David Gilman - Ice Claw

The land Fedir ruled harbored deep treasures of energy beneath the surface-oil and natural gas deposits that gave him wealth and even greater power. By the time he was twenty-five years old he was one of the richest men in the world. He influenced stock markets and had politicians and governments at his beck and call. He sought no publicity, he bought no football teams, he became as mysterious as the legend surrounding him. And when he was thirty-one years and one day old, he sold everything to the powers that be.

And disappeared.

That was five years ago.

Now he hunted in the silence of the night. It was his creed to calmly punish disloyalty and incompetence. Lessons had to be taught so that others would learn. This boy he hunted had made a grave error. In a town near where Zabala had lived, the boy had got drunk and spoken about the smuggled animals. Tishenko’s new private world, this mountain kingdom, could have been compromised. There was only one punishment.

The sounds of Tishenko’s hunting wolves were far behind the boy. His strength gave him confidence as he ran across the hard-packed snowfield. He would outrun them, he was certain of it. He knew the landscape, and where the glacier crept down the mountain pass, there was a way up the side of the ice. The wolves could never follow him.

Tishenko could see his victim’s plumed breath, watched as the boy kept looking over his shoulder, perhaps unable to believe his good luck that he was not being pursued, that the deadline for escape had been achieved, that he might live. Freedom beckoned. That was the most wonderful gift for a frightened mind-hope. But he had failed to look into the night sky behind him.

Tishenko eased the black-winged paraglider into position.

Moon glow sprinkled the snow. Tishenko’s muscles tightened, his breathing steady as he watched his fractured shadow steal up behind the boy, who had only seconds to live.

The specially made titanium hunting bow needed strength and skill to draw, hold the target and release the arrow to kill effectively. Tishenko did not wish to cause undue suffering. Fear was torment enough.

With barely a whisper through the air, his darkened wings made him a creature of the night, gliding between moon and victim. A hurried sigh and the broadhead-tipped arrow flew in the night air and plunged into the running target.

The boy dropped instantly, prone, arms outstretched, without any conscious thought of what had struck him. A puddle of blood darkened in the cream-tinted snow. Death took only seconds. His last sensation was feeling the rough, wet crystals against his face and being drawn down into the cold, embracing ground.

The wolves would pick up the blood scent. The body would be devoured. Tishenko knew others would need watching before his plan to harness the most powerful force in nature could be completed. When that was done, a new order would be created out of the destruction.

As Tishenko turned the paraglider across the desolate but hauntingly beautiful snowfields for the place that was now his home, deep inside the Swiss Alps, a raven flew across the face of the moon. Ravens do not fly at night, nor should they cross such desolate areas.

It was an omen. Of something unexpected.

The boy, Max Gordon?

Time would tell.

Like a dark angel, Fedir Tishenko drifted beyond the killing ground.

Max’s room in the chateau was basic. An old iron bedstead, a worn mattress, a duvet, bare floors and hand-painted wooden shutters across drafty windows. A spindle-backed chair served as a clotheshorse. Almost like home, he thought. He had wrapped the duvet around him: this was his first opportunity to have a proper look at the newspaper cuttings he had taken from Zabala’s scrapbook. With little help from the bare, forty-watt lightbulb, he scrutinized the French reports, getting his brain to think in the other language.

Twenty-three years ago Zabala had caused a furor by claiming that a catastrophic event was going to take place in southeastern Europe. He had, it seemed, little evidence that pointed to a disaster. Everyone scoffed. Zabala was ridiculed, accused of dabbling in astrology, the predictive, unproven art, instead of keeping within the discipline of astronomy.

So that was what he was-an astronomer.

Zabala’s riposte to his critics was that in ancient times Egyptian, Greek and Persian cultures had embraced celestial attributes and associated them with major events in history. Zabala refused to disclose his research and insisted that Lucifer-

Max gasped. Zabala was talking about Lucifer all those years ago! The last word he said before he died. That moment of terror on the mountain persisted with startling clarity in his mind.

Lucifer would return, bringing cataclysmic destruction, Zabala had insisted in the newspaper. The journalists’ articles derided Zabala rather than offering any facts. Perhaps there were none to report. They didn’t even mention where he worked, so Max decided that the man had become something of a figure to poke fun at. However, Zabala insisted throughout that he would provide definite proof, that his research was not yet finalized, but that all the signs were there.

Signs? The newspapers scorned him.

It was getting late. Max clambered onto the bed and switched off the light. The old house creaked from the wind sneaking under its floorboards and rafters. Despair whispered through the run-down building. The shutters, edged in fuzzy half-light, pushed and pulled, moaning from the breeze.

Maybe this was all a wild-goose chase. An obsessed man, demented by a half-baked prediction, forcing himself from society into the mountains because of something that didn’t happen. He had turned his back on the world and become a reclusive monk. If Zabala had raised the alarm all those years ago, had been proved wrong because nothing happened, then from a rational point of view Max was getting caught up in an old man’s fantasy.

Max checked his thoughts. Someone had attacked, pursued and killed the elderly monk. That wasn’t a fantasy. Stark terror had strangled them both in the moment before Zabala’s death. But Max had hung on. Had done everything to save him, just as Zabala had done for him. Just as his dad would have done.

One of the articles made a final, sober statement. Zabala was nothing more than an unknown, publicity-seeking, third-rate scientist, possessed by the demon of failure. He had become a religious zealot who should carry a placard telling the world The End Is Nigh .

Max lay in the gloom. Someone padded barefoot along the corridor-candlelight seeped around the doorframe-paused, then moved on.

He slipped out of bed and put the chair under the door handle. A crazy woman with a knife had nearly cut his throat. He didn’t want her, or anyone else he was unaware of in this crazy place, coming back to make sure he was all tucked up for the night.

Sleep tugged at Max’s mind. He fingered the stone pendant and dismissed the whispers of doubt that plagued him about Zabala’s sanity. The only way to find the killer was to have something he wanted badly enough. Zabala had found Lucifer’s secret and Lucifer had taken his revenge.

Max would find the secret.

And Lucifer would come for him.

The chateau was no less stark in daylight. Two huge balconies hung precariously from the art deco building. A turret that looked like a small bell tower peeked above the castellated roof terrace. The roof’s eaves were rotten and most of the big windows were boarded over. At the turn of the nineteenth century it had taken four hundred men twelve years to build an aristocrat’s dream. Its grim history of bad debt, misery and sadness had by now soaked into the neglected structure.

Max had slept badly: the mattress was lumpy, the room drafty and the ancient water pipes kept up a constant groaning. As he wandered through the corridors towards the voices and the smell of coffee and bacon, he noticed that there was barely any furniture anywhere. And when he finally reached the main living room, it looked more like a city squat than a French chateau. Bobby Morrell, his two surfing friends and Peaches sat with Sayid and Sophie. They lounged with plates of food on their laps on big, overstuffed chairs that looked as though they came from the Second World War. A big dining table, once beautifully polished but now scratched and burned by innumerable pots of hot tea being placed on its surface over the years, teetered on thin legs, supporting fresh bread, jars of honey, jam and marmalade. There were bacon, eggs, coffee, fruit-just about anything anyone could want to eat.