, and besides we had bigger problems at the time. Why, do they mean something?’

  Harker immediately shook his head. ‘No, it just sounds strange, given he was trying to escape you.’

  Vlad thought about it and then, with a smile, he cocked his head. ‘Maybe we will pay them a visit after all. I don’t like leaving any loose ends.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Wilcox now said dismissively, ‘but he has already paid the price and, of course, he has so much more punishment to come.’

  Harker had never seen Brulet half-naked before but the scar tissue that disfigured the Grand Master’s body did not look well healed. Whatever Wilcox had been inflicting on Brulet, it was unquestionably an ongoing process.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ Harker demanded, this being the first time he was able to address the sad state of his friend.

  ‘Nothing that he did not richly deserve.’ Wilcox’s smile disappeared and his crusty lips curled up in disgust. ‘I told you how the Devil resided in this capsule, and I did not lie. For Sebastien Brulet was and is my personal devil, Satan incarnate, and he is paying the price – call it penance, retribution or simple bloody revenge.’ Wilcox scowled at Harker with such intense loathing that one of his eyes began
to twitch. ‘Your friend Mr Brulet has been demoted from the position of Templar Grand Master to my plaything, and how we have played. I keep him drugged and unconscious most of the time, but when I feel like it, we wake him up occasionally and have some fun. Cutting, electro-therapy, anything that’s painful really. We even had a spell of waterboarding, but he dealt with that far too well, I’m afraid, so we went back to the previous techniques. Don’t worry, apart from that he is kept in tip-top medical shape. I can’t have my favourite entertainment toy ruined. His screams of pain do so warm my heart.’

  Harker gazed down at Brulet’s still body with a great sadness in his heart. Six solid months of torture! He could not even begin to imagine it.

  ‘Anyway, enough of that, Alex, for you and your friends will experience for yourselves all his woes soon enough,’ Wilcox continued with a chuckle. ‘So, there I was, surrounded by the remnants of my precious Magi, my plans in ruin, our networks almost obliterated – contacts, companies and funds seized by either the authorities or the good old Templars, I still don’t know which. We were so desperate at the time that we had to enter the world of crime just to keep ourselves going. I can’t take the credit for that myself because Vlad had most of the contacts there, but we actually made a lot of money. You would not believe how easy it is to take over crime syndicates if you have properly trained men, no one knowing who you are, and get in and out as quickly as possible. Long-term crime may last for the organization, but rarely for the individual.’

  Vlad smiled grimly. ‘My house was never averse to a spot of crime here and there. In fact it’s what we were trained to do…as well as kill on behalf of the Magi, of course.’