By the time Musca puts a hand to his lips and sees the blood, the Warrior has already spun rubber and gassed exhaust down the street.
Octans and Volans stand in the doorway looking worried. The noise, the altercation. The scene may well have been witnessed. But they’re nowhere near as worried as Musca. He knows Serpens is going to be a problem. A big problem.
69
Chief Constable Alan Hunt likes his desk tidy. A tidy desk is a tidy mind. Always end the day with it clear, no business unsettled. John Rowlands, who is sat opposite him, would say it’s because he came up the modern way. Masters degree in law. Fast-tracked through the ranks. Chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers. Home Office golden boy with political nous and a financial expertise at stretching budgets.
Sat next to the Chief Super and across from Hunt is the crumpled shape of Deputy Chief Constable Greg Dockery. It’s six a.m. and there is only one piece of outstanding business ruining the otherwise clear slab of beech between the three men: a large blow-up of Caitlyn Lock.
Hunt’s small and tidy hands touch the photo. ‘So where is she, John? Why haven’t we heard anything from whoever has her?’
Rowlands scratches grey stubble peppering his chin. ‘I expect the kidnappers to make contact later today. They seem to be professional. Happy enough to kill the boyfriend to take her. Now they have her, I’m sure they’ll issue a ransom demand.’
‘I agree,’ says Dockery. ‘I would take the silence to mean they’ve been busy. Probably monitoring the situation. Watching how we react to her disappearance. They may well have moved the girl by another vehicle to a safe location.’
Rowlands taps his watch ominously. ‘The first forty-eight applies to kidnapping more than most.’
Dockery sees the Chief frown. The boss’s fast-tracked ascendancy evidently excluded force jargon. ‘John means the first forty-eight hours, sir. Statistically, our chances of solving a major crime — especially kidnapping or murder — are halved if we don’t catch the offender in the first two days.’
Hunt smiles. ‘I only believe in good statistics, Gregory, you should know that.’ There’s polite laughter around the table, then he adds, ‘After I got your call about the Timberland boy, I rang Sebastian Ingram at the Home Office to update him. They’re putting the SAS on standby and want the Yard to send over a team from its Specialist Crime Directorate.’
Dockery knows better than to doubt the wisdom of such a move. Rowlands is less diplomatic. ‘Sir, this is our inquiry. We are more than capable of handling it. I’ve had direct experience of hostage negotiations.’
The Chief tries to placate him. ‘It’s not about ability, John; it’s about political responsibilities and budgets. We are scratching for funds to keep traffic cars on the road. An investigation like this could bleed us dry for the rest of the financial year.’
Dockery tries to sweeten the pill. ‘We’ll make sure you stay involved. Whoever they dump on us. He’s going to have to work every bit as long and hard as you and your team.’
The desk phone rings. They all know a call this early won’t be good news. Hunt takes it and briefly talks to his secretary before being put through to someone important enough to make him sit up straight and grow tense.
After less than a minute, he replaces the phone on its cradle and coolly passes on his news. ‘Gentlemen, Vice President Lock and his ex-wife have just boarded a private jet in New York and will be with us shortly.’
70
Stripped to the waist and barefoot in black tracksuit bottoms, Draco exercises in the purpose-built gym at his lavish country home. The long, mirrored-walls indulge a near-constant checking of the muscles he’s painstakingly crafted. He looks ten, maybe twenty years younger than his actual fifty. Serpens is on his mind. A man he never liked. One he is sure is true to his star name — the snake.
A few metres away, his burner rings. The call he’s been waiting for. The update. He abandons his sixth mile on the treadmill, guns down the music channel on a sixty-inch plasma and answers it. ‘Everything go all right?’
‘Not everything.’ Musca sounds tense. ‘We got the job done as planned but our man has fallen ill.’
Draco understands the code. ‘Anything to seriously concern us?’ He picks a white hand towel off a bench and mops sweat from his face.
‘Possibly, yes.’
Draco drops the towel and reaches for a water bottle. ‘Where is he now?’
‘At home.’
‘Check on him. See if he’s feeling any better.’
Musca rubs his jaw, nursing the spot where Serpens punched him. ‘I’ll wait until lunchtime, let him sleep a little, then I’ll go round and have a chat.’
‘Don’t leave it too long.’ Draco thinks on it a second. ‘Best not to take any unnecessary chances at the moment. If he’s really sick, we need to find a cure. A permanent one.’
71
Gideon is almost too exhausted to leave his bed. His mother’s video message and her goodbye secret were the final straw. Grief, insomnia and emotional turmoil are now all taking their toll. First there had been his father’s revelations — the Sacreds, the Followers, the sacrifices. Then cancer. The CLL that killed his mother. Then her private words to him. Arrows in his heart.
He heads downstairs and triggers a nerve-jangling burst of bells. Still in shock, he turns off the alarm system that he’d forgotten he’d set the night before. Heart still pounding, he makes a mug of dark tea and sits by the kitchen window to watch the last of the sunrise.
Briefly, as golden light comes over the trees and flower beds, he forgets the personal horrors in his life. Then, when the tea is gone and the distraction over, the worries come back. Are his genes ticking time-bombs, primed to explode like his mother’s did? Or did the strange childhood baptism his father performed with water from the stones cure him? He remembers the words in the journals: ‘I will willingly give my own blood, my own life. I only hope it is worthy. Worthy enough to change things. To alter the fate that I know awaits my poor, motherless son. I put my trust in the Sacreds, in the bond I make with them, in the clear blood of mine that I pledge to purify that of my child’s.’
Gideon wearily trudges back upstairs to the diaries. They lie strewn where he left them, open at pages that seemed significant. So many refer to the stones. Stonehenge, a site his father published books on, its links to the vernal equinox, the earth’s precessional cycle, its mystical connections with the celestial equator, Plato, the Great Sphinx.
Mumbo-jumbo. That’s what he always felt it was. Yet some of the fragments he’s discovered are coming together, forming a path like crazy paving that leads to the heart of his strange and troubled childhood. His father forced him to learn Greek, wrote codes in it and gave him the worst birthday gift a ten-year-old could ever get — a copy of Plato’s Republic. Not the racing bike he’d lobbied for but instead a wedge of impenetrable philosophy about happiness, justice and the fitness of people to rule.
Looking at the diaries, he sees the old philosopher’s shadows in his father’s words. Passages emphasise the role of the Sacreds in celestial mechanics and the Platonic year — the time required for a single complete cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. In hard numbers, about 25,800 years. About the same amount of time Gideon thinks it will take him to fully decode and understand everything his father has written.