‘It’s impossible. I saw you die,’ Harker protested, struggling against Vlad’s arm-sword which had once again been swiftly pressed against his throat. ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’
‘Yes, you did,’ Wilcox replied with apparent disdain at the mention of his demise, ‘but I am not the only one you have seen resurrected recently, am I?’
With thoughts of the two decomposing priests he had encountered, Harker shook his head soberly. ‘No, but they looked a lot better than you do.’
His sarcastic quip was met with pressure from Vlad’s blade, but Wilcox looked neither bothered nor angry.
‘Being brought back to life is not without its consequences, sadly, but given the miraculous nature of such a thing, it is a price worth paying. Please, Vlad, take off his cuffs. I don’t think Alex is going to make any fuss. Not unless he wants his friends here killed on the spot.’
Vlad fiddled with the cuffs and, after releasing him, threw them over to one side of the stage and stepped back from Harker, who began rubbing his wrists and stretching his aching shoulders.
‘By “miraculous”, you mean your judgement by…the Devil.’ Harker struggled to say the word and was met with a blank stare from Wilcox.
‘Please, Alex, you didn’t really think that cock-and-bull story had any basis in reality, did you?’
‘With everything I’ve seen so far, I’m not sure what to believe.’
‘Well, how delightful,’ Wilcox replied. ‘What one will believe, when out of the loop, as it were, never ceases to amaze me, so allow me the pleasure of enlightening your feeble little mind.’
Now that Harker knew it really was John Wilcox underneath all that dead skin and wrinkles, he could see that, although his appearance had been terribly altered, the man’s narcissistic character had not changed one bit. He was just as much a self-serving, megalomaniac pain in the arse as he had always been.
‘Now I want to tell you a story and I want to enjoy it, even if the first part is something I would be happy to forget.’ Wilcox’s tongue made a clicking sound and he let out a wheezy sigh. ‘Let us start at the beginning or, to be accurate, the end…of my life.’ The leader of the Magi shuffled in his chair and, once comfortable, he raised his hands like a conductor about to begin a performance. ‘When your albino freak of a friend, Sebastien Brulet, dishonourably stabbed me in the throat with my own blade.’ Wilcox glared down at Brulet’s sprawled out, motionless body. Noticing that Harker was already taking a step towards his old friend, Vlad moved in between them and waved a finger menacingly.
‘Don’t worry, he’s fine,’ Wilcox scoffed. ‘Believe me, he’s been through worse, but I will get to that. Now where was I… Ah yes, my unfortunate death. My memory is a little bit fuzzy after that, but I do remember the highly unpleasant sensation of choking on my own blood, before everything went black.’
For the first time Harker detected a sliver of humanity in Wilcox as his eyes dulled in contemplation of that event, and he almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
‘At the time I didn’t think about what might come next,’ Wilcox continued, now regaining his composure. ‘I was far too busy dying, but what I can tell you is that I remember nothing more until I saw a distant white light, which came closer and closer, and then – wham! – I was staring into the face of Vlad here, with my wounds all healed but my body decrepit.’
Wilcox seemed to drift off into a daze, as though the simple recalling of such a terrible personal experience was consuming him. So it was Vlad who now dutifully spoke up.
‘You and your Templar zealots thought they had destroyed all of the Magi, right there and then in the destruction of our base at Macuira National Park. But, as always, your greatest weakness is your optimism. Not all the houses of the Magi were present that day. There was another, the most powerful one. My own house. La casa degli assassini.’
‘The house of assassins,’ Harker murmured through taut lips. Brulet had once mentioned them as among the most fearless and dangerous of all those who composed the Magi and, as he stared in to Vlad’s soulless black eyes, he believed it.
‘Yes. As the first line of the Magi defence, we were the last to arrive at Macuira, and only once everyone else had arrived safely. Unfortunately, by the time we did arrive by helicopters, the whole mountain had been brought down, and all those heroic troops gathered from all nations were nothing but a blip on the horizon.’
