The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (43 page)

Inside a walk-in closet Grey found a rack of silk robes, boxes of candles, and entire shelves full of massage oils and sex toys. A curtain next to the closet concealed a marble bathroom with a wall-length mirror, a walk-in shower, a giant bathtub with multiple jets, and a cabinet full of syringes and pharmaceuticals.

Grey went through another curtain leading to a bookshelf-lined study. The bookshelves were spilling over with books on magic and the occult, with an entire bookshelf devoted to manuals on sexual practices, both ancient and modern. A tapestry on one of the walls depicted a tree with roots growing out of a pile of rotting corpses, vultures perched on the branches and feeding on the bodies.

On a desk in the center of the room was a laptop docking station. The absence of the computer confirmed Grey’s suspicion: Darius had already set in motion whatever he had planned for tomorrow night.

Grey searched the desk and took a stack of folders, full of receipts and papers. Another door led to a modest kitchen, and then Grey stopped in front of a black wooden door that gave him an uneasy feeling.

The door was unlocked. Grey eased it open.

A giant urn filled the center of the stone-walled square room, tongues of flame flicking upward from the mouth of the urn. From his research and his conversation with Dastur Zaveri, Grey knew this was the
atashkadeh
, the fire temple, representative to Zoroastrians of purification and marked by a ceaseless flame tended by the priests. He also knew that dry sandalwood was most
often used to fuel the sacred fire, but from the greasy smell of animal fat emanating from the urn, and the piles of knobby bones stacked along one of the walls, Grey made a wild guess that, to the followers of Ahriman, this fire represented something besides purification.

On the far wall, an enormous glass aquarium swarmed with snakes, spiders, and a variety of insects. Grey knew Zoroastrians considered crawling, slithering creatures abhorrent. This room was an abomination, a perversion of a fire temple.

He had found his priest of Ahriman.

Grey was no sociologist, but he was pretty sure the Order of New Enlightenment’s starry-eyed worshippers might be put off by the drugs, sex, and black magic lurking on the top floor. How many other inner sanctums, Grey wondered, looked similar to this? Who knew what lay underneath the veils, inside the holy-of-holies, behind the proverbial and sometimes all-too-real curtains?

Grey left the room and swept the entire sixth floor, searching for hidden doors, safes, anything that might contain more information on tomorrow night. Finding nothing else, he stood in the middle of the room with the six throne-like chairs, staring at the skylight, shivering from the pain in his thigh.

If there was something that revealed Darius’s hand, it was either long gone or buried among the folders Grey was holding. It was time to get the hell out of Crazytown.

He returned to the elevator and descended to the basement, planning to return to the guard station, trip a few alarms, and walk right out the front door, on the pretense of securing the perimeter. He’d have to do his best to mask his limp, but if he could get to the gate before anyone stopped him, he might have a chance. The bigger issue was escaping the neighborhood, as he had the feeling it was teeming with Satanists.

Grey could call the police with the guard’s phone, but he still couldn’t risk getting tied up in procedure, and he wasn’t giving up those folders. Instead, he called information and found a taxi service, instructing the driver to meet him at an intersection two blocks away from Bar 666.

As he started down the hallway to the guard station, the door to the guard room burst open and a group of men brandishing guns spilled out. Grey cursed and scrambled backwards. They must have caught him on the monitor as soon as he left the service elevator.

Grey pulled his gun and shot the first man in the chest, causing mass confusion. They should have expected him to have the guard’s weapon. He moved in a backwards crouch as he fired, trying to keep them unbalanced long enough to cover the ten feet to the elevator. He shot at least three more, but before he reached the elevator a bullet clipped his side, just below his injured rib.

He lurched inside, slamming and locking the door. No way he could last another round. He heard shouting and running, and he didn’t waste any time. There was only one button left to press, and he did so furiously.

T
he heat was intense, the sense of isolation more so. The world stilled as Viktor climbed, his sense of time winding down and then ceasing altogether. By the time he had climbed a fourth of the way up the mountain, he felt as if he were moving in a bubble of shimmering heat and pain, sweat pouring down his body, every muscle throbbing, his mind screaming at him to do the sensible thing and stop.

Halfway up, Viktor rested in the limp shade of a desiccated pine. He gulped water from the canteen, forcing himself to save enough for the return. When he had regained his wind he rose and peered across the basin, to where he had left the guide.

No sign of Antonio. Viktor assumed he had wandered off for the moment or gone to relieve himself.

His gaze moved downward, and he saw a figure climbing near the bottom, following the same path as Viktor. Viktor whipped out the binoculars and focused.

He cursed. It was the man from Zador’s shop, the same man who had followed him in York.

Viktor replaced the binoculars in the pack and started climbing, this time for his life. He scrabbled over loose rocks and long slabs of stone, slipping on the smooth surfaces, bracing himself with his hands when the climb became near-vertical. He alternated between admiring and despising whoever
had built this monastery in such an absurd place. It was impregnable without an army of harpy eagles.

