The Deadly Game (2 page)

As Jake walked along the narrow corridor, panelled with dark oak, the wood adorned with old paintings showing an England long past, hunting scenes, countryside celebrations, his sense of dread was replaced with one of anger. Yes, he knew that Gareth was going to look at him and sigh with that tone of unhappy resignation Gareth did so well, and then proceed to tear him to shreds with his caustic, sarcastic language, which was not a happy experience. But what right did Gareth have? thought Jake indignantly. Jake hadn’t been doing anything wrong. Well, not on the face of it. Even if Gareth suspected that Jake was trying to pass on some information to Lauren about the books, there was no proof. Not this time, anyway. And Gareth had had a nerve to shut down the Skype connection between him and Lauren. Well, Jake would have something to say about that!

Jake arrived at the door to Gareth’s office, knocked, and went in to be met by Gareth’s assistant, Janet.

‘He’s ready for you,’ said Janet, and she ushered Jake smartly over to an inner office. Gareth was sitting behind his huge desk, empty except for a few papers, on which he was scribbling some annotations. He looked up as Jake arrived, and the inner door closed behind Janet.

Gareth gave an unhappy sigh.

‘What are we going to do with you, Jake?’ he asked in a tone that showed his deep disappointment.

Jake said nothing, just waited for the dressing-down he knew was coming, and got ready to bark back.

‘I thought we had an agreement,’ continued Gareth. ‘That you and Ms Graham would forget about the secret library of Malichea.’

‘No,’ Jake corrected him. ‘Our agreement was that we wouldn’t
search
for any more of the books.’

Gareth regarded Jake with his standard bland expression, but Jake could see the steel in his eyes, and now that same icy hardness entered Gareth’s voice as he said flatly: ‘Don’t mess with me, Jake. We could have put your girlfriend on trial for murder, but we didn’t, because we wanted to give both of you a chance at a fresh start.’

‘Her in New Zealand and me over here, and not allowed to meet, is hardly how I would describe a fresh start.’

‘Separately, Jake. It has to be separately,’ said Gareth. ‘We both know why.’

‘Yes, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me, anyway.’

‘To remind you.’ Now it was Gareth’s turn to do the correcting. ‘Apart, on opposite sides of the planet, you’re not a danger. When you get together, insane ideas seem to take on some kind of reality for you both.’

‘All we wanted to do was put the library into the public domain. Let the people know about the texts. What they contain. How they can help people.’

Gareth shook his head, wearing his more-in-sadness-than-in-anger expression again.

‘They won’t help people, Jake. Not the kind of people you’re talking about. The only people who will benefit are gangsters, warmongers, terrorists, patents lawyers.’ He shook his head sorrowfully again. ‘I thought you’d accepted that. But obviously, you haven’t.’

‘You shut down our Skype call yesterday,’ said Jake, doing his best to control his anger.

Gareth shook his head.

‘An automatic safeguard in the system shut it down,’ he said. ‘Obviously, we then got an alert to tell us what had happened, and a playback of your conversation.’

‘We didn’t mention the word Malichea,’ said Jake. ‘Or anything about the books.’

Gareth looked down at a print-out on his desk. Looking at it upside down, Jake saw that it appeared to be a script. He assumed it was the transcript of his and Lauren’s Skype call.

‘You said: “I went for a stroll at a place called Firle Beacon”,’ read Gareth.

‘Well, I did,’ said Jake, annoyed. ‘So what? That’s what you do when you talk to friends, you tell them what you’ve been up to. Things you’ve done. Interesting places you’ve been. I thought it might cheer Lauren up, remind her of England.’

Gareth didn’t bother to look up. He took a sheet of paper from a small pile at one side of his desk, and read aloud: ‘Firle Beacon, West Firle, East Sussex. Said to be the burial place of a giant.’ He looked up at Jake. ‘In other words, one of the list of places that is said to be sacred, cursed or haunted. According to your very own Ms Graham, the very place that one of the Malichea texts might have been hidden.’