Vlad paused a moment to look over at Wilcox, who was staring into his lap with a glazed expression. ‘That’s when we retrieved the body of our Lord, took as many others as we could carry, and stole away into the sunset.’
Vlad was clearly hamming the story up, and in doing so revealed that both he and Wilcox shared a certain tendency for the dramatic, but to Harker it still seemed like a highly unlikely scenario. ‘How could you have managed that? The whole mountain collapsed in on itself. Everyone was crushed, and during the clean-up there were very few bodies intact to even recover.’
Vlad raised his hand and gave Harker a good slap across the back of the head. ‘You idiot, do you honestly think the Magi would go through all that time and effort of building a subterranean city without putting in suitable exits? The whole place had a number of escape routes in place and, although many died when the whole thing went down, some of them made it out.’
Vlad leant closer to Harker, with his arm-sword still extended and hanging at his side. ‘You yourself and Dr Stanton managed to escape, didn’t you?’
With all the destruction the Magi’s HAARP weather project had caused to their base, Harker had not even considered that anyone might have survived and, given there were emergency services and the Venezuelan military on site within the hour, it seemed unlikely. But clearly not impossible, and Wilcox was proof of that. ‘OK, then how about Sebastian? The last time I saw him he was engaged in a fight to the death with one of your henchmen, McCray, and the whole place was collapsing around him.’
The mention of Brulet woke Wilcox from his daze and he leapt back into the conversation. ‘Yes, Sebastien Brulet, he is one tough bastard, I will give him that. He killed Captain McCray and then, while fleeing to find another way out, he came upon some of my subordinates dragging my lifeless body towards an exit route. He was one of the last to make it out as the mountain crumbled inwards. He even helped carry my body, as he tells it.’
Harker looked down at the man mentioned, still lying on his front and barely moving, and it stung him to think that while he and Chloe had been helicoptered to safety, Brulet had been fighting desperately for his life.
‘That bastard took down three of my men before we managed to subdue him, and later on he even managed to escape during our stopover in the UK.’ Vlad administered a sudden hard kick to Brulet’s thigh, which was greeted by nothing more than a moan. ‘But he was never completely out of our sight. Do you know he made a dash to join two of his friends and their baby boy in some hick country village – thinking it a good place to lie low I suppose – but we tracked him there and had him transferred back to this island in no time.’
This mention of a family living in a country village had Harker worried, and he had to suppress a rising sense of panic. Had Brulet’s first instinct been to check on the safety of the Christ child, and his adopted parents, before all else? Not wanting to draw any attention to them, Harker had made very few visits , but if something had happened there, he would have been among the first to know. ‘What did you do to them?’
‘You mean the family?’ Vlad replied, curious as to why Harker should care. ‘Nothing, as there was no need to invite any unwanted attention, and besides we had bigger problems at the time. Why, do they mean something?’
Harker immediately shook his head. ‘No, it just sounds strange, given he was trying to escape you.’
Vlad thought about it and then, with a smile, he cocked his head. ‘Maybe we will pay them a visit after all. I don’t like leaving any loose ends.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Wilcox now said dismissively, ‘but he has already paid the price and, of course, he has so much more punishment to come.’
Harker had never seen Brulet half-naked before but the scar tissue that disfigured the Grand Master’s body did not look well healed. Whatever Wilcox had been inflicting on Brulet, it was unquestionably an ongoing process.
‘What have you done to him?’ Harker demanded, this being the first time he was able to address the sad state of his friend.
‘Nothing that he did not richly deserve.’ Wilcox’s smile disappeared and his crusty lips curled up in disgust. ‘I told you how the Devil resided in this capsule, and I did not lie. For Sebastien Brulet was and is my personal devil, Satan incarnate, and he is paying the price – call it penance, retribution or simple bloody revenge.’ Wilcox scowled at Harker with such intense loathing that one of his eyes began to twitch. ‘Your friend Mr Brulet has been demoted from the position of Templar Grand Master to my plaything, and how we have played. I keep him drugged and unconscious most of the time, but when I feel like it, we wake him up occasionally and have some fun. Cutting, electro-therapy, anything that’s painful really. We even had a spell of waterboarding, but he dealt with that far too well, I’m afraid, so we went back to the previous techniques. Don’t worry, apart from that he is kept in tip-top medical shape. I can’t have my favourite entertainment toy ruined. His screams of pain do so warm my heart.’
