David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

“Yeah, yeah,” Peroni grumbled and shoved his hands out behind him, bunched up the way they did in training, holding his palms together as the cuffs came on, cutting tight into his skin.

“You,” the American said, jabbing a finger at Laila.

She held out her hands in front of her, looking meek and obedient.

He nodded. “You’re a smart little cookie, huh? You want some advice? Quit stealing. It just leads to trouble.”

The plastic went round her slender wrists with rather more care than he’d allowed before. Then he bounced Peroni round again, pulled him tight to the girl, withdrew another cuff from his pocket, looped it to join the two of them together through the wrist restraints and tied off the join around the narrow iron support for the altar rail. They couldn’t move. Just to ram home the point, the American reached into Peroni’s pocket, took out his phone, dropped it on the floor, and stomped the thing into pieces.

“I worked with Kurds once,” he said sourly. “They’d call you brother, they’d give you anything, they’d die for you. Then one night they’d see you’d got money in your baggage, and they’d come in and slit your throat, walk out and spend it on a new VCR. You know why?”

Peroni sighed. “I’m a cop, mister. I walk these streets. I do my best. I try to put people like you in jail if I can.”

It was as if the other man didn’t even hear. “I’ll tell you why. Because we taught them how. You think about that the next time she steals something.”

“Yeah,” Peroni replied sourly, without even thinking. “Nobody’s really responsible for anything these days, are they?”

He wondered if he was going to throw up. Or faint. Or both, possibly in the wrong order. “I guess,” he added, “it wasn’t really you who carved that woman up in here the other night. Just someone else wearing the same skin.”

The gun came down again. “You know you could just be right.”

The American drew out a small torch and shone the beam briefly in Peroni’s face. Then he pulled out the wallet, opened it up and took out a couple of old, battered photographs, held them beneath the beam. Two clusters of people, out in the desert somewhere. All were wearing military fatigues and sunglasses, looking as pleased as punch, posing against a couple of those huge jeep things the Americans loved.

He was in the first photo. Younger, happy, in control. The boss maybe, posing with his team, eight or so men and women, all smiling at the camera, all lords of their little universe.

“I got all of them inside me,” the American murmured. “Every one of them. I watched them die and I couldn’t do a damn thing because we were just walking straight into some stupid little turkey shoot, not knowing what was waiting there for us.”

“I guess that picture must be important to you, huh,” Peroni said.

“You could say that.”

He pushed the other photo to the front. A different set of people but the same kind of crowd. One them familiar, Peroni realized. Emily Deacon’s dad, looking a whole lot younger and happier than he had in that formal shot from a few months ago that they’d seen in the embassy. And a couple of women too. One who just might have been the corpse they’d found in this very building two nights before.

The American’s mouth came close to Peroni’s ear. “Ain’t they pretty?”

The grey, stony face didn’t flicker, but something was going on, Peroni realized. The man was thinking. He had the time, too. There was nothing Gianni Peroni could do that would shape the flow of events now.

“So you’re just a minion?” the American asked. “A local cop? Those guys from the embassy told you nothing?”

“Yeah, a minion. I only know what they think I need to know.”

Peroni gazed into the icy eyes, wondering what, if anything, could move this man. “That there’s a lunatic out there, carving some pattern out of people’s backs, for no reason at all. And he sure loves US military webbing, too.”

That struck a nerve somewhere. The guy was laughing. Not the cold, dry laughter Peroni had heard in the dark. This was more human somehow, more scary because it came from a place deep inside the man, and because it was the kind of laughter that could just go anywhere, from joy to despair in a heartbeat.

“No reason?” the American asked, and pushed the gun back into Gianni Peroni’s face. “You believe that?”

Peroni looked down at the dead grey metal barrel and tried to tick off the few remaining options in his hurting head.

“Not really,” he murmured.

HE’D FOUND SOME PASTA and a jar of tomato sauce. They sat on the sofa together in front of the empty plates, aware of the clock ticking towards midnight, bone-weary. Nic Costa wasn’t even sure he wanted any more questions answered. He wasn’t sure what he wanted at all.

Emily leaned back into the soft cushions, closed her eyes and asked, “Do you have a bible?”

He blinked, wide awake all of a sudden. “Excuse me?”

“A bible. This is a good Italian household, isn’t it?”

So many things to explain. So many preconceptions. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I have a bible. I wouldn’t dare bring one through the door. I’d have my old man’s ghost haunting me forever. I told you. He was a Communist. Do you really need one?”

She thought about it, retrieved the notebook, turned it on and started looking for something.

“I can’t do this from memory. The Deacons aren’t exactly regular churchgoers either. But when I was in training I spent three months researching a bunch of religious fanatics on the Net. Nice people. All white. All armed to the teeth. All as crazy as they come. There is a reason here. Bear with me.”

He leaned over, close to her shoulder, and watched the skilful way she worked the Web. After a brief search Emily brought up a page from some bizarre religious site, one covered in woodcut engravings of mythical beasts next to a comic-book colour illustration of a naked woman writhing on a red, many-headed dragon.

“This is just one of their places. You can read about every last damn conspiracy under the sun here. How the Jews run everything. Except for the stuff that’s run by the Catholics. While both are really under the thumb of the Illuminati. And you know what they keep going back to for inspiration?”

“Ordinarily I’d suggest ”drugs and drink,“ but I rather imagine…”

“If only they would, Nic. Parts of Montana would be so much improved. They go to Revelation. The last book of the New Testament. Heard of it?”

Costa opened his hands in a gesture of despair.

“You remember,” she continued, “that Kaspar mentions ”the Scarlet Beast“ in that original memo from 1990. Leapman, or whoever, is taunting him with the same phrase now. So it’s important. The only reference I can find anywhere is in here. I remember it because these fundamentalist guys just can’t get it out of their heads. It’s meant to explain everything. Listen…”

She began reading from the screen. “ ”So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.“ ”

Costa’s head reeled. “Emily-”

“Stay with me, Nic. It gets weirder. A couple of sentences later: ”And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.“ Seven mountains, Nic.”

His mind was a blank. This was so far from his normal realm of experience.

“Here’s a clue,” she said. “Think of it as seven hills instead. And another clue. The image of the woman was often used as a cipher meaning ”church.“ ”

There was only way to interpret that, surely. “You mean the Scarlet Beast is Rome?”