Scott Mariani - The Doomsday Prophecy

‘I’m not like you,’ he replied. ‘I know the kind of treatment you had in mind for me tonight if I didn’t answer your questions. But I’m not a senseless killer. If you tell me where she is, what’s going on, and who you are, you won’t be harmed. I’ll put you where nobody can find you. When I find Zoë safe and well, I’ll come back and maybe I’ll let you walk free. It’s your choice. But understand that if you don’t tell me, you’re dead. Right here, right now. No more finger games.’ He aimed the pistol at her forehead.

‘Who the hell are you?’ The Spanish accent was less pronounced now. She sounded distinctly American.

‘Nobody. Last chance. Where is she?’

The woman heaved a sigh. ‘She’s been taken to the US. Five days ago.’

‘Good. We’re getting somewhere. Where exactly in the US, why and by whom?’

‘I don’t know everything,’ she said. ‘I just do what I’m told to do.’

‘Who tells you? Give me names.’

‘I don’t have any names to give.’

‘What’s yours?’

‘Kaplan. Marisa Kaplan.’

He watched her eyes and believed her. He pointed back at the fair-haired man on the floor. ‘What was his?’

‘Hudson.’

‘Why are you here, Marisa? Who planted the bomb?’

Then the room was filled with noise. Ben felt the shockwave of a bullet pass close to his ear. A wall-light shattered. He whirled round and fell back simultaneously, returning fire. The Beretta kicked in his hands. The fair-haired guy was half-raised on one elbow, and the gun in his bloody fist was a small backup revolver. It fired again. The second shot went through the cuff of Ben’s shirt.

Ben fired back. Saw the bullet strike. Fired again. The guy’s eye disappeared and his head dropped to the floor. There was blood up the wall behind him.

Then there was silence again. Ben clambered to his feet and checked himself. He wasn’t hit. But the intruder was definitely dead this time. Ben kicked the.357 Magnum snubby backup piece away across the floor.

He heard a tiny sound behind him. He turned. The woman called Kaplan was sitting up, staring at her stomach. The blood was spreading fast over her cream dress. She clutched at the wound that her partner’s stray shot had punched into her gut, trying to tear the cloth to get to it. Her mouth opened and closed. Then she slumped backwards and died.

Creating corpses was much quicker and easier work than disposing of them afterwards. Ben found some heavy-duty plastic garbage sacks in the kitchen of the beach house. Stepping over the pools of blood on the tiles, he tore two sacks off the roll, opened them out and spread them on the floor in the passage near the front door.

He took Kaplan by the wrists and dragged her. Her head hung down, eyes still open, her hair trailing in the slick of blood on the tiles. He dumped her corpse on top of one of the garbage sacks, walked back across the room to Hudson’s body, bent down and grabbed his ankles. Hudson was much heavier and much more bloody. His right eye socket and cheekbone were smashed by the impact of the 9mm bullet from his partner’s gun. Ben dragged him over the tiles and left him lying next to Kaplan.

He crouched over them and frisked them carefully. No papers, no personal items of any kind. Hudson had a phone in his back pocket. He found Kaplan’s in her handbag. With a phone in each hand he redialled the last call she’d made, and Hudson’s phone vibrated in his other hand. He checked through their call records. The two phones had been used only to call each other.

Ben left the corpses lying there and started cleaning up the house. The broken wall-lamp had sprayed glass shards over part of the floor, and he swept them up with a dustpan and brush and shook them out into the bin. In a kitchen cupboard he found a mop and bucket and a bottle of bleach. He filled the bucket with cold water, lugged it through to the other room and started mopping up the worst of the blood. Once that was done, he used a kitchen knife to hack at one of the doorframes, where a bullet had embedded itself deep into the wood. He dug the flattened 9mm bullet out and dropped it in his pocket. He winced at the mess he’d made of the doorframe.

As he worked, he was thinking hard. Kaplan and Hudson hadn’t been the best surveillance and hit team he’d ever seen, but they hadn’t been the worst, either. The two Berettas were the exact same make and model. The serial numbers had been expertly removed. Those kinds of details pointed to a professional outfit. He was pretty certain that they had been sent to kill Nikos Karapiperis. If Nikos had really been involved in drugs, he wouldn’t have gone to Charlie for help to find Zoë. So the killers had planted the drugs on him. That was a neat touch. Then the bombing had been orchestrated to eliminate Charlie, after they’d seen him talking to Nikos. And it wasn’t a difficult step from there to figure out that they’d come after Ben for the same reason.

Those pieces slotted together neatly enough. But when Zoë Bradbury was factored into the equation, it started falling apart. There was no ransom demand. No apparent reason for snatching her. Her parents were hardly the kind of people who could be screwed for millions to get their daughter back. If Tom Bradbury had been in politics or some other kind of position to be privy to valuable information, it might have made sense. But he wasn’t. He was a theology scholar in one of the world’s dustiest institutions, about as remote from the real world as it was possible to get.

So whatever reason was driving someone to these extremes, it had to come from Zoë herself. But what was it? He thought about the money. She’d apparently got hold of twenty thousand dollars fairly easily, and was expecting a lot more to come soon. It certainly sounded like a blackmail deal. Whoever she was extorting the money from had to be pretty rich and powerful, and they were clearly desperate. Which meant that whatever she was threatening them with, it was real enough to be taken very seriously.

But why go to the trouble of moving her halfway across the world to the States, when it would have been so easy just to put a bullet in her head right here on Corfu? He thought about it and could come to only one conclusion. She had something they wanted, and they wanted to keep her alive until they got it.

But that led to another problem. Kaplan and Hudson weren’t soft types. They were ready and willing to kill. And Zoë wasn’t a soldier trained to resist interrogation. If all they wanted was to make her talk, it would have taken just a few seconds to get the information out of her. Just the sight of a knife or a gun and, like the vast majority of ordinary people, she would fold instantly.

After that, they probably would kill her. And after twelve days, there was a good chance that she was dead already.

At three-thirty in the morning, the beach taverna started closing up for the night. The last of the stragglers wandered off homewards. The music stopped and the lights went off, leaving the beach in darkness.

Ben watched and waited for another half hour. The sands were deserted. He stuffed a Beretta in each of his jeans pockets, pushed open the front door and dragged Hudson’s corpse out across the sand, sliding him along on the plastic sack.

It was a long drag, and a dead body on sand was a heavy weight. The pull on the stitches in Ben’s neck was agonising, and the muscles in his shoulders and forearms were pumped full of lactic acid by the time he reached his chosen spot a hundred yards away. He left the corpse in a nook between two dunes and walked back, breathing hard.

Back at the house, he took Kaplan’s wrists, gritted his teeth and hauled her out onto the beach. As her head lolled and bounced he kept imagining that her staring eyes were meeting his. He didn’t like to see a woman dead like this, and he was glad that he hadn’t been the one to kill her.