The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3)

by Green, Layton

  “I don’t dispute the existence of evil,” Viktor said. “What I dispute is the existence of a Devil with horns and a red pitchfork, tossing human beings into the nine circles of Hell. Or a mythological entity from Persian legend named Ahriman, who created a book that allows one of his worshippers to flit about the world causing murder and mayhem.”

  “Who knows why the Evil One chooses to act as he does?” the priest said softly. “Who knows why our Lord chose a Jewish carpenter to die on a cross for our sins? Why he created a universe as complex as the one we have? You may not be a man of faith, but I know that you search. I sense you at least allow for the possibility of a Creator God to whom you attribute the impossibility of existence, of a deity or life force or entity so apart from humanity, so above, that He is outside our ability to ever fully comprehend?”

  Viktor didn’t respond, and the priest said, “We can never hope to understand the mind of God. Of course He is not a white-bearded patriarch from the Middle East, enthroned in the firmament above. He is outside the scope of human imagination, he is God. But don’t you see? It is the same with the Evil One.”

  He let this statement sink in. In all of Viktor’s years studying religions and cults, with their various beliefs and rationale concerning the presence of evil, he had never heard it put quite that way. It caused his skin to prickle, before he pushed away the priest’s words as just another, albeit more complicated, superstition.

  “I find these statements odd coming from a Catholic priest,” Viktor said.

  “Piety is not an absence of honest thought. To attempt to understand God is to attempt an impossible task, and to understand there might be other avenues to comprehension.”

  “Then why not attribute evil to God, rather than a second entity?” Viktor said. “Didn’t Isaiah say, ‘I am the Lord and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe’?”

  “I’m Christian, not Zoroastrian. I do not believe in a separate but equal entity, but rather a Satan whose purpose as created by God I shall never understand. Then again, I also allow for the possibility that I might be wrong, or that the intertwining of the two is beyond my comprehension. Despite what some within the Church claim, the ontology of the Devil has never been resolved. I believe there is no striving towards the light without the dark, no love and free will without pain and suffering. But it’s not our task to contemplate how evil sprang from God. It’s our task to struggle against the Devil.”

  The priest beckoned Viktor closer. “Take my rosary.”

  Viktor hesitated, and the priest said, “Those of us at the extreme end of faith… such as myself and my visitor from Ahriman… we see this realm more clearly than do you. This rosary is the embodiment of my faith, my blood and spirit intertwined with that of my Savior.”

  He lifted his head ever so gently, removing the rosary from his neck. The movement seemed to take a lifetime, and Viktor stood there dumbly, a man always in control who was somehow indecisive in the presence of this priest. Though he had no desire to take the rosary, he couldn’t bring himself to refuse.

  Viktor bent to receive it, almost gagging at the putrescence of the priest’s wounds. After slipping the rosary around Viktor’s neck, Father Angelo lay back as if he had expended his last ounce of energy.

  “Do you know where he is?” Viktor said.

  “I do not.”

  “Do you have any idea what he plans to do?” Viktor said.

  “He has renewed the heresy.” His enfeebled fingers made the sign of the cross. “Go with God, my son.” Then his hands returned to his chest, his eyelids sagging with the heaviness of sleep.

  Viktor waited beside Father Angelo for a long moment, feeling as if this entire foolish journey had been in vain. He had learned nothing more about Darius except the knowledge that he had slipped further into madness than Viktor thought possible, that he had destroyed the body of this gentle man of God. For that alone there was no penalty too harsh.

  He stepped out of the room and eased the door closed. He would leave for London in the morning, his appointment with Darius little more than twenty-four hours away.

  Brother Pietro approached with a lantern. “You’ll stay the night?”

  “Thank you, but no.”

  He nodded as if expecting Viktor’s answer. “Come with me.”

  “Has there been any sign of my pursuer?” Viktor said.

  “No,” he said, and Viktor didn’t have time to worry about it further.

  The monk led him across the summit to the iron gate surrounding the ancient chapel. Charcoal clouds smothered the top of the mountain, the valley below invisible in the darkness.

  Pietro inserted a six-inch key into the gate, and it creaked open. Viktor saw no door, and the monk led him to the left of the chapel, putting his hands on a section of the wall that appeared as smooth and inaccessible as the rest of the granite mass. He pushed on the wall, and a block of stone swung inward.

  “This is where you kept the grimoire,” Viktor said.

  “Yes.”

  The lantern illuminated a stone passage, which they followed deep into the church. They came to a three-way intersection, but instead of choosing another passage, Pietro again went to an indistinguishable section of the wall, pushing on another stone. This time Viktor heard a groaning sound, and the two-foot square block next to Pietro fell away, revealing a staircase descending into blackness.

  Pietro shone the lantern down the staircase. Huge oak casks lined the passage. At the bottom of the staircase was an old motorcycle with knobby tires. The monk handed Viktor a set of keys.

