We Are Death (35 page)

And that was him. That was the switch. From the slightly aloof but serious businessman taking care of what needed to be done, to the angry thug with only one intent.

She staggered back, her knees buckling, and then he was upon her. Another sharp blow to the face, and she fell back onto the floor.

‘Jesus,’ he said, his voice still low, ‘all you had to do was play along. Play the game.’

He reached down and grabbed her by the blouse, one side of it tearing as he pulled her up. She gasped as he roughly propelled her towards the couch, her blouse ripping off her shoulder as he did so.

She fell back now, slouched on the couch, her face marked, her small breasts exposed in a light summer bra.

‘It’s all a game,’ said Develin, undoing his tie. ‘We’re all in a game, and all you had to do was play your part. Was that too much to ask? Seriously?’

‘Don’t make this out to be my fault,’ she said to him, determined to be angry and defiant in the face of his attack.

He leaned over her, and she punched him as hard as she could from her position, trying to push herself up. But it was nothing to him, and this time he brought a clenched fist to the side of her face. An ugly gasp escaped her lips as she fell back, dazed by the strength of the blow.

He kneeled on the couch on top of her and tore her blouse completely off her shoulders, then roughly pulled her bra down to her waist. The three blows to the head, the last in particular, had left little fight in her.

He leaned forward, taking her right breast into his mouth, biting and sucking. She tried to lift her knee up into his groin, but he easily held her leg down as soon as it started to move. His cock was already hard and damp, flushed with the dominance and power.

He put his hand to her throat.

‘Don’t try to stop me again, or I’ll really fucking hurt you, you bitch,’ he snarled.

Her head was pushed back against the sofa. She didn’t know what to think. She couldn’t think. Wasn’t she going to die anyway? But what exactly was it she was supposed to do?

His mouth back on her breast, he undid his trousers, uncomfortably pulled them down, then straightened up, kneeling over her. His erection stood out before him, ramrod straight, circumcised, short but thick.

She looked at it, closed her eyes, steeled herself for one last strike.

‘I want you to run your fingers over it,’ he said. ‘My cock. I want your fingers on my cock. But don’t try to hurt me, don’t try anything stupid, or I’ll crush your fucking cheekbones.’

She opened her eyes, desperately trying not to show her fear, but failing horribly. She wanted to be strong, she wanted to stand up to him, but there was nothing there. She was being raped, then she was going to be murdered, and she had nothing.

She looked over his shoulder. The expression on her face changed slightly, although she did not understand what she was seeing. He noticed, snarled again, presuming some pathetic schoolgirl trick, lifted his hand to bring it swiftly down on her face once more, and then stopped.

Suddenly, feeling an unexpected lump of nerves in his gullet, he turned.

‘What the fuck?’ escaped his lips.

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S
even men around a table. Fifteen security men and women of various allegiances standing around the room against the walls, although only Geyerson’s men were armed.

Geyerson owned the room.

He was wearing the white gloves of the snooker referee and had just placed the lost Book of Lazarus on a velvet mat on the table. The box the book had been carried in since he brought it back from the mountain had been placed on the floor beside him.

It was a little smaller than A4 in size, and indeed it was barely a book, pages of parchment placed together inside a loose leather cover, tied together with a thin strap.

The six potential buyers stared at it, none of them looking at Geyerson, with his faintly absurd look of white gloves and imperious expression. He hadn’t quite unveiled it with the word ‘behold’, but had not been far off.

None of the others were positioned close enough to touch it, and the two guards at Geyerson’s shoulder were primed, waiting to intercept anyone who tried.

‘You’re going to give us all a pair of gloves and pass it around?’ asked one of the two furthest away. The American. Always the first to speak.

Geyerson slowly looked up. This was his Goldfinger moment and he intended to completely dominate every second of it. If, at any stage, he suddenly didn’t like how it was going, he was leaving. If anyone objected, well, his men were the only ones with guns.

