The Doomsday Prophecy by Scott Mariani
Just as suddenly, and for one eerie moment, everything was completely still. Then the screams began.
Ben’s ears were ringing badly and his head was swimming. His first thought was for the boy. He slowly raised himself up, kneeling in the broken glass. The boy’s eyes met his, wide and terrified. Ben checked for injury. There was no blood. The kid hadn’t been touched. He was just rigid with shock.
Then Ben thought of Charlie. He staggered to his feet, suddenly aware of terrible pain in his neck and shoulder. His shirt was ripped and wet with blood. He raised his hand up to his neck and his fingers felt something there that they shouldn’t. But he ignored it. He stepped out from behind the burning van and saw the full devastation of the explosion.
It was carnage. Blood-spattered corpses and smouldering body parts were strewn across what used to be the café terrace. People were screaming in horror, others moaning, calling for help, others dying. Some of the wounded were already up on their feet, staggering dazed through the wreckage. Black smoke and the acrid smell of burning filled the air. The street was littered with little fires.
Ben shouted for Charlie. Then he saw him.
Charlie’s hand was still gripping the back of his chair. The hand ended at the wrist. The rest of him was spread across the pavement. Ben looked away and closed his eyes.
It wasn’t long before the screech of sirens drowned out the screams of the survivors and the urgent shouts and chatter of the people flocking to help them. Then all was frantic activity. Paramedics waded in hard and fast, like soldiers through the wreckage. In minutes the street was flooded with emergency vehicles and equipment. Police streamed everywhere, yelling into radios, working fast to cordon off the scene, holding off the hundreds of onlookers crowding in from neighbouring streets. People were crying and hugging each other, faces contorted in anguish.
Meanwhile the ambulance and coroner’s teams carried out their grim work. The dead were covered with sheets where they lay, waiting to be bagged and loaded. The medics did what they could to patch up the wounded before the ambulances took them away. One by one, vehicles screeched away up the street, fresh ones arriving in a steady flow.
Ben watched the whole thing from across the road. Beside him on the edge of the pavement, the boy sat quietly with his ball between his feet, staring at the scene in front of them. He looked up at Ben with questioning eyes. There was a cut oozing blood above his left eyebrow. Ben patted his shoulder.
Then the boy seemed to see something. He straightened up and then jumped to his feet and ran off before Ben could stop him. He disappeared into the crowd and then was lost in the milling chaos.
After another minute, a paramedic pointed Ben out to his team-mate. They jogged over to him, and he remembered that his shirt was soaked in blood down one side. He hardly felt the pain any more. He was numb all over, and he couldn’t hear properly. He tried to protest as they wrapped a blanket over his shoulders and attended to his wound. He didn’t understand what they were telling him, but they seemed to think the injury was serious. He didn’t have the strength to resist them as they walked him to an ambulance.
He looked over to the terrace. What was left of Charlie was lying under a bloody sheet. The hand had been removed from the back of the chair. In his daze, Ben wondered where they’d put the hand, and whether they’d found all of him. Then the paramedics got him inside the ambulance and made him lie on a bunk. Doors slammed, an engine revved and the siren started up.
He felt the ambulance accelerate hard up the street. He looked around him. Saw medical equipment, tubes dangling and rattling with the motion of the vehicle. A drip swinging on a stand above him.
He wasn’t alone. Hands were moving over his body, faces peering down at him, the sound of voices somewhere behind the constant ringing in his ears. The distant impressions began to blur. After that, he was drifting, spinning weightlessly into a black space. He dreamed of fire and explosions, saw Charlie’s face smiling at him. Then Charlie’s face was the child’s face, giving him a last look before he ran away into the crowd. Then it became nothing at all.
Chapter Seventeen
The twelfth day
Ben woke with a start and sat bolt upright. He blinked and looked around him, disorientated for a second. He was alone in a room. Everything white and clinical. The smell hit him – a sickly combination of disinfectant and hospital food. A trolley clattered past the open door, pushed by an orderly in a blue overall.