‘I wasn’t looking for any of the books,’ defended Jake. He was lying, of course. And he could tell that Gareth knew it.

‘Jake, I would have thought you would have been aware of it by now, the number of times you have been cut off when talking to Ms Graham; but in case you haven’t yet worked it out: in addition to the security system being programmed with the name Malichea, and every other possible permutation that may be used to describe either the Order of Malichea, or the library, or the abbots or monks of the Order, it also contains every place in the British Isles that fits with the definition of sacred, cursed or haunted. It is also programmed with the list of the author and name of every suspected title believed to have been hidden by the Order. Any of those words can trigger the cut-off of any Skype conversation, email, or phone call, and a report will then be automatically generated and delivered to me.’ He looked Jake directly in the eyes. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Jake?’

Yes, thought Jake. If you even think we might be talking about the secret library, we’ll get cut off. And as he and Lauren had discovered that their letters were also being opened and read, and censored, the powers-that-be were making absolutely sure that Jake and Lauren would never again be able to even hint at mentioning the forbidden books.

‘Pierce Randall are still looking for the books,’ blurted out Jake.

Pierce Randall, the powerful international legal firm, with a client list that included dictators, organised crime around the globe, as well as governments and multinational companies.

Gareth hesitated, then he nodded slightly. ‘We are dealing with Pierce Randall,’ he said. ‘They know the rules of the game. At this moment, you are the wild card, the unstable element. I hope I don’t need to remind you that unstable elements cannot be tolerated in an orderly world.’

In other words, stop or we’ll kill you. You and Lauren, thought Jake in horror as he decoded Gareth’s outwardly bland words. It would be done in an untraceable manner. An unfortunate and tragic accident.

‘Do I make myself clear?’ asked Gareth.

Jake hesitated, then he nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Gareth’s happy smile returned to his face.

‘Good,’ he purred. ‘Then we have an understanding?’

‘Yes.’ Jake nodded again.

Chapter 3

Jake caught the bus home. It was crowded and slower than the tube, but after his experience a few months ago, when a would-be assassin had almost succeeded in pushing him under a tube train, he felt safer. He still didn’t know who had been behind that attempt on his life. He suspected Gareth’s secret service people, but it didn’t make sense. Not now, now that Gareth knew about Jake’s interests in the secret library, and Jake knew about Gareth being the person responsible for keeping the books hidden and the truth about them hushed up.

He thought about Lauren, far away in New Zealand, exiled. Never able to return. Unless he could find a way to force the government to change their mind. And there was only one way to get them to do that, and that was to get the whole business of the Order of Malichea and the books out into the public arena. End the secrecy. Once it was out in the open, they wouldn’t have the same hold over Lauren. OK, there was the murder charge. But Jake still felt that was a bluff. For one thing, it wasn’t murder, Lauren had killed Parsons in self-defence. For another, if they prosecuted her, it would bring out a lot of stuff they’d prefer to keep hidden: like the secret experiments at the government research laboratory from where Jake and Lauren had taken the one book he’d seen.

Jake thought about contacting Pierce Randall, offering to work with them. They had at least one of the old books; Alex Munro, the chief executive at Pierce Randall had told Jake so himself. But Jake also knew that Pierce Randall weren’t interested in finding the books for ‘the common good’, as Munro had claimed. The international law firm wanted the books for their clients for the money they would make, for the power they would bring: to be able to hold governments and companies to ransom, to destroy and remake national economics, to use the scientific information as weapons.

No, Pierce Randall would be the wrong direction. They wouldn’t help him gain Lauren’s freedom.

The bus pulled up at his stop in Finsbury Park, and he walked to the small block of flats where he lived. As he walked, he cast glances around, looking for anyone suspicious, anyone who might be keeping a watch on him. It had become a habit of his, ever since he had become involved with the Order of Malichea.

