Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (2 page)

I was thinking of a plump, tasty BLT and also of the plump, tasty new barista at Caffè Buono. Krystyna, her name badge said. From Poland, to judge by the spelling and her accent. Farm-girl pretty and very friendly. Flirtatious, even. It was never likely that I would ask her out, she being at least fifteen years younger than me, but seeing her brightened my day and I chose to think that seeing me brightened hers. If it didn’t, she did a very creditable job of pretending it did.

I moseyed along, a million miles from where I was, and all the while the jet black Range Rover was stealing ever closer to me, homing in from behind, a shark shadowing its prey.

I was coming to the end of my latest commission – another reason I was so preoccupied. I was on the final straight of eight months’ solid work. Five pages left to go on a four-issue miniseries. Full pencils and inks, from a script by Mark Millar. I liked collaborating with Millar; he gave the bare minimum of art direction. Usually he offered a thumbnail description of the content of each panel, with a caption or two to fit in somewhere, along with an invitation to “knock yourself out” or “make this the best fucking picture you’ve ever drawn.” So few restrictions. Happy to let the artist be the artist and do what an artist was paid to do. I was fine with that.

But it had been a long haul. I was slow. Had a reputation for it. A stickler; meticulous. Notoriously so. Every page, every panel, every single line had to be exactly right. That was Zak Zap’s unique selling point. You only got top-quality, ultra-refined product, and if you had to wait for it, tough titties. I’d been known to tear up a completed page rather than submit it, simply because a couple of brushstrokes weren’t precisely as I’d envisaged they’d be, or the overall composition was a fraction off. Just rip that sheet of Bristol board in half and bin it. Three days’ effort, wasted. And I’d rage and fume and yell at the cat, and then maybe neck down a few beers, and then next morning I’d plonk my backside down in front of my drawing desk and start all over again.

Stupid, but that’s how I was.

It was why Francesca left me.

Not the tantrums or the fits of creative pique. She could handle those. Laugh them off.

It was the pressure I put on myself. The sense of never being good enough which constantly dogged me. The striving for unrealisable goals. The quest to be better than my best.

“It’s not noble to be a perfectionist, Zak,” Francesca told me as she packed her bag. “It’s a kind of self-loathing.”

I was within spitting distance of the coffee place, just passing the Louisiana Chicken Shack, when the Range Rover drew alongside and braked.

The doors were already open before the car came to a complete stop.

Men in suits bundled out.

I glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye. They were Hugo-Boss-clad barrels in motion. My first thought was that they must be bodyguards for some movie star. Someone famous, over in the UK from Hollywood to promote the release of his latest action-fest, had had a sudden hankering for southern fried chicken, and his security detail were forming a cordon so that he could go in and buy a bucketful. Will Smith, maybe. Bruce Willis. The Rock. One of those guys.

And then I thought,
In Crouch End?
This wasn’t even the fashionable end of Crouch End. This was the crouchy end of Crouch End. And no movie star in his right mind, however hungry, would want to sample the battered scrag ends of battery hen they served at the Louisiana Chicken Shack.

And then the nearest of the men in suits grabbed hold of me. And then another of them did too, clamping a hand around my elbow and whispering in my ear, “Don’t shout. Don’t struggle. Act natural, like this is nothing out of the ordinary. Otherwise you’ll regret it.”

Then, loudly so that passersby would hear, he said, “All right, sweetheart. That’s enough now. You’ve had your fun, but it’s time to go back to the Priory. Your management is paying all that money for your rehab. They don’t want it wasted.”

With that, they dragged me towards the Range Rover – literally
dragged
, my heels scraping the kerbstones. I was helpless, inert, a flummoxed idiot, no idea what was going on. Even if I hadn’t been warned to act natural, I’d have been too dumbfounded to resist or protest.

It happened so fast. Just a handful of seconds, and suddenly I was in the back seat of the Range Rover, squashed between two of the suited goons, and the car was pulling out into the traffic, and I wasn’t going to have that BLT or that cappuccino today and I wasn’t going to cheer up Krystyna with a smile and she wasn’t going to cheer me up either.

2. KNUCKLEDUSTER RING,

HILLBILLY MOUSTACHE AND FRIENDS

T
HERE ARE MOMENTS
in your life when you do what you have to, simply because you’re too scared to do anything else.

I was no Jedi knight, no master of kung fu. I hadn’t been in a fight since secondary school, and that was more of a pathetic bitch-slap contest than anything, and besides, I lost. Now I was in a car with four blokes, each of whom weighed twice as much as me, each of whom had a shaven head and no-bullshit mirrored sunglasses and seam-straining muscles and looked as though he could snap my neck just by breathing hard on me.

Compliance was the only logical course of action. I wasn’t going to karate chop my way out of this predicament. I didn’t have super powers like the characters in the comics I drew for a living. No eye beam to blast a hole through the car roof. No webbing to truss up my kidnappers. No frigging Batarang. I was stuck, a victim, panic-stricken, hyperventilating, only human.

They could kill me, these men. Were they going to kill me? Who were they? What did they want with me?

We had driven perhaps half a mile before I finally found some gumption and piped up. “Piped” was the word; my voice sounded like a piccolo.

