The sound of sporadic gunfire rattled around the amphitheatre as Harker slammed his shoulder into Vlad’s sternum, sending them both tumbling backwards onto the stage’s floor with a hefty thud. Behind them, scores of uniformed men in full black assault gear slid down the helicopter tethers and formed a circle around the landing area as, over at the ground exits, a tide of the Magi’s island guards began to pour inside. It was organized chaos, and except for the arriving force’s plain black face masks, it was near impossible to tell one side from the other.
Harker pulled himself to his feet and rushed at Vlad, slamming his full weight against the man’s shoulder, but it barely made an impression and he was thrown backwards, with the wind knocked out of him. He rolled onto his front then rose up on all fours, waiting for the momentary paralysis in his lungs to pass, as Vlad now lurched forward and kicked him in the ribs and flipped him onto his back. Out of the corner of his eye, Harker could see Wilcox being rushed by one of the guards to the rear of the stage, who then propelled him behind the heavy red drapes with such force that the old man was nearly toppled from his chair.
The dark tint of unconsciousness began to cloud Harker’s vision as finally his lungs began to work properly again, giving him a massive head rush. He nevertheless sprang up into a sitting position and sucked in a deep breath, his ribs aching, just in time to receive a punch across the cheek which sent him back onto the floor.
Vlad grasped him tightly around the throat and began to press down with his full weight. ‘If it’s over for me, then it’s over for you too,’ he spat, manoeuvring his knees on top of Harker’s arms to prevent him from fighting back. ‘I should never have allowed our Lord to involve you in our affairs, but I will at least have the opportunity now to rectify that mistake.’
The flashes of gunfire down on the amphitheatre floor began to intensify and, although Harker could see yet more soldiers dropping from the stealth helicopter, none of them had noticed him – because if they had, surely someone would have shot the man attempting to strangle him. The Magi home team was obviously putting up one hell of a fight, drawing all the newcomers’ attention, and as Harker watched the helicopter glide away, only to be replaced by a new one which began to drop off more soldiers, he realized he was going to die no matter how many troops arrived. There was no way now they would reach him in time, and he began to feel himself slipping away.
For the second time in just as many minutes, Harker’s vision began to fade as unconsciousness beckoned him. But with his last remaining strength he twisted his head towards Chloe, still hanging from a crucifix and staring back at him. She nodded to him, then looked over at something else, then right back at him. As Harker’s whole body began to tingle while Vlad constricted his throat with yet more force, he gazed up at the killer and then, as his eyes began to glaze, he caught the blurry image of something close, something white. Then an arm swished down and connected with Vlad’s head, and his grip loosened and he fell to the floor beside him.
The release of pressure on his throat caused Harker to momentarily black out as blood rushed back into his brain. When his vision returned, he could discern only the shapes of two glistening crosses.
Sebastien Brulet knelt over Harker with a relieved smile and let drop the thick Illuminismo volume from his hands, before he grabbed the hunting knife from Vlad’s belt sheath and plunged it deep into the back of the killer’s neck. ‘Choke on that, you sick bastard,’ he managed to utter over the buzzing rotors, as the helicopter dropped off the last of the troops. He stared down at Harker and his eyes widened. ‘Alex?’
With that the Grand Master collapsed on top of Harker, who, still choking after his attempted strangulation, grabbed onto the man and stopped him from rolling onto the ground. ‘Nice to see you too,’ Harker yelled over all the commotion, and he glanced over at the amphitheatre floor, where he saw Tristan Brulet staring towards him with his mouth hanging open. Surrounded by masked soldiers, he was oblivious to the bullets zipping past him. As his protection unit continued firing back at the considerable number of Magi guards who had now taken up position on the steps surrounding the arena, the younger Brulet pulled himself up onto the stage and dashed over towards the pair of them.
‘Oh my God,’ he huffed, as some of his soldiers followed him before crowding around the three of them protectively. ‘You’re alive.’
Sebastian made no response, and his eyes twitched as his brother pulled him upwards and, in a commanding tone, shouted to the nearest soldier. ‘Get him to safety, now!’
The soldier nodded and, with help from three others, made a shield around him and carried him off one side of the stage and out of sight as, deeper in the amphitheatre, the battle raged on.
‘You’re not going to kill me, are you?’ Harker asked, having to raise his voice over the all the noise.
‘I never was going to kill you,’ Brulet replied. ‘How the hell did Sebastian get here?’
