Vicious Circle (51 page)

“Look,” I began, “as a concerned citizen, I’m really happy to cooperate with any—” But Gwillam must have given some kind of signal to his team that I didn’t catch. Po’s massive, clawed hand closed around my throat and he hauled me unceremoniously over to the chair, slammed me down, and held me in position. Zucker and Sallis made busy with the ropes. They were enthusiastic amateurs where knots were concerned, but they made up in quantity what they lacked in real finesse.

While they worked, Gwillam brought up another chair and placed it opposite me. Then, when they stood back respectfully from the finished job, he nodded them a curt acknowledgment. “Sallis,” he said, “you’re with me. Mr. Zucker, after your recent exertions you and Mr. Po might wish to avail yourselves of the chapel.”

“Thank you, father,” Zucker said, and the two of them turned on their heel and walked away into the darkness. Po looked over his shoulder at me: bared way, way too many teeth. Sallis went over to the wall and sat down with his back to it, the gun not exactly pointed at me but still ready in his hand.

“Is that a euphemism of some kind?” I asked Gwillam.

He shot me a look of genuine surprise.

“No,” he said. “We have a field chapel wherever we set up, Castor. Our faith is very important to us.”

“Your former faith.”

Gwillam quirked one eyebrow. He didn’t look upset, though; the barb didn’t have quite as much sting as I’d expected it to.

“Do you know how many Catholics there are in the world, Castor?” he asked me.

“Before you and your pals got their marching orders, or afterwards?”

“There are more than a billion. Seventeen percent of the world’s population. Five hundred million in the Americas alone.

“So the Holy Father must of necessity be a statesman as well as a religious leader. He has to play the games of men, and of nations. And sometimes that means he has to balance small injustices against larger gains.”

“Meaning?”

“The Anathemata Curialis was given a massive appropriation of funds just before the death of John Paul II. Then his successor, Benedict
XVI
, ordered us to disband or face excommunication. The two actions are best seen as the diastolic and systolic beats of a heart. The church has disowned us, but it has not ceased to wish us well.”

“Even though you use werewolves as field agents? How broad
is
your brief, Gwillam? I’m just curious.”

He knelt down, picked up the black bag and put it up on the coffee table. He snapped it open and rummaged inside. I hadn’t forgotten the bag: in fact, it was fair to say that it was preying on my mind a little.

“Our brief,” Gwillam said, “is narrow and exact. We fight the last war. We’re heaven’s skirmishers, sent into the enemy’s heartlands to gauge his strength and harry his forces as he attempts to deploy them.”

“The enemy being . . .?”

“Hell, of course.”

He took from the bag, one by one, a disposable hypodermic, a bubble pack with a small vial of some straw-yellow substance, a larger bottle of clear liquid, and an unopened pack of surgical swabs. “The rising of the dead,” he said, looking me full in the eyes with the deadly calm of the fanatic, “was the opening of hostilities. Hell is on the move against heaven, in every sphere, in every nation of earth. It was foretold, and it was foreseen. We were not taken by surprise. But there were those in the church who wouldn’t accept the evidence of their own eyes.”

He smiled bleakly. I got the impression that he was remembering specific conversations; specific clashes of will and words. “They forgot their duty of stewardship,” he said gently. “They became too ensconced in the comforts of the world, and forgot that the world must always and ever be a forge. You do not sit comfortably by God’s fire: you are plunged into it, and shaped and made by it.

“You seem to think, Castor, that there’s some contradiction between the battle we wage and the tools we use. There isn’t. We fight against the demons who are Satan’s generals in the field—and we avail ourselves of whatever weapons God places in our hands. If faithful Catholics return from the dead not because they conspired with the Adversary but because the rules of engagement have changed, then we will not turn our backs on them. Po and Zucker have suffered much, and they have turned their suffering to good account. I number them among my most trusted officers.”

He counted off the items on the chair, pointing at each with his index finger, as if to satisfy himself that he had everything he needed. Then he nodded, satisfied, and stared at me again.

“Where is Abbie Torrington?” he asked me.

“In a police morgue in Hendon.”

Gwillam blinked, once, twice. “I don’t mean her shell,” he said, with the closest thing to heat I’d ever seen from him. “I mean her true self. Her spirit. As you of all people must appreciate.”