Harker gazed down at Brulet’s still body with a great sadness in his heart. Six solid months of torture! He could not even begin to imagine it.
‘Anyway, enough of that, Alex, for you and your friends will experience for yourselves all his woes soon enough,’ Wilcox continued with a chuckle. ‘So, there I was, surrounded by the remnants of my precious Magi, my plans in ruin, our networks almost obliterated – contacts, companies and funds seized by either the authorities or the good old Templars, I still don’t know which. We were so desperate at the time that we had to enter the world of crime just to keep ourselves going. I can’t take the credit for that myself because Vlad had most of the contacts there, but we actually made a lot of money. You would not believe how easy it is to take over crime syndicates if you have properly trained men, no one knowing who you are, and get in and out as quickly as possible. Long-term crime may last for the organization, but rarely for the individual.’
Vlad smiled grimly. ‘My house was never averse to a spot of crime here and there. In fact it’s what we were trained to do…as well as kill on behalf of the Magi, of course.’
The last admission had Wilcox smiling proudly at his men’s ingenuity, but he now gestured for silence. ‘Either way, after the debacle of Macuira National Park, we appeared finished, with barely the manpower or resources to chase any real ambition. And I myself was trapped in this ragged and useless body you see before you.’ His hands began to clench with anger, but then they relaxed and he placed them on his lap and gently stroked the tartan blanket laid across his lap. ‘But I was alive still and not without purpose, because you see, Alex, there was one thing you never did understand and neither did the Templars, and it is that we never put all our eggs in one basket. We had one final card to play, one more trick up our sleeve, and it has proven in such a short time to be the most potent of all… Belief.’
Harker was now frowning because, as he had discovered time and time again, getting a straight answer out of Wilcox was near impossible. The man was like some medieval storyteller who went from village to village, spinning a tale and drawing it out in the hope of getting a meal in payment. A raconteur of the very worst kind…an annoying one.
‘Belief has the power to make men do things they never would have dreamt of, good and bad alike, but the most useful part is that it can be manipulated and moulded to another’s will.’
He raised his hand and limply pointed it in the direction of the line of fallen bodies lying collapsed on top of one another. ‘Hundreds of years ago when science was still in its infancy and the world still offered the lure of exploration and fresh knowledge, these families were brought together by a single common purpose… Money. They bestowed upon themselves the name of the enlightened ones, bloody corny, if you ask me, but then power and money weren’t and never will be a substitute for taste. Many in this “club” were born from such groups as freemasons, merchants and bankers, all of them bonded together by wealth. The archaic practices of paganism and the dark arts were still seen by them as valid tools in a world that, although modernizing rapidly, still held many unknowns. In their minds the concept of Shangri-La and the fountain of youth were very real possibilities and, over time, this combined with a shunning of the usual dogmatic catholic practices of the time and instead veered towards the darker side of human nature. Elements of Satanism and witchcraft became incorporated and, over the generations, intertwined with their beliefs so that they considered themselves special above all others. They embraced many ideas that were deemed an offense to practices of the norm, and in doing so they came to believe that they truly were in name and by nature the enlightened ones. They were the holders of truth while everyone else was plain wrong. They were special. Was it simply human vanity or just their increasing wealth that reinforced this belief that they were all-knowing, and above everyone else? It is debatable, indeed, but in truth it was mixture of the two. It is curious yet understandable that people who are born into wealth and positions of power sometimes believe that their very existence is somehow a divine right, theirs a destiny that mere mortals can never hope to attain.’