With everything going on around them and Wilcox making a run for it, Harker had little time to explain anything now. ‘I’ll tell you everything – but we don’t have time now. I need you to protect my friends.’ He pointed over to Chloe and Carter and, without hesitation, Brulet issued orders to one of his men, who in turn began organizing the remaining five members of Tristan Brulet’s protection unit. Splitting into two squadrons of three, they split and approached the two crosses. In no time Carter was cut down, followed quickly by Chloe, but as they were dragged off the stage and away to safety elsewhere on the island she struggled against the three men in a bid to get back and join Harker.
He gestured emphatically for her to get out of there, and reluctantly she stopped resisting her escort and, with a final look of concern, she disappeared around one side of the stage.
‘Thank you,’ Harker shouted while rubbing his sore neck. ‘Now I’m going after Wilcox.’ He motioned towards the rear of the stage.
OK,’ Brulet replied without need of encouragement, and then pulled a Beretta from a concealed holster and placed it into Harker’s open palm. ‘Do you know how to use this?’ he asked, and Harker nodded. ‘Good,’ Brulet said and extended one hand so his arm-sword clicked into place. ‘Then let’s bring this matter to a close, shall we?’
Leaving the ongoing conflict in the amphitheatre behind them, and with Harker in the lead, they pushed past the red drapes to find nothing but a stone wall. The only way forward appeared to be a flight of steps heading downwards, like the entrance to a wine cellar.
‘Let’s take this slowly,’ Brulet cautioned and, with a nod from Harker, they began to descend.
Overhead light fixtures lit the way, and as they went deeper, the air grew stale. At the bottom they were confronted by a thick metal door that had been left wide open.
‘Not very secure leaving it open,’ Brulet remarked, tapping the metal surface with his sword.
‘Forget the door, Tristan. I want to know how Wilcox got himself down all these stairs in a wheelchair so quickly.’
The two men exchanged mystified glances and then, with Brulet taking the lead, they headed through the open doorway.
The room they entered was one of the most unwelcoming and uncomfortable sights imaginable. It looked like a prison, as a series of cells were spread out in a grid formation, with pathways running in between them so as to surround each cell on all sides. Stranger still, the cells had no bars but were instead made up of thick Perspex boxes, around eight foot by eight, with a single letterbox-sized opening covered by a grille with a padlock on it. The Perspex was frosted, meaning it was impossible to see inside, and these cube-shaped cells stretched as far as the eye could see.
‘What on earth?’ Brulet muttered, approaching the nearest cube and then walking all around it. ‘No door… Someone doesn’t want anyone looking in.’
‘No,’ Harker corrected, ‘someone doesn’t want anyone looking out.’
At one side of the room a monitor flared up and Harker moved over to check it out. The touch screen displayed a graphic image of forty square boxes, and with an encouraging nod from Brulet, he tapped the first in line, labelled H1. The frosted glass of the cube nearest to them suddenly became clear, revealing an empty interior.
‘Whatever was once in there is long gone,’ Brulet observed, taking Harker’s place and tapping each box icon in turn as, one by one, the cubes in front of him began to clear. By the time the last cell had been triggered they had a clear view all the way to the other side of the room and towards an open doorway leading off into another part of the facility.
‘It’s like someone’s own personal zoo,’ Brulet suggested, ‘minus the animals and with little or no care for their well-being.’
‘It’s not a zoo, but a lab,’ Harker stated, and he returned his attention to the touch screen and to the three icons that had appeared next to each of the boxes. These consisted of a water droplet, a lightning symbol and, finally, a fire sign. He pushed at the droplet icon and water began to spray down inside the nearest box. ‘A warning?’ Harker queried, then he pressed the lightning icon, whereupon the crackling of an electric current began to emanate from inside the cube. ‘A punishment?’
By this point Harker already knew what the last button would do but he pressed it anyway and the entire interior of the cube was consumed by a hot fireball which, although it looked hot enough to melt steel, did not blacken the Perspex walls one bit. ‘Game over.’
‘God almighty,’ Tristan gasped out loud as Harker directed his attention to the ‘H’ labelled inside each box.
‘Human 1, Human 2 and so on,’ Harker explained in disgust. ‘Wilcox said they did human testing, and he wasn’t lying.’
Neither of them spoke a word as the gravity of it sank in, then Harker headed along the nearest path in the direction of the doorway on the other side of the room.
Brulet followed close behind. ‘Test on humans, for what?’
‘You know I told you about those two priests coming back to life?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well it seems the Magi have been synthesizing a compound that regenerates dead tissue and that’s how they were able to achieve it,’ Harker revealed as they reached the open doorway. ‘So I would guess that the lab rats used in those experiments were kept here.’
