The Third Antichrist (11 page)

Adrian took nearly an hour to die. Antanasia and Dracul watched him from a corner of the room, fearful to either approach or to touch him.

At one point Adrian started fitting, similar to an epileptic boy they knew in the village. Antanasia stood up, intending to go to him, but Dracul motioned her down.

At the end, Adrian’s legs started a running motion, as if he was trying to send himself in circles, like an injured dog. Green matter began bubbling out of his ear.

Dracul turned and faced the wall, refusing to watch. Antanasia did the same. Brother and sister held each other’s hand.

When it was all over, Dracul stood up. He motioned to Antanasia that she must fetch the coverlet from their parents’ bed. They covered Adrian in the blanket, and then secured both ends with twine.

‘I must take him out of the village now.’

‘Why?’

‘So that people will think that he has left us. This way, there will be no suspicion. I know just where to put him. There is a hidden crypt near the monastery. Nobody knows of it but the old monk and I. And the old monk is dead. So there is no fear of discovery.’

‘But how will you carry him there?’

‘On the mule. You must fetch the animal from the stable and meet me outside the village. By the plague marker. Then I will strap our father over the saddle and take him to Orheiul Vechi. Then I will kill the mule and bury it with our father. I have been along this road a thousand times. I know it even in the dark. I shall be back before morning. Then nobody will ever think that our father is dead. Just that he has gone away and taken the mule with him.’

‘But if he’s buried outside consecrated ground, he’ll become a vampire. That’s what the priest says. He will be denied eternal rest.’

‘The priest just says that to frighten the old people. There are no vampires. You are being silly.’

‘What about Vlad
Ţ
epe
ş
?

‘He was an impaler, not a vampire. And anyway, the monastery is consecrated. Monks have lived up there for hundreds of years. What do you think? That I’d dump our father in a field?’

‘No. No. I know you wouldn’t do that.’

‘However evil the bastard was.’

Antanasia began to cry. ‘He was our father.’

Dracul shook his head. ‘Yes. He certainly was that.’

Le Domaine De Seyème,
Cap Camarat, France
8 November 2009

20

Abi glassed the back of his mother’s house. It was three o’clock in the morning. In November. With its dark and drawn-out dawns. Nobody would be up and about until at least six – Abi knew the routine.

There were security lights at the front of the house, triggered by a motion sensor. He knew all about those too. But what were these new lights at the rear, set into sconces beneath the eaves? They had certainly not been there on his last visit. Were they security lights as well? Was Madame, his mother, becoming paranoid in her old age? One thing was certain. If he set them off, there was bound to be some sort of an alarm linked to them in Milouins’s bedroom. Abi offered up a prayer of thanks that the Countess hadn’t gone for the full monty and installed CCTV cameras. Milouins, he knew, had eyes like a shithouse rat.

Abi feared no one in this world. But were he to fear any man, that man would be his mother’s manservant, Hervé Milouins. Ever since Abi’s childhood, Milouins had been a lowering presence in his life. Both Milouins and his mother’s private secretary, Madame Mastigou, shadowed the Countess wherever she went. In consequence it had been next to impossible for her adoptive children ever to see her alone. This had terminally prejudiced Abi’s ability to charm and manipulate her, just as he charmed and manipulated everybody else unfortunate enough to encounter him – he wasn’t named after golden-tongued Abiger, satanic pinup and hereditary Grand Duke of the demons of hell, for nothing. Tonight, Abi intended to rectify the Milouins situation once and for all.

Abi lowered his night glasses and cupped his ears. Nothing. Not a sound. Not even the wind, which appeared to have died away completely. He shivered inside his thin jacket. He listened again – for a full five minutes this time – with his mouth stretched open like an anaconda to create even more of an echo chamber effect. Same result.

No outside watchers, then. This pleased him, as he had already decided on which way he would enter the house.

Abi calculated that the new security lights were designed to overlap each other, leaving no gaps through which an intruder could pass. This was fine, except that it relied on a house that was built to a modern design, with flat walls, no rounded bevels, and without eaves.

The main structure of the Domaine de Seyème was 250 years old, but with curious growths and excrescences scattered all about it, dating to maybe a hundred years before that. There was one tower, for instance, which bulged out below the casement window, as if whoever had built it had suffered from a particularly pernicious form of astigmatism.

Abi knew that this bulge had been crafted to hide a secret room below the floor, which had been used during the Revolution to conceal the de Bale family treasures. As a child it had amused Abi to envision what might have happened to the builders of the secret room. If Monsieur, his father, was anything to go by in terms of de Bale family intolerance for the sharing of their secrets, the architect and his workmen were even now acting as unwitting additions to the very tower they had so fastidiously built.

A little like the architect, Postnik Yakovlev, when you came to think about it. Legend had it that Ivan the Terrible had ordered Yakovlev to be blinded immediately after he had finished building St Basil’s Cathedral. Ivan’s excuse was that if he didn’t do this, Yakovlev might go on to repeat his masterpiece elsewhere, thereby diluting its effect. Abi had always liked that story. It showed true power. No wonder Russia and France had needed their revolutions.

