The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3)

by Green, Layton

  “I’ll go alone,” Viktor said.

  The guide regarded Viktor’s disheveled form, sweat already trickling down his face, skin reddening from the sun. “I should go with you.”

  “Thank you, but no.”

  Whatever waited at the top of the mountain was Viktor’s cross to bear, and he wouldn’t endanger the guide. He was dehydrated and suffering from the heat, but he could make this final push.

  “Then I’ll wait for you here.”

  Viktor eyed the exposed ground, then said, “Why don’t you return to the top of the hill, and wait by that fig tree? If I’m not back by dusk, return to the village. I’ll find my way back.”

  “It’s not a good idea to walk the hills after dark.” He unslung his pack and thrust it towards Viktor. “You’ll need more water, and there’s an emergency kit inside. Take the binoculars as well.”

  Viktor objected, but Antonio moved his horse closer, reaching up to loop the pack around Viktor’s neck. He pointed at a faint path worn into the rock. “When I was a boy I took this path halfway up the mountain before turning back. I believe it leads to the monastery. Be careful of loose rock.”

  Viktor clasped his hand. “Thank you.”

  The guide started to canter away, and Viktor called out, “Did you wait for him?”

  Antonio twisted his torso to reply. “I waited, but he never returned.”

  Grey again woke to darkness and a dull ache in his side, now joined by a parched throat and an agonized throbbing in his thigh. Wincing, he raised his cheek off a cold concrete floor. A pair of handcuffs hampered his hand movement. He rose to a sitting position, felt and then heard the clinking of chains around his ankles. Unable to see his hands in front of his face, he reached down and probed.

  His feet were manacled, attached by a three-foot chain to an iron ring in the floor. He was still clothed, though they had taken his backpack. They had not, however, taken his boots, and his mouth pursed in a grim smile.

  Cracking a variety of locks and entranceways had been one of Grey’s specialties in Force Recon. After his capture by Al-Miri’s men in Egypt, and inspired by one of his companions on that journey, Grey had decided to perform a little surgery on the black combat boots he wore almost everywhere. He installed a hollow space in the left heel, where he now kept a miniscule tension wrench, a bobby pin, and a thin iron file that was curved at the end. Tools that could open most handcuffs and locks.

  He had the cuffs off in seconds, the manacles around his feet a few minutes later. He stood gingerly, the pain in his thigh acute but manageable—barely. Dante’s knife hadn’t reached bone, and a torn muscle was painful as hell, but not incapacitating. A severed muscle was a different story, but the top of the thigh was a solid piece of anatomy, providing protection for the femoral artery underneath.

  Grey still had to contend with the lack of light and the small fact that he was imprisoned God knew where, likely surrounded by murderous cultists. On the other hand, those manacles and that chain had been pretty thick, and he was guessing no one expected to see him anytime soon.

  When did they plan to see him? What was their endgame, and why hadn’t Dante just killed him? It obviously had something to do with Anka, or Eve, or whatever her name was. Dante might be on his way right now to extract more information, or waiting outside Grey’s prison.

  But why? Grey had to assume she knew more than she should, and had threatened to go public. It was the only option that made sense. They knew about the meetings she had with Grey, and they thought Grey might know where she was.

  Well, he didn’t. For all he knew, she lived in Hong Kong and did the astral projection thing whenever they met up. He knew as much about this girl as he knew about the queen of Denmark, and torture wasn’t going to change that. And the Eve angle disturbed him. Was Darius playing out some twisted fantasy through this girl? Was she telling him the whole story, or were there angles in this theater of the bizarre he wasn’t seeing?

  He could sort through all this once he got out of this hole. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious, but he knew time was running out. He moved about the room, testing the walls for a door, deflated when he found nothing but wood and concrete. No openings, no secret doors, no hollow walls as far as he could tell. He did the same thing to the floor, probing for a way out.

  Nothing.