He tried not to think about the man below. Viktor knew he stood no chance against his pursuer. This man was much younger, most likely a trained killer, and Viktor was nearing the end of his endurance. His only hope was to reach the monastery and hope someone was left to help him.

He stopped to use the binoculars, realizing with a flagging spirit that the man was climbing at twice his speed. Viktor’s legs hurt so much he debated moving off the trail and hiding among the droopy-leaved cacti or spiky palms. Then he realized the foolishness of a seven-foot-tall, sixty-year-old professor hiding behind a foot-wide cactus on an exposed Sicilian hillside, at the mercy of even the slightest glance to the side by his pursuer. Viktor said
do prdele
for the hundredth time and poured every ounce of his will into the remainder of the climb.

Somehow Viktor reached the top of the path first, though he knew the man was just behind him. The cliff wall rose fifty feet above him, impossible without gear. The path leveled off and continued around the side of a boulder.

Viktor was fighting for every breath, but he didn’t dare rest. He risked a glance below, the long granite cliff a slab of shaved ice streaked with grime. No sign of his pursuer, and that worried Viktor even more.

Was he right below him, taking aim at Viktor from behind a shrub? Did he know another path to the top?

Viktor clambered around the boulder. The path ended at a narrow opening. He squeezed through, following the naturally cleft passage through the rock, his body sagging in despair when he rounded a corner and saw what lay at the end of the path.

An iron gate, fifteen feet tall and spanning the width of the passage, blocked his way. There was no handle, no lock, no possibility of ascent. Viktor heaved at the gate with all his might, but it didn’t even rattle. The thing had been built to withstand a small army.

Viktor heard a noise behind him, the scrabble of loose rocks below. He pounded on the gate and shouted in Italian, his voice weak from the strain of the climb. “Is anyone there?”

He took out his knife, debating fleeing back to the slope before his pursuer entered the narrow passage. At least he would have the advantage of higher ground, though he knew in his heart that wouldn’t matter.

More sounds from below, and Viktor beat at the gate in frustration. “Anyone!”

“Who’s there?”

Viktor jumped at the sound, already having decided no one still lived at the monastery. The voice had come from the other side of the gate, a man speaking Italian-accented English, an educated voice with the ring of authority.

A monastic voice.

“I’m a professor at Charles University in Prague,” Viktor said. “Please hurry, I’m being followed. There’s no time to explain.”

“Why are you here?”

Viktor wanted to bellow in frustration, but he pushed his words out. “I’m a private investigator as well, working with Interpol. I’m trying to solve a series of murders, and there’s about to be another one if you don’t let me through.”

“The last man I let through was a deceiver.”

“I’m tracking that man,” Viktor said. “It’s why I’m here. I don’t know how to convince you, except to swear that it’s true.”

There was a prolonged silence, each passing second a needle of compressed time piercing Viktor’s spirit. Knife in hand, he kept his back against the gate, waiting for his pursuer to appear in the shade of the passage.

Again he heard the clatter of loose rock, this time on the other end of the cleft passage. Finally the monk said, in a voice as grim and stern as the mountain itself, “Renounce thrice the name of Ahriman, and I will open the gate.”

Viktor didn’t hesitate. “Ahriman, I renounce thee. Ahriman, I renounce thee. Ahriman, I renounce thee.”

The gate creaked open. Viktor hurried through, the giant gate slamming shut behind him.

Grey knew where the other buttons led: either to one of the main floors smothered with cult members, or to a top floor with no exit. He worried the last button led to a dungeon, but he had no choice.

The elevator descended, and when the door opened he was looking at a small garage with four parking spaces. Three were empty, but in one of them the headlights of a black BMW X5 stared back at him like the eyes of a dark savior. Grey hurried to the SUV, expecting to waste precious time with a hotwire. Instead, he found the keys in the ignition, a rare gift from the capricious god of chance.

He roared down the only way out, a tunnel-like egress that ended at a wide steel door. Grey pushed the remote opener clipped to the driver’s visor, and the door lifted. He sped down the driveway, noticing in the rearview that he had exited from what looked like an abandoned building.

He entered onto a street full of graffiti-covered warehouses. Grey guessed Darius had purchased the entire dilapidated block. Two blocks later he passed the gleaming glass building on his left, then entered the maze of East London.

No one followed, and Grey surmised that was because no one still left in that building had any clue about the service elevator, the sixth floor, the hidden garage, or whatever was going down tomorrow night.

When Grey had passed by the glass building, he had noticed an elongated space between the highest windows and the roof, a space that contained the windowless sixth floor. To the untrained eye it looked natural, part of the building’s neo-modernist architecture. And the aesthetic capstone on the roof, a crystal dome in the middle of the structure, masked the rounded central chamber and the skylight.