Winters sucked up a pool of saliva from inside his mouth and spat it in the direction of the bodies. ‘Idiots, the lot of them, but useful nonetheless. The Magi crossed paths with this enlightened group many times over the centuries, and friendships were forged, trust gained, because people of such huge financial resources should never be overlooked, and you never know what the future will bring. To be fair, they never held any real interest for the Magi…that is until six months ago, when our own family was brought to ruin.’
Wilcox shot Harker a dirty look and then, with his hands clasped, he began to smile. ‘I became extremely interested in them after that. You see, the enlightened ones’ original mandate to discover a cure for death was over the years added to by successive generations. Its original members had pooled their resources and scoured the world for anything that might aid them in this endeavour. There are tales of the expeditions they financed to search for the fountain of youth amongst other quests, interesting stories of exploration and courage, but ultimately proving useless. That is until they heard of the Codex Gigas and the mystery pertaining to the missing pages – pages that many believed were written by the Devil himself, and contained knowledge of how to achieve everlasting life. And so the obsession began. Funded by the group, paid agents tracked and searched for any information as to the pages’ scattered locations. And, as generations passed and another piece of the jigsaw was found, it was delegated to the next generation to continue the search. I like to think of it as a sort of Chinese whispers that, although beginning with a rational idea, then becomes distorted over time and culminates in something far different from what was originally articulated. It’s a shame really, because I doubt that their forefathers’ – Wilcox motioned towards the robed corpses – ‘would even have recognized the pathetic bunch of sycophantic Satan-lovers their great-grandchildren had become. Rich heirs and heiresses saddled and indoctrinated with a belief that the Dark Lord would rise up again and make them immortal, simply because they or their bloodlines were special above all others. They were easily manipulated, though, and that’s what I liked about them.’
The laborious history lesson that Wilcox was delivering, although a fascinating insight into how dogma could corrupt over time, was beginning to prove frustrating to Harker and he let out an agitated sigh. ‘John, with respect, what has this got to do with any of the supernatural tragedies I’ve witnessed?’
‘Shut up and show some respect, Alex,’ Wilcox scowled, ‘and you can call me Jacob or Mr Winters from now on. John Wilcox is no more, and only I remain.’
‘John, Jacob…Barry! Whatever. What the hell has this got to do with me and my friends?’
Without direction from Wilcox, Vlad stepped over and landed a solid punch to Harker’s ribs. ‘Listen and learn, you idiot. Don’t make me cut you.’
Harker’s pained groan had Wilcox smiling and, without any further berating, and clearly satisfied the blow had done its job, he continued with his account. ‘When I told you back at Macuira National Park that I was happy to live out my life underground so as to ensure my children saw the new world we had created, you didn’t really believe me, did you? Do you honestly think we would go to all the trouble, time and effort of creating and perfecting HAARP, a weather machine with the ability to reshape the world, with me at its head, without my being able to experience and enjoy it for myself?’
Wilcox began to laugh but he soon succumbed to a bout of coughing, and as the old man struggled to gain control of his lungs, Harker looked on in fascination. Fascination not because it completely made sense that Wilcox was so self-serving, but rather that Harker had never questioned it in the first place. John Wilcox was a narcissistic psychopath with zero empathy, and the idea of him giving his life for a greater cause just didn’t make sense. It was bloody obvious.
‘You idiot,’ Wilcox rasped as he regained his composure. ‘The whole point was so I could be there, so that I would be the one to harness the shackles of what was left of humanity and guide it towards the world it should now become… My world.’
Vlad suddenly began to look irritated but, on seeing Harker notice his change of expression, the man quickly returned to his previous impassive look as Wilcox explained further.
‘You actually believed that it was our ability to clone Christ which motivated us to set into motion our plan, didn’t you? Would it surprise you to learn that procedure was one of the first things we perfected, followed by the technology of HAARP? For we would not have even contemplated beginning on such a path without first developing the most important cog of all.’
Wilcox waved a hand and Vlad reached into his pocket and produced a thin tube containing a milky-looking substance, which he proudly held up before Harker.
