Ash

  As a precaution, the security chief had ordered the containment area guard, Grunwald, to keep the heavy self-closing safety door behind them open just in case there was trouble and Babbage and the nurse needed to get out fast. As he had put his weight against the iron door and wrinkled his nose as the foul air came up at him, the sentinel’s relief that he hadn’t been made to go with them had been all too clear.

  Not generally a nervous individual, Babbage couldn’t help but be aware something was very wrong about Comraich Castle lately, and it wasn’t just the maggots and the flies. No, there was a definite oppression hovering over the place, far worse than ever before. Even the ceiling and wall lights were low, as if the generators weren’t working properly. And it was cold, so bloody cold that several people were wearing topcoats even in the operations room. He could see the vapour from his mouth each time he breathed out.

  When they reached the bottom step, Babbage undid the two buttons of his jacket in case he needed his gun in a hurry. He turned to face the long dingy corridor. It was difficult to see things clearly down here, even though the ceiling lights were just about working. He was going to have those generators checked out again.

  He felt Nurse Krantz at his side.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing a finger at the end of the corridor.

  Squinting, Babbage peered into the shadows, seeing only rubble and dirt caused by the old elevator’s crash.

  ‘I can’t . . .’ he began, then stopped when he saw a shape, a woman wearing an inmates’ smock. She was holding something clutched to her chest.

  ‘It’s her,’ prompted the senior nurse. ‘Her. The madwoman. The cell locks must have failed again.’ The red-haired nurse clucked her tongue in annoyance. She started forward, but Babbage held her back.

  ‘Just hang on a minute.’ The security chief went to the nearest cell door and gave it a shove with his hand. The door was locked and he peeked through the wired glass observation panel. It was even darker in there, but he could see the figure of a man lying in a foetal position on his cot.

  Meanwhile, Krantz had tried the door opposite and found it shut tight. She, too, looked through the letter-box viewing window. The room looked empty, but as her eyesight adapted to the semi-darkness she realized there was someone sitting curled up in one corner of the cell. It was a man, for he wore thin, pyjama-style trousers. His forehead was lowered to his bent knees, hands and lower arms tucked into his lap. She gave the wired window a sharp tap with her fingernail and when the inmate looked up to see her, his wide eyes were crazed. He sent a shiver through Krantz and she was used to handling the crazies.

  She gave a start when a hand touched her shoulder.

  ‘This one, too?’ asked Babbage.

  ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘The door,’ he replied tensely. ‘Is it locked?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Yes, there’s an old man in there, curled up in a corner. He can’t get out.’

  ‘Nor the other one.’ The security chief turned his head to seek out the figure that Krantz had spotted a minute ago. She was still standing there, staring at them, black orbs floating around her.

  ‘How the fuck did she get out if all the other cell doors are locked?’ Babbage wished he’d brought his flashlight with him: this permanent gloom was giving him the creeps. In fact, the whole fucking castle had been giving him the creeps for weeks now.

  ‘Okay,’ he said quietly to Krantz, only partially hiding his nervousness. ‘Let’s put her back before she starts getting excited.’ He walked on ahead and Krantz hurried after him, pushing at doors along the way, making sure they were also locked.

  Babbage came to a halt unexpectedly and the nurse almost bumped into him.

  ‘Look. That thing she’s holding,’ he said edgily. ‘What is it?’ He had a nasty feeling about what the madwoman clutched to her flat chest so tightly.

  ‘It’s just a box.’ Krantz’s voice was brusque: she’d been dealing with the idiocies of patients like this for more years than she cared to remember. ‘She probably picked it up from the rubble.’

  When the nurse started walking towards the crazy woman, Babbage noticed it was not really a box at all. It was covered in dust, but there was something odd about it. He could just see dusty wires on its top and a small nub.

  He looked into the wild eyes that stared up balefully into his own. Baleful because the size of her head, which was too big to be supported by her skinny neck, meant that her jaw rested on her chest and her black, slanted eyes, pupils dilated from the darkness she constantly lived in, couldn’t possibly look anything other than baleful.