  That left the ceiling. If it were out of reach, he was out of luck. He prepared himself for the worst and jumped off his right foot, pushing through the terrible throbbing in his left leg. His fingers touched plaster about a foot above his head. He moved about the room, probing the low ceiling at various points, until he found his exit: a wooden square that budged when he pushed on it. There must be a padlock on the other side, but Grey couldn’t generate enough power to break through.

  He stepped back three feet from the wooden trapdoor, jumped off one foot and punched the ceiling. The plaster cracked, and he did it again and again, until he was able to rip down enough plaster to expose a ceiling beam. He knew he was making way too much noise, but he had no choice. He ripped at the plaster until his fingers bled, face and hair covered in white dust.

  He jumped and grabbed onto the exposed beam with both hands, then began to swing. It took him a few times to gain momentum, and then he kicked at the wooden square with his good foot. After a dozen or so kicks he heard a splintering sound, and on the next kick the wood separated from the metal hinge. Grey ripped down the wooden slats, then jumped and felt around the opening until his fingers closed on an aluminum ladder. After the searing pain in his thigh subsided, he pulled it down and climbed out of his makeshift cell.

  He felt his way through stacks of boxes, finding an unlocked door. He cracked it open, and a glimmer of light emanated from the end of a hallway. Before he left he opened a few of the boxes. Pamphlets for the Order of New Enlightenment filled every one, the same pamphlet Grey had received from Thomas and Alan. Grey estimated a hundred boxes lined the walls of the room, each filled with thousands of pamphlets.

  He left the storeroom and crept down the long hallway, understanding why no one had heard him kick through the trapdoor. The hallway stretched in both directions, with closed doors at either end. When he got to the first door he stopped to listen. A television blared on the other side, a British comedy. He waited, hands at the ready, but heard only laughter from a single voice.

  Grey gently tried the doorknob. Unlocked.

  Thinking through various scenarios in his head, knowing one could never plan for chaos, Grey cleared his head of thought and burst into the room.

  Even limping, he was on top of the guard before he was out of his chair, the bag of chips in his hand spilling to the floor. His hand reached for a gun at his side, but Grey forced his arm behind his back before he could draw, twisting it until he felt the shoulder wrench out of socket. The guard swooned from the pain, and Grey removed the gun and helped him the rest of the way to dreamland with a blood choke, cutting off the oxygen on both sides of the carotid, forearms wrapped around the guard’s head and neck.

  As the guard slumped to the floor, Grey noticed the ring on his right index finger, the same ring Viktor had noticed on Oak’s hand. A chill rippled through Grey. No doubt the building was infested.

  He tore off the guard’s shirt and made a crude bandage for his thigh, thankful the bleeding was muscular rather than arterial or venal. He also found a small bottle of ibuprofen. Adrenaline had carried him through the fight with the guard, but the pain from his cracked rib and thigh threatened to overwhelm him. It wasn’t much, but he popped a handful and put the rest of the painkillers in his pocket.

  He surveyed the room. Two rows of monitors showed various shots of the grounds, as well as a rotation of interior rooms. Dozens of people worked throughout the complex at a variety of tasks, most of them cleaning or setting up chairs and tables. Some of the rooms looked like offices or conference rooms, some worship centers or meditation rooms. He also noticed a kitchen, a dining hall, and a small gym.r />
  There were no windows in the room, but on one of the monitors he saw a modest, well-kept lawn surrounded by a huge iron gate that looked familiar. Grey had a strong suspicion he was inside the cylindrical glass building he had seen close to Bar 666.

  A clock on the wall showed seven p.m. He assumed, he prayed, he had only been unconscious since the previous evening. That left him a little over a day before the appointed hour of Viktor’s death.

  The alarm system was fairly sophisticated, but it was designed, as were most alarm systems, to keep people out. Judging from the lack of windows he had seen, he guessed this level was the basement.

  Monitors marked floors one through five. On one of the monitors he saw the hallway from which he had just escaped, and he silently praised British comedy.