‘Life,’ Winters declared pompously as Vlad placed the vial into his waiting hands. ‘Regeneration, to be more accurate. A biological substance that not only repairs but regenerates the tissues, the organs at the cellular level.’
Harker stood dumbfounded and just stared at the white liquid as Wilcox shook it in delight.
‘I once told you, Alex, how we spent tens of billions on cloning development, but only a fraction of it went to that particular project. The vast bulk of it went to this.’
‘How…? I mean the reality of such a thing must be decades away, if not longer,’ Harker uttered in disbelief, now entertaining the idea that this was yet another smoke-and-mirrors trick that the Magi so loved to pull.
‘Ahead of its time, yes, but impossible, no. Don’t misunderstand me, for the technology and research that went into this was triple, even quadruple, the annual GDP of some countries, but I can assure you it is as genuine a compound as anything you or I are made up of.’
Wilcox passed the small vial back to Vlad and then, by his own effort, wheeled himself closer to Harker. ‘I am and always have been a believer in the impossible being made possible and, although I freely admit the research and development behind this stuff is staggering, it must be placed in context. Decades ago, the Magi formed a plan to infiltrate as many pharmaceutical and medical research and development institutions as possible. All over the world we targeted companies with an interest in the biological nature of things, and we have since financed and used our resources to overcome any political and judicial issues along the way, but we never sought to control them. As shareholders we have made huge profits from these ventures, but the political branch of the Magi has been extremely successful in getting our own men onto the boards of these companies. Once this was achieved, we set up our own research and development company…off the books of course, and based in countries with little or no interest in anything else but cash. And then we siphoned off whatever data we needed. We had the time, the research data, the professionals and a lot of money all focused towards a single goal – the one you see in that vial. We also had something that put us decades and decades beyond any other legitimate company or pharmaceutical institution on the planet. Namely a resource without which we could never have managed such a feat.’
Harker groaned because he knew where this was leading even as Wilcox explained further. ‘Do you know how the Nazis were able to make such gigantic leaps forward in medicines, drugs and anything else they cared to research? Human testing. They had at their disposal thousands of people – millions had they wanted them – on whom to test anything they wished. There were no test trials undertaken on lower-form animals, or moral standards committees to tell them what they could and could not do. No, they just did it, and whether it took a hundred patients or a thousand, it didn’t matter. They could do whatever it took to achieve their scientific goals and they did so. It’s one of the reasons their work was so sought after by the Allies at the end of World War II. Their advances were literally decades ahead.’
Wilcox wore a grizzled look of severity as he nodded his head slowly. ‘We aimed towards one single goal without any of the constraints the outside world would normally impose on such a scientific venture, and because of that we succeeded in achieving the impossible.’
Harker was still marvelling over the possibilities of this designed compound– as well as sickened at the methods of attaining it – because what the Magi had created was nothing short of a miracle…the miracle. In all of human history there has been a single dream that has been pursued, wished and prayed for at one time or another by every soul to ever grace the planet’s surface – the one of everlasting life – and now this little vial held the hopes and dreams of billions. And it was in the hands of a total psychopath with empathy for just one person and one person only… Himself.
‘Do you know the motto of the SAS, Alex?’ Wilcox continued.
Harker was transfixed by the small vial still being held in Vlad’s hand but he managed a nod. ‘Who dares, wins.’
‘Exactly, he who dares, wins. And the Magi dared and the Magi won, but unfortunately the research in its current form only allows for a certain amount of regeneration. Take that compound within twenty-four hours and there is a good chance the body will heal perfectly, but when you allow for decomposition, then the results are…well, mixed. I myself did not receive the treatment for over thirty-six hours and as you can see its effects were…limited.’
Harker’s nerves were tingling as he began to understand, in part, all the things he had witnessed over the past few days. ‘So the priests back at the cemetery were too far gone to make a full recovery, then?’
‘Not at all. Their appearance was just as we intended.’
‘And the cardinal locked in the basement of the Vatican?’