  “You didn’t actually think we climbed down the path every time we left? This tunnel will take you through the mountain. When you exit, follow the dirt trail for the better part of an hour. Be careful, it is steep. This will merge into a road, which you will take to a village. After the village is a bridge, and a house with a flat roof just after the bridge. The man who lives there will recognize the motorcycle. He will take you where you wish to go, at any time of night.”

  “I can’t thank you enough,” Viktor said.

  He grasped Viktor by the arm. “You can thank me by avenging my brother.”

  Viktor sped through the night, and everything was as Pietro had said: the drive through the tunnel with nothing but stone and silence and the mental image of Father Angelo’s ruined eyes, riding for miles under a bloated moon beside cacti bent at fantastical angles, and the surreal rendezvous with Pietro’s man in the village, who took Viktor to Cefalù without so much as a word or a backwards glance.

  He dropped Viktor at Piazza Garibaldi. After another futile attempt to call Grey, which worried him immensely, Viktor began the climb to his villa, weary beyond belief, shaking from the need for absinthe.

  His driver’s villa lay just below his. When Viktor exited the mountain tunnel, he had called and told the driver to be ready to leave at first light, a mere three hours away.

  He saw a light inside the driver’s villa, casting a soft glow over the patio. He glanced inside, expecting to see the driver asleep on the couch in front of the television. Instead, he saw the driver in a pool of blood on the floor, his insides curled beside him like the glistening strands of a web, his face locked in a final expression of horror.

  Before Viktor could react they surrounded him, at least a dozen figures in black masks. He caught the flash of a silver ring, and one of them injected him from behind with a needle, catching him as he fell.

  A barrage of emotion coursed through him before he lost consciousness. Terror, rage, anguish at the fate of his driver, worry for Grey. The one emotion that did not register was surprise, because he knew, with awful certainty, why they had waited until now to take him, until after he had visited the monastery.

  Darius had wanted him to see.

  Grey took Anka to a hotel a few blocks away, paying in cash for the room and acting as nonchalant as possible, trying to hide his battered face from the clerk. Anka waited off to the side,
face buried in a fashion magazine.

  Their fourth-floor room was a typical Lilliputian affair, though it did have a small desk next to the bed. Grey went to the bathroom to change the blood-soaked dressing on his wounds. Anka helped, gingerly unwrapping his thigh. Her face expanded when she saw the wound.

  “You shouldn’t be walking,” she said.

  “No choice. It’ll cause more scarring, but I have plenty of that already.”

  She removed his shirt to change his bandages without a word, revealing the halved tattoo on the backs of his upper arms that symbolized justice and balance, as well as the various scars on his body. Anka was only the second woman who hadn’t reacted in surprise when she saw his back. Nya was the first.

  She helped him rinse the wounds and apply the antiseptic, then sat cross-legged on the floor to help wrap the bandages. The pain from his thigh lanced through him. He shuddered and breathed deep through his nose.

  When it was over Anka’s arms encircled him from behind, fingers resting on his ridged stomach. He eased into her, and her hands moved upward to stroke his chest. Her fingernails sent little shivers of pleasure channeling through those same nerve endings, distracting him from the pain. He eased her away.

  “I know,” she said with a hungry look, helping him to his feet. “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” Grey thought of the harem he had seen on the sixth floor. “I assume Darius doesn’t live in the same place anymore?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “As you can imagine there’s not much trust between us.”

  “What’s his old address? I’ll check it as a last resort.”

  She wrote the address down on a piece of paper, a flat in South Kensington. He knew that would be a dead end. He moved to the desk, where he had placed the folder full of documents taken from the glass building.

  “While I’m looking at these documents, I want you to think of everything he’s ever said or done, every goal or dream he’s mentioned, every name, every place. Anything that might help. Try to remember the location of the house you were at when you witnessed the ceremony.”

  “I will,” she said, hovering behind him and kneading his neck muscles. “What’re these papers?”

  “After they kidnapped me,” he said, “I was held in a building in East London which has to be their home base. Before I escaped I found these.”

  “Let’s hope something’s in there.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “We’re running out of options.”

  “Give me a second to freshen up,” she said, “then I’ll help.”

  She slipped into the bathroom, and Grey started poring through a stack of receipts pertaining to the procurement and build out of real estate in East London. Before he finished the first folder, Anka emerged and grabbed her handbag. “I’m going to the vending machine for a bottle of water.”

  “The one by reception? Don’t let anyone see your face.”

  She kissed his forehead. “Sure, love. Be right back.”

  When she stepped out, Grey checked his remote voice mail again. He had a message from Viktor summarizing his visit with the priest, which Grey listened to with increasing dread. When Grey tried Viktor’s cell and it went straight to voice mail again, his pulse thumped with worry.

  Viktor’s cell should not be off. Grey knew in his gut they had found him, and that Viktor’s only hope was Grey’s intervention before midnight of the next night, little more than twenty-four hours away.

  Grey eyed the stack of documents in front of him, praying they held a clue to Darius’s whereabouts, knowing Viktor’s life might be forfeit if they didn’t. He ran a hand through his hair and rose to use the bathroom.

