“He got suspicious?”
“I doubt it, but something spooked him. Maybe he was afraid of love. Plenty of people are, when it comes right down to it. Maybe he just got tired and wanted a new plaything. You know how the rich are. Whatever the reason, he cut her off completely. We’ve got the transcripts of her debriefing, but there was nothing in there as far as I could tell. Then she met the son, Miles. He was off on some building project in Israel, trying to prove to daddy just how independent he was. Grace found a way to get herself on the project. Like father like son, I suppose. They became lovers, but unlike Devere senior, junior was completely infatuated. He kept trying to impress our girl with how much he knew about the old man’s dirty secrets. Needless to say, as far as these things go, it was really rather useful.”
“Quite,” Sir Charles said.
“She went with him when he started Devere Holdings, and for a number of years she was party to the ins and outs of every deal they struck. She began to notice anomalies in the corporate accounts, not just hiding pennies from the tax man, you understand, but some rather large offshore deposits. There were meetings. At first she assumed it was the usual corporate espionage kind of thing, but Grace was nothing if not thorough. Turns out Miles Devere wasn’t just mixed up with some bad people, he was the bad person others were mixed up with, if you catch my meaning. His money brought a lot of pain to the world. Everywhere daddy’s corporations spread war, junior came in their wake, snapping up contracts to rebuild the infrastructure, the buildings and the schools. He liked to open the school himself, great photo opportunities for the benevolent capitalist and all that. No mention of all that blood on his hands, of course. That didn’t make for good copy.”
Sir Charles nodded. He was getting a picture of Devere now, and an understanding of how it all hinged together. Some aspects still didn’t make sense, not completely, but as ever it seemed that money, money, money- and the things in life that money could buy-were at the root of it all. Wasn’t that always the way?
“The last time Grace checked in, and it was quite some time ago, more than a year in fact, she left a rather enigmatic message for her handler. She had found patient zero. You’re aware of patient zero-that first disease carrier who walks around, blissfully infecting others, without ever exhibiting symptoms of the sickness himself? Grace had found him, in Berlin it seems, if that is where this sad story of hers finally played itself out. Poor girl. I don’t mind saying I was really rather fond of her. She played the game as well as any of us old boys ever used to. She was prettier too, if that was your sort of thing.”
The old man had a very good idea who patient zero was in this c Grey Metzger. How he linked Devere, war profiteering and clean-up with the Akim Caspi impostor, who may or may not be Mabus the terror-master, he wasn’t sure, but he would find out. There was something, one last piece of the puzzle to drop into place. He would find it.
It’s what he did.
He found things out.
“Are we finished here, then? Because as much as I am enjoying our little reunion I can think of a lot prettier faces I’d like to be looking at, no offense.”
“She didn’t die well,” the old man said. “I thought you ought to know. It wasn’t clean, but even at the last she was professional enough to get a message out. We found all of her journals. Everything she had dug up, the entire paper trail. My boy is going through it right now.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“I have my suspicions.”
“Now who’s being coy. You’ve had my tit, you owe me your tat. Who killed her, Charles? Who killed my brilliant little girl?”
“One of two men: an Israeli who calls himself Mabus or Miles Devere.”
Quentin nodded. “Will you promise this old man something, Charles?”
The old man raised an eyebrow. “I would say it rather depends on what it is you want me to promise, my friend.”
“When you know which one it is, don’t wait for justice to take its course. Kill them for me. No one kills one of my people and lives to tell the tale. I’m old fashioned like that.”
20
Jude Lethe stared at the screen. The video clip had gone viral. In a matter of hours from its first being posted on the net to when he’d found it just now, some three million people had seen it.
The picture wasn’t good. It was the usual kind of fuzzy, grainy image with poor-quality lighting and terrible audio distortion. It didn’t matter. The content was hypnotic. Hypnotic in the same way as a car wreck where the paramedics are loading up the body-board as you drive slowly past. You can’t help but look, even though you know what you are seeing is someone else’s tragedy.
He watched again, trying to be sure, but it was so difficult because of the poor resolution and bad light. He knew in his gut though. Just knew. On the small screen a man in black walked backward and forward, ranting every so often at the camera. Behind him slumped a woman in chains, her head down, hands trussed up over her head. Her body was sliced with red welts where she had been whipped and beaten. She didn’t look up once. The masked man pulled a blade and held it up to the camera. Lethe couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it had that fanatic’s rising pitch that sent a shiver, bone by bone, down his back. Normally Orla would have interpreted the madman’s rant for them. Nothing about this was normal.
The dagger man paced back and forth.
Lethe studied the blade in his hand. It was old, that much was obvious. It wasn’t Damascene, but it was quite similar.
The dagger man walked up to the chained woman and drove a fist into her stomach. She barely reacted. Off screen someone laughed. It was the single most chilling sound Jude Lethe had ever heard. The man took a sheet of paper from his pocket and walked toward the camera. He read what Lethe assumed was a list of demands, then walked back across to where the woman hung. Someone off camera moved the light source, casting an eerily bright glare across the woman’s tortured body. She looked wretched. Her body was covered in bruises, and her bones stood out like an anorexic’s against her wax skin.
He ran the blade from her temple, down her cheek and neck all the way down to her hip, drawing the thinnest line of blood that welled in the cut. He tangled his hand in her hair and yanked her head back, forcing her to stare at the camera. He spat another outburst of bile at the screen. Lethe didn’t understand a word of it. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what was going to happen next.
The man took the blade, leaned in close and cut her throat.
He couldn’t watch.
Equally, he couldn’t look away.
The man didn’t stop cutting until he was through the windpipe and the blood was streaming down his hands. Then, holding her head up, he finished the job with a thicker machete-like blade, cleaving through the bone. Her body still hung there, suspended by the chains. The masked man picked the woman’s head up from the floor and showed her face to the camera.
He paraded his trophy back and forth, with more ranting in whatever language it was. This wasn’t the part that had stunned Lethe. It was the last ten seconds before the camera died, as the picture roved wildly around the makeshift dungeon.
He froze the stream.
In the shadows, barely recognizable for the beating she had taken, he saw another woman chained to the wall. He pushed the image on, frame by frame, until she looked up. For a single frame she stared straight at the camera.
Orla.
He called up to the old man and told him. For a moment there was only silence. Then the old man said, “Are you sure it was her?”
