Forty 2 Days

by Georgia Le Carre

  ‘Who else did you expect?’

  Thirty-three

  I lunge into his arms with a yelp of pure joy and rain kisses on him; his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, his hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I ran away. I thought I was doing the right thing.’

  ‘It’s all right. I knew you would. Once you sold yourself for your mother. I knew you would do the same for me.’

  I cannot hold back the tears. He did understand. I had no choice. I had to break my promise to him.

  ‘I love you, Lana Bloom, I love you more than life itself.’

  ‘Oh, darling. I’ve waited so long to hear you say that.’

  ‘I’ve loved you for a very long time. I thought you’d know. My every action screamed it. Even when I thought you left, I couldn’t forget you. We have this unbreakable connection. No matter what you do, I still long for you. I always have and I always will. Could you not tell?’

  ‘Maybe, but I couldn’t be sure. Why couldn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I wanted my father to think the relationship was temporary. It gave me time to lay down my plans.’

  ‘If you had told me I wouldn’t have told anyone, anyway.’

  ‘And take the risk that you would blurt it out accidentally in a conversation with Billie or Jack? No, the stakes were too high. It involved you.’

  ‘Will you tell me everything now?’

  For a moment he hesitates.

  ‘Please.’

  He nods and switches on the bedside lamp, and suddenly I see how worn he looks. There is also a look in his eyes that I wish wasn’t there. It is the look of a man who has had to tell the vet to end his beloved dog’s suffering. I lay my palm on his cheek. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes. I was always safe. You were the one in danger.’

  ‘As you can see, I am just fine.’

  He takes a deep breath, his chest collapsing. ‘Oh, God, the thought that you might not have been.’

  ‘How did you know where to send Brian?’

  ‘Our apartment was bugged, not only by my father, but by me too. I knew he had been around and what he had told you.’

  ‘So you knew when we were at The Ritz that I was leaving you the next day.’

  He nods.

  ‘Why didn’t you try to stop me?’

  ‘The only thing I had on my side was the element of surprise.’

  ‘Where is your father now?’

  His eyes harden. ‘As of fifteen minutes ago, the victim of a plane crash.’

  ‘You killed him,’ I gasp, utterly horrified.

  ‘Yes,’ he admits flatly.

  ‘Why?’ My voice is no more than a whisper.

  ‘Because he wanted to terminate the thing I love most in the world. And what my father wants, my father gets.’

  ‘You killed your father for me?’ My voice is incredulous, disbelieving. The words I waited so long to hear, tainted.

  ‘The real test of love is not being willing to kill for someone, but being able to give up your own life for them. I think I proved my love for you more than a year ago.’

  ‘Oh no, what have you done?’ I close my eyes in horror. ‘He wasn’t going to kill me. He just wanted me out of your life. He was only going to set me up with a new identity.’

  ‘My little innocent. How little you know us. It is cheaper and far less troublesome to kill someone of little value than to give them a new identity and support them for life.’

  I shake my head. I am in a state of shock. Blake killed his own father. I can’t take it in. Everything is screwed up. ‘Will you have to go to prison?’

  He smiles sadly. ‘How many billionaires do you know languishing in prison cells?’

  ‘So you killed him,’ I say again. As if repeating it will somehow make it go away.

  ‘And would again.’

  ‘Why did he hate me so much?’

  ‘He didn’t hate you, Lana. You were simply in his way. He wanted Sorab.’

  Thirty-four

  I wear this crown of thorns

  Upon my liar’s chair

  Full of broken thoughts

  I cannot repair.

  —Hurt, Johnny Cash’s Version

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go

  ‘Sorab?’ I gasp, utterly, utterly confused.

  ‘You were looking for Cronus. Did you find him?’ he asks sadly.

  ‘Your father told me I should be looking for El.’

  ‘And did you?’

  I shake my head. I can’t remember the details. All my thoughts are scattered and ruffled. ‘Only briefly. There was not enough time. It used to be the name of the highest god before it became a generic name for God.’

  ‘Mmnnn.’ But he is not really listening. He turns away from me, and rests his forehead on the heel of his palm. ‘Remember when my father told you, his father was a banker, he is a banker, and his son will be a banker. Well, here is something he didn’t tell you. My father has a dead brother, I have a dead brother and Sorab’s brother would have had a dead brother too.’

  I feel the blood drain away from my face. I grasp his arm and turn him to face me. ‘What are you telling me?’

  His eyes. His eyes. I become terrified. Not of him, but for him.

  ‘What did your Wikipedia tell you was the demand of the highest god?’

  My fingers are icy. ‘Sacrifice of the first-born.’ My eyes narrow. ‘Are you trying to tell me that your family are Satanists?’