There was little time for Brulet to respond for, as they reached the doorway, they suddenly saw the very man they had been looking for.
At the end of a long dark corridor, Wilcox sat in his wheelchair in front of a control panel covered in buttons and monitors. With a light-hearted wave he called out to them. ‘It seems I have nowhere left to run, doesn’t it?’
Both Harker and Brulet paused to survey the corridor as best they could, and once satisfied it was built out of solid rock, they ventured along it. It was probably a foolish thing to do because Harker knew full well that Wilcox would never in a million years give up in the face of his most reviled foes. But he was done caring by now and they would just have to deal with anything as and when it happened. Tristan Brulet had been right when he had shouted out from the helicopter ‘It ends here’, because he was damn right, either way.
‘Well, we know how you managed to get down all those steps.’ Harker motioned to the red-faced wheelchair assistant who was standing in a corner, still catching his breath.
The young man did not appear to have any kind of weapon, but nevertheless Brulet raised his arm-sword towards him and silently shook his head in warning.
‘Oh, don’t mind Albert here. He is but a lowly servant to my needs.’ Wilcox raised both arms upwards. ‘Welcome to my church.’
‘More like a slaughterhouse,’ Harker replied venomously, and Wilcox gave a shake of his head and tutted loudly.
‘You couldn’t be further from the truth, Alex. This is a modern form of Genesis, but a Garden of Eden for anyone with sufficient vision. Just see for yourself.’
Wilcox pressed one of the many buttons on his control panel and, through a viewing window, a large excavated cave was illuminated by overhead lightning. For Harker the sight before him was just another damming indictment of Wilcox’s moral depravity and he couldn’t help but feel an urge to shoot the old man in the back there and then. Close to a hundred rectangular boxes were stacked high upon thick metal girders, like storage containers waiting to be shipped out from a supply dock. Their fronts had been cut away and replaced with sealed Perspex windows, so that the interior of each was always visible. But it was not the boxes themselves that were the cause for concern but the sorry-looking individuals housed inside them. Each ‘hutch’ contained an uncomfortable-looking metal bed with a single pillow, and water and food tubes ran into a single trough secured to the wall. Separate air pipe nozzles were connected at the front of each hutch and, from what Harker could judge, they were all independent of each other.
‘Each living space is hermetically sealed and self-contained,’ Wilcox informed them proudly, ‘which ensures accurate and viable testing for every experiment conducted.’
The patients were a mixture of men and women of different ages, and they shielded their eyes from the sudden light with most not even bothering to stand up or even pay attention to the small group of men now studying them through the viewing window opposite. The only consolation, and there was precious little, was that Harker could see no children amongst them.
‘We used to go down the human-trafficking route, but we will soon breed our own. I feel it’s so much more humane that way. Otherwise it’s like taking zoo animals from the wild…it’s just not humane, is it?’
‘You sick piece of sh—’
‘Careful,’ Wilcox warned, holding his finger above a red button with a fire symbol on it, ‘or I will not hesitate to torch everyone inside there.’
At that moment Harker could have sworn blindly, reasoned for humanity’s sake and finally resorted to pleading, but he knew it would not have made the slightest difference. ‘What do you want, Wilcox?’
‘Not a lot really,’ he replied in a cavalier manner. ‘I just want you and the cross-eyed wonder here to die horribly.’
With his free hand he pressed another of the buttons, whereupon halogen bulbs flared up revealing two frosted rectangular cells, bigger than the others, and running the entire length and either side of the corridor they had just walked down. ‘This whole facility is an engineering marvel, you know. It’s fully equipped with the mechanism to move each of the containers down there into any cube we wish, which means the patients are completely isolated from the moment they arrive to when their usefulness comes to an end.’
‘Don’t like to get your hands dirty, John?’ Brulet suggested, wincing in disgust at the set-up.
‘Not at all,’ Wilcox replied, as he pressed another button so that the sides of the two corridor cells now became clear. ‘Would you want to handle these things?’
Inside each container a hulking beast spun around and began to eye their audience with aggressive curiosity. As Wilcox chuckled to himself, Brulet looked mortified but Harker hardly flinched. He had seen these creatures before, deep in the basement of the Governorate in Vatican City.
‘Consider these beasts the prototypes for that cardinal wretch,’ Wilcox said smugly, ‘except this time you’re both going to enjoy a little one-on-one time with them. What do you say…you game for it?’
At that moment the whole room began to shake as an explosion went off outside, undoubtedly part of the battle raging in the amphitheatre above.
