——————— ◆ ———————
Piccadilly
London SW1
The United Kingdom
Ava checked her watch as she clicked the flat’s heavy front door shut.
She was relieved to see it was just before 7:00 a.m.
She paused on the doorstep and breathed in the cool morning air. After the heat and dust of the Middle East, the smell of an English summer morning was a sensual treat of earth and plants. She had not particularly noticed it when she lived in London before. But now, when she visited England, it seemed as exotic as the perfumes of the Middle East once had.
Even though the sun had been fully up for several hours, the air still felt damp, and there were pockets of dew on the rainbow of flowers nestling in the rows of window boxes lining the quiet street.
She looked around carefully, scanning the street in both directions, before heading to the popular French café and bakery on the corner.
The aroma of hot coffee and fresh buttery pastries had already drawn a buzzing crowd of people grabbing breakfast on their way to work.
Service was quick. But as she picked up her steaming foam cup of scalding black coffee, she felt a strong hand on her arm.
“What a surprise!” It was a man’s voice—sounding unusually cheerful for the time of the morning.
She recognized it immediately.
She turned, and found herself face to face with Ferguson—looking significantly healthier than when she had last seen him in Kazakhstan.
He beamed at her, hooking his sunglasses into the neck of his T-shirt. “Dr Curzon, I didn’t know you lived round here.”
“An amazing coincidence.” She wondered how long he had been outside her house waiting for her to emerge, and kicked herself for not having seen him.
She needed to be more vigilant.
Pressing the plastic lid down hard onto the hot cup, she turned towards the door. “Well, it was great seeing you again,” she added, anxious to get away. Prince had clearly been hard at work—passing her address to Ferguson and sending him to stake it out.
“Actually,” he looked expectantly at her, “as we’re neighbours, maybe we could have breakfast together? Get to know each other a little better? It all ended so quickly last time. Unless,” he paused, “there’s anywhere you need to be going right now?”
Ava had no desire to take Ferguson to Stonehenge with her, whatever Prince expected.
“That’s a kind offer,” she answered, buttoning up her black velvet jacket and opening the door of the café. “But if it’s all the same to you, I have to be going. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.”
“Why don’t I give you a lift,” he suggested breezily, following her onto the pavement and opening the door of a large steel-grey four-by-four parked directly in front of the café. “It’d be a shame for you to spend such a lovely summer’s day alone.”
Ava needed to be at the railway station in thirty minutes, and had no desire to waste time pointlessly fencing with Ferguson.
She moved closer to the café’s outside wall and stood under the navy blue awning overhanging the metal tables and chairs, indicating for him to follow.
She waited until he was close enough for her to speak without being overheard. “Look, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do today than follow me around,” she began. “So why don’t you just tell Prince that I gave you the slip? I won’t say anything. You can have a day off, doing whatever you do.” She smiled at him encouragingly.
Ferguson dug his hands into his jeans pockets and nodded several times, making a show of weighing up the options. “Well, I could. It’s actually pretty tempting. But then you’d miss my important update on Malchus, which I’d be free to tell you about at length in the comfort and privacy of the car on our drive to wherever you need to go.”
Ava could feel her jaw tightening.
Prince had this all worked out
.
She hesitated for a moment, chewing the inside of her lip as she digested this new piece of information.
Making her decision, she stepped over to the passenger door and threw him a threatening look. “For your sake, it’d better be good.”
Ferguson nodded, and headed around to the driver’s side.
While he was out of sight, Ava quickly bent down and wedged Prince’s flash drive under the car’s front wheel, before climbing into the oversized cabin and firmly closing the door.
She put her coffee into the holder by her armrest. “Strange that you were queuing in the café, though,” she said to him, “when you didn’t want any coffee.”
Ferguson looked for a moment like a rabbit caught in the headlamps. “Not really.” He shook his head, recovering quickly. “Caffeine interferes with my spider senses.”
Ava groaned inwardly. It was going to be a very long day.
As Ferguson edged out of the parking space, she opened her window in time to hear the satisfying sound of two tonnes of vehicle splintering Prince’s flimsy flash drive into a thousand pieces.
——————— ◆ ———————
Maze Hill
London SE10
The United Kingdom
The trip to London had been easy. It had gone like clockwork.
After swimming ashore onto the Isle of Wight at Bembridge, a combination of hovercraft and trains had brought Uri to London’s Maze Hill station within four hours.
So far so good.
He had never been to Maze Hill before, but his research suggested it had everything he required—good transport, cheap temporary accommodation, anonymity, and a strong history of support for extreme far-right groups.