  Searching the room, he found nothing of interest other than the guard’s key ring, which he pocketed along with the guard’s wallet and cell. He also took the gun, as well as a silencer he found in a drawer, then stripped and switched clothes with the guard, having to tighten the belt to the last notch. Grey dragged the guard back to the same hole in which Grey had been held, then handcuffed him, manacled his feet, and shoved a stack of boxes over the splintered trapdoor.

  Before returning to the guard room he walked the length of the hallway, finding a door at the other end. It was locked, and he worked his way through the guard’s keys until he found the right one. A small service elevator was on the other side of the locked door.

  On his way back to the guard station he checked the other rooms, finding them stuffed with boxes. He opened a few, and found the same pamphlets translated into Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and French.

  He debated calling Jacques or the police, but discarded the idea. Grey had an opportunity to find real information, and scurrying away while the police arrived, likely without a warrant, wasn’t going to help Viktor in the next twenty-four hours. From the look of things, a quick search by the cops would yield nothing, and Grey didn’t want the lackeys arrested. He wanted Dante and Darius arrested.

  He knew this building held secrets, but the longer he observed the monitors the less he saw, and he knew he was pushing his luck. Someone could contact or visit the guard station at any minute, and eventually they would.

  Just past the guard room was the huge main elevator, a staircase right beside it. Even leaving was a dicey proposition: He was going to have to slip into the grounds, fumble with the iron gate, and hope no one noticed.

  He disabled the silent alarm protecting the complex, then put his palms down on the counter beside the monitors and leaned forward.

  What was he missing?

  Two things came to him. The first was that the service elevator down the hall appeared on none of the monitors. The second was his discussion with Viktor about the importance of symbology and numerology to black magicians and occultists.

  Why only five floors? Why not three, six, seven? Perhaps he was over-thinking it, but Darius didn’t seem like the type of man who left anything to chance. Or maybe the number five had some significance of which he was unaware.

  Blowing out a breath, he hobbled to the service elevator and unlocked the door. He slipped into the small space and ran his eyes over the control panel. The basement was labeled as the first floor, the upper levels two through five. Just below the fire alarm was an access box. He tried the guard’s keys, and none of them worked.

  Grey frowned. The guard should have a key to the elevator’s access box. Maybe it was on a separate key ring, but if so, then it wasn’t kept in the guard room, which was also odd. Grey went to work on the lock, complicated but still a pin-and-tumbler. It took him a few minutes of exact pressure and careful listening, ear pressed to the panel, but he finally heard the click of success. When the panel swung down, Grey’s jaw dropped along with it.

  Two more buttons appeared, set into a hidden control panel. The bottom button was labeled G, the top one labeled with the next number in line.

  The sixth floor.

  Grey knew he might be walking into the lion’s den. He shut and locked the elevator door, then pressed the button for the sixth floor.

  When the elevator stopped ascending, Grey pulled the handgun and readied it at chest level, easing the door open. He found himself in an empty foyer, the walls draped in black cloth, illuminated by gaslit candelabra. No sound except the faint hiss of gas.

  A door led from the foyer to a hexagonal room with six empty armchairs made of black wood. The walls and floor were made from the same material. A sigil-inscribed door loomed opposite where Grey was standing, and the rounded ceiling, painted to resemble a star-filled galaxy, lent an illusion of depth. A skylight in the middle of the ceiling allowed moonlight to filter inside. Grey let his eyes adjust to the low luminosity, then moved to the door in the far wall. He had to pick the lock again.

  His eyes roamed the next room, taking in the cushion-strewn floor, the Persian carpet and silk netting, the velvet-covered walls and dozens of unlit candles placed about the room. A sizable triangle outlined in chalk covered the middle of the room, a variety of other sigils surrounding the chalk. Grey was getting the distinct impression that the entire level had been abandoned for the night.

  Inside a walk-in closet Grey found a rack of silk robes, boxes of candles, and entire shelves full of massage oils and sex toys. A curtain next to the closet concealed a marble bathroom with a wall-length mirror, a walk-in shower, a giant bathtub with multiple jets, and a cabinet full of syringes and pharmaceuticals.