  On the bathroom counter by the door he noticed a bottle of perfume. He thought nothing of it at first, but as he washed his hands a troubling thought entered his mind.

  When Anka bent to kiss him before she left the room, he hadn’t smelled any perfume.

  Why remove a bottle of perfume from a handbag without using it? There was also something familiar about the bottle, which was shaped like an elongated pyramid.

  Removing the bottle alone might not have been cause for alarm, but as he returned to the desk, he had another thought. Anka had left the bathroom door wide open, which was a strange thing for a woman to do, and the bottle had been placed on the counter as close to the door as possible, just out of Grey’s line of sight.

  Then it hit him, and he gripped the desk. His memory was hazy, and he was sure the label had changed, but he remembered the bottle of perfume he had found in Xavier Marcel’s bedroom, also triangular in shape. And while he didn’t remember seeing perfume in Ian Stoke’s residence, there had been a bottle of cologne on the nightstand.

  Both men had been seeing someone new. Both crime scenes contained perfume-size bottles placed in strategic locations.

  He covered his mouth and nose with his arm, gathered the documents and fled the room. More conclusions, long harbored as possibilities in the back of his mind, crashed in like a series of punishing waves.

  Darius burned his victims in one location while she killed them with poison gas in another, no doubt discharged from the perfume-size bottles, no doubt equipped with some ingenious release mechanism. Viktor had said Darius was a master chemist.

  He took the stairs three at a time. She had seduced them, gained access to the bedroom and set the time release of the poison gas for midnight. Had she slept with them as well?

  Of course she had.

  His last flicker of doubt concerned the timing. She could have killed him, or at least left him to be killed, in the catacombs. Or she could have come with him to his room in Cambridge, knowing he wouldn’t have protested, and released the gas.

  So why now? He realized what he was carrying, and the last piece fell into place.

  There was something about her in the documents.

  He didn’t know why she had waited, but he had forced her hand. He burst through the hotel door and onto the street, head straining to spy a glimpse of her. She had played him perfectly, easily, and without a shred of remorse.

  He saw her at the end of the block, hurrying across the street as the light turned. He caught up with her, grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her around.

  She gasped. “What’re you doing? You’re hurting me!”

  “I’d wager death by poison gas hurts a hell of a lot worse than a bruised wrist.”

  “What are you talking about—how could you think I had something to do with that? Grey, it’s me.” She reached up to stroke his cheek, and he swatted her hand away. He had to admit she was the best liar he had ever encountered, flawless under duress, a scarily competent operative in the field.

  “It’s over, Anka. I saw the perfume bottle. I know what it is.”

  “You’re wrong,” she whispered. “I’ll go back in the room if you don’t believe me. You can shut the door and wait outside.”

  “Is that why’re you hurrying down the street?”

  “The vending machine was out of order.” She pointed at a pharmacy just ahead on the street. “That’s the closest place. I’m coming right back.”

  “You’re unbelievable,” he said.

  “Go check the machine, if you don’t believe me.”

  “Was a bottle of water that important?”

  “I was already downstairs,” she said with a helpless shrug. “I didn’t think it would matter.”

  He patted the folders he was carrying. “You’re mentioned in here, aren’t you?”

  “Why wouldn’t I have betrayed you long before now? And why would they torture you to find me?”

  Grey didn’t answer her last question, because he hadn’t figured that one out. But he was through with her duplicitous words and her poisonous touch, the narcotic honey in her eyes. Love might be dependent on trust, but attraction sure as hell wasn’t.

  Instead of pulling away she came closer, her face inches away. “You know this doesn’t feel right. You know when I ki
ssed you I meant it.”

  “I don’t know anything when it comes to you,” he said.

  She took his hand. “Come back to the room. I’ll stay in there as long as it takes for you to trust me.”

  He held her gaze, then said, “You’ve called them already, haven’t you? Where are they, Anka? Where’s Viktor?”

  She sobbed and beat his chest. “Don’t don’t don’t. You’re the only man in my life who hasn’t tried to take advantage of me, even though you had the most reason to do so. There’s no one else I can trust. No one but you, Grey.”

  “No one else except Darius.”

  “I despise him with all of my being,” she said.

  “I’ll ask you one more time. Where are they?”

  She spoke between sobs, reaching for his face. “Don’t do this.”

  Whatever she knew or didn’t know, he knew he wouldn’t uncover anything without tying her down and torturing her until she gave him what he wanted to know. If Viktor died he might never forgive himself, but neither could he torture this girl who would whisper her innocence as he destroyed her body.

  And despite his conviction, he had to admit he did not have absolute proof. But it was enough, and he had to trust his instincts. He backed away from her. She collapsed while standing, face crumbling. “Please don’t leave me.”

  “Good-bye, Anka. Don’t get in my way.”

  He continued backing away, watching her wring her hands and then finally turn and walk away in the same direction she had been going.

  Then he followed her.

  Viktor woke to darkness and the musty smell of burlap. The rough fabric brushed against his face. When he tried to move he realized he was tied to a chair, his waist and feet bound with rope, wrists handcuffed behind him.