The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (32 page)
Read The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) Online
Authors: Scott Mariani
If Ben had been keeping his ears open instead of focusing every shred of attention on the rifle that was pointing at him, he might have heard the laboured noises of a mortally injured man crawling up the stairs, inch by blood-smeared inch. The staggering footsteps making their way towards the study door—
There was a sudden crash. Big Joe McCrory filled the doorway. His face was streaked with pain and rage and blood and his teeth were bared like an animal’s. His breathing was a tormented rasp as he lurched into the room with the last of his strength, eyes wide and fixed on the man who had taken his life. His own son.
‘I’m going to kill you, boy,’ came the croaking wheeze. Blood bubbled from the old man’s lips as he spoke. He was dying on his feet, and yet the force of the willpower that had driven him all his life kept him moving.
Big Joe raised a bloody fist. In it was clenched one of the old six-guns he’d kept on the wall downstairs. The hammer was cocked. The trembling barrel pointed straight at his son.
Finn McCrory looked stricken, beyond horror. He turned the Winchester he’d been pointing at Ben towards his father.
The two gunshots filled the room in a single ragged crashing explosion. The express bullet from the Winchester caught the old man in the chest, blowing out his heart and killing him instantly. The .45-calibre soft lead slug from the old six-gun caught Finn right in the centre of his brow. It didn’t have the energy to blast an exit wound through the back of his skull. It ricocheted and rattled around like an angry bee inside his head, carving wound channels in so many directions that his brain was churned to jelly before his knees even gave way under him and the rifle slipped from his lifeless hands.
Father and son hit the floor almost simultaneously, both stone dead.
Ben stood looking from one to the other. The chronicle of blood and deceit that was the Stamford line had ended forever, tonight, in front of his eyes.
He left the study and went back for Erin.
Outside, the night had grown sultrier, and the clouds that had gathered to blot out the stars were pregnant with rain. The Dodge Ram sat deep in shadow under the trees. Ben took the key from his pocket and was going to clunk the central locking when he realised that the back door was hanging open.
Erin was gone.
She might have opened the door from the inside. Might have gone to hide in the house, or wandered off among the ranch buildings to look for him. Or someone else might have popped the central locking from outside and taken her. There was no way to tell. Ben scanned the grounds, but saw nothing, no trace. He was berating himself for having disabled the alarm system. Either way had been taking a risk, but he understood now that this risk had been worse. It was too late now. He just had to find her.
‘Erin!’
Nothing.
He felt the first fat plop of rain hit his face. Then another tapped his shoulder. Then the clouds let go, as if they couldn’t hold the weight of the deluge any longer. The water soaked his hair and drummed on the roofs of the cars. Within seconds it was spouting from the gutter pipes of the ranch house and running in rivers across the ground.
‘Erin!’ he called again, louder.
‘Right here,’ said a voice that wasn’t Erin’s.
Ben turned.
Ritter limped out of the trees. He had Erin clutched to his chest, her body in front of his like a shield. One hand was clamped over her mouth and the other held a pistol against the side of her neck. Ritter’s face was pale. Ben could see that the gun was shaking slightly and that Ritter was swaying on his feet.
It had been him on the stairs. He was badly wounded from at least two shotgun blasts, and must have lost a great deal of blood. He was frightened, and more dangerous than ever before.
They faced each other through a curtain of rain. Erin was struggling in Ritter’s grip, but he had her tight and helpless. Her eyes were locked on Ben’s and full of terror.
Ben laid down Moon’s rifle.
‘You don’t give up,’ he said.
‘Neither do you.’ Ritter’s voice was unsteady and racked with pain.
‘Let her go, Ritter. Everyone’s dead.’
Ritter blinked rain from his eyes. ‘Not everyone.’
‘Let her go,’ Ben repeated, ‘and we’re done. You can walk away from this.’
Ritter dug the gun harder into the side of Erin’s neck and his eyes flashed.
‘It’s not her you want,’ Ben said.
Ritter gritted his teeth and said, ‘No.’ He took the gun away from Erin and pointed it at Ben. ‘On your knees. Fingers laced on top of your head.’
Slowly, Ben raised his hands in plain view. He spread his fingers and interlocked them against his wet hair. He kneeled on the ground, head bowed, peering up at the man with the gun. The rain streamed from his hair and down his face. He could feel the cold wetness soaking into his trousers where he knelt.
Ritter’s face was hard and expressionless. The gun wavered in his hand. He blinked again. Then let go of Erin and shoved her hard. She stumbled and fell.
Then Ritter fired.
Ben keeled over backwards into the dirt.
Erin screamed.
Ritter stepped closer. Smiling now.
Ben rolled on the wet ground. The pain in his chest was blinding. He tried to focus.
Ritter aimed the gun down at Ben. Now he’d finish him. He was in no hurry. Then he’d kill the woman.
Then
they were done.
‘Say goodbye, asshole.’
‘Goodbye, asshole,’ Ben said. He pulled McCrory’s .44 Magnum from the back of his belt. It had two rounds left.
