Pawn (22 page)

Chapter Twenty Four.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Hopkins was shocked and rightly so as they crested the hill and finally set eyes on Venner’s new house. Barns was just as staggered. First they’d found a Las Vegas casino type house and thought that was over the top. Now Venner had a castle? An actual bloody castle?

It would have to be checked of course, and oddly enough Barns suspected that when the property records were searched and the owners name found, Venner would find himself in a whole new world of trouble. Because he was certain it wouldn’t be owned in his name. A company maybe. A shell that no one had thought to look at. But at a guess a shell with at least a few tens of millions of pounds in assets. And if it held a magnificent, fully restored castle in its listings, then who knew what else it would have.

“Agent?”

“I’m typing in the GPS as we speak. Twenty minutes and we’ll know the owner, a few more hours and we’ll have the warrants.” Agent Dikē sitting in the back seat typing away on her computer, was turning out to be a godsend. How her people managed to get the warrants signed so quickly and easily he still wasn’t sure. But as long as they did. And they needed one. Actually he suspected, looking at the flash cars already parked outside the front gate, they might need several. Barns was no great movie buff, but so many hugely overpriced cars, rollers and Bentleys, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, that had to spell drug dealers and organised crime. Exactly the sort of people who had the money to buy what was now considered to be a hundred million pound painting.

“Hopkins, grab those licence plates.”

The next twenty minutes went by surprisingly quickly, as Hopkins used the camera to scan each car and licence and phoned the information back to base, and each time the answer came back with a name someone knew. Bad guys, very bad guys. And even while they sat there on the side of the road, staring down at the castle, two more overpriced status symbols drove up. It was beginning to look like a meeting of all the worlds largest crime families.

Then the prize arrived, though at first Barns thought it was the caterers in a standard white van. But when they needed a forklift to hoist out the huge crate in its back, he started to think again.

“Hopkins, photos! Photo’s!” He pointed frantically at the driver of the van knowing exactly who it had to be. The man with the painting, and the man who’d walked away from his death bed not a week before. It was. Aidan Hennassy in the flesh, walking around as if he’d never been shot, casually directing the forklift driver.

It was a nerve wrecking five minutes as Hopkins kept shooting pictures with the telephoto, and Barns was all but biting his fingers for every second of it. One photo. Just one good photo, and their case was made. Warrants would flow like water and hundreds of officers would be with them no more than an hour later.

“Plutos corporation?” The agent piped up from the back seat and showed them the local authority’s ownership records for the castle, already emailed to her machine. It meant nothing to Barns of course, but then he hadn’t spent a lifetime chasing Venner and his money. The fact that it didn’t seem to mean that much to the agent though, that was maybe more important. But not nearly as important as Hopkin’s photos.

“You don’t know it agent?”

“The company no. But the name yes. Plutos is the ancient Greek god of prosperity or greed.” Barns groaned quietly. Aphrodite and now Plutos. Not the ancient Greeks again. He just didn’t need it when he had real crooks to catch.

“And who owns the company?”

“Don’t know yet. The articles of incorporation are based in Thailand. It’ll take a little time. But Barns didn’t need that time as he silently chalked up another tick in his box of things to do as he mentally nailed Venner once more.

“Yes but Venner has a factory there. In fact that’s where he was when the painting was originally stolen. What’s the bet he has far more than just a factory over there?” Already he was thinking guns and drugs, just like all those he dealt with. The man was greedy, and there was plenty of money in them.

“Sir!” Hopkins distracted him as he shoved the camera in his face, but Barns didn’t mind for once. Not when he could see Aidan Hennassy’s face as clear as day displayed all over the view screen. It was the most beautiful picture he’d ever seen.

“Yes! Sergeant, get that away now. I want warrants for his arrest and everyone else in that monstrous mountain of a castle within the hour.

“Yes sir.”

Hopkins and Dikē set about their work, playing on their laptops and chatting away on their phones, while Barns simply sat there and watched the castle. Aidan Hennassy alive and well, and now linked directly to Venner. He knew the castle would be his, and soon the paper trail would prove it. And then there was the painting too. Driven there in the van, and delivered directly to his suspect by another suspect. It was a dream given form. A dream of having the evidence to lock both these men away for life.

Soon, very soon he promised himself, he would have them. And when he did, nothing and no one was ever going to let them out of prison.

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Chapter Twenty Five.

“Your time has come Rufus.” A woman’s voice came unexpectedly from behind him as Rufus was recovering a little from his exertions of the morning. He wished people would stop doing that. But they didn’t. It seemed to be one of their favourite tricks. Maybe they had too much time on their hands, these gods and goddesses. Still at least he was coming to accept the insanity that had entered his life. Accept it and use it.

There were actual gods and goddesses walking the world. Ancient Greek ones. And they had power and abilities far beyond what a man should have. But so did he. Not what they had, but still something.

