The Demon Club

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Just improving the smell in here,’ Ben said.

  In their military careers he and Wolf had both spent hundreds, maybe even thousands, of hours sitting around on standby waiting for things to happen. But at this moment six or seven minutes seemed like an eternity. At last, right on cue, Shelton’s computer finished its work and spat out the decrypted code with a triumphant ping.

  ‘There you have it,’ Shelton announced. ‘The magic password is F-U-C-K-T-H-E-M-A-L-L-6-6-6. That’s original.’

  ‘Sounds like a man highly motivated in his work,’ Ben said. He watched as Shelton returned to the laptop screen, brought up the prompt box for the entry code and tapped it in.

  ‘Easy when you know how,’ Shelton chuckled. The prompt box vanished. The book manuscript file flashed up onscreen, opening at the last page its author had been working on before being forever interrupted by the advent of his hired assassin.

  There it was. The Pandemonium Club, by Thomas Revere, aka Anthony Abbott.

  Ben flicked away the stub of his Gauloise and approached the desk. Wolf jumped down from his perch and came over to join him. Clearly, the manuscript had come on in leaps and bounds since Abbott had submitted his sample to Seaward & Laverack. The word counter at the bottom left of the laptop screen showed a reading of 116,573 words.

  ‘Who’d been a busy little bastard, then?’ Wolf commented with a smile.

  ‘Getting to be quite a magnum opus,’ Shelton said. ‘Well over four hundred pages’ worth. It’ll take a while to read it all from the beginning.’

  ‘Later,’ Ben told him. ‘Let’s keep this focused for now. Is there a way to search the whole document for a specific key phrase?’

  Shelton gave him a look. ‘Wow. I can tell I’m in the company of a fellow computer nerd here. Uh, yeah, I think we’re able to do that.’ He shot his cursor down to hit Select Browse, then clicked a little binocular icon, and another little box opened up that said ‘Find What?’ Shelton paused expectantly with his fingers poised on the keys. ‘On your command, boss.’

  ‘Search for “Tristan Dudley”,’ Ben said.

  Shelton’s agile fingertips rapped out the thirteen letters faster than a machine gun and he entered the search phrase with a flourish.

  The computer didn’t need long to think about it. In a heartbeat it had scoured all 116,573 words and come back with its findings.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Wolf said.

  The search result showed that the name Tristan Dudley was mentioned forty-seven times in the manuscript.

  ‘Mustn’t jump to any conclusions yet,’ Shelton cautioned them. ‘It’s a political memoir and he’s an important politician. You’d expect his name to come up.’

  ‘Playing Devil’s advocate now?’ Wolf sneered.

  ‘But it tells us one thing,’ Ben replied to Shelton. ‘Abbott’s no longer using false names.’

  ‘You called it right,’ Shelton admitted. ‘Looks like this is the real deal.’

  ‘Now for the real acid test,’ Ben said. ‘Pick one mention of Dudley’s name at random and let’s see what comes up.’

  Shelton shrank the document down so that its hundreds of pages looked like a mosaic of tiles and the text was unreadably tiny. He clicked blind somewhere in the middle, then hit ‘Find Next’ and scaled the pages back up to full size.

  The line of text containing the chosen search term read:

  ‘Also present at the ceremony that misty November night at Karswell Hall, clad in his mask and robes along with the rest of us, was Privy Council Member Tristan Dudley.’

  Wolf gnashed his gold teeth in disgust. ‘And there you have it.’

  Ben said, ‘Not much question about it now. He’s one of them.’

  Chapter 50

  It was too late to return to the mainland that night. Dinner with Shelton was a trio of wagon-wheel-sized frozen pizzas piled with peppers, olives and pepperoni, which they ate in the War Room at a large table cleared of junk, papers and screens. There was so much to eat that neither Ben nor Wolf could finish it all, hungry as they were. Shelton cleared his entire plate in just a few bites, helped himself to his guests’ leftovers and washed the gargantuan meal down with four bottles of ale. Over food they talked about the series of discoveries that had led to Tristan Dudley becoming their new primary target, and where the investigation was to proceed from here.

  Chewing loudly through a mouthful of pizza crust, Shelton asked the obvious question: ‘What are you going to do to him?’

  ‘We’re going to pay him a visit and take him aside for a private chat,’ Ben replied. ‘Then we’re going to ask him nicely to reveal what he knows about his fellow club members.’