As he shifted on the hard bed, Ben winced at the tearing pain in his neck and shoulder. He reached his hand up and felt the big dressing. He remembered now. The moment of the blast. The shards of glass sticking in his neck. The paramedics taking him away.
Then he remembered something else.
Charlie was dead.
His diver’s watch and the wedding ring on its leather thong were on the bedside table. He reached for them gingerly, feeling the pull of the stitches. He stared at the date and time. Nearly twenty-two hours since the explosion. He’d been asleep all day and all night.
He climbed slowly out of bed and walked around his hospital room, slipping on the watch and hanging the ring around his neck. He found a small private bathroom and wandered in to inspect his dressing in the mirror. He peeled back the edge of it and looked at the wound.
He’d had worse. He couldn’t afford to let a couple of slivers of glass stop him. He pulled the hospital gown off over his head, washed quickly in the sink, then walked back into the room to dress. What was left of his clothes had been folded and left on a chair near the bedside. The ripped, bloody shirt was gone. He stepped into his jeans and shoes.
A nurse came into the room, stared at him and started talking in rapid Greek.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’
She gestured towards the bed, trying to shoo him back into it.
He shook his head. ‘I’m getting out of here. But I need a shirt.’
‘You no leave,’ she said, and pointed to his neck. ‘You hurt.’
‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘I want to leave now.’
‘I call the doctor.’ She turned and went off, shaking her head and muttering to herself. She slammed the door behind her.
He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, ruffled his hair and waited. After a couple of minutes there was a loud knock at the door. For a second Ben thought it was the doctor come to scold him for wanting to check out too early and to give him the whole bit about complications and infections.
But it wasn’t the doctor. The door swung open and a huge bear of a man walked in. He was several inches taller than Ben, and he had to stoop as he came through the doorway. He stared at Ben with glittering eyes and a wide grin as he strode across the room and grasped his hand in a strong fist. A small dark-skinned woman followed in his wake, beaming at Ben.
The big man shook Ben’s hand vigorously, clinging on as if he never wanted to let go. Tears welled in his eyes. ‘You are a hero,’ he rumbled in heavily accented English.
For a second Ben was bemused. But then he saw the child appear in the doorway. He had a plaster over his left eyebrow and a couple of scratches on his cheek. Ben knew him immediately. The boy with the ball.
‘You are a hero,’ the big man said again, still clutching Ben’s hand. ‘You saved our son.’
‘I didn’t do much,’ Ben replied. ‘He saved me as much as I saved him. If he hadn’t run out into the road, I’d have been blown to pieces.’
‘But if you had not acted, Aris would have been killed.’ A tear ran down the man’s cheek and he sniffed and wiped it away. ‘I am Spiro Thanatos. This is my wife Christina. We own the guesthouse where the bomb exploded.’ His gaze landed on Ben’s neck and bare shoulder. ‘You are hurt.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Just a few bits of glass. I’m leaving soon. Just need something to wear.’
Spiro smiled. He immediately started unbuttoning his shirt, revealing a Hotel Thanatos T-shirt underneath. ‘Take mine. No, please. I i
Ben thanked him and slipped it on, wincing a little at the pull on his stitches. The shirt was light blue cotton, a little baggy on him, but it felt cool and crisp.
Spiro talked and talked. He and Christina had been in the kitchen when they’d heard the explosion. They’d thought their boy was surely lost. It was terrible. People dead, maimed, buildings ruined. Drug-dealing murderers on their peaceful island. The world was going to shit. Their business was devastated, but they didn’t care as long as Aris was unharmed. They would do anything, anything to repay their debt to him. Anything he wanted, anything they could do. They’d never forget …
Ben listened and protested, ‘anyone would have done the same.’
‘What hotel are you in?’ Spiro wanted to know.
‘None,’ Ben said. ‘I only just arrived. I wasn’t planning on staying.’
‘But you must stay for a while, and you must be our guest.’
