“Barry,” Glen sighed, too tired to work up more stress, “what I mean is that these men do not have families. The leader of the Barking community that we usually have to go through to facilitate official procedures…he says these men are not from their community, Barry.”
Dr. Barry Hooper knew that the incessant repetition of his name was always a sure sign that Glen was beyond irritated with his laid-back assumptions. He could see that the peculiar occurrence had squarely uprooted what little peace Glen Victor had left in his waning personality.
“Alright, okay then,” he offered eagerly to accommodate Glen’s concerns. “Tell me what you think is going on here. I agree, usually Muslims are extremely attentive to their dead and their traditions, which does make this a bit disconcerting.”
“Thank you,” Glen accepted, like a very unhappy and bitchy wife. “I think we’re dealing with immigrants of another sort altogether. Look at us! We assumed. But based on what exactly did we assume that they were Islamic extremists? Their dark eyes and hair?”
“Um,” Barry dreaded the correction, but he was obliged to, “the fact that they were executing a woman in a burka by means of lapidation?”
“Oh, Christ!” Glen exclaimed in fury, much as Barry had expected. The annoyed medical examiner was perspiring terribly, beads of sweat dripping from his jaw as his livid face quivered at the rectification. “Don’t you think that was the perfect way to murder someone? Think, Barry, think for a moment. If you want to shoot your wife and you don’t want to get caught, you stage a robbery, right?”
Barry didn’t quite know how to answer such a harsh question, but he didn’t have to. His fervently spitting colleague presented more options to elucidate his theory. “Look, you would make it look like an accident, or a case of the wrong place at the wrong time! Don’t you get it?”
By now, the day staff had congregated around the last embalming slab to listen to the ludicrous argument which had them a bit shaken. Dr. Victor was ranting like a madman and until now, his raving had been countered by the calm dismissive tone of Dr. Hooper. However, Dr. Hooper had suddenly realized what Dr. Victor was aiming at.
“By God, Glen, you are right!” he replied.
“Listen, don’t be such a right cu—,” Glen seethed, but he was interrupted short of a vile simile the eavesdropping staff were bracing for.
“No, Glen, I genuinely fathom what you’re trying to tell me,” Barry insisted. Glen’s wild eyes stared stiffly at him. “If you wanted to kill someone without worrying about being arrested, you’d make sure it happened in a place, and by means or methods, where it would not seem out of place.”
Glen’s face lit up and he raised his hands in what was almost an embrace, but instead he simply slapped Barry against the upper arm, smiling, “That! That is it, old boy!”
“Like killing someone on Halloween, see?” the two physicians heard one of the assistants explain to the others outside the office. “You kill someone on a night where everyone is used to birds screaming, blokes full of blood, right bruv? Right?”
“Right, Brent,” Glen rolled his eyes and sighed as he peeked around the doorway of the office. “Dead right, son.”
“So who got their ticket punched like that? Someone what was coming in here?” Brent the day assistant asked to the back of Glen Victor who slumped into the office and shook his head. “Fucking Ali-G, working for us, Barry. I tell you, I weep for the future of the medical profession.”
Barry could not help but chuckle at that.
When the cups were empty and the debate had come to a point, the two had to decide on what to do with the bodies of the men who were not going to be collected. In their unofficial opinion, these men were plain and simple killers, foot soldiers hired to make a hit look like a form of religious punishment in an establishment where such acts were regrettably not frowned upon.
“Look,” Glen started, a lot calmer than previously, “I think we should call in someone who knows symbology or at least, obscure cults, to have a look at these tattoos. Maybe an expert would be able to tell us where they come from – if they are a militant group of assassins marked the same. You saw the credo. ‘Soldiers,’ but of what?”