‘Ah, now that was more of an atonement. It had no other purpose really.’
‘Atonement,’ Harker gasped, still confused.
‘That man almost cost me the papacy back when I was seeking to be elected as pontiff. Jumped-up little shit never trusted me, and therefore tried everything he could to stop me. It only seemed fitting that he was changed into the very thing that must have horrified him to the core: a demon, a servant of the Devil. And with a tinkering of our compound, it worked extremely well. I only wish he could have known it was me who arranged it, but we cannot have it all, can we?’
Everything Harker was hearing made little or no sense as yet apart from that crazy plan for revenge, which was classic Wilcox, but why would anyone spend billions of dollars and precious remaining resources on a simple revenge scheme? ‘So you’re saying that all this time and effort was just a way of getting back at somebody? Christ, Wilcox, why not just have the man killed? And the others…? And why even bother dragging me into all this?’
Harker’s questions elicited an annoyed grunt from Vlad, who was now staring angrily at Wilcox.
‘God, Alex, you sound just like Vlad here. Why cause complications? Why take the chance?’ Wilcox snarled and once more turned his attention to the bloodied corpses. ‘They were but a means to an end. You and those pious Templar idiots brought the Magi to its knees. It pains me to say that but it is true. When I reawoke in this husk of a body, we as an organization had nothing. The money was confiscated, and with it our power, influence and any chance that we would survive. Can you imagine the Magi going from strength to strength for over two thousand years only to be obliterated in little more than the blink of an eye? Preposterous. I could never let that happen, so what was there to do? Well, you work with what you have and, aside from this island as the Magi’s final place of refuge, a smattering of connections and Vlad’s band of assassins, which have proved crucial by the way, we only had this – our regeneration treatment. But how to use it?’
Wilcox raised his eyebrows and another devious smile crept across his face as he motioned to the dead bodies one final time. ‘That is where they came in, a chance to prey upon their idiotic notions of Satanic worship and the Devil’s dark gift of everlasting life. I knew of their obsession with the lost Codex pages, and their group had even managed to obtain one of them – which, I might add, was neither useful nor written by the Devil. Isn’t that so, Vlad?’
‘It was useless and written by the same piddling Benedictine monk who wrote the damn thing in the first place,’ Vlad explained with a sarcastic snort. ‘Something about the inner workings of their monastery, but the group believed it contained some hidden message, which of course it didn’t.’
‘You had some fun acquiring that one, didn’t you?’ Wilcox said enthusiastically as Vlad gave a smirk. ‘You managed to convince him to burn out his eyes with a hot poker, and all in the name of Satan and the need for a show of faith. Brilliant. He’s a very persuasive soul when he wants to be. The other pages, we forged. That text you heard Vlad reading was made up.’ He again glanced over at Vlad. ‘He can barely speak English, let alone the words from some ancient undecipherable text. But they believed it, and so all we had to do was convince them that their belief in the Codex, and everything that came with it, was genuine.’
‘The sacrifice at Spreepark,’ Harker spoke up, as the ritual he had witnessed at the abandoned amusement park now made sense.
‘Yes, although I will admit I had not expected you to cause such trouble when I sent you there.’ Wilcox gave a solemn nod towards Vlad. ‘You were right about that one, for which I apologize. Still, we were able to snatch the resurrected man from outside the morgue, and those dead clods over there were in awe at his rebirth.’ He now gave a chuckle. ‘I even managed to spin them a line that you were after the pages because of your own desire to be immortal, which explanation they bought hook line and sinker. Now the priests in the cemetery involved nothing personal, but I needed our friends to believe that, although the Codex could bring them back from the dead, it would only bring back those deemed worthy, and so their bodies were left to decompose for a while before we administered the regenerative treatment. It needs some hours to take effect, which was more than enough time to get them buried before the show began. When you turned up, it only cemented the group’s concern that others were after the gift that they considered was by destiny rightfully theirs. It’s always the same when making a pitch – sell the sizzle and not the sausage. When a buyer sees others are interested, it only serves to encourage them further, and your antics made them even more determined than before.’