‘I haven’t made my plans yet.’
‘Please,’ Spiro went on. ‘If you stay, you must not book into a hotel.’ He dug in his pocket and dangled a key from his fingers. ‘We have a place on the beach, just outside the town. It is simple, but it is yours until you leave Corfu.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Ben said.
Spiro grasped his wrist in a strong, dry hand and dropped the key in his palm. Attached to it was a small plastic tag with an address. ‘I insist. It is the least we can do for you.’
Spiro and Christina left reluctantly, with more smiles and gratitude. Ben was tucking the borrowed shirt into his jeans when the door swung open again.
He turned, expecting the angry doctor this time. But it was another visitor.
Rhonda Palmer’s face was pale, puffy and streaked with tears as she walked into the room. An older man and a woman came in behind her, watching him grimly. He knew them from the wedding. Her parents.
‘I wanted to see you,’ Rhonda said.
Ben didn’t reply. Didn’t know what to say to her.
‘I wanted to see the man who killed my husband, and tell him how I feel about that.’ There was a quaver in her voice. She reached up and wiped a tear away.
Ben felt suddenly weak at the knees. He wanted to tell her he hadn’t killed Charlie. That he would never have involved him in anything like this if he’d known.
But it seemed so lame, so pointless, to tell her those things. He stayed silent.
Rhonda’s face was twisted in fury and pain. ‘I knew, when you turned up at my wedding, that you would bring trouble into our lives somehow. Major Hope, luring my husband to his death.’
‘I’m not Major Hope any more,’ Ben said quietly.
‘I don’t care what you call yourself,’ she fired back at him. ‘You’ve ruined my life and my family. You took my child’s father away.’
Ben stared at her.
‘I only found out two days ago,’ she sobbed. ‘I was going to tell Charlie when he came back. But now he’s dead. My child will never know its father. Thanks to you.’
Then she broke down, weeping loudly, swaying on her feet. Her father held her, supporting her. She broke free of him. She looked at Ben with hate and disgust in her eyes. ‘You’re a fucking murderer!’ she screamed at him. She spat in his face. Slapped him hard across the cheek.
He turned away from her. His cheek was stinging. He looked down at his feet. He could feel all their eyes on him. Two nurses had come running when they heard the raised voices. They stood staring, frozen in alarm.
Rhonda was bent double, racked with sobbing, shoulders heaving. Her mother put her arms around her. ‘Come on, darling. Let’s go.’ They turned to leave. Rhonda’s father shot Ben a last look of venom as he pushed past the nurses.
Her mother hovered in the doorway, clutching her daughter tight in her arms. She turned and looked Ben in the eye. ‘God damn you,’ she said, ‘if you can live with this on your conscience.’
Chapter Eighteen
Paxos
The same day, 8 a.m.
Just over thirty miles away on the island of Paxos, the fair-haired man called Hudson was sitting at a table in the empty house by the beach. The woman, Kaplan, was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder as they both stared intently at the laptop screen in front of them.
The digital video image was as crisp as it had looked through the lens when they’d filmed the scene from the apartment window the previous day. The camera was zoomed in on the two men sitting at the table near the edge of the terrace. For now, they were calling them Number One and Number Two. Number One was the man they’d been monitoring after he’d started asking questions about Zoë Bradbury. Number Two was the man who’d unexpectedly come to join him. They knew less about him, and that bothered them.
What bothered them more, in the aftermath of the bombing, was that he was still alive. It was what was keeping them here, when they should be packing up this job and heading for home.
On screen, the conversation was intense. Then the child with the ball appeared. After a moment one of the two men jumped up from his chair and ran out into the road. Seconds later, the café terrace was engulfed with flames.
‘Pause it,’ Kaplan said.
Hudson tapped a key. On screen, the unfolding fireball and flying debris stood still, sudden terror frozen on the faces of the victims caught in the blast.
‘Scroll it to the left,’ she said.