  Wolf eyed Ben sceptically across the table. ‘Hold on, let’s just think about that for a minute. This guy is one of Britain’s most senior politicians. That means he has a team of several armed close security guys watching his back twenty-four-seven, provided at taxpayer expense. His house will be more invasion-proof than Fort Knox. No terrorist on earth could ever hope to get near enough to take a shot at him, let alone snatch him away from there. And you want to walk in, scoop him up and have a “private chat” with him about the fact that he’s a murdering Devil worshipper who sacrificed his own daughter to a cult.’

  Ben said, ‘Yes.’

  Wolf shrugged. ‘Oh. Okay, then. Just checking.’

  ‘How do you plan on finding him in the first place?’ Shelton asked. ‘MPs don’t make their home addresses public, for obvious reasons.’

  ‘By following him home from his daughter’s funeral,’ Ben replied. He’d already checked out the Worcestershire village of Hanbury and the Anglican parish church where the service for Annie Dudley was due to be held tomorrow afternoon. It was a quiet semi-rural location in the heart of the West Midlands, yet close to the M5 and just half an hour’s commute from Birmingham Airport. The perfect convenient country hideaway for a hard-driving A-list future political leader. ‘Once we know where he lives, we wait until nightfall and then make our move.’

  ‘Simple as that,’ Wolf said. ‘And what about taking care of the armed security detail?’

  ‘It’s what we do,’ Ben replied.

  ‘Will it be dangerous?’ Shelton asked, his eyes glittering with excitement.

  ‘More for them than for us, as long as things go to plan.’

  ‘Which they often don’t,’ Wolf interjected.

  ‘Can I come with you? I mean, I’d really love to be there.’

  Ben stared at him. ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. You’ve already done plenty for us.’

  Wolf wasn’t so diplomatic. ‘And a big fat-arse like you will only slow us down,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, thanks so much for that,’ Shelton grunted sourly.

  ‘Besides,’ Ben said, ‘I thought you hated leaving your hi-tech fortress retreat.’

  ‘For this, I’d have been willing to break my own rule.’

  ‘And get yourself shot into the bargain,’ Wolf said. ‘How could they miss?’

  Shelton slumped deeper into his chair and pulled a face. ‘Fine, fine. Why did I even ask?’

  ‘Don’t feel too bad,’ Ben consoled him. ‘You have plenty to keep you busy here at home. Like a four-hundred-page book to read. The full lowdown. Nothing left out. Enough material for a year’s worth of blogging.’

  That brightened Shelton up. ‘You’re leaving me Abbott’s laptop?’

  ‘I like to travel light,’ Ben said. ‘But I’ll need a copy of the manuscript for myself.’

  Shelton nodded, fast becoming resigned to being left behind. ‘I can easily load that onto your phone.’ He drained the last of his beer, then yawned and stretched. ‘And with that, gentlemen, it’s been a long evening and I’m going to hit the sack.’

  It was long after midnight and they’d have an early start. Ben and Wolf had their pick of seven luxurious spare bedrooms. Ben took a bottle of Shelton’s beer to his room and stood at the open window for a while, savouring the night sky over the oc
ean and the rush and whisper of the waves while smoking a Gauloise, sipping beer and wondering whether or not to call Grace yet. Tomorrow would be a long day and there was no telling what it might bring. He decided that when this was over, he’d call her. They would both have a lot to talk about. Sometime after one a.m., Ben crawled into bed and was asleep seconds after his head touched the pillow.

  The next morning started bright and beautiful. Ben was up just after dawn, took his customary short, cold shower and pumped out a hundred press-ups before booking himself and Wolf onto a ten a.m. flight back to the mainland. They would land in Birmingham and make it out into the countryside in enough time to beat the crowd attending the funeral.

  Meanwhile, Shelton had dragged himself out of bed and was on the phone to arrange for his bald-headed chauffeur to return his guests to the airport. Once that was done, he set about doing the necessary computer jiggery-pokery to enable Abbott’s unredacted book manuscript to be copied onto Ben’s phone. Ben and Wolf each downed a large mug of black coffee, and they were ready to go. Shelton was still disappointed at being left behind, but he shook their hands and thanked them for what they’d brought him. ‘God is on your side.’