Barry sat deep in thought, rubbing his neck as he stared past his colleague in contemplation. Then he nodded slowly. “I concur. It would be the best way to ascertain what we’re dealing with before we go off half-cocked and run the risk of attracting the wrong attention. I mean, if these boys are indeed a group of hit men, Glen, we’re playing with something deep and dangerous. I say we don’t tell anyone else about this until we know what that seal represents. Only then will we know how to proceed, right?”
“Right,” Glen agreed resolutely. “Now, who do we know who could analyze this thing for us without going out and telling everyone about it to get some sort of credit, if it’s important?”
“I can ask my wife. She works at the London Archives, knows a lot of academic rats who keep a low profile just lecturing and so on,” Barry suggested. “And she won’t send us to someone we cannot trust.”
“Alright, mate. You do that,” Glen agreed. “For now though, we keep our killers nice and out of sight. We don’t need the other MEs jarring about in the freezers and open the case up all over again.”
With that, Dr. Victor summoned two dieners to assist in the relocation of the eight bodies under the premise of extended storage period to accommodate retarded collection arrangements on the register and called it a day.
An uncharacteristically clear morning greeted Dr. Barry Hooper as he walked to his car. Thick eyes, plagued by fatigue after the full night he’d had during his shift, made the place look glaring and overly bright. To exacerbate his visual problem, the walls all around the parking area were painted white, reflecting the awful morning light. Like every other day, he unlocked his vehicle to the sound of the 8:35 a.m. train passing on the other side of the wall where the tracks intersected.
With a sigh to rid himself of the numbing onslaught of tiredness, Dr. Hooper tried to ignore the deafening noise of the clacking iron wheels punishing the metal beams carrying the monstrous engines. His ears ached from the din he had to endure after the tomb-like silence of the night shift. Although last night was probably the most eventful they’d had in a long time, the place was still eerily quiet compared to other offices, perpetually a stark contrast between his shift and his release from it.
All he wanted to do was to get home, take a scalding shower and heading for bed. The night’s strange discovery along with the storm had left him unnaturally cold. Barry felt as if he’d flayed one of the Muslim cadavers and put on its skin. A sensation lingered over his body, as if he wore a dead skin. Was it the weather or perhaps the projection of perplexity behind the pearly dead eyes of the new arrivals?
Claire, his wife, would be at work by now. Without her home, their bedroom was a cozy, messy haven of heaven where he could just creep into the unmade bed (she left it so for him deliberately) and doze off. The best part was her absence, the lack of shrill-pitched questions and the incessant warnings and commands of a bossy wife. It was an underrated pleasure for Barry.
Today he wouldn’t mind speaking to her because this time he’d have something to talk about. And it was something that had nothing to do with how many clean shirts he still had, if he had taken out the trash, or why he would rather watch the National Ten Pin Bowling Championships than accompany her to Madge, the widow’s couple’s bridge night. Today he would have a subject to throw at her to chew on. He needed information from her, information that would fill her jaws long enough to make her forget the mundane rubbish she planned to yoke him with.
Barry smiled as he started his car and pulled out of the parking area. The notion that finally he would have something to burden her with, for a change, miraculously alleviated his fatigue for the drive home. And he could sleep deeply for hours before having to confront her with the interesting task he’d have to coax out of her.
Claire Hooper was a batt
le-axe, of Irish descent, and could intimidate a great white shark with one scoff. But she could be really sweet when approached correctly and Barry already knew which angle to use – he would ask her expertise, in those words, he reckoned. That way she could not resist getting him the information he needed, even just to prove that she knew someone on the board or at the universities.
9
The Meeting
Two days after the renowned investigative journalist, Sam Cleave, collected his car from the Barking street, the man who sent him a video message was sitting in a bunker nearby. Surrounded by the rest of his local chapter, he called the informal meeting to order.
“He has not delivered Toshana, neither has he notified us of his intentions,” he declared to the few men. “I really, really hoped he would not call my bluff on this. I admire the man.”
“How could you?” his friend Gille asked, vexed at the leniency shown by their leader. “He killed our friends, our brothers! With his typically annoying heroic bullshit, he disrespected our ways! How could you admire him at all?”