He held down another key and the image panned across. The green delivery van was slewed at an angle in the road. The other side of it, the man who had leapt from the café terrace was sprawled on the ground, shielding the child.
She watched him thoughtfully, pressing a finger to her lips in concentration. ‘Did he know something?’ she said. ‘Did he see it coming?’
‘Doesn’t look like it to me,’ Hudson said. ‘He ran out to save the kid. A second later, he’d have been caught up in it too.’
‘What if he saw Herzog? What if he remembers him? He’s a witness.’
‘No way. It was just chance. He had no idea what was coming.’
She frowned. ‘Maybe. Go back. OK, stop. Replay.’
‘We’ve been through this a hundred times,’ Hudson said.
‘I want to know who this guy is. I get a bad feeling about him.’
They watched and listened again. The sound was scratchy and filled with background sound – jumbled conversation from other tables and passers-by, traffic, general white noise.
‘The sound is shit,’ Kaplan muttered.
‘Yeah, well, we didn’t exactly get much time to prepare,’ Hudson said. ‘If I hadn’t thought to bring the stuff just in case, we wouldn’t even be listening to this conversation at all.’
‘Just shut up and let the damn thing play.’
He went quiet. Kaplan was in charge, and he already knew she could be pretty mean if he pushed it too far.
‘Pause,’ she said. ‘Did you hear that? He mentioned her name again. Go back.’
He rewound the image a few frames. ‘It’s hard to be sure.’
‘I’m sure. Turn up the volume,’ she said. ‘Can you clean it up any more?’
‘I’ve cleaned it up all I can,’ Hudson replied irritably. He’d been up most of night working on it, painstakingly whittling away as many unwanted frequencies as he could isolate. ‘I’ll need a few more hours to get the best out of it.’
‘If you could get that fucking kid out of it,’ she said, ‘I’ll be happy.’ The percussive tap – tap – tap of the child’s bouncing ball each time he came into the range of the mike was cutting out a lot of the precious conversation and driving her crazy.
Hudson restarted the playback and they listened carefully.
‘There it is,’ she said. ‘Bradbury. Comes out clearly now.’
‘Yup. Definitely Bradbury.’
‘Shit. OK, let it play on.’ The video played on a few more seconds. She focused hard on the sound, closing her eyes. Then she opened them, and her jaw tightened. ‘Stop. Cleaver. He sa
Hudson was annoyed he hadn’t picked up on it before. ‘Copy. What did he say about him?’
‘Run it back. Slow it down.’
They listened to the hissy, muffled recording again. ‘I think he’s saying “where is Cleaver?”,’ she said. ‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’
‘But how could he know about Cleaver?’
‘Means he’s been talking to Bradbury. Means he’s in on it.’
‘Or he just saw it in the address book.’
‘Either way,’ she said, ‘that isn’t something we want him to know.’
They watched more. On screen, Number One unfolded the newspaper and leaned across the café table to show it to Number Two.
Kaplan reached for the copy of the same paper on the desk. Followed Number Two’s gaze down the front page. She nodded. He was definitely looking at the report on Nikos Karapiperis’ death.
Then the child came into the frame, his ball went out into the road, and they watched again as Number Two leaped out to save him. Then the explosion burst across the terrace all over again.
‘You can shut it down now. I’ve seen enough,’ Kaplan said.
‘Fucking baby-saving hero,’ Hudson muttered.
Kaplan started pacing up and down. ‘Put it all together. They knew everything. Bradbury, the money, Cleaver, Nikos Karapiperis. And Number One knew we were tailing him.’
Hudson swivelled round in his chair to face her. ‘How did he know that?’ The screen went black as the laptop shut down.
Kaplan shook her head. ‘He wasn’t just some friend of the family. This is a professional at work. No way anyone could have spotted us otherwise.’
‘So who are these people? Who are they working for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You think they know where Bradbury put it?’
‘I’m going to have to call this in,’ she said. ‘I don’t like either of them. And I don’t like that Number Two is still around.’