I have to stop worrying, he told himself. Gareth and his men know about me. They’re keeping watch on me. Pierce Randall aren’t interested in me if I don’t have one of the books. No one’s after me. I’m safe.

But he didn’t feel it. Sometimes, he thought he’d never feel safe again. That was another reason to get the whole business of the Order of Malichea and the hidden library out into the open. No one would touch him or Lauren once it was out there.

He opened the door of his flat, picked up the mail from the doormat, walked into his kitchen, and stopped dead. A large envelope was lying on his kitchen table. He knew it hadn’t been there when he’d left. Someone had been in his flat and put it there. They hadn’t broken in, the lock on his front door was undamaged. He looked at the windows. All of them were shut, and locked, exactly as he’d left them. And no one had keys to his flat except him.

He approached the table warily. The envelope looked bulky. It had his name, Jake Wells, printed on it.

Warning bells sounded in his brain. His mind went back to the site in Bedfordshire, when he’d seen that digger driver dig up one of the books, open it, and then the man’s whole body had been consumed by a mass of writhing vegetation within seconds. Was there something like that in this envelope? Some booby trap, waiting for him to open it, and fall victim? Jake wondered if he should plunge the envelope into a sink full of water as a safety precaution, just in case. But then he reflected that whatever was inside the envelope might be more dangerous when it came into contact with water.

Of course, he could always throw the envelope away, unopened. But someone had deliberately come into his flat and placed it carefully there for him. And he reasoned, if they wanted to kill him, there were plenty of easier and more straightforward ways to do it.

This was to do with the hidden Malichea books, that was obvious. And any piece of information he could get about them could be a step nearer to freeing Lauren.

Jake picked up the envelope carefully. Whatever was inside it was light. And soft. Nothing hard-edged or rigid. Not metallic. So, hopefully, not a bomb.

Jake opened the flap. It wasn’t sealed. Cautiously, he peered into the envelope. There was something thin and dark in there. He upended the envelope, and an object dropped out on to the table. He recognised it straight away: old darkened leather, still soft, dull but with a strange sheen to it where it had been made waterproof. It was the cover of a book, with its pages removed. On its flat surface was the embossed symbol of the Order of Malichea, a capital letter M with a snake coiled through it. And carved into the leather, the Roman numerals CXXI. 121.

It was a protective cover from one of the hidden books, hundreds of years old. And it was book number 121. It was identical in style and material to the book that Jake and Lauren had rescued from the research centre at Hadley Park. That book had been number 367.

Why send me just the cover? thought Jake. Straight away, he knew his question was idiotic. The information in the books was what was valuable. So where was the book? And what was it about?

Jake looked again into the envelope, and saw there was a piece of paper inside. He took it out. On it were typed the words:
Suggest we meet.

Yes, please, thought Jake. This could be exactly what he needed to get Lauren back to England: one of the books. Proof of the existence of the library.

The sound of his doorbell ringing startled him. He wondered who it could be, he didn’t get many callers. Then it struck him that his caller could be the person who’d delivered the cover to him. If so, why didn’t they just walk in, like they had before? Perhaps they wanted to play it carefully, not frighten him by just appearing inside his flat unannounced.

The doorbell rang again. Whoever it was, was impatient.

‘Coming!’ called Jake.

He hurried to the front door, and looked through the spyhole on to the landing. A figure in a courier’s yellow top and wearing a crash helmet was standing there, holding a small parcel. Could this be the book itself?

Jake unlocked the door and opened it. As he did so, he was aware of another figure out of the corner of his eye, this one appearing from by the wall of the landing. Then something was sprayed into his eyes. He let out a yell and stumbled back, groping for the door to slam it shut, but before he could do so, they were on him. Strong arms wrapped themselves around him, pinioning his arms to his sides, and then a pad was pressed over his mouth and nose. A sickly smell filled his nose. Chloroform . . . !