He fired them both into Ritter’s head.
Ritter crashed backwards as if he’d been hit by a truck. The pistol cartwheeled out of his hand and he went straight down and landed spreadeagled on his back on the wet ground.
‘Ben!’ Erin picked herself up and ran to where he lay. ‘Oh, God! Ben! No!’
The pain was blinding. Ben flung away the revolver. He propped himself up on one elbow as she reached him and fell to her knees beside him. With his other hand, he unzipped his jacket.
Erin stared at the vest that Ben had taken from O’Rourke. The bullet was a flattened lead disc circled by splayed-out petals of copper jacketing. It slid down the front of the Kevlar and disappeared in the wet grass.
‘You’re not shot,’ she said, stunned.
‘Might have cracked a rib.’ He held out his hand and let her help him clamber to his feet.
‘You took a bullet just to get him away from me,’ she said. She brushed her dripping hair away from her face, looking up at him with big wondering eyes.
Ben shrugged. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time.’ He looked down at Ritter. The rain was washing his blood into the dirt.
Ben took the dead man’s phone from his pocket. There was one last call to make before this was over. First, he took out a set of car keys and tossed them to Erin.
‘The Plymouth.’ She’d never thought she’d see it in one piece again.
‘Not a scratch on it,’ he said. ‘It isn’t far away.’
She nodded. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You’re going home.’
As they walked back to the car, Ben used Ritter’s phone to call 911. He told them they’d find the mayor dead at the scene of a shooting at Arrowhead Ranch, along with several detectives from the Tulsa PD including the police chief. He told them to call FBI Special Agent Dobbs. They might also like to send some officers to Adonis and check out the remains of Big Bear Farm. That was going to keep them busy for a while. Ben said all he needed to say, then threw the phone into the bushes.
By the time the flashing lights lit up the sky and the fleet of police descended on the ranch, the Plymouth was already long gone.
‘You won’t be staying, will you?’ she asked as they drove back towards the city. The wipers were beating fast, lashing away the rainwater.
He shook his head. ‘The FBI won’t waste time turning up at your door. I don’t intend to be there when they do.’
‘Aren’t you even going to come back to my place tonight?’
He looked at her. ‘You can drop me off on the edge of town.’
‘You mean you’re just going to disappear into the night.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Where will you go?
Ben kept his eyes on the road ahead and said nothing.
‘I wish you didn’t have to leave,’ she said softly.
He reached across and clasped her hand. Squeezed it for a moment, and then let it go.
On the outskirts of Tulsa, he told her where to drop him off. He watched the car disappear into the night, then turned and walked off to make his own way.
Like he always would.
The crowd looked on in awed silence as the pall of smoke drifted densely upwards to meet the falling sleet.
Four attempts to light the pyre had finally resulted in a dismal, crackling flame that slowly caught a hold on the pile of damp hay and twigs stacked up around the wooden stake at its centre. So thick was the smoke, the people of the mountain village who’d huddled round in the cold to witness the burning could barely even make out the figure of the man lashed to the stake. But they could clearly hear his frantic cries of protest as he writhed and fought against his bonds.
His struggles were of no use. Iron chains, not ropes, held him tightly to the thick wooden post. Rope would only burn away, and the authorities overseeing the execution wanted to make sure the job was properly carried out – that the corrupted soul of this evil man was well and truly purified in the cleansing flames.
He was a man of around forty, thin, gaunt and known locally as
Salvator l’Aveugle
– ‘Blind Salvator’ – because he had only a right eye, the left a black, empty socket. The robed and hooded traveller had first turned up in the village in late November. He’d declared himself to be a Franciscan priest on a lone pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where almost for the first time since its fall to the Muslim army of Salah al-Din in 1187, Christianity was re-establishing a lasting foothold. Salvator’s mission was to join his fellow Frenchman and Franciscan, Roger Guérin of Aquitaine, who had managed to purchase from the current Mamluk rulers parts of the ancient city, including the hallowed Cenacle on Mount Zion, and was in the process of building a monastery there.
But Salvator’s long journey hadn’t started well. He’d scarcely covered eighty miles from his home in Burgundy before a gang of brigands had beset him on the road, taking his nag and the purse containing what little money he had. Bruised and battered, he’d plodded on his way on foot for a month or more, totally dependent on the goodwill of his fellow men for shelter and sustenance. Finally, fatigue and hunger combined with the growing winter cold and the unrelenting rain had brought on a fever that had nearly ended his pilgrimage before it had properly begun. Some children had come across him lying half dead by the side of the path that wound up through the mountain pass a mile or so from their village. Seeing from the dirty tatters of his humble robe that he was a holy man, they’d run to fetch help and Salvator had soon been rescued. Men from the village had carried him back on a wagon, he’d been fed and tended to, and fresh straw bedding had been laid down for him in an empty stable that he shared with some chickens.