  And Babbage said in a kind of low moan, ‘Oh no, oh no . . .’

  For that small nub on the top of the object that appeared to be a simple box was suddenly glowing red.

  Experience told him instantly that what she held in her thin, clawed hands was a time bomb. A time bomb? So that’s what that creepy little bastard Cedric Twigg had been—

  Rachael Krantz, who was marching forward to deal with this mentally disordered crackpot, was stopped in her tracks by Babbage’s moans.

  She looked over her shoulder to see the horror on his face, then back at the old loon holding the box. A box with a red light on it. A red light that flicked on and off three times as she watched, then—

  The deafening explosion vaporized Hitler’s daughter instantly, then seared the skin off Senior Nurse Rachael Krantz’s bones, and threw the burning shreds of Security Chief Kevin Babbage down to the far end of the corridor in a rich boiling cauldron of flame and flesh before diverting up the stairs to consume the guard and then roaring its way onwards.

  Soon after that explosion, which had literally shaken the castle to its foundations, there came the booming of many more.

  83

  The desolate hunched figure that had once been a colonel and tyrant roamed the round room in the tall tower, wearing the traditional robes of his people because they would not let him bring his military uniform with him (nor any of his mistresses!), venting his fury at empty air, kicking chairs and breaking furniture, smashing fine ornamental vases on the carpeted wooden floor.

  Once they called him a monster, those infidels of the Western media – but never to his face, never in his presence. Politicians, diplomats, interviewers, those in opposition – especially those cowardly scum – not even royalty, had ever called him a monster to his face.

  But now, physically, he was a monster. To escape the unjustifiable wrath of his own people he’d endured painful cosmetic surgery in a Marseilles clinic. They’d advised him he would have to look considerably different if he was ever to go out into the real world again unrecognized. But not this, never this.

  He stopped to hold his hideous head in both hands for a moment, for the pain in his temples was excruciating, the ache developing gradually over a period of weeks so that now it had peaked and become unbearable, causing his eyes, over which his brow extended so far they were almost hidden beneath bone and shadow, to flow with tears of pain and self-pity. There was something wrong with this place called Comraich Castle, something indefinable but clearly evil; sometimes he thought the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of his own people had followed him to this cold, lonely place just to torment him, while others had already been waiting here so that they could taunt him with constant whispers of: Lockerbie, Lockerbie, Lockerbie . . .

  The Inner Court’s plan to help him flee the uprising against him, which he’d finally realized he could never win, was clever and skilfully executed. Like all dictators he had employed body doubles, men who so closely resembled their chief that they were often used as decoys. He’d had two of his own lookalikes surgically refined, so cleverly that even his own bodyguards could not tell them apart.

  In those last days of the revolution one doppelgänger had been sent from the beleaguered city of Sirte to the leader’s hometown of Bani Walid in a small convoy of military vehicles. The rebels would have no doubt as to whom they’d captured, for even the double’s dental records
had been substituted for the dictator’s in case there was ever a post-mortem.

  Meanwhile, the Inner Court had insinuated the real despot into a group of ‘legitimate’ businessmen whose private aircraft was about to depart from a small airstrip near Homs, concealing him in a compartment under a short row of seats.

  As he reflected on all this, a shocking sound came to his ears: an explosion, a sound he knew only too well. Then another, and another, this one so huge that the tower, his eyrie, shook to its very foundations.

  He panicked. Had subversives followed him to his secret hiding place, his haven of safety, his promised and highly priced refuge? Surely this could not be so! But then came even more explosions, some distant, some closer. And then one that was closest of all: beneath his very feet, the floor jolting suddenly, causing him to fall to his knees.

  To his relief, the floor did not fragment: it and its covering carpet remained intact under him. Soon, though, he smelt smoke and felt the carpet on which he belatedly prayed for forgiveness begin to grow warm and smoulder, until soon the heat and the smoke became insufferable.