“You must have the wrong man,” I said. “I haven’t done anything. I’m nobody.”

“You Zachary Bramwell?” said the goon on my immediate left, who wore a gold sovereign ring so large it could easily double as a knuckleduster.

It didn’t really seem to be a question, which was why I said, “Yes.”

“Then we’ve got the right man. By the way, you got a phone on you?”

“No.”

“I’m going to check anyway.” Knuckleduster Ring ransacked my pockets, finding nothing but lint and loose change. “Left it at home, eh?”

I had. I nodded.

“Good. No need to confiscate it, then. Now shut your trap.”

I shut my trap, but after another mile I couldn’t keep it shut any longer. My anxiety wouldn’t let me.

“What was all that stuff about ‘the Priory’ and my ‘management’?”

“What do you think? To make it look like we were staging an intervention.”

“Oh. But you
are
sure you’ve got the right Zachary Bramwell, not a different one? Same name but, you know, minus the substance addiction issues?”

“Hundred per cent.”

“So where are you taking me? Who do you work for? Are you cops? The government?”

Knuckleduster Ring smiled. The goon on my right, who had the type of drooping moustache favoured by bikers and hillbillies, smirked. The guy driving the car actually laughed, like I’d cracked a joke.

“Nah,” said Knuckleduster Ring. “They pay shit.”

“Private contractors, you could call us,” said Hillbilly Moustache. “Available to the highest bidder.”

“Well, who is that, then?” I said. “Who in God’s name has it in for me so badly that they’ve hired you to snatch me off a London street in broad daylight?”

“Christ, this fucker talks a lot,” said the fourth goon, who was the spitting image of Knuckleduster Ring and could only have been his identical twin brother. “Can’t I give him a crack upside the head? I don’t want to listen to him jabber all the way.”

“Unharmed, intact,” said the driver, who I reckoned was the boss of the outfit. He had a diamond inset into one of his upper incisors. “That’s the brief. But,” he added, “maybe you should think about quietening down, Mr Bramwell. My boys have a pretty low threshold of tolerance for nonsense, if you know what I’m saying. Here, I’ve got an idea. How about some nice soothing music? Help us all chillax.”

Diamond Tooth switched on the radio, tuned it to Classic FM, and there we were, tootling along the North Circular, me and this quartet of brick-shithouse abductors, listening to a sequence of plinky-plonk sonatas,
¹
with comments from the nerdy posh announcer spliced in between. At one point Knuckleduster Ring’s twin brother raised his hand off his knee and started stroking patterns in the air as though conducting an orchestra. It was ridiculous, and I might have thought it funny if I hadn’t been trying so hard not to soil my pants.

We drove for an hour, leaving London behind. We headed northbound up the M1, turning off somewhere before Milton Keynes and then wiggling around in the Buckinghamshire countryside on A-roads and B-roads until I was thoroughly disorientated and couldn’t have found my way back to civilisation even with a map.

In my head Diamond Tooth’s words – “Unharmed, intact” – rang like a church bell, offering solace and hope. Whoever my kidnappers’ employer was, he didn’t want me hurt. There was at least that.

Or could it be that he didn’t want me hurt until he himself got his hands on me? I was the pair of box-fresh sneakers that no one else could touch and that only his feet could sully.

I racked my brains, thinking of people I’d pissed off during the nearly forty years of my life so far. It wasn’t exactly a short list. I’d aggrieved more than a few editors in the comics biz with my propensity for handing in work at the very last minute, or else blowing the deadline completely. I’d hacked off my previous landlord but one with my complaints about mice droppings in the kitchen and mould on the bathroom walls, but those were legitimate gripes and he had no right to be upset with me for pestering him about things he was duty-bound to fix. I’d left behind a trail of women who to a greater or lesser degree found me lacking in the attentive boyfriend department, up to and including Francesca, who had stuck it out with me the longest but had ultimately come to the same conclusion as the rest: that I wasn’t worth the time, trouble and effort. And then there was that financial advisor at the bank who I’d lost my rag with, just because he told me I wasn’t in a “reliable occupation with regular income” and therefore didn’t deserve to be offered a more preferential mortgage rate. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have swept his pot of ballpoint pens onto the floor of his cubicle and told him to stick his flexible variable rates up his backside. It was petty and childish of me. I should have done the mature, manly thing and thumped the tosser.

All these people and others had cause to dislike Zak Bramwell. They might well wish to curse me under their breath and think ill of me during the long watches of a sleepless night.

But hate me so much as to have me brought to them so that they could inflict prolonged and nefarious revenge upon my person at their leisure? And at great expense, too?

I didn’t think so.

Who, then? Who the hell was I being taken to meet?

I couldn’t for the life of me rustle up an answer.

Finally the Range Rover arrived somewhere. And by “somewhere” I mean the middle of nowhere.

To be precise: a disused, dilapidated aerodrome that had once served as a US airbase during World War 2 and subsequently the Cold War, and was now a collection of grass-covered hangars, mouldering Quonset huts, and sad, sagging outbuildings.

An air traffic control tower with smashed-out windows overlooked a shattered concrete runway criss-crossed by strips of weed.

And on the runway stood the most extraordinary vehicle I had ever seen.

¹
Vivaldi? Haydn? One of those guys.