Me of all people? I let that one pass.

“Her soul is in a locket,” I said. “Made of gold. Shaped like a heart. Her father took it from her neck just after she died. I think it has a lock of her hair inside it, and I think that that’s what she’s clinging to. And Fanke has it now: he took it from Peace’s body after he killed him at the Oriflamme on Castlebar Hill.”

“And where is Fanke?”

“I don’t know. Gwillam, if you can see that Abbie’s ghost is the same thing as her soul, then how in fuck’s name can you talk about destroying it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that what we do?” he asked. “Isn’t that exactly the power that was given to us?”

“ ‘We’?” I don’t know why that came as a shock: it was pretty much on the cards, given that he was the one the Anathemata had chosen to head up this mission. “You’re an exorcist?”

He nodded curtly. “That was how I knew that God had chosen me to fight in His cause.”

“Funny,” I said. “That was how I knew I’d never have to work on a building site. What do you use? A fragment of the true cross?”

Gwillam looked at me reflectively. His hand slid into his breast pocket, and it came out holding a small book bound in black leather.

“The Bible,” he said. “This Bible. I read aloud—words and phrases taken at random from different verses. The words of God make a cage for the souls of sinners—as you would expect.” He put the book away. “I told you, Castor. I’m a soldier. If I could save the child, then I would save her, but I can’t and won’t allow her soul to become the mechanism through which hell’s mightiest general is unleashed upon the world. The ritual that was used here requires the sacrifice of body and soul; therefore without the girl’s soul, it can’t be completed. Now, I ask you again, for the second time: Where is Fanke?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” I said. It was true, as far as it went: I didn’t know where Fanke was right then. I was pretty sure I knew where he was going to turn up at some point in the very near future, but I was keeping that little nugget to myself. Maybe Gwillam was the best chance I had of dropping a wrench into Fanke’s good works, but at the expense of Abbie’s soul? It couldn’t be done that way. Not if I was going to be able to look in the mirror afterward.

Gwillam nodded to Sallis, who stepped up beside me. He tucked his gun into a holster strapped across his chest under his jacket and took a double handful of my hair, pulling my head back as far as he could. I tensed against him, but standing over me like that he could exert a lot more leverage than I could. Unhurriedly, Gwillam uncorked the large bottle and poured some of its contents onto one of the surgical swabs. The pungent smell of some strong disinfectant filled the air. Gwillam carefully swabbed the area where my shoulder and throat met, then threw the used swab down on the chair.

“I’m telling you all I know,” I snarled, finding it hard to talk with my head tilted back so sharply.

“We’ll see,” said Gwillam tersely. He tore the bubble wrap open, loaded the syringe with the snap-in ampoule and pumped it lightly, sending a thin jet of fluid spraying from its tip. “Hold him steady,” he warned Sallis, bending back over the doctor bag for a moment so that I lost sight of him. “If this goes into his carotid artery, it will probably kill him.”

That was bad news, whichever way you looked at it. But even if I survived this, it was obvious that Gwillam was about to shoot me full of some thiopental derivative to ensure a fuller and franker discussion. Was there anything I could do to stop him? I couldn’t think of a damn thing.

What did I know about truth serums? Only what I’d picked up from reading cheap spy thrillers, but that was enough to know that they didn’t work. They were just disinhibitors, cutting the brake cables of your subconscious so that you freewheeled endlessly, gabbling on about whatever came into your head. People injected with propofol or pentathol couldn’t consciously lie, but they could and did talk a load of free-associative shite. That was why truth drugs didn’t turn up much anymore even in cheap spy thrillers.

On the other hand, did I want to free-associate in front of Gwillam about Asmodeus and Abbie and Juliet and St. Michael’s Church? No, I didn’t. This was definitely a good time to be keeping my thoughts to myself.

And just then, another bit of trivia that I didn’t even know I knew popped up out of nowhere. I suddenly remembered what class of drugs the truth serums belonged to—and it gave me the bare bones of an idea; thin and pathetic but marginally better than nothing. No harm in trying, anyway: the only downside was that if it didn’t work, I might never wake up. I started to breathe fast and deep, forcing air into my lungs.