  He scrabbled on his hands and knees to the door. The doorknob was hot to the touch. Pulling himself up, he yanked it open, throwing part of his robe over his head for protection, and ran out onto the small landing at the top of the spiral staircase.

  He screamed, but his cries were lost in the chaos. No one could hear him. No one came for him. He was crying, sobbing, his throat already painfully parched because of the smoke rising in curling mists that seemed to contain figures, some of whose faces he recognized. Those men and women he’d had executed as enemies of the state. The choking swirls now billowed into other familiar faces, all of them gloating, grinning sickeningly before morphing into others, many of whom he either did not know or had forgotten during forty years of torture and death, but all of whom knew him.

  Howling, he rushed back into his apartment, unaware that flames from the room beneath were eating away the flooring. As he reached the centre, the fire flared up from below, feeding on wooden boards and beams, hungrily consuming the lush carpet under his feet.

  As he looked down in dread, the flames erupted with an immense roaring bellow, providing a wide portal through which Colonel Muammar Gaddafi plunged from this world into the very depths of Hell.

  84

  Haelstrom was gripping Ash so tightly that he was about to pass out, but even with his senses fading, the investigator heard the terrific boom and then felt the whole building shake and tremble before the effects of the explosion settled. His fingers gripped tightly, holding on frantically to the stone battlements on either side of him to prevent Haelstrom pushing him onto the sea-soaked rocks below.

  He felt the big man’s hold on him weaken as Haelstrom was distracted by what sounded like a roar of thunder somewhere deep in the castle.

  Suddenly, adrenaline pulsed through Ash and everything became acutely clear to him again. As Haelstrom’s huge head turned away from him, searching for the source of the explosion, the investigator pulled himself back from the brink with the help of the thick stones he was pressed between. Before Haelstrom had even realized it, Ash had dived past him to crash on the walkway’s flagstones.

  Haelstrom twisted his neck further to see Ash sprawled on the ground behind him. Now, he turned his whole body round to face the investigator, who was on one elbow, beginning to rise. Their eyes locked, and through Haelstrom’s look of vicious contempt, Ash could also see confusion. The huge man reached forward again and took a first step towards the exposed investigator.

  ‘Leave him alone, you bastard!’

  The shrieking voice seemed to come from nowhere. Both men swivelled their heads to look in the direction of the French windows they’d smashed through minutes earlier.

  If Haelstrom had looked confused before, he now appeared totally perplexed.

  And so was Ash as he took in Delphine standing just outside the broken doors, poised in a marksman’s semi-crouch, legs apart but planted firmly on the ground, knees slightly bent, and her arms stretched forward holding something in her hands, pointing it directly at Haelstrom.

  Something that looked like a pink tube of lipstick.

  It was a weird tableaux in the moonlight: the huge figure of Haelstrom, the bright moonlight behind him casting an elongated black shadow across the flagstoned walkway, Delphine poised like a slim female gunslinger, and beyond her, just inside the shattered doors, shards of glass glinting under the light, the figure of Louis, dressed in his long cashmere robe and soft shoes. He stood perfectly still and Ash could only guess how frightened and disorientated he must be feeling.

  But the lipstick that Delphine, her tan face whitened by the moonlight, was pointing at Haelstrom was possibly the most bizarre element of the freeze-frame.

  Ash’s gaze returned to Haelstrom, who had a stupid grin on his face, the small features pulled together in the centre of his massive head.

  ‘Don’t be silly, girl,’ the big man growled and took another step, this time towards her. ‘You can’t frighten me with—’

  That was all he got to say.

  Delphine’s thumb pressed down and two wires shot out from the weapon and clung to his bulk. He screamed with sudden shock and his whole body juddered in the moonlight as the Taser sent 50,000 volts into him.

  Haelstrom staggered backwards across the walkway, the shock not enough to knock a man of his size unconscious, but the pain of it sufficiently excruciating to empty both his bowels and his bladder. His legs came up against the crenellated wall and he sat down hard in one of the gaps in the battlements before, unable to stop himself, tipping back through it and over the cliff edge.

