Carter nodded briskly and drained the last of his beer. ‘Excellent. Welcome back, then.’
‘So when do I start?’ Joel asked.
Carter glanced at his watch. ‘I’m heading right back to St Aldates station this minute. You want to string along?’
Chapter Thirty
Lillith and Zachary sat in silence in the wine cellar as Gabriel paced furiously up and down, deep in thought.
‘What do we do?’ Lillith said eventually.
‘It’s simple,’ Gabriel told her. ‘We must take it back. We have to retrieve it. Such a weapon is perfect for us. Our enemies will be annihilated at a stroke. Then, once victorious, we will ensure that the cross is destroyed once and for all.’
‘Brother, you surely can’t have forgotten that we can’t go near it?’
Gabriel nodded. ‘Indeed. The sword is double-edged, so to speak. Which is why we need to enlist a human to carry out the task.’
‘Not another ghoul,’ Lillith groaned. ‘Look at the two specimens we have with us here. And remember what happened with Lonsdale.’ She spat out the name. ‘We took him in, we gave him everything he could have asked for, and he betrayed us.’
‘The motherfucker
Gabriel shook his head. ‘No. No ghouls this time. This must be done properly. And evidently, the right candidate for this particular task will require a certain set of virtues. Leave that to me.’ He paused, rubbing his eyes to clear away the mental picture of the cross that was still haunting him. ‘In the meantime, we have another, very grave, problem. The Federation have agents combing the human media constantly. They only have to find this article, and they will know the location of the weapon.’
Lillith blanched. ‘What if they already have? They went after it before; they can do it again.’
Gabriel pursed his lips. ‘I believe we have the advantage in this situation. The Federation have no reason to be looking for the cross. However, it is only a
‘I was going into their news sites to see if there was more on the cross story,’ Zachary rumbled.
‘Is there?’
‘I don’t know,’ Zachary said, still peering hard at the screen. ‘I’m looking at something else. The kind of guy you’d be looking for — I guess he’d have to be the meanest hard-assedest motherfucking killer that ever walked the earth? For a human, I mean.’
‘A man of little scruple, certainly,’ Gabriel said. ‘A man of physical strength and brutality. And one who is open to the sort of persuasion that we are in a position to offer.’
‘What I thought. Then I think I might have found just the guy we need,’ Zachary said, pointing at the screen as he heaved his bulk out of his chair. ‘Take a look at this.’
With the air of a person forced against all principles of good taste to come into contact with something very unsavoury indeed, Gabriel sat down at the computer. The online BBC news archive article Zachary had found was a few days old. Its headline was
Gabriel read the whole piece twice over, then sat back in his chair with a slowly spreading smile. ‘Zachary,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I think you may very well have made an interesting discovery. Now, listen. There is not a moment to lose.’
Chapter Thirty-One
The operations room deep inside the St Aldates police build ing was one Joel had been inside many times before, but never as a task force commander overseeing an entire team of his own. They were a mixed bunch of male and female CID officers, some of whom Joel had worked with in the past. He was just glad that his old friend Superintendent Page was nowhere to be seen.
Sam Carter perched his bulk on the corner of a desk and bustled through the introductions. ‘This is Inspector Solomon, for those of you who don’t know him already. Inspector: Sneddon; Jenkins; Lloyd; Hardstaff; Cushley; Braddock; Myles. Okay?’
‘Got it,’ Joel said, memorising their names and faces more quickly than he’d have imagined possible. When the murmurs of ‘Afternoon, sir’ had died away, Joel pointed at DC Cushley. She was about thirty, blond-haired, the most alert-looking of the team with quick blue eyes. ‘Cushley, tell me what we’ve got on Stone.’
Outwardly, he projected an impression of calm efficiency, focused on the job and completely in his element; exactly the same Joel Solomon that those who knew him would have remembered from all the previous times they’d worked together. But it was an impression he was having to fight to keep up. The humans’ voices were beginning to echo in his ears, blurring into one, and the room swirled around him as his incredibly keen sense of smell threatened to take over completely. The scent of their warm blood, pulsing tantalisingly through veins and arteries … gallons of it, lakes of it and all within such easy grasp, there for the taking … it was intoxicating. He wanted to gasp. He wanted to run out of the room. But he fought it, maintaining his expression of thoughtful concentration and trying not to let his eyes linger on Cushley’s throat as she spoke.
‘Good deal less than we ought to, sir,’ Cushley said. ‘It’s like no Gabriel Stone ever existed. No birth records, no National Insurance number, nothing. No vehicles registered to him either. The plates on the McLaren F1 taken from Crowmoor Hall turned out to be false. And we can’t trace where it was bought.’
Joel had already checked them before his trip to Romania. ‘Any luck digging up the property deeds?’
Cushley shook her head. ‘Our guy seems pretty adept at not leaving a paper trail. Crowmoor Hall’s bills were always paid in cash, we think by Stone’s employee, Seymour Finch.’
‘Now resident in the police morgue,’ Carter said. ‘Anyone been down there lately and seen the size of his hands, by the way? Buggering things are enormous. Hardly human, even.’
‘Another blank there,’ Cushley said. ‘Finch is as much of a mystery as his former boss. Forensic analysis of the bullet dug out of him shows up an unusual rifling pattern, suggesting it was fired from an old wartime Webley.45 revolver. No sign of the weapon so far.’
‘Lonsdale hasn’t surfaced yet, Inspector,’ volunteered the tall, greying CID detective called Hardstaff. ‘I’ve been working on tracking the movements of his private jet, and we have a record of a flight from Surrey to Brussels five days ago. That’s the last we have on it. After that, it just disappears, along with the pilot and crew.’
‘Who the hell flew it out of there?’ Carter demanded. ‘I thought we were working on that.’
‘We are. There’s nothing,’ Hardstaff said. ‘Nobody knows where it went.’
‘Inspector, there’s one other thing,’ said Myles, a female DS Joel had worked with on a drugs case a few