“Listen, not all wars have only two sides, Gille! Sometimes you make alliances with enemies so that you can defeat the forces that wedged us apart in the first place,” he explained to a very angry Gille. “Yes, he and the man in the car killed our brethren. For that, I am deeply regretful and angry, but we cannot have a man like him killed without drawing international attention. Do you understand?”
Another of the men scoffed from the other side of the room, “It’s not like we can stone him in public, you know, Gille.”
To the mocker’s amusement, Gille flipped him the bird. He turned to look at his leader with a serious face. “What are you going to do, then? We have to find him before he gets Toshana out of the country, out of our reach.”
“Bitch,” one of the men groaned as he ate his sandwich. A hum of agreement filled the room from the other men. They were only six in total, what was left of the initial group before Sam and his unknown friend had reduced their numbers.
“For Christ’s sake, man. Why don’t we just kill him and be done with it!” Gille hissed.
The leader promptly slapped him across the face. “Do not blaspheme, Gille. I will not tell you again.” Gille recoiled, holding his face, but he nodded obediently. “I think you all ought to know that Sam Cleave is not a full-blown enemy of ours just because he killed our brothers to save Toshana,” he continued to explain the predicament to his men. “He is a member of the Brigade Apostate.”
“What?” an older man next to the scoffer gasped.
“What the hell is the Brigade Apostate?” Gille asked, his hand still firmly on his cheek.
The old man took the liberty to explain, since it looked like their leader was conceding him the chance. Blinking profusely as he recounted, the old man tried his best to give an accurate description. “They are a clandestine organization, one of many in the world, and they are based in the wild mountain ranges of Mongolia and Russia, mostly. In the time of the Second World War, Hitler, Himmler, and the other members of the SS High Command founded a small group…”
“The Thule Society, we know all that, Ben,” Gille sighed.
“Listen to him,” was all the leader told Gille, gesturing for the old man to carry on.
“Not the Thule Society this time, Gille. From the Thule and Vril Societies, along with remnants of others like the Brüder des Lichts.”
“Brothers of the Light,” the leader elucidated to accommodate those of them suffering from rusty German.
“Within the Thule Society, some the SS elite formed another secret society they called The Order of the Black Sun. Heard of them?” the old man asked his associates. Some nodded, others looked lost. “Well, the Black Sun was in pursuit of holy relics to facilitate the inter-dimensional arrival of the old gods who would obliterate the world’s nations and elevate the Aryan race to rule the world. I know it sounds preposterous, like something from a bad novel, but they truly believed that artefacts like the Spear of Destiny and the Ark of the Covenant could amass the ethereal thrust they needed to connect with the original master race they believe begot all pure Aryan races.”
He looked at his associates, all of whom were listening intently. “The Black Sun is reputed to have disbanded after the death of Adolf Hitler, somewhere in the late 1940s. But many people know that the Order of the Black Sun is still in existence, still pursuing world domination. They have boundless resources, including members of high society belonging to the order and funding their agenda. Now, the Brigade Apostate is a secret organization too, but what makes them a special threat to the Order of the Black Sun is that most of them once belonged to it!”
The men sat, spellbound at the revelation. In silence they took it all in, and the old man gave them time to learn what he was teaching. With a gruff voice, low in tone and drenched in mystery, he said, “The Brigade Apostate is the anti-Black Sun, so to speak, making it their sole objective to locate and quietly incapacitate and destroy all Black Sun endeavors. Using financial institutions, computer hackers, social media, and a plethora of other crippling modern methods to disable the foundations of what the Black Sun tries to accomplish, the Brigade Apostate is an enigma. In fact, they are untraceable except to those who know where to find them.”
The leader combed the congregation of loyal friends before adding the point he wished to make to Gille. “And Sam Cleave, my friends, is an esteemed member.”