From his fresh vantage point, Abi now estimated that the bulge in the tower would effectively mask the security lights’ infra-red sensor if he were to approach it at just the right angle. Once he was tucked tight against the walls of the house, he could ease himself inside the span of the security lights and through into the cellar. The cellar lock was old, and therefore amenable to picking – plus the door was indented, providing even further cover from the lights. Once inside the cellar, he would only be faced with a conventional mortise lock leading directly through into the main house. Child’s play.

Abi acted the moment he’d made up his mind. He’d broken into enough houses as part of his Corpus training to know that inaction begat failure. He and his twin brother Vau had been old hands at burglary. They’d studied with the best.

Thrusting the unwelcome thought of Vau out of his head, Abi jogged towards the house. If the lights switched on, he would simply change course and sprint back to his car.

The lights stayed off.

Abi eased his way along the wall to the cellar door. It took him three minutes to get inside. During the three minutes he was picking the lock, Abi amused himself by thinking that he wasn’t yet committing a crime. Not even an inchoate crime. This was his own mother’s house he was entering. He had every right to be there. Hard luck if the inhabitants thought otherwise.

He padded up the cellar steps. He didn’t even need his lock picks for the mortise lock – two twists with his penknife did the trick.

Once in the main part of the house, Abi paused for a moment to take a sense of the place. Did it feel different in any way from the last time he was here? He snorted the atmosphere in through his nose. His burglary master had taught him that trick. Rationally, there was no logic to it. Irrationally, it made perfect sense. It triggered all the latent instincts of the intruder. Switched him on to what was going on around him. Prepared him. Psyched him up.

Abi started up the stairs. He knew exactly where Milouins’s room was, and he avoided that part of the house completely. He made his way past Madame Mastigou’s suite of rooms and down the corridor towards his mother’s. As he did so, he checked the vial of
Antiaris toxicaria
he had secreted inside the collar stiffener section of his shirt.

The Chinese called this particular variety of blowpipe poison, distilled from the Javanese upas tree, ‘Seven Up, Eight Down, Nine No Life’. Meaning that once a person was poisoned with it, they would be able to take no more than seven steps uphill, eight steps downhill, or nine steps on the level, before suffering from irremediable cardiac arrest. Abi’s mother was in her seventies and had a long-standing heart condition. Which doctor would think twice? And anyway, as far as the authorities were concerned, Abi was safely tucked away in Boston. Had been for the past few days. Any calls about his mother’s death would reach him via his US cell phone. Who would ever know he had been in France?

The moment she died, he would be in line to inherit a quarter of her estate, as only he and his three remaining siblings, Lamia, Aldinach, and Athame, were still in the loop. What would his share be? One hundred million? Two hundred million? His mother was worth at least three quarters of a billion euros in property, shares, and other assets. In the US she owned real estate in New York, California, and Boston. In Paris she owned an entire city block in the 8th Arrondissement, surrounding the de Bale family’s town house. In London she owned choice parts of Mayfair and Belgravia, thanks to an inspired marriage by one of her paternal ancestors, who had taken time off to seduce an English heiress whilst busy fleeing the Reign of Terror.

The neat thing about French law was that, under the Napoleonic Code, it was virtually impossible to disinherit a child. But that cut both ways. That’s why Abi had decided to abandon the three in the cenote. With them still around, the Countess’s estate would have been split seven ways. It would have cost him tens of millions.

He’d never liked the three of them anyway. So he was profoundly grateful to fate and to the Mexican
narcotraficantes
for providing him with the perfect family get-out clause. A part of him regretted abandoning his siblings to a long drawn-out death by drowning – he would much rather have slit their throats and had done with it – but it had been best to get them out of the way when the chance presented itself. In a year or so, when things had quieted down a little, he’d arrange to have their bodies unexpectedly found and given a decent burial. What was left of them, that was.

As far as any police investigation went, what had happened would be self-evident. His siblings had blundered onto a drug-making factory. They’d been taken prisoner. They’d attempted to escape. Bang. End of story. In Mexico, cops didn’t investigate drug-related murders if they wanted to stay alive long enough to welcome their grandchildren into the world.

Abi stopped outside Madame, his mother’s, bedroom. It pleased him that he would be taking revenge for the death of his brother and striking the mother lode at one and the same time. Vau had been a fool. And hardly the brightest button in the box. But they’d been twins. Conjoined at birth and sharing a kidney. That counted for something, didn’t it?

Well, feral cats had probably eaten the kidney long ago. But it hadn’t been right of his mother to try and fool him. To pretend that his sister Lamia had gone over to the enemy, when in fact she’d been working for the Corpus all the time. It demonstrated a fundamental lack of trust. Not to mention landing them in the cenote.

From here on in, Abi would be making his own decisions. Running his own life. Empowering himself.

He tipped open the door and stepped into his mother’s room.

21