  ‘No, that is for the rough and the crude. A show. We are the sons of El.’

  I shrink from him, feeling like one of those boys who dive for pearls, get entangled in seaweed, and run out of breath. ‘Wait, just wait for one moment. I can’t take any of this in. I’m sorry I just can’t. It’s making me feel sick.’ And it is too. I feel my stomach heave even though there is nothing in it.

  ‘We count on people to be incredulous, to turn away because it is too terrible to contemplate. It is our protection. Do you still want the truth, Lana? Do you want to know what a monster I am, or shall we go back to what we were? We can pretend I am your knight in shining armor. That you made the right choice when you accepted my offer over Rupert’s. Your choice.’

  I take a deep breath. The shock made me react in that way. I want the truth. The whole truth. No more lies. No more pretenses. If I kick hard enough I will reach the surface and the light.

  ‘I want the truth, whatever it may be,’ I tell him.

  ‘People think that they are no different from us, that we are all playing for the same stakes. That by a process of aspiration and hard work, perhaps a lucky break they can become one of us. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  ‘We are not merely different we are a different species entirely. We are willing to go further than anybody else. Our naked ambition is a cold vise-like clamp around our hearts that causes us to align ourselves to a horrific blackness. And the blackness craves power over others and maintains itself by sucking the innocent energies of others.’

  My heart is thudding so hard in my chest I can hear its roar in my ears.

  ‘A child goes missing every three minutes in the United Kingdom alone, and around the world millions disappear every year. They are never seen, heard of or found. What do you think happens to them?’

  I am too stunned to reply.

  ‘On some days of the year, but especially eight dates, tens of thousands of children are sacrificed, not just by the sons of El, obviously, but by the Satanist and other cults around the world. On the night of the autumn equinox, September 21, three days from today, Sorab would have been ritually murdered. Like my brother, his uncle, and his uncle before him.’

  My hands are clasped like a prayer in front of my mouth.

  ‘I had to stop it,’ he says, his face gray.

  ‘Why couldn’t we have just run away? Why have his blood on our hands?’

  ‘There is no place on earth where Sorab, or you, for that matter, would have been safe. Only with me at the helm of the agenda, ca
n the forces be held back.’

  ‘But I don’t want you at the helm of such a sick and twisted religion,’ I cry.

  ‘There is no other way. It is not a club. We are chosen to rule. I was born into it and must die in it.’ I shudder visibly. ‘Please,’ he continues, ‘don’t grieve for me. I am reconciled to the knowledge that it shall be for me…a hell for all eternity. It is only important now that Sorab and any other children I father are not initiated. They will be free as my brother Quinn is.’

  My skull aches. ‘Is Marcus involved in…your father’s death?’

  ‘No. I acted alone. To protect what is mine.’

  A desperate sob escapes me. ‘Why can’t we run away and let Marcus take over? He’s older than you.’

  ‘Marcus is not strong. My father always knew that. It was always going to me. At the helm of this empire of dirt.’

  ‘Why can’t you expose them? Tell the whole world the truth.’

  ‘Who would I tell, Lana? Over the years hundreds of children who have escaped have told the same story, with the same details of underground chambers, hooded figures, orgies, and sacrificial murders, and they have all been dismissed as unreliable fantasists. Not a single figure of real prominence has ever been brought to justice.’

  ‘But you are Barrington. You are powerful. You have inside information. You know people. You are not an unreliable witness.’

  ‘The other families would immediately close ranks. What my father claimed he would do to me will be done. I will be destroyed and you and Sorab will disappear without a trace.’

  I am frightened to ask my next question, my throat feels raw. I swallow. ‘Do you also participate in these…rituals?’

  ‘No, the rituals are not for us. We float above them. They are for the compromised and those who enjoy such perversions. I do not.’

  ‘Can you not stop the agenda from the inside out?’

  ‘Can you stop Monday from rolling into Tuesday? No one can stop the agenda, Lana. It will come to pass no matter what I do.’

  Thirty-five

  I fell into a burning ring of fire

  I went down, down, down as the flames went higher

  And it burns, burns, burns,

  The ring of fire, the ring of fire.

  —The Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash

  That night we do not make love.

  We huddle together like the shell-shocked survivors in the embers of a horrific battlefield. All around us are the dead and the terrible cries and wails of the dying. His hands cling to mine.

  His voice is a whisper in my hair. ‘I know I should push you away, but I can’t. Until you came I lived a joyless life. It will be up to you to leave me.’

  Finally, I understand why the choice to stay will be mine.

  It is only in the early morning hours that his hands stop clinging, relax, and fall away in exhausted sleep, but sleep never comes for me. I lie on my side, his warm body curled around me and I think of Victoria’s mother. That shrill look in her eyes that had so frightened me. She was right. It was already too late for me by the time she came to see me.