  Grey went through another curtain leading to a bookshelf-lined study. The bookshelves were spilling over with books on magic and the occult, with an entire bookshelf devoted to manuals on sexual practices, both ancient and modern. A tapestry on one of the walls depicted a tree with roots growing out of a pile of rotting corpses, vultures perched on the branches and feeding on the bodies.

  On a desk in the center of the room was a laptop docking station. The absence of the computer confirmed Grey’s suspicion: Darius had already set in motion whatever he had planned for tomorrow night.

  Grey searched the desk and took a stack of folders, full of receipts and papers. Another door led to a modest kitchen, and then Grey stopped in front of a black wooden door that gave him an uneasy feeling.

  The door was unlocked. Grey eased it open.

  A giant urn filled the center of the stone-walled square room, tongues of flame flicking upward from the mouth of the urn. From his research and his conversation with Dastur Zaveri, Grey knew this was the atashkadeh, the fire temple, representative to Zoroastrians of purification and marked by a ceaseless flame tended by the priests. He also knew that dry sandalwood was most often used to fuel the sacred fire, but from the greasy smell of animal fat emanating from the urn, and the piles of knobby bones stacked along one of the walls, Grey made a wild guess that, to the followers of Ahriman, this fire represented something besides purification.

  On the far wall, an enormous glass aquarium swarmed with snakes, spiders, and a variety of insects. Grey knew Zoroastrians considered crawling, slithering creatures abhorrent. This room was an abomination, a perversion of a fire temple.

  He had found his priest of Ahriman.

  Grey was no sociologist, but he was pretty sure the Order of New Enlightenment’s starry-eyed worshippers might be put off by the drugs, sex, and black magic lurking on the top floor. How many other inner sanctums, Grey wondered, looked similar to this? Who knew what lay underneath the veils, inside the holy-of-holies, behind the proverbial and sometimes all-too-real curtains?

  Grey left the room and swept the entire sixth floor, searching for hidden doors, safes, anything that might contain more information on tomorrow night. Finding nothing else, he stood in the middle of the room with the six throne-like chairs, staring at the skylight, shivering from the pain in his thigh.

  If there was something that revealed Darius’s hand, it was either long gone or buried among the folders Grey was holding. It was time to get the hell out
of Crazytown.

  He returned to the elevator and descended to the basement, planning to return to the guard station, trip a few alarms, and walk right out the front door, on the pretense of securing the perimeter. He’d have to do his best to mask his limp, but if he could get to the gate before anyone stopped him, he might have a chance. The bigger issue was escaping the neighborhood, as he had the feeling it was teeming with Satanists.

  Grey could call the police with the guard’s phone, but he still couldn’t risk getting tied up in procedure, and he wasn’t giving up those folders. Instead, he called information and found a taxi service, instructing the driver to meet him at an intersection two blocks away from Bar 666.

  As he started down the hallway to the guard station, the door to the guard room burst open and a group of men brandishing guns spilled out. Grey cursed and scrambled backwards. They must have caught him on the monitor as soon as he left the service elevator.

  Grey pulled his gun and shot the first man in the chest, causing mass confusion. They should have expected him to have the guard’s weapon. He moved in a backwards crouch as he fired, trying to keep them unbalanced long enough to cover the ten feet to the elevator. He shot at least three more, but before he reached the elevator a bullet clipped his side, just below his injured rib.

  He lurched inside, slamming and locking the door. No way he could last another round. He heard shouting and running, and he didn’t waste any time. There was only one button left to press, and he did so furiously.

  The heat was intense, the sense of isolation more so. The world stilled as Viktor climbed, his sense of time winding down and then ceasing altogether. By the time he had climbed a fourth of the way up the mountain, he felt as if he were moving in a bubble of shimmering heat and pain, sweat pouring down his body, every muscle throbbing, his mind screaming at him to do the sensible thing and stop.

  Halfway up, Viktor rested in the limp shade of a desiccated pine. He gulped water from the canteen, forcing himself to save enough for the return. When he had regained his wind he rose and peered across the basin, to where he had left the guide.