For whatever reason, and he still believed it was Di’s love, he had abilities he’d never had before. Speed, strength and stamina far beyond what a normal man should have. The vitality to take a terrible blow and walk away from it unharmed. And when he focused, when he drew all his pain together from his childhood, he could launch a blow that could shatter stone. He knew that from experience.

He turned, wondering who the woman was. He didn’t recognise her voice from the other women who kept beating him up on a daily basis. How could there be so many goddesses of war? And how could they be so small, seem so innocent, and yet deliver the most devastating attacks? Sometimes he could nearly hold his own against them, the training was brutal but effective. Mostly though he simply went flying out of the arena to end up anywhere in the training hall. But he always got back up and returned to the arena. He could take a punch or it seemed a blow from a sword or a shield.

The woman wasn’t a warrior. At least she wasn’t wearing the armour he had come to expect of them, which wasn’t armour in the normal sense. Robes just weren’t armour as far as he was concerned. But then neither were the togas the men wore, and that was the only thing he’d managed to stop them from doing to him, dressing him in a toga. Instead one night, when he’d been all but exhausted, he’d managed to drag his weary body to a cheap clothing store and get some army camouflage gear before returning to his bed.

“Lady?” She wasn’t a warrior, but she was a goddess and from the way his flesh reacted to her presence, a powerful one. That was the other thing he was slowly learning to feel, the presence of the divine. When he was around the gods and goddesses, the celestials as they called themselves, he could feel them, like a charge in the air, a whiff of ozone sharpening the senses. And with this lady it was as though a lightning strike was about to hit.

“Moirae, the spinner.” She smiled and actually nodded politely to him, he wasn’t sure why. He was only a consort, and if she was who she said she was, then she was one of the most powerful of the ancient gods, even their lives in her hands as she played with the threads of all their lives.

She didn’t look that powerful. She looked if he was going to be unkind, like a middle aged housewife, her face lined from the stress of family life, her body just a little rounder than it should be as the first flush of youth had passed, and her long dark hair, limp as it hung about her shoulders. But he could still feel her, and he knew that whatever she looked like on the outside, what lay inside was something far different.

“Fate. Shouldn’t there be three of you?” That was the other thing he’d been doing during the nights when he should be resting. Surfing the internet for information about the ancient Greek gods, and finding that little was as it should be. At least according to the myths.

Each morning when he came back to the arena with another night’s study under his belt, the others had poured scorn on his work. Apparently the ancients had it very wrong. Just not completely. The knew the names and the dominions, mostly, but the rest were fairy stories. Soap operas the ancient people’s had woven about them. He hadn’t asked if there were such things as fairies though.

He had asked about the lightning bolts, and then spent a morning being laughed at because of it. Apparently the gods didn’t do that either. Their power was far more limited. But he figured that that was a good thing since it meant their enemy’s power was also limited.

What he did know, sort of, was that a god or a goddess was a personification of a particular attribute or desire of the human condition. So as war was a human function and people wanted to fight and win, there were gods and goddesses of war. A lot of them actually. As people dreamed of love, there were love gods and goddesses, and so on. Something in the collective soul of the human race, the gestalt maybe, created them. But just desire alone wasn’t enough. There also had to be a person. Someone in whom that desire could be placed and made manifest.

So each of the gods and goddesses had at one time been normal human beings. People, who had in some way exemplified that trait and become known for it. Di, Aphrodite, he was still having some trouble with thinking of her by that name, had once been flesh and blood. But as a mortal she had become known far and wide as a woman of great beauty and great love. And somehow because of that, no one could explain exactly how, she had been elevated to the status of a goddess. And she had filled that role for three thousand years. Fate he gathered, was older still. Maybe the oldest of them all. Maybe the most powerful too.

His words made Moirae laugh, something he suspected from her long face, that she didn’t do enough of.

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read about us. Your ancestors brought us into existence, something no god likes to remember by the way, but then they wrote huge tracts of mythology about our lives, that simply weren’t true. I am the spinner of fate, a powerful position, since most people secretly believe that there is a pattern to life that everyone must follow, even if they deny it to everyone else. But I am not three women playing with the threads of every person’s life. I’m not part spider either. My powers are broader than that, but also more limited.”

“Maybe one day I will explain a little more of that to you. But this time I’m here with a specific purpose. I’m here for Aphrodite.”

“Di.” Suddenly the tiredness and the aches and pains were forgotten as Rufus heard her name again. It had been so long. The other trainers, they said nothing of her. They said nothing of anything but his training. And when they spoke of that, they mostly used their fists and their feet, and of course their weapons. Grief he was learning to hate those round shields of theirs. A sword or a club he understood, and he knew enough to dodge them, but he’d never imagined that a shield could be a weapon as well. “Is she alright? Why is she gone? When can I see her again?”

“That depends on you. Everything depends on you.” Naturally Rufus didn’t understand. That was one of the things he’d slowly discovered about all the gods he met, great and small. They spoke in riddles. He was beginning to suspect that they trained in being cryptic. Maybe it was a required class in god school. But sometimes they did eventually explain themselves. All he could do was hope that this was one of those times.