  ‘We’ll find that out soon enough,’ Ben replied. That was when Shelton’s phone rang. ‘That’ll be Nosferatu,’ Wolf said.

  Sure enough, the driver was waiting outside. Ben and Wolf grabbed their things and made their way back through the spaceship corridors and up to the green steel door. The dark blue Mazda was parked by the church ruins, idling softly. They climbed in the back and Nosferatu took off without a word.

  Forty-five minutes later, Ben and Wolf were walking back inside the departures terminal at Ronaldsway Airport. Their plane for the return flight was the same purple Flybe twin-prop. Ben spent his time waiting to board and in the air reading Abbott’s book on his phone, making notes. Their long conversation with Shelton had prepared him for what to expect, but all the same he was sickened and infuriated by what he found in its pages. He recognised a lot of the names of those involved – but his main interest was finding out the true identity of the individual he knew as Saunders, and Wolf knew as Curnow. The man who had forced him into this whole thing, and would soon pay the price. Ben carefully scanned the whole four hundred filthy pages but found neither of those names, nor anyone’s description that fitted with the visual memory of the man that was burned deep into his mind.

  But though Saunders’ real name kept eluding him, Ben’s reading revealed the identity of another key player Wolf had flagged up. It was the older man who had travelled with Saunders to the spring equinox ritual at Karswell Hall. The man with the bird-headed walking stick.

  His name, mentioned several times in Abbott’s account, was Bartholomew Van Brakel. The book provided a little background. The old man’s grandfather, Wilhelm Van Brakel, had been a German-Dutch immigrant who came to England in 1871 and made a vast fortune in tobacco, building a business empire that he passed on to his son Carl. Wilhelm’s grandson Bartholomew had first appeared on this earth in 1933, the same year as Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and it appeared that he’d outwardly done very little with those eighty-odd years except bask in the family wealth. He’d never run a business, never held a job. His public persona was virtually non-existent.

  But in private, Bartholomew Van Brakel had led a colourful, highly unorthodox and very busy life. Abbott claimed that the fifteen-year-old Van Brakel had been a personal acquaintance, disciple – and, he hinted, teenage lover – of the Pandemonium Club’s illustrious founder, Aleister Crowley. His mentor had initiated him into the black arts and taught him everything he knew. The boy had proved an able student. Following Crowley’s death in 1947, Van Brakel had risen steadily up in the ranks of the Ancient Order of Thoth. When the order’s then Grand Master, the billionaire industrialist Sir Cecil Randolph Postlethwaite, had died under mysterious circumstances in 1979, Van Brakel had eagerly taken over the role. The following year, in recognition of his unparalleled expertise in occult practices and to honour his direct connection to the revered Crowley, the AOT’s Grand Council had elected him Life President of the Pandemonium Club. A position he had now held for decades. Van Brakel’s status in the cult was godlike, his authority was absolute, and his influence over a number of key figures at the very highest level of the British establishment was considerable. He had top-ranking police commanders, judges, government ministers and senior intelligence directors in his pocket. He was privy to classified information and invited to secret meetings that determined the course of international affairs. According to Abbott Van Brakel had a direct line to Number 10, Downing Street and was a regular guest at the Sandringham Estate and Balmoral Castle. The list of his connections went on and on until Ben had had enough of reading.

  Ben shut down his phone, sat for a while with his eyes closed and worked on meditatively relaxing one group of muscles at a time, easing the tension out of his system. He turned to gaze out of the plane window. The fields and villages of north-western England were visible through the grey clouds, twenty thousand feet below.

  He looked at Wolf, who had been sitting quietly absorbed in his own thoughts. Asked him, ‘What will you do when this is over?’

  ‘Head back to my hillside in Albarracín,’ Wolf said with a smile. ‘Get on with my new life. Maybe get myself a little place. Raise some chickens, plant a herb garden. Find a girl, maybe. Who knows? I’m not in a hurry. Like the saying goes, the world is my lobster.’

  Ben could only wish that his own life were so uncomplicated.

  ‘Then again, maybe I won’t,’ Wolf said, letting the smile drop for a moment. ‘Because I’ll be dead. Or worse, sitting in a jail. What we’re about to do isn’t like what I used to do. I was in and out before you knew it, no traces, no witnesses. We’re going to leave a trail a blind man could follow, and we might not get as lucky as we did with Abbott. A lot can go wrong.’