With astonished expressions, the group of men in the bunker under Trinity Square Gardens realized why they could not act with haste concerning Sam Cleave. Gille dropped his face, feeling rather out of place after vehemently rallying for the ousting and execution of the journalist.
“You know how they always say in those gangster movies,” the leader smiled, “about not killing someone you don’t know? This is such a case. We have to move wisely, my brothers. We cannot just kill who we don’t know, you see?”
“So now what?” Gille asked. “What are you going to do, then, to get Toshana back?”
The leader shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know yet. I would hate to resort to using people close to him. Getting Toshana, though, is worth the risk of kicking the hornet’s nest.”
“The enemy of my enemy, and all that, seems to come into play here,” the old man reckoned. “That makes it hard for us to trust. But on the other hand our leader is right, brothers. We have to tolerate Sam Cleave and maybe use him to find Toshana, before we make him disappear without the Brigade Apostate learning of his sudden demise.”
“Wise words, Papa, wise words,” the leader acknowledged.
“So I shall track him and see if I can reason her away from him. If he resists, I will shoot him in the face and stone the bitch without much effort in some abandoned building,” the leader shared. “But either way I will remove her from this earth, with or without Sam Cleave’s help.”
The men all sat in silent contemplation of the new plan. They were used to sitting in wait while developments dictated their next move. From where they bided their time, their leader usually paved the way for their next endeavor and they had learned by now to trust him with all decisions.
“Just sound the charge when you need us, son,” the old man said.
“I will. I will leave in two hours for Edinburgh. The tracker I put in Cleave’s equipment points to a stack of mass cage-living Scots in some prime part of the city – just the place you would expect a cheap superstar to live,” the leader said. “No matter how this turns out, we will know which path to take within the next twenty-four hours.”
10
Nina Gets a New Gig
Nina tried calling Purdue, but his personal assistant told her that he was in the Netherlands for an exclusive meeting that she could not disclose. The information somewhat unsettled Nina, especially given that Purdue had previously stepped over very perilous borders during other similarly spun meetings. These gatherings usually involved shady dealings between high society members with agendas way
beyond the next merger or lucrative proposition.
Purdue was, whether he liked it or not, a very prominent member of high society. Now that he had been absolved by most of the speculative types from his previous misdemeanors towards the Black Sun and other élite conglomerates, he was back in his old position as billionaire playboy. However, even with the political and business climate concerning his recent history settling, Purdue was far from the man they used to know.
With everything he had endured, learned, lost, and fought in the past five years or so, the jovial philanthropist and explorer had turned slightly. More cynical and apathetic these days, though equally fearless, he was now wary of those he used to charm into his business associations. Still, he was attending to assure those watching from the sinister shadows of the annually held private conference that he was back in charge of all his holdings and open for allegiances.
“Would you like me to ask him to call you back when he calls tonight, Dr. Gould?” Nora, Purdue’s new PA, asked Nina courteously. Nina liked Nora. She was Scottish, charming, and efficient.
“No worries, Nora,” Nina refrained. “I just wanted to say hello and catch up a bit. I’m on my way back to Oban tonight, so I will not be in Edinburgh by the time he gets back anyway.”
“Alright, Dr. Gould. Keep well and have a good trip home,” Nora beamed over the handset.
“Ta, will do,” Nina replied, ending the call shortly after. She shook her head and took a drag of her Marlboro. “Right back out of the frying pan, hey Purdue?” She sighed, surveying her clothing in piles on the bed, ready to be packed and lugged into the car. She knew which exclusive secret party Purdue was attending and it made something in the pit of her stomach stir. Like the punishment of a bad batch of seafood burritos and cheap wine, her stomach cramped at the thought of him plunging right back into the cesspool of super rich monsters and charlatans he had just managed to crawl free from. But like with Sam, she dared not say anything. She dared not pry, warn, or offer her help.
The Lost Crown of the Knights Templar (Order of the Black Sun Book 19) Page 5
