Tess Gerritsen - The Mephisto Club

“My father believed it.”

“Do you?”

“I believe there are hostile forces who would bring down the Mephisto Foundation. And now they’ve found us. The way they found my father.”

She stared at him, waiting for him to explain.

“Eight years ago,” said Sansone, “he flew out to Naples. He was going to meet an old friend, a man he’d known since his college days in New Haven. Both of them were widowers. Both of them shared a passion for ancient history. They planned to visit the National Archaeological Museum there and catch up on each other’s lives. My father was quite excited about the visit. It was the first time I’d heard any animation in his voice since my mother died. But when he got to Naples, his friend wasn’t there at the airport. Or at the hotel. He called me, told me that something was terribly wrong, and he planned to return home the next day. I could hear he was upset, but he wouldn’t say much more about it. I think he believed our conversation was being monitored.”

“He actually thought the phone was tapped?”

“You see? You have the same reaction I did. That it was just dear eccentric old Dad imagining his goblins again. The last thing he said to me was, ‘They’ve found me, Anthony. They know who I am.’”

“They?”

“I knew exactly what he was talking about. It was the same nonsense I’d been hearing since I was a kid. Sinister forces in government. A worldwide conspiracy of Nephilim, helping one another into positions of power. And once they assume political control, they’re able to hunt to their hearts’ content, without any fear of punishment. The way they hunted in Kosovo. And Cambodia. And Rwanda. They thrive on war and disorder and bloodshed. They feed off it. That’s what Armageddon means to them: a hunter’s paradise. It’s why they can’t wait to make it happen, why they look forward to it.”

“That sounds like the ultimate paranoid delusion.”

“It’s also a way to explain the unexplainable: how people can do such terrible things to one another.”

“Your father believed all that?”

“He wanted me to believe it. But it took his death to convince me.”

“What happened to your father?”

“It could easily have been taken for a simple robbery gone wrong. Naples is a gritty place, and tourists do have to be careful there. But my father was on Via Partenope, alongside the Gulf of Naples, a street almost always crowded with tourists. Even so, it happened so quickly, he had no time to call for help. He simply collapsed. No one saw his assailant. No one saw what happened. But there was my father, bleeding to death on the street. The blade entered just beneath his sternum, sliced through the pericardium, and pierced the right ventricle.”

“The way Eve Kassovitz died,” she said softly. A brutally efficient killing.

“The worst part for me,” he said, “is that he died thinking I’d never believe him. After our last phone call, I hung up and said to one of my colleagues, ‘The old man’s finally ready for Thorazine.’”

“But you believe him now.”

“Even after I got to Naples, a few days later, I still thought it was a random act of violence. An unlucky tourist, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But while I was at the police station, waiting for a copy of their report, an older gentleman stepped into the room and introduced himself. I’d heard my father mention his name before. I never knew that Gottfried Baum worked for Interpol.”

“Why do I know that name?”

“He was one of my dinner guests the night that Eve Kassovitz was killed.”

“The man who left for the airport?”

“He had a flight to catch that night. To Brussels.”

“He’s a member of Mephisto?”

Sansone nodded. “He’s the one who made me listen, made me believe. All the stories my father told me, all his crazy theories about the Nephilim-Baum repeated every one.”

“ Folie à deux, ” said Maura. “A shared delusion.”

“I wish it was a delusion. I wish I could shrug it off the way you do. But you haven’t seen and heard the things I have, what Gottfried and others have. Mephisto is fighting for its life. After four centuries, we’re the last ones.” He paused. “And I’m the last of Isabella’s line.”

“The last demon hunter,” she said.

“I haven’t made an inch of headway with you, have I?”

“Here’s what I don’t understand. It’s not that hard to kill someone. If you’re the target, why don’t they just eliminate you? You’re not in hiding. All it takes is a gunshot through your window, a bomb in your car. Why play stupid games with seashells? What’s the point of warning you that you’re in their sights?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can see that it’s not logical.”

“Yes.”

“Yet you still think these murders revolve around Mephisto.”

He gave a sigh. “I won’t even try to convince you. I just want you to consider the possibility that what I’ve told you is true.”

“That there’s a worldwide brotherhood of Nephilim? That the Mephisto Foundation, and no one else, is even aware of this vast conspiracy?”

“Our voice is starting to be heard.”

“What are you going to do to protect yourselves? Load silver bullets in your gun?”

“I’m going to find Lily Saul.”

She frowned at him. “The daughter?”

“Don’t you find it strange that no one knows where she is? That no one can locate her?” He looked at Maura. “Lily knows something.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because she doesn’t want to be found.”

“I think I should go inside with you,” he said, “just to be sure everything’s all right.”

They were parked outside her house, and through the living room curtains Maura could see lights shining, the lamps turned on by her automatic timer. Before she’d left yesterday, she had scrubbed off the markings on her door. Staring through the gloom, she wondered if there were new ones scrawled there that she couldn’t see, new threats concealed in the shadows.

“I think I’d feel better if you came in with me, too,” she admitted.

He reached into his glove compartment for a flashlight, and they both stepped out of the car. Neither of them spoke; they were focused instead on their surroundings: the dark street, the distant hiss of traffic. Sansone paused there on the sidewalk, as though trying to catch the scent of something he could not yet see. They climbed to the porch, and he turned on the flashlight to examine her door.

It was clean.

Inside her house, the phone was ringing. Daniel? She unlocked the front door and stepped inside. It took her only seconds to punch her code on the keypad and disarm the security system, but by the time she reached the telephone, it had fallen silent. Pressing the call history button, she recognized his cell phone number on caller ID, and she itched to pick up the receiver and call him back. But Sansone was now standing right beside her in the living room.

“Does everything seem all right to you?”

She gave a tight nod. “Everything’s fine.”

“Why don’t you have a look around first before I leave?”

“Of course,” she said, and headed up the hallway. As he followed her, she could feel his gaze on her back. Did he see it in her face? Did he recognize the look of a lovesick woman? She went from room to room, checking windows, rattling doors. Everything was secure. As a simple matter of hospitality, she should have offered him a cup of coffee and invited him to stay for a few minutes, after he’d been kind enough to drive her home. But she was not in a hospitable mood.

To her relief, he didn’t linger, but turned to leave. “I’ll check in with you in the morning,” he said.