As he headed away from the railway station and towards the centre of Maze Hill, he nodded to himself. It was pretty much as he had expected.
The streets were scruffy and dirty. Tattered posters advertising ‘Old Skool’ club nights and upcoming TV dramas fluttered from hoardings and boarded-up shop fronts. Sandwiched between them, discount stores and fast-food takeaways hid behind chicken wire screens and graffiti-daubed metal security shutters.
The overwhelming feeling of decades-old neglect and economic deprivation was palpable. Whatever boom had built the chrome and glass skyscrapers of London’s financial district, visible in the distance, it had passed Maze Hill by.
This would do just fine.
Heading into a shabby newsagent’s, he bought a copy of the local paper from the shopkeeper, who merely nodded at him before returning to watch a small television under the counter showing a foreign-language film.
Next door was a tired-looking
Money Converters
pawn shop. He slipped inside, and picked up a battered pay-as-you-go mobile phone that still had a few pounds of credit on it.
He could get top-up cards for it anywhere.
Perfect. Untraceable.
He knew all too well how mobile phone data was used by law enforcement and the intelligence community. Every registered user’s movements could be exactly tracked by triangulation from masts, or directly by GPS. He could not risk either. He did not want to appear on any system.
Spotting a workers’ café,
The Lite Bite
, across the road, he pushed open the door, took a seat at a small plastic table, and ordered a mug of tea.
There was a group of labourers on the other side of the room tucking into an early lunch of thick greasy bacon sandwiches and crisps.
Uri shook his head in bewilderment.
How did people live on that?
Turning away, he spread the newspaper out on the table and flicked to the property classifieds, where he scanned the columns for one-bedroom flats to rent. He did not want anything out of the ordinary—just something any average working man in the area might live in.
He would start ringing around once he had finished his tea. Not that he liked milky English tea. He would have preferred strong black mint tea, like they served back home. But his task now was to fit in, not stand out.
He had never felt particularly warmly towards the English. They had not done his country any favours over the years. But this assignment was the chance of a lifetime, in whichever country it unfolded.
And there were aspects of it he was already looking forward to very much.
——————— ◆ ———————
Wiltshire
England
The United Kingdom
“So, Prince is serious about you tailing me around then?” Ava asked. She hoped from her tone of voice that Ferguson would get the message she was not enthusiastic about the idea.
“She’s worried about the company you’re keeping,” he replied, keeping his eyes on the road.
She could not tell if he was being serious, but dropped it. The traffic was already heavy, and he was concentrating on navigating the oversize MI6 car through the grandiose but often narrow streets of west London.
She waited until they had slipped out of the built-up area and onto the leafy road down to Wiltshire before opening the main subject on her mind. “What have you got?” she asked. “On Malchus.”
Ferguson turned down the radio. “I’ve been doing some digging. If I’m going to be tasked to you on this, I want to know who we’re dealing with. And I figure you do, too. DeVere and the Firm don’t seem to have a file on him, but Prince was able to pass me a good chunk of the American one.”
“Not all of it?” If there was a file, she wanted to know what it said.
He shook his head. “Apparently it’s not a thin file, so she just gave me the highlights. But it’s enough.”
Ava looked dubious. “I don’t like partial information. Especially when I feel people are hiding things from me.”
“I don’t think there’s much missing,” he reassured her.
“Okay,” she replied, taking a sip of her coffee. “I’m listening.”
Ferguson overtook a car pulling a horse-trailer, and settled back in the seat. “His real name is Oskar Boehme. He was born in Dresden in 1960. Back then, of course, it was part of communist East Germany.”
Ava looked unimpressed. “You can skip the geography lesson—I know where Dresden is.”
Ferguson carried on unabashed. “Do you know much about the East German Stasi?”
Ava nodded. “Enough to know I’m glad I was never their guest.”
“Highly unpleasant bunch,” Ferguson grimaced. “And it seems Malchus was one of their finest.”
“I can believe that,” Ava replied, keen for him to get onto the details.
“His career started off in his home town of Dresden, where school held little interest for him. He preferred the education he got from the city’s black-marketeers. He began with the usual—smuggling and hawking contraband goods, but quickly graduated to hardcore criminality. By the time he was fifteen, the school barely knew what he looked like. Unsurprisingly, he was expelled. And that was when the Stasi started to see his potential.”
“Any family connections to the Stasi?” Ava asked.
Ferguson shook his head. “His father was a successful industrialist with the usual communist party connections, so they lived in a big house in a nice part of town. But he was also an alcoholic sadist, who regularly battered his wife and son.”