  ‘You could always continue on down to London,’ Ben told him. ‘Pick up your money bag at Heathrow and jump on another flight to Spain.’

  Wolf laughed. ‘Screw that. You won’t get rid of me just yet.’

  Chapter 51

  They disembarked from the plane in grey, cloudy Birmingham and made their way through the drizzle to the nearest car hire outlet. Ben had a long and painful history with the rental companies, who one by one had all blacklisted him merely because he seldom returned their vehicles to them in one piece, or at all. Rather than argue against their petty tyranny, he was content to let Wolf fill out the rental agreement in the name Jack Cullen. Wolf’s fake driving licence was one of the best forgeries Ben had ever seen.

  They picked out the most nondescript car in the lot, a drab-grey Skoda estate that nobody on the planet would look at twice. Wolf took the wheel and Ben set the sat nav on a course for Hanbury, twenty-six miles from the airport. The motorway carried them on a dogleg route, south and then west, after which they stopped off at a services for fuel, sandwiches, two big rolls of gaffer tape and a couple of additional purchases from a Carphone Warehouse. Leaving the motorway they switched southwards again on A and B roads. By the time they reached the Worcestershire village, the rain had stopped and the sunshine was peeking through a blue opening in the clouds. The time was just before three, leaving them over half an hour before Annie Dudley’s funeral service was due to begin.

  The Church of St Mary the Virgin stood alone on open ground a mile outside the village, at the end of a single-track road overhung and shaded by tree canopy. A low wrought-iron rail fence surrounded the church property and there were two small car parks to the front and the side. Nobody had yet turned up. The only vehicle was a white van with a grounds maintenance company logo.

  ‘Where to?’ Wolf asked.

  ‘Right here,’ Ben said, pointing. Nobody knew their faces, or would take notice of two guys sitting in the world’s most boring car. Wolf slotted the Skoda into the empty space next to the groundskeeper’s van and killed the engine. Ben wound down his wi
ndow and lit a Gauloise. He was running out. Wolf grabbed the sandwiches, ripped both packs open and offered one to Ben. Ben shook his head. ‘Not hungry.’

  ‘Eat when you can, sleep when you can. That’s the rule.’

  ‘I’m not sleepy either.’

  ‘Just want to suck on those cancer sticks.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Been a while since I’ve been on stakeout like this.’ Wolf munched into his sandwich, then smiled to himself. ‘Hey, remember that time in Manchester when those silly shitheads tried to break into our van?’

  The incident had happened years earlier, when four men from their SAS unit had been on a night-time counterterror training surveillance exercise on a council estate. Ben, Wolf and their team-mates had been armed with automatic weapons loaded with live ammunition, for realism. About two in the morning, one of the lads had spotted a gang of teenage delinquents who were trying their luck with every van on the estate, looking for tools they could pinch. As the young crooks worked their way closer and closer, Ben and his SAS comrades hoped they would pass them by, for fear of ruining the exercise. But such hopes had been in vain.

  ‘I’ll never forget their faces when they opened up the back doors and found themselves staring into four submachine gun muzzles.’ Wolf chuckled. ‘What a slapping we gave those morons.’

  ‘You ever miss those days?’ Ben asked him.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Wolf admitted.

  ‘Should ask to sign back up. They’d have you in a heartbeat.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t miss it that much.’

  At 3.20 the first vehicle rolled into the church car park, the funeral director in his black mini-van. Five minutes later the procession arrived. First in the sombre line was the gleaming hearse with the flower-covered coffin in the back. Behind it was a Bentley with dark windows. Several more cars brought up the rear. The procession parked outside the church. With great solemnity the pall-bearers unloaded the coffin from the hearse and carried it into the church. Then the Bentley’s doors opened and out stepped Tristan Dudley and his weeping wife. Clarissa Dudley was a slender and attractive woman, younger than her husband at around forty, but her terrible grief had aged her twenty years. The couple were escorted by a pair of square-shouldered close protection operatives in black suits and ties. Four more of them were riding in the black Jaguar SUV behind. They parked beside the Bentley and discreetly took their positions while the Dudleys followed the coffin inside the church. The minister came out to meet them, to offer condolences to the grieving mother and shake hands with Tristan Dudley, who was playing his role of stoical suffering to perfection.