He had never, in all his long climb to the top, ordered anyone killed, but he knew that now he was moving in circles and among people who played an entirely different game, even to the brutal cut and thrust of big business, and if his men had to draw their weapons, then that’s what would have to happen. There was a reason he hadn’t gone to G4S to recruit them.

‘No one gets to see it,’ said Geyerson.

Three of those at the table muttered dissatisfaction. The three to worry about, he knew, were the ones who stared in silence.

For a moment Geyerson felt vaguely ridiculous, sitting there with his white gloves, playing the part of the Godfather, so he took them off and laid them down on the floor on top of the box.

‘Seriously?’ said the American. ‘What are you saying here? You’re expecting some open bidding war, right? That’s what this is about. The six of us, around a table, openly fighting each other with money. And we don’t even get to see what we’re buying?’

‘I know what you will have done,’ said Geyerson. ‘You will all, all of you, have done as much as you can to track the history and the current workings of The Pavilion, difficult though they make it.’

He paused. He was in charge, he could take his time. He could savour the moment. He had the world powers at the table and they had no choice but to listen to him.

He had done his own research on The Pavilion before he’d ever got to the top of Kangchenjunga, on a quest that had all begun based on a story he’d heard in a dive bar in a small town not far from Darjeeling. He’d found what he was looking for on the mountain, but since then his only thought had been of how much money he could make out of it.

Was it magical? Did it hold great and deep secrets of the life of Christ? Did it hold the secret to immortality?

None of it mattered to Geyerson. All he was interested in was the money.

Perhaps, he suddenly thought, he should have insisted on the leaders attending, instead of faceless and nameless representatives.

‘The Pavilion dominated the world of the nineteenth century, and their power is still beyond knowing today. Where did this power come from?’

His eyes fell on the book. He’d intended that the table follow his gaze, but only two of them did. These were all powerful men in their own right, and none of them enjoyed being treated like threepenny bit villains in a Bond movie.

‘They rose to great wealth and authority on the back of this, and then... it seems it was too formidable even for them. We can conjecture that they tried to destroy it, but were unable to because of its great power. We can conjecture many things. What we know is that the men of The Pavilion wanted this book as far away and as far out of reach as it could possibly be, so they placed it at the summit of what they believed to be the world’s highest mountain. And there it has stayed for more than one hundred and sixty years, untouched by the elements, untouched by time.’

‘But what does it say?’

The Brazilian, the first time he’d spoken.

Geyerson glanced at him but already considered him the weak link in the room. He looked away again, his air of superiority intact. The Brazilians had asked for a place at the table, but they were never going to be able to afford the kind of money Geyerson was looking for.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Jesus...’

Another couple of blank faces, some eye rolling, some muttered expressions of disgust.

‘You’re still being serious?’ said the American. ‘Not only can we not look at it, you’re not even telling us what it says? How much are you expecting this auction to get up to? A buck-fifty?’

‘I don’t know what it says, because I haven’t had it translated. If I had a translation sitting here in my jacket pocket, then I would know the secret and you would have to kill me, as well as take the book from me. And I would have had to kill the translator. And if you all knew what the book said, this meeting would become a fight to the death, with only one of you able to walk from the room.’

He paused again. They may have been angry, but they would all know he was making sense, even if they would have to take it on faith that he himself didn’t know the contents of the book. They could believe what they liked.

‘I’m not asking you to trust me,’ he continued. ‘You must all ask yourselves, do I trust the legend? Do I trust the myth of the Book of Lazarus? If the answer is yes, then you’ve got to make a judgement on whether or not you’re prepared to pay for it. The Book lies here before us. I am just the messenger, delivering it from the mountain. You must make the decision on whether it would make a worthwhile investment.’

They were all looking at the book now. It was a calculation they’d been making in coming here in the first place, regardless of Geyerson’s Goldfinger speech.