“At around the time Malchus was expelled from school, his father beat his mother so badly she was hospitalized with a fractured eye socket, ripped ear, and broken hip. When his father died the next day, the official report recorded he had accidentally electrocuted himself in the kitchen with a faulty kettle.”
“I think I can see where this is going,” Ava murmured.
“The Stasi files give another story,” Ferguson confirmed. “Malchus had grown to violently resent his father, and saw his opportunity. He stripped the wiring in the kettle’s power lead, electrifying the metal. When his father came to turn it on the next morning, he plugged himself directly into the Free State of Saxony’s main grid.”
“So that’s how the Stasi roped him in?” Ava asked. “Blackmail?”
Ferguson nodded. “They kept his little secret for him, and in return he began to inform on the area’s black-marketeers. It turned out to be a marriage made in heaven. Malchus was able to earn two lots of wages, and at the same time clear his competition off the streets into the Stasi’s prisons and torture basements.”
“So when did he move to Berlin?” Ava was unsurprised by what she was hearing. Someone like Malchus clearly had a violent past.
“After several years, the local Stasi bosses had come to appreciate his quick mind, brutality, and naked ambition. And it wasn’t long before he attracted the attention of a talent-spotter from head office. He was soon transferred to Berlin’s Ministerium on
Ruschestrasse
, and given more sensitive assignments.”
“I can imagine.” Ava knew the Ministerium’s reputation only too well. Along with the Lubyanka in Soviet Moscow and Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse under Nazi Germany, it ranked among the twentieth century’s most brutal fortresses of state torture and terror.
“He was tasked to stay involved in the black-market side of things given he had an excellent network by this stage. The arrangement suited him, as he could continue to enjoy the bribes and favours that went with the role. But he also started working on political dissidents, which was a much darker trade altogether, and he soon developed quite a reputation for his innovative methods.”
Ava raised an eyebrow. She wondered what it would take to stand out among the Stasi’s torturers.
“It seems the incident with his father gave him a long-lasting love of electricity and water. In the basements of the Ministerium, he was able to fine-tune his techniques with car batteries and buckets.”
Ava shuddered. She had met men like him before. They were never the ones to be found ‘just following orders’—they were a different breed, enjoying the power and brutality. “What about the occult side?” she asked, changing the subject. “How does that fit in?”
“It doesn’t really,” Ferguson replied. “He kept business and pleasure separate. Magic was his personal obsession. According to the Stasi file, when he was a young teenager, he was rummaging around an abandoned convent to find a hiding place for a consignment of smuggled cigarettes when he stumbled across a book called the
Grimoire of Turiel
. The file doesn’t say what it’s about, but he was deeply influenced by it. After that, he began his own odyssey into the occult. As he became increasingly obsessed, he bribed and burgled his way into assembling his own dark library.”
Ferguson paused to overtake a lorry. “But getting hold of books—especially occult ones—was not easy behind the Iron Curtain. So when the wall came down in ’89, Malchus seized the opportunity. As the crowds partied and hacked off wall souvenirs, he slipped into the throngs of revellers, and that was the last the Stasi ever saw of him.”
“Where did he go?” Ava asked.
“Wherever he could get what he wanted. He moved around Europe: Paris, Rome, Madrid, but ended up in London. He was occasionally spotted hanging around counterculture bookshops in Covent Garden, and he dabbled with what was left of the Order of the Golden Dawn. But his tastes were much darker. He quickly disappeared, sucked into the spider’s web of occult groups that make up Britain’s black magic subculture.”
“And what about his extremist politics?” Ava asked. “When did that start?”
“The file’s not clear,” Ferguson admitted. “It seems he fell off the radar. No one was very interested in him at that time. The world was busier with other things, and he was by no means the only ex-Iron Curtain security officer on the loose in Europe. There were thousands of them, and he wasn’t on anyone’s priority list. So not much is known of his politics in this period, but he seems to have drifted strongly to the right, falling in with fringe and extremist groups. The Thelema is only the latest in a long line of them—although it’s by far and away the most serious. Which is why he’s now getting the attention he managed to avoid for so long.”
No wonder her father had been so interested in him, she mused. Malchus’s mixture of occultism and extreme politics was exactly the combination he had been trying to warn people about.
And yet again, it seemed he had been right.
Ferguson turned towards her. “So that’s what we know.”
Ava lapsed into silence. The information was valuable—what Ferguson had said, and what he had not said. It gave her a lot to mull over.
Lost in thought, she gazed out of the window as the vast empty expanse of green downland sped by, taking them closer to Salisbury Plain’s mysterious centre.