“Aphrodite’s been kidnapped by Plutos.”

Plutos! Rufus knew the name instantly, and he was one god he even knew something about. The others had discussed his faults at great length. They liked him no more than he did, and given the chance they would cheerfully kill him. But he was far too powerful for them to face alone, and in any case, death was never permanent for a god. They died, they hated it, but in time they reformed and returned to their place. As long as they still had a place to return to.

“What?” The thought of her being held by that pompous little jackass was unbearable. It could not be allowed.

“She is safe for now. Plutos foolishly overreached himself in taking her. He is not strong enough to break her despite his pride, and his crime has been reported. An attack upon one is an attack upon all, and already the gods are lining up to do battle. On both sides.” Rufus wished she hadn’t added the last since he understood that she was talking about a war. A war in the heavens, and if he was any judge of things, a disaster on Earth.

“I have to rescue her.” And he did. It wasn’t a choice. Every fibre in his being was telling him to go to her, instantly. There was only one problem, he had no idea where she was. Among with all the gifts he’d somehow been given by her, he didn’t have a sense of where she was. Most consorts did so he understood, though there were few hard and fast rules in the divine realm.

“Of course you do. You are her consort. And you will. The others here will help you. They have been training for this battle for a very long time. But first there is one thing you must do, and one thing you must learn before then.” He looked into her eyes and saw the weightiness there. He didn’t interrupt her.

“First the learning. And this one thing you must know always and beyond all. A consort has great powers among mortals, but among gods, little. Mortals have even fewer powers. But in the end even a mortal can fight. Even the smallest and weakest can change the world.”

“This war is about choices, and in the end the one choice you must make, and make alone. The choice on which everything hangs. Your life, Aphrodite’s. The heavens above and the Earth below. In the end you will have to make a decision. One that you have been preparing for your entire life.”

“Everything will come down to it, and I do mean everything. Make the wrong decision and you will die. Aphrodite will fall. The heavens will be torn asunder, the council broken, the gods themselves locked in war. And the world, it will shift into darkness for maybe a thousand years. Make the right one and everything will return to normal and centuries of evil will be held back.”

“I cannot tell you what that choice will be. I cannot tell you what the right decision will be. That would ironically enough, force you to make the wrong one. But I can tell you this. Everything will come down to courage. After a lifetime of fear and suffering, of hiding and running, you will have to learn bravery. No matter how frightened you are, no matter how weak and small you feel, you must become the lion that dwells within you. Let courage be your guide.”

There was silence for a while as Rufus digested her words, wondering what they meant. Could everything really come down to him? How? And what choice did he have to make? He wanted to ask, but he knew she would tell him no more. She had already said exactly what she intended to, no more, no less. Everyone else did the same to him, telling him exactly what he needed to know and no more, and this was the woman who’d given them those instructions. She would be even tighter lipped than them. So instead he simply sat there and waited, until she finally gave in.

“And now comes the thing that you must do. You must choose your weapons.”

“Weapons?” That caught him by surprise. It was one thing to battle all day every day in an arena with ancient looking weapons, it was another thing entirely to be expected to have some of his own.

“How else do you expect to stand by your goddess when she needs you?” Moirae stared him right in the face and he knew she was serious. But it was still crazy.

“A gun?” Finally he drew a reaction from the audience. They burst into laughter. As if it was a stupid thing to say. But then in their world it probably was. They battled with swords and shields, whips and chains, and when it suited, their fists and feet. A gun would have probably been seen as dishonourable. Even if the bad guys used them.

“Not yet I think. The heavens are not yet ready for such foul devices. Besides in the battle you’ll be asked to fight, a gun would be completely useless.” She seemed certain of herself, as did the others who were still chortling away merrily. And maybe they had a point. What they were doing, what he was somehow doing, was incredible. Maybe the fact that they could do such things outweighed the value of guns and bullets. But he still suspected that in the end it was about honour. A gun would be seen as cheating.

The idea was taken out of his head a moment later as half a dozen men he didn’t recognise, but all of them in togas and battle dress, carried out a huge wooden box from the back room where it had been hiding. The box drew his eye and not just because it was so large that it seemed impossible for a mere half dozen men to carry it. But there was something about it that twisted at the eye. Something that somehow drew the heart, and his question was quickly forgotten.

Then they put it on the ground and like some sort of standing display, opened it up. But what was inside was no billboard. Instead it was some sort of collection of antique and ancient weaponry. Things that everyone from the cavemen on had probably used in combat, all of them carefully pressed into place against a dark velvet background.

There were so many of them. Swords, not just a few of them but dozens. At least as many whips and chains, many more knives, and a huge selection of other hand weapons. Everything from spears and javelins, to great wooden clubs and axes. There were more too. There were even a few slings. Did these people have the sling that David had used to bring down Goliath?