David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

“You mean, am I scared?” he asked.

“Kind of.”

“No.”

“Don’t you ever get scared?”

He looked around the living room. It felt good with another person there. The fires were doing their job at last. The place finally seemed warm, human.

“Not here,” he answered. “Not now. But I have to tell you, another fifteen minutes and I fall fast asleep, Agent Deacon. You’d better have something else to amaze me.”

“Oh, I have,” she said with a grin, and went back to stabbing the keys of the machine.

PERONI HAD NEVER DONE well on the weapons range, never paid much attention to the smart-ass firearms monkeys who thought you could run the world through the sights of a gun. He was a vice cop. He didn’t mind frontline work. When he was a senior officer he’d made damn sure he didn’t let his men take risks he’d never face himself. All the same, vice was nothing like this. It was pimps and hookers, turf wars and stupid, cheated johns. Black and white in the corners sometimes, but more often a difficult, indeterminate shade of grey. Not something shapeless moving through the dark, unknown, unseen, looking to kill for no real reason at all.

Peroni did what seemed natural, put his big arms out and covered the girl with his body. A futile gesture, one designed more for reassurance than anything else. The huge door opposite was completely shut. The side exit was doubtless locked too. This killer made no mistakes. They couldn’t flee. They couldn’t do much but wait and face whatever lay out there.

And think …

Even a stupid old vice cop could do that.

“What do you want?” he yelled into the darkness.

Someone moved, feet tapping on the ancient stone floor, a menacing presence shifting around the echoing interior like a ghost. He could be anywhere. The sound of his shoes on the hard floor bounced around the upturned stone eyelid, came at them from every direction.

“ What do you want ?” Peroni yelled again.

The footsteps stopped. The hall was silent except for the faint rumble of a lone car making it through the night in the distant world beyond.

“What’s mine.”

It was an American voice. Flat, middle-aged, monotonous. A voice that sounded as if most of the life had been squeezed out of it somewhere along the line. Peroni wondered if he could guess where it came from. If he could just point the service pistol in that direction, loose off a few shots and hope something-good luck, God, the remnants of a benevolent spirit still lurking here-would send one piece of metal spinning in the right direction.

But he didn’t believe in God or ghosts. You had to make your own way.

Peroni turned, still doing his best to cover the kid behind him, peered into her face and held out his hand. She was clutching the wallet, thin fingers tight on the leather, as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

“Laila,” he whispered. “Please…”

Stealing’s a bad thing , he wanted to say. Stealing gets you into big trouble, marks you out for life, as visibly as if you were wearing a sign round your neck saying “evil.” Or a magical symbol carved out of your back.

That was why cops like him spent their working days chasing little thieves, looking for those telltale marks. It was too hard trying to catch the big, smart guys, the ones who carried scalpels and didn’t baulk at using them. And as for the really big fish-well, they just got immunity from their paid politicians anyway. None of which helped a dumb cop on the street to work out the difference between what was truly good and bad.

She passed the wallet over to him without a word, eyes glittering, shiny, full of fear.

“Here!” Peroni bellowed into the darkness and sent the wallet spinning out into the heart of the building, hard enough, he hoped, to take it into the shade on the other side where their unseen stalker could collect it, say a quick thank-you, then disappear into the night leaving everyone safe and sound.

Instead, the thing fell with a gentle thud, slap bang in the middle of the tiny mound of snow building beneath the oculus, and sat there under the silver light like a beacon, like a bright, shiny trap.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” Peroni said, half to himself, half to the figure hiding in the dark. “I’m not playing any tricks here, friend. Just take the damn wallet and go, will you?”

The gun felt heavy in his hand. Behind him, Laila was beginning to squirm. If there’d been an easy and obvious exit he’d have sent her flying towards it, screaming at her to get the hell out of this makeshift tomb in the centre of a slumbering, snow-covered city. Instead, all he could think of was how to hide her from whatever was approaching, how to keep her frail body protected behind his.

And even that wasn’t enough. When it came, straight out of the darkness, it came as a storm of pure physical force, furious, relentless. The man was punching and kicking and screaming, pistol-whipping Peroni’s skull with what felt like a hammer. The gun flew out of Peroni’s hand, clattering across the stonework, spinning into the shadows. He tried to dodge, to find some way of shifting his frame away from the sudden, vicious onslaught of violence, but it was impossible. His hands left Laila and tried to cover his face. He felt his breath flee from his lungs, his mind start to wander off into another place.

… death, they called it, somewhere this man knew very well indeed. Somewhere he liked to visit often, in the company of others .

“Just let her go,” Peroni mumbled, aware that the iron taste of his own blood was feeding into his mouth as he spoke, bowing his head now, knowing what was to come. “What can a kid do to you?”

He saw the butt of the pistol now, racing down towards him through the dark, heard what the figure at the other end of that powerful, sweeping arm was saying, over and over again.

Busy, busy, busy, busy .

He was a busy man, Peroni thought. That was about all they knew of him. Then even that was gone once the pistol butt connected, gone into an agonizing blackness where nothing made sense, not even the words he heard through the rushing bloody haze inside his head.

“THIS ZIGGURAT IS UNIQUE, Nic,” Emily said. “Read the report. That design is not uncommon, but an entire room, the holiest of holies, was decorated with it throughout. There’s nowhere like it in the whole of Iraq. Probably in the world. The place was uncovered back in the 1980s, at which time no one had the money to excavate it properly. It’s only now people are starting to see what’s really there. The irony is the Romans probably knew about this kind of architecture all along. They borrowed from it for buildings like the Pantheon. The resemblance can’t be coincidence. Hell, it even had an oculus. Hadrian could have copied the whole damn thing.”

“So what do you think happened?” he asked.

“Let’s start with some facts. He knew my dad. They were in the ziggurat together. My dad and those other people got out. Kaspar didn’t. Work it out.”

It wasn’t hard.

“Laura Lee?” he asked again.

“I think she was the woman who died in the Pantheon. It’s not her real name. God knows what that is. I tried to look at the files on her this afternoon. All gone. Buried so deep they might as well not exist. Why would anyone want to do that?”

The answer was always the same. “Because something went wrong.”

“Exactly. Listen: none of this is random. It never has been . He’s had thirteen years in some stinking Iraqi pit to think about this. So, come this year, Iraq’s free. He doesn’t walk up to the nearest American base and say, ”Hey, take me home.“ For some reason he doesn’t want to come in from the cold. He wants to get even. So he begins on the line that led to my dad.”