  They heard his scream, terribly loud at first, then fading as his bulk disappeared into the night, stopping only when he hit the wave-battered rocks below.

  Trembling, Ash scrambled to his feet and hurried over to the small figure of Delphine, who now stood with shoulders slumped and head down. She dropped the weapon and practically threw herself into Ash’s embrace.

  ‘Oh, God. David . . .’

  Her body was trembling more than the investigator’s as he held her tightly against him.

  Her drooped shoulders spasmed as she sobbed. ‘I never meant to kill him, David, you must believe me. I only intended to disable him for a while. When he went for you . . .’

  Another wrenching sob brought a halt to her words.

  ‘Delphine, he was going to kill me. You saved me from a ruthless, evil man. I didn’t have a chance against him.’

  ‘When . . . when I saw him trying to push you off the battlements I could only think of using the Taser in my shoulder bag. Dr Singh and I always carry one in case we ever need to subdue a violent patient. I . . . I’ve never had to use it before.’

  ‘Just don’t ever forget and use it on your lips.’

  He felt, rather than heard, the small laugh that came from her, and then she clung to him even more tightly.

  Other muffled explosions were coming from different levels of the castle, although none as powerful as the first. They heard faraway screaming, a man’s screams, and looked at each other in dismay.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Ash said, to himself more than to Delphine. ‘Those sound like bombs. Is the castle being attacked?’ He sensed that these explosions were man-made rather than supernatural. They weren’t necessarily part of what was coming, but they couldn’t help but make it worse.

  There was equal questioning in her frightened eyes.

  ‘Lewis and I heard an explosion coming from somewhere on the fifth floor, I think. Did you hear it?’

  Ash remembered the loud boom, and how the fire in Lord Edgar’s hearth had flared outwards, its rekindled heat scorching his face. That must have been caused by the explosion that had Haelstrom rushing into the laird’s suite to warn him.

  ‘That’s when I brought Lewis down. I didn’t know if we should wait any longer in his room, and I was worried about you. The door to the suite was wid
e open and I could see through to the battlements. I was even more anxious when I saw Lord Edgar’s body slumped in an armchair, and Byrone’s on the floor.’

  Through all the confusion, the fight, the fear, Ash’s mind was suddenly more alert. He gripped the psychologist by her elbows. ‘Delphine. I know who Lewis is. We have to protect him. We’ve got to get him out of here.’

  She looked at him in bewilderment. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘No need to for now. Is that Taser thing still workable?’

  ‘No, it needs to be recharged from the mains.’

  ‘We don’t have time to wait. Something awful is happening to Comraich at this very moment.’

  He hurried her back through the opened doors to Louis, who was standing very still in the semi-gloom, the robe’s cowl pulled over his head so that his face was in shadow.

  ‘Are you all right, Lewis?’ Ash leaned forward a little to try and glimpse the young man’s – the young prince’s – countenance.

  ‘I’m okay, Mr Ash. But are you all right?’

  Ash smiled at the exiled prince’s concern and answered more brightly than he felt. ‘I’m fine. But we have to leave Comraich Castle, d’you understand? And right away.’

  Louis held on to the psychologist’s hand. ‘Delphine explained to me why we have to go away, but I’m a bit confused.’

  ‘When we’re clear, when we’re far away from here, somewhere peaceful where we can talk, I’ll tell you all I know.’

  ‘Everything?’

  Ash’s smile was warmer now. ‘Everything,’ he promised.

  Another explosion shook the room, although it sounded as if it came from a lower floor.

  Delphine spoke quickly, as though fully aware that time was running out. ‘David, Louis suffers from epilepsy. He has the Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, to be exact, which means he can have a seizure and drop to the floor at any time. I medicated him with Inovelon while we were waiting, so he should be okay if his adrenaline doesn’t run out of control. I thought I should warn you.’