“Would it be better if he was unconscious?” Sallis asked, with what from my point of view sounded like an indecent amount of enthusiasm.

“Hardly,” Gwillam snapped. “How will he be able to answer any questions if you’ve put your fist through his skull?”

He loomed back into my field of vision, the needle raised in his hand.

“Gwillam!” I growled, still breathing in fast, forced gasps. I must have looked like I was starting a full-fledged panic attack.

Gwillam hesitated. “What?” he asked.

“I’m allergic.”

“Allergic to what, exactly?” Gwillam asked, his tone dangerously mild.

There could be any of twenty different drugs in the syringe. All I could do was guess.

“Propofol,” I said.

Gwillam shrugged. “Then you can relax,” he said. “This is something different.”

The needle came down towards my neck. I twisted suddenly in Sallis’s hands, and Gwillam stopped: he didn’t want to kill me—or at least, not until he’d asked the rest of his questions. “Hold him steady,” he rasped, and Sallis threw one arm around my neck, leaned in hard against me to restrict my movement as much as he could.

All of this was just playing for time while I drew as many breaths as I could, working my lungs like bellows until the actual moment when the tip of the needle slid into my skin and Gwillam’s thumb pushed home the plunger.

A red curtain fell across my mind. A black one followed, half a second later. But they weren’t curtains at all, they were solid walls, and I crashed into unconsciousness so fast and hard that I actually felt the impact.

I woke up slowly and painfully; bleeding fragments of thought running together like mercury, pooling like ultra-cold lakes in the fractal wastelands of my cerebellum.

The “I” came first, but there was nothing to join it to. Just I. What I? Where I? Who the fuck cared? It couldn’t matter. Whoever he was, let the bastard wait. There was pain going on somewhere nearby and I wanted to lie low so that it didn’t find me.

A minute or an hour later, an “am” trickled down from somewhere and attached itself to the “I.” I am. I therefore think.

It was me, again, bubbling up from under the chemical sludge of anaesthesia whether I liked it or not; being harshly, achingly reborn in a dark, cold room that seemed to be hanging at an angle. But no, that was me. I was lying skewed, my cheek pressed against the floor, my legs canted up into the air. I couldn’t figure it out so I let it go.

I was still alive, anyway. And I was still thinking. Any brain damage? How would I tell? If you’ve lost enough of your brain function to make a difference, you’ve probably lost the ability to see it as a problem. Maybe the terrific throbbing inside my skull was a good sign: there had to be a lot of nerves in there still doing their jobs.

Truth serums are general anaesthetics. They’re the primary inducers that you’re given to kick your conscious mind away into the long grass so that your body can be cut and spliced and sewn without any kickback from your cerebellum. By hyperventilating, I’d made sure that I got as big and fast a hit as the dose in Gwillam’s syringe could provide. I was hoping that I’d go straight past the rambling stage into full unconsciousness. It might even have worked: I didn’t have any memory of talking, anyway. But maybe a hole in your memory was normal with these things.

I opened my eyes, but there was nothing to see. Either I’d been struck with hysterical blindness, or I was in an absolutely dark space. I tried to move, and couldn’t. I could lift my head, just, but that turned out to be a mistake because it made the throbbing worse. I opened my mouth to swear and discovered that my tongue was glued to my dry palate.

Belatedly I remembered that I’d been tied to a chair. It seemed that I still was, but that the chair was now lying on its side on the ground. That explained the weird position I was in and the fact that I couldn’t move.

Son of a bitch! Didn’t the Vatican ever sign the Geneva Convention? They’d just wheeled or dragged the chair, with me in it, over to some cupboard and pushed it inside so hard or so clumsily that it had fallen over. That was no way to treat a prisoner.

As the pain gradually subsided, I worked at the ropes. They felt pretty loose: the original intention had just been to stop me moving while Gwillam interrogated me, not to keep me a prisoner forever. Consequently Sallis and Zucker hadn’t bothered to check whether the knots fell within reach of my fingers.

All the same, it took me a long time—I guessed more than an hour—to get my hands free. By that time, my fingers were so sore and abraded from the stiff sisal fibers that I had to rest up for a while before I started on my legs. Getting them free was much faster, but it took a good ten minutes of massaging life back into them before I could stand.