Harker rubbed at his temples, feeling sickened by the heartless way Wilcox treated everyone else as a mere resource, and was completely uncaring about the degradation and pain he caused. ‘OK, John, I get it. This has been one long con job, but why?’
‘Because, my slow-witted friend, something of the magnitude of what we were offering would be a valuable thing to some. Some might even give everything they owned to gain such a prize…the prize of fulfilling the hopes and dreams of their ancestors. And those dead idiots there signed away half of their net worth earlier today in exchange for what they most seek…everlasting life.’
‘They don’t look very alive to me,’ Harker remarked.
‘Don’t knock it, Alex. They went to their deaths believing they would wake up to a new world and serving the master they all loved so much. That’s not a bad way to go, really.’
‘And how about that woman who changed her mind?’ Harker replied, referring to the one Carlu had cut down after she expressed second thoughts.
‘Well, you can’t please everyone, can you? Besides, nineteen out of twenty isn’t bad in my book.’
To Harker, Wilcox had proved himself again and again to be a psychopath of the highest order, therefore he should not have been surprised at the callous tone on display, but he could only be astounded at the complete lack of a soul in the man, or even the merest ounce of decency. ‘So this was all about a simple robbery?’ Harker exclaimed, shaking his head at such a mundane motive. He had never felt fully convinced that the Devil was going to put in an appearance, but between bodies rising from their graves and cardinals turning into demonic monsters, he had been tugged back and forth in his mind about what was possible and what was not.
‘A simple robbery!’ Wilcox looked disgusted at the description. ‘Because of you, the Magi have been left flat broke and with nothing. If you know another way to make half a trillion pounds in assets and shares, then by all means speak up.’ Wilcox looked affronted, and he began to breathe as heavily as his weak lungs would allow. ‘The money we have acquired will allow the Magi to regain their power. We will become a force to be reckoned with once more, but this time, with your help, we will do it unimpeded. Vlad, would you fetch it out please?’
The other man disappeared behind the red drapes and returned, a few moments later, carrying a thick leather book which he placed in Wilcox’s lap. The weight of it elicited a wince of pain but he maintained a satisfied smile as he opened it and began to read.
‘Here is inscribed the name of every Templar which we will now liquidate, and we have you to thank for that. You see, I told you, Vlad, that getting Alex involved was a good idea. We never could have acquired this without him.’
As Vlad made a conciliatory bow, Wilcox began tapping his finger against the page. ‘I’ve only had enough time to flick through these Templar curios since there are so many volumes, but did you realize the name Harker comes up quite a lot?’
Tristan Brulet had once mentioned how he had been mentioned in the Illuminismo, and at the time he had taken some pride in that, but now it sounded more like a damning indictment of his failure to protect everything the Templars held dear. More like a death note than a footnote. ‘Yes, I do know.’
‘Really?’ Wilcox continued. Licking his lips, he looked up with a searching expression. ‘I didn’t know your name was Liam.’
‘Liam?’
‘Yes, Liam Harker. He appears a lot in the more recent records.’
Harker looked dumbfounded, and Wilcox was clearly delighted to be making the revelation. ‘Your father?’
Harker was momentarily at a loss for words and the insinuation had him feeling light-headed. ‘My father was indeed Liam Harker, yes. But he wasn’t a Templar.’
‘Well, that’s not how this book tells it,’ Wilcox replied, and he licked his finger and turned the page. ‘Your father appears to have played quite a role.’
Harker’s mind was buzzing. His father had worked for most of his life in a chicken factory, for Christ’s sake, and had lost his life in an IRA bombing back in Belfast. His father, a Templar?’
‘Brulet never told you that, did he?’ Wilcox laughed maniacally and slapped his palm down on the open page of the Illuminismo. ‘Oh, this is too much. What a delicious betrayal of trust.’