‘Even if we die, the Magi are finished,’ Brulet stated categorically, still pointing his arm-sword in the direction of Wilcox’s wheelchair attendant, whom he addressed as Mr Reed. ‘The Templars must outnumber your men three to one, so it’s over whatever happens.’
Wilcox looked unperturbed by this prospect. ‘On that we can both agree, but there is one other thing you don’t know.’
‘Like what?’ Harker said with a scowl.
‘Like, that just down there is a corridor leading to a small helicopter pad,’ Wilcox explained, pointing to the only other door in the room. ‘And after you make your ultimate sacrifice, I will use it to take off to pastures new.’ He pointed to a rectangular steel box at the feet of Mr Reed. ‘In that case is all the regeneration compound I will ever need, and a disc containing the fruits of our work on this project.’ Wilcox began to laugh like a man without any cares. ‘With a half a trillion pounds at my disposal, I’m sure I can live comfortably for the rest of my life and restart on the research to cure my withering body, wouldn’t you say? As for you two morons, you only have to offer yourself up to these fine specimens and then, with me gone, your men will be able to free those poor, desperate test subjects… What do you say? Sound like a fair deal?’
Harker glanced over at Brulet and then towards the nearest ‘demon’, who was licking his forked tongue against the glass, leaving a slimy trail down its surface.
Sensing some resistance, Wilcox continued pushing for an agreement. ‘Come on, Alex, you always wanted to be a hero and…well, now’s your chance. Just think, you two could go down in Templar history as the men who saved a hundred wretched souls from being burnt alive. I can think of worse epitaphs.’
Both men stared at each other for a second and then, with a weary nod, Harker turned back to Wilcox, looking like a beaten man. ‘OK, John, you win,’ he said, as Brulet lowered the sword to his waist. ‘I’ll go first.’
‘Good,’ Wilcox said. ‘It’s the right thing to do, for honourable men like yourselves.’
Harker nodded solemnly, then he turned to Brulet and reached over slowly to hug the man tightly.
‘Very touching, it really is,’ Wilcox commented sarcastically. ‘I might even shed a tear.’
Brulet wrapped his arms around Harker and then began to lower his arm-sword further. But the moment it was level, and with lightning speed, he thrust forward and sliced into Wilcox’s forearm with the tip of its blade. At the same time Harker grabbed the old man’s chair and flung him away from the work desk, as Brulet now retracted the bloody tip, turned it on Mr Reed and drove it right through his chest.
The younger man began to shake as Brulet pinned him to the wall. With one final gurgling breath, he became motionless and, as the sword was withdrawn, he crumpled to the floor.
Wilcox was screaming as he nursed his injured arm, and Brulet grabbed him by both shoulders and spun him around on his wheels so he was facing him. ‘I told you it ends now, and I am a man of my word.’
Without any hindrance from Harker, Brulet wheeled the old man all the way down to the far end of the corridor before stopping at the sliding door leading into one side of the left-hand transparent cell. He then glanced over at Harker, who was already at the monitor and searching for the right button. The door controls were simple. It was like a turnstile: slide it open, person enters, slide it shut and you are inside the cube.
Harker pressed the appropriate button and the door slid open. Even as he did so, the hulking beast, dripping what could only be described as slime, began to get noticeably excited. It was evidently not the first time this creature had been given someone to play with.
Brulet shoved the wheelchair into the turnstile as Wilcox began to beg for his life. ‘Please don’t do this…it’s not your way… I beg you. We can make a deal.’
But his pleas fell upon deaf ears. For as Harker stared at Wilcox, who was crying like a baby, he did not feel a thing. After all the pain and hurt this man had caused to so many men, women and children, it was difficult to feel one iota of empathy for an individual who would destroy every human being on the planet if he had the chance. I mean, would you really consider killing the Devil himself murder?
‘I once said to you, John, something that still holds true today,’ Harker declared as he pressed the door button, then made his way back up to Brulet while the turnstile began to rotate slowly. ‘I’ve met some evil bastards in my time but you…you’re special.’
Harker and Brulet continued heading out of the corridor even as Wilcox’s screams turned into shrieks, and the sounds of a body being slammed against the cell’s walls reverberated past them. ‘We’ll make sure all’s clear outside, then we’ll come back and liberate everyone on this island. Give them back the life they deserve.’
‘Agreed,’ Harker said emphatically, and they continued towards the exit as meanwhile the screams of John Wilcox began to subside. ‘And half a trillion pounds should go a long way to buying them some comfort.’