During the weeks that followed, the priest’s fever had passed and his strength had gradually returned. By then, though, winter was closing in, and he’d decided to delay resuming his journey until the spring. To begin with, most of the villagers hadn’t objected to his remaining with them two or three more months. It was an extra mouth to feed, true; but then, an extra pair of hands was always useful at this hard time of year. During his stay, Salvator had helped clear snow, repair storm damage to the protective wall that circled the village, and tend to the pigs. In his free time, he’d also begun to draw a crowd with his impromptu public sermons, which had grown in frequency and soon become more and more impassioned.
Needless to say, there were those who were unhappy with his presence, and this became more noticeable as time went on. It was a somewhat closed community, somewhat insular, easily given to suspicion and especially where strangers were concerned – even when those strangers were men of God. And most especially when those strangers frightened some people with their odd ways.
The first rumours had begun to circulate about a month after Salvator’s recovery. Just a few passing whispers to begin with, quickly growing to a widespread consensus that the presence of this itinerant priest was cause for deep concern. Increasingly, villagers complained that the content of his sermons was scandalous. He railed against core doctrines of the church, even attacked the views of the Pope, which he declared to be ignoble and ungodly. But that wasn’t the worst of it. What really worried people were the seizures.
Once while feeding the pigs and again in the middle of delivering one of his sermons, Salvator had been seen to suddenly go rigid, then drop to the ground and begin to thrash about in a way that absolutely terrified those who witnessed it happening. During these inexplicable convulsions, his limbs would twitch violently and his face would contort in the most horrible way, foam drooling from the corners of his mouth and his one eye rolled up in its socket so that only the white showed. Most alarmingly of all, it was reported that he would babble and croak in a strange, guttural language that none of the villagers had ever heard before.
As the rumours inevitably picked up momentum, so did the growing belief that Salvator was possessed by demons. They’d all heard of such things, though never before seen it with their own eyes. What else could explain these frightful episodes?
It was after the third seizure happened that the village elders convened to discuss the urgent situation. The assembly of greybeards unanimously decided that such evil could not be allowed to remain in their midst. Despite the risks posed by the weather, they all agreed that their best horseman, a young carpenter named Guy, should be dispatched at once to the nearby town to notify the higher church authorities. In the meantime, Salvator should be locked up in a stone barn outside the village walls and guarded day and night, so that whatever sinister forces had taken hold of him could do no further harm.
When, after several worrying days, Guy returned from his trek, he was accompanied by an envoy of the bishop and a small party of officials and soldiers, who rapidly set up court in the village’s tiny stone chapel and summoned the prisoner to be brought before them. Covered in chains, Salvator was forced to prostrate himself in front of the bishop’s envoy, explain himself for preaching such scandalous and profane sermons and provide evidence to all present that he was not in league with powers of Satan.
The evidence Salvator gave them was all they needed. Right before their eyes, and to their equal horror and satisfaction, he succumbed to yet another bout of convulsions that proved beyond any doubt that some devilish entity had taken possession of this man’s soul. There was no alternative but to purge it out, to banish the demon and cleanse the corrupted fleshly vessel that had been its host.
Death by burning was the only way.
Bit by bit, the sluggish flames gained on the pyre, helped by a chill wind from the mountain that picked up and cleared the smoke. Salvator screamed in agony as the fire began to dance around his feet, then up his legs. Part of his robe burned away, exposing blackened and blistered skin.
‘I curse you!’ he screamed through the heat mist at the church envoy on his high seat, and at the lesser authorities and the soldiers gathered nearby to watch.
‘And you!’ Salvator bellowed at the crowd. ‘Damn your souls, for what you have done today to an innocent man!’
The people shrank away, terrified in their belief that it was the voice of the tormented demon inside him that they were hearing. Children buried their faces in their mothers’ robes; hands were pressed over their ears to protect them from evil.
The flames leapt higher around Salvator, and still he wouldn’t pass out but kept on roaring at them.
‘God sees the shameful sin that has united you all. May His eternal curse be on you all, and your children, and your children’s children after them! May a thousand years of pestilence rot this unholy place and everyone in it!’
One of the soldiers glanced nervously at the bishop’s envoy, ready to raise his bow and fire an arrow into the heart of the flames in order to silence the voice that was rattling the nerves of even the most hardened man present.
But the envoy shook his head. For purification to be effective, no mercy could be allowed. The heretic must burn to death.
And burn to death Salvator did, but it took an unbearably long time. To the villagers, it seemed as if the flaming human torch went on railing at them even as the sizzling flesh peeled from its bones. Then, finally, his cries diminished and he hung limply, no longer resisting, from the blackened chains that held him to the stake. The remnants of his robe burst alight. Then his tonsured hair. By now he could barely be seen for the flames. His one rolling eyeball seemed to peer balefully at them from the scorched ruin of his face.
Long after the carbonised skeleton had fallen into the cinders leaving the chains hanging empty, Salvator’s voice went on ringing inside the heads of the horror-struck villagers. They would never forget the promise of everlasting pestilence that had been heaped on them and their line.
Within a year, Salvator’s words would come true.
The martyr’s curse had begun.