Harker’s shoulders sagged and he stood there in stunned silence as Wilcox looked down at Brulet’s limp body and pointed his finger at him. ‘You lying little devil, Sebastian. Perhaps we have more in common than I could ever have believed.’
Vlad now joined in the laughter and their condescending mirth incensed Harker as his shock quickly turned to anger. Was that why Brulet had always appeared so giving and open with him regarding the Templars? And why he had been allowed access to so many secrets that it would have taken decades for most to learn? Was he actually a Templar by birth?
‘I knew there must be a reason I always hated you so much,’ Wilcox continued, his frail body still quivering in delight at having unearthed such a personal truth. ‘It’s genetic, in the genes, so we were enemies from the start, and we didn’t even know it…priceless. I wonder who killed him, then? It wasn’t the Magi, but if it had been, well, what a turn-up for the books that would have been!’
Harker’s head was brimming with questions, but for all he knew, this was just a psychological game that Wilcox wanted to torture him with, so with great difficulty he pushed it to the back of his mind. In all the madness of Wilcox’s master plan to essentially mug a bunch of rich people, Harker focused now on the only question that had been eating at him since his arrival here. As Wilcox flicked through the pages of the Templars’ highly treasured Illuminismo, he sought to address that. ‘You still haven’t answered my question, John. Why drag me and my friends into all this?’
‘I understand, Alex, that this must be a big shock to you, and I am happy to move on for the time being. We have all the time in the world still to discuss your family issues.’ He continued scanning through the book, page by page, then he stopped, looked up and his eyes turned steely and cold. ‘Simple, Alex, it’s because I hate you more than any other person I have ever met, and so I wanted you to suffer like I myself have suffered. You are now hated by all those you care about. The police are after you, which would be a worry enough, but must seem trivial given that you have apparently betrayed your Templar allies, who will track you down – and I suspect would have killed you had you not made it to this island. Imagine that: death at the hands of your own family! Your girlfriend and, of course, Mr Carter will suffer greatly at the hands of my men before they die, and at the end they will wish they had never met you. You, like your good friend Mr Brulet here, will suffer unimaginable pain and degradation till eventually you beg me to have you killed. I will additionally have that old fart Dean Thomas Lercher murdered in some terrible way that has not even occurred to me yet.’ Wilcox hissed at him through brown clenched teeth. ‘By the time it’s all over you will wish you had never been born and, within the annals of Magi history, your name will become synonymous with the pain that is inflicted upon those who would cross us.’
The words sapped Harker of his strength and his body wilted. Vlad raised his arm-sword and rested the tip up against Harker’s throat. ‘We’re going to get to know each other very well during the coming weeks and months,’ Vlad said with a snarl. ‘And I must say that I am very curious to see how long it will take to break you.’
He began to nudge the blade harder, until Harker felt the tip break the skin, then the pressure was released. Vlad suddenly pulled back and stared over Harker’s shoulder, scanning the amphitheatre as his face became ashen. ‘What is that?’
In the distance what looked like a star flickered in the night sky, and it was quickly joined by others which spread out in a line high up in the air. Each of the lights started to wobble from left to right and, with every second that passed, they grew in size as they drew closer. A low-level humming could now be heard, getting ever louder as the lights grew brighter, then a single beam of shone directly onto the stage, where Harker raised his hand to protect his eyes from the intense glare.
Vlad snatched the Motorola walkie-talkie from his belt clip and began shouting into it as a tremendous downwash of air blew dust from the amphitheatre floor up onto the stage, which left Wilcox wrapping his arms around his face protectively.
‘All units, breach detected, converge on the amphitheatre now.’
The noise was now deafening and reached a climax as two Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk stealth helicopters hovered overhead. The doors slid open and black nylon tethers dropped to the ground, like dangling vines, as a voice crackled out from above.
‘John Wilcox,’ the voice boomed and, through the slits between his fingers pressed against his eyes, Harker caught the sight of Tristan Brulet leaning out of one helicopter with a handset pressed to his mouth. ‘It ends here.’