  When the first light filters through the gap in the curtains I watch him sleep, his face relaxed and vulnerable, and I shiver not with desire, but with the memory of my desire for this man, for this body. It seems another lifetime ago. I think of what he has done for Sorab and I, and I am filled with sorrow at the thought of the secrets and sins that he carries in his soul. I understand that he is as trapped as I was when I slipped into a sluttish orange dress and went to sell my body to the highest bidder.

  Billie, Jack, and probably even you…you thought it was too much to sacrifice for such a small percentage of success, didn’t you? But I didn’t. I would have done anything for my mother. Would I kill for her? If someone climbed into her bedroom and threatened her survival, yes, in a heart beat. Blake and I are worlds apart and yet we are cut from the same cloth.

  I get dressed quietly and put my son into his carrycot. He smiles at me. I look into his clear blue eyes and feel like sobbing. How lucky he is. He is pure. He has done nothing wrong, yet.

  I go downstairs.

  Brian is sitting at the kitchen table watching TV. It is running the news of Blake’s father’s plane crash. When he sees me at the doorway, he switches off the telly and stands up. In his eyes something has changed. A new respect. It is in recognition of my association with the new head of the Barrington empire.

  ‘Good morning, Ma’am.’

  Ma’am? Even that’s new. ‘Good morning, Brian. Is there a church nearby?’

  ‘Sure, but it won’t be open yet. Bit early.’

  ‘Can we try it, anyway?’

  ‘Of course. Would you like to go now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll let Steve know.’

  Outside Tom is carefully polishing the Bentley.

  ‘Good morning, Miss. Bloom,’ he calls.

  I wave.

  Brian drives me to the church, and as luck would have it, a man is locking the great doors. I run up to him, carrycot in hand.

  ‘Oh please, please. Can I go in and say a quick prayer?’

  He looks at me, glances at the child. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses his eyes are kind, innocent, unaware that I have been touched by sin. Would he believe me if I told about the secret world of the children of El? What they do for power and domination? Even to me, in the cold light of day, it all seems like a fantastical nightmare or a particularly bad film script.

  He smiles kindly, and opens the door.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘I’ll be outside. Go with God, my child.’

  Inside it is very quiet. First, I consecrate myself with holy water, then I walk down the old church. Light is filtering in through the stained glass, a magnificent aspect in the still gloom of grey stone. It streams onto a massive icon of the dying Christ as he hangs sorrowing above the altar. Above the smell of flowers and ferns.

  I stand in silent awe in the middle of the house of God. A lost sheep returning to its fold. Alone, I go to the side of the hall where there is a statue of Mary carrying baby Jesus in her arms. I open a wooden box and take out four candles. They cost a pound each, but I have no money with me. I will come back tomorrow and put the four pounds into their donation box. I light the candles and put them into their metal holders. One for Jack, one for Sorab and one for Blake and one for all the little children.

  The flames cast their warm light into the shadows.

  I remember my grandmother saying, Gods are not beings like people. It is only humans who have given them arms and legs and faces. They are metaphors for all the things human consciousness can aspire to. If there is a darkness called El, then there must be another metaphor to describe the consciousness of light and goodness. I will pray to that god, in every temple, mosque, synagogue and church that I find.

  I fall to my knees, cross myself and pray.

  ‘Dear God, take care of Jack while he is in war-torn Africa and bring him back to this kind land as soon as possible.’

  I stand and put the carrycot with Sorab in it in front of the altar and return my knees to the cold stone floor.

  ‘I give you my son to keep safe for always and…in return, I promise to do for the little children all that is in my power…until my last breath. I am not a cog in the machine. I am not a bloodline. I can make a difference. Nothing is set in stone. Not even the agenda.’

  Then I bow my head and pray for Blake’s tormented soul. With the unyielding, cold stone against my knees, I tell God, ‘Dear God, this is my sincere and most fervent prayer, if Blake must burn in hell for eternity, then I must burn with him. For we are two souls that must never again be parted.’

  “Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above thei
r breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

  Thomas Woodrow Wilson

  28th President of the United States (1913 to 1921)

  About the Author

  Thank you to all you awesome readers who left feedback and reviews for The Billionaire Banker. Reviews are incredibly precious to new authors as they help other readers find the book.

  As a gesture of gratitude the first hundred Amazon reviewers for 42 Days will get the next book (Yay! out in May) as a gift from me, with love. Just leave an honest review on Amazon, then write to me at Georgialecarre@gmail.com or https://www.facebook.com/georgialecarre to tell me you have done so and Voilà...

  See you at the back of the next book. But until then, say hello to a beautiful stranger, he could ignore you or marry you…

  Georgia xx