‘And what if this great secret,’ said the American, ‘the power inherent in the book or written in the book, turns out to be the equivalent of, I don’t know, a microchip? The Internet? Maybe it was incredible back then. Maybe it was a game changer in eighteen-whatever. But now it’s just, meh... It’s nothing more than, I don’t know, an app that millions of fifteen year-olds have on the iPhone 6 in their back pocket.’

The others were letting the American speak. That was what usually happened in the modern world, wasn’t it? People let the Americans speak. It didn’t mean they would follow, or leave them alone on the field. But they were good for drawing out information, or at least establishing exactly where everyone stood.

‘Or what if this book, this thing lying there,’ he continued, waving a hand in its direction, ‘could let us bring Jesus back to life? What if it told us where goddam Jesus
was
, and we could go there and bring the dude back? What then? Who’s going to give a shit? Someone, somewhere, sure. But most people aren’t going to believe it, and even if they did, they’d care for all of five minutes, and then Kim Kardashian’s butt would explode or some guy off YouTube would use the word black in not quite the right way, or Gwyneth Paltrow would appear naked on the red carpet and tell everyone she was wearing the latest Yves St Laurent that was so sheer it was invisible and the Internet would explode with Gwyneth’s tits, and Jesus would be left saying
look, look, I’m over here, it’s me, Jesus!
and everybody would be like, yeah, whatever, that was, like, five minutes ago, man, but hey, if you want to post a butt-naked selfie, maybe you can get back on the rollercoaster.’

Geyerson couldn’t help smiling, but he did his best to make sure the smile that edged its way to his lips was knowing, understanding, and obviously superior.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’m even going to argue with you. Like I said, there’s a lot of faith involved in this kind of thing, and it’s about who has the faith.’

He looked around the assembled company, immediately aware that he had taken a misstep. He shouldn’t have brought faith into it. He hadn’t been going to mention faith, of any sort.

‘Or,’ he added, ‘perhaps even more to the point... Can you risk something with this potential falling into the hands of one of your competitors?’

‘Have you at least had it carbon dated?’

Geyerson looked at the Israeli and nodded, then made an acknowledging gesture.

‘There will be a lot of money that needs to change hands for this business to be concluded, and I understand that the purchaser will need certain guarantees. These are the kinds of details that will be ironed out by myself and whichever one of you gentlemen is most willing to invest in your nation’s future.’

There was a moment of quiet. The assembled parties realised that there had been a sudden full stop put on proceedings. There may have been a hundred other questions, there may have been a woeful lack of information of the kind required when considering a large financial outlay, but they all knew that any further talk would be skirting round the edges. They had done the required research before coming here. They knew what was at stake.

Geyerson was happy for the moment to play out in silence a while longer. It was still his moment. When this was over, when everyone walked out of the room, it would be gone, and he would just be another guy. Maybe richer than everyone else, but just another guy all the same. At the moment he was the guy with the Book.

‘All right,’ said the American, ‘we might as well get this show on the road. You got a minimum bid or else you walk out the room?’

Geyerson held his gaze for a moment, owned the silence for what he judged to be the perfect length of time and then said, ‘Fifty billion dollars.’

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‘J
esus!’

Jericho looked up and caught Haynes’s eye. Markussen started laughing. Badstuber, as usual, did little more than raise an eyebrow.

‘Holy shit!’ said Markussen. ‘Fifty billion! That’s crazy!’

Haynes shook his head, couldn’t help laughing along with Markussen.

They were in a black van, a block away from the house, listening to the conversation. So far they had sat through Geyerson’s pomposity without comment. It was unfolding much as they had expected, although there had been some discussion beforehand on whether he would have each of the men in a different room.

That he had taken the approach he had, more or less summed up the man. He couldn’t turn down the opportunity to grandstand.

They waited for the next sound in the room, but there was nothing for the moment. The silence was so long, in fact, that they began to wonder if they had lost the feed.

‘Maybe they all just got up and walked out,’ said Haynes.