The Third Antichrist (40 page)

What he didn’t need was a modern car with some complicated bloody alarm system that woke up half the town and drew everybody’s attention to the stranger in their midst. Vau – or at least the Asperger’s afflicted part of him – had been a genius at all that sort of technical mumbo jumbo, and Abi had been quite content to leave that side of things to him. But the five-year-old Romanian-built Dacia Logan he was now looking at wouldn’t be beyond him. There were thousands of such vehicles in Romania, and he would have no problem at all in interchanging number plates. The cars were designed for crap roads too, with firm suspension and extra-high clearance. They had 50 per cent fewer parts than the Renault they were based on, and no fancy electronics. Perfect for the job.

The fifth one of his pass-keys worked on the lock. He checked around himself. At this time of the evening, and in these conditions, people were busy shutting down for the night, not winding up to go out on the town. Chances were, the theft of a car wouldn’t be noticed until the morning, when he would be long gone and the car re-registered with different plates. Yes. He might as well go for it.

The same key that had worked for the door worked for the engine. Paradise. Why weren’t all Western cars built like this? He gave the engine sufficient time to warm up, consciously winding himself down in the process – adjusting his breathing – moving from highly tense to merely alert.

The snow was still falling, but the roads were definitely passable. If things got worse, he would simply steal himself a four-by-four. Or a pick-up.
Saperlipopette!
He might even steal a snowplough. There was nothing – nothing at all – linking him to the three Western Europeans lying dead in the ravine. And he suspected that the local Sighetu police force wouldn’t waste a great deal of their precious time and limited resources on an in-depth investigation into what was clearly just a tragic accident occasioned by the weather.

Abi felt a burgeoning sense of freedom. It really was true. He was the only one of his immediate family left alive. An unreluctant orphan. The last survivor of the Devil’s Dozen. He already held all the family’s aristocratic titles. And now, when Madame, his mother, died – as she eventually would, with or without his help – he would be rich beyond the dreams of Croesus. And he was still in his twenties – limbs, brain and family jewels intact. Christ. He might even decide to get married and breed if the fancy took him. The world and all its goodies, Abi decided, were his oyster.

But first things first.

He still had to square the reckoning with Calque and Sabir. Once that was done, his triumph would be complete.

Albescu, Romania
Saturday, 6 February 2010

63

Dracul Lupei let it be known around town that his sister had been stricken with the typhoid. He blamed it on the Transnistrians himself. People from that part of the world came to Albescu all the time looking for salvation, and his sister had been in the habit of interviewing most of them on arrival to see what they could contribute to the communal interest. Such people tended to bring stuff in with them – diseases and suchlike. In the future, he – Mihael Catalin, the Renascent Christ, the Chosen Harbinger of Revelation – would enforce a strict period of quarantine for all foreigners. Not all drinking water was as safe as that provided by his own purification plant. Yes. He would place this at the very top of his agenda.

Privately, Lupei ordered his Crusaders to guard the house and not let anyone in – even the cleaning women. And that included Iuliu Andrassy’s wife, Georgetta. Typhoid was dreadfully contagious, and Coryphaeus Catalin, given who he was, would nurse his sister himself and thus protect the rest of the community from danger. Perhaps he could even contrive another miracle?

He had informed Georgetta that her husband was on a secret mission for him, infiltrating the Evangelicals, and would thus not be home for a number of weeks – and that, because he was working undercover, he would inevitably be out of telephone contact during that period. Georgetta was a peasant and therefore gullible as hell, except when it came to money. She didn’t question the Coryphaeus’s story – everything he said and did was all right by her. She was merely worried that he would have no one to do his washing and to clean his house while he nursed his sister back to health. She would have time on her hands without her husband around. Surely he would like her to look after him?

No. The Coryphaeus wouldn’t. He would manage alone. Abnegation was good for the soul, and had not the Lord Jesus Himself been forced to spend forty days and forty nights in the wilderness during the period of trial immediately following His baptism? The Coryphaeus would therefore dedicate himself to fasting and to the mortification of the flesh while he tended to his sister’s welfare. What had Cimarosa said in his Requiem?
Juste judex ultionis, donum fac remissionis, ante diem rationis
– ‘Just judge of vengeance, grant me remission before the final day of reckoning’.

Privately, Lupei had tried to contact Andrassy on a number of occasions during the twelve hours following his original phone call, but he had eventually given up in disgust. Instead he had called Andrassy’s superior officer in the Crusaders, Lieutenant Markovich, and told him to pull all his subordinates off what they were doing and converge on Brara to see what was going on. Then he had lost interest.

What really interested him was Antanasia. He would enter her bedroom and stare at her for hours on end as she lay, unmoving, on the bed. Recently, as well as dosing her up on morphine, he had tried switching her to Rohypnol when the pain became too great for her to bear. He liked the Rohypnol effect. One time he had even made love to her from behind, while she was still unconscious, the mush from her unhealed wounds spreading like jelly beneath his thrusting body. The orgasm he had achieved in this way had been the most significant of his entire life. It had made him feel like God Himself.

Having Antanasia entirely in his power gave Lupei an extraordinary sense of potency. There was no thought in his mind that she might die. He was sufficiently convinced of his own pre-eminence to no longer doubt his capacity to influence nature to his own advantage. If he did not wish her to die, she would not do so. If he wished to kill her, he would. If he chose to mark her body, this was his prerogative. He had taken her from his father, and she was his to do with as he would. Every path was acceptable, just so long as it reflected his will.

Recently, he had become even more convinced of the truth of his asseveration that the world would end on 21 December 2012. The Mayans, who had originally earmarked the date as the end of the Long Count Calendar and the Cycle of Nine Hells, and then – based on the quality of response of the world community, as the beginning of the era known as the Great Change – simply did not know what they were talking about. They were good at calendars, but useless as eschatologists. As a race, the Mayans were largely passive. Content to let things happen to them rather than to trigger events themselves. Look at what had occurred under the Spanish. Total bloody capitulation.

He, on the other hand, was a doer. A catalyst. A changer of history. If he said something would happen, it would. This was not vainglory on his part – merely the simple acceptance of an established fact.

As future President of Moldova, he would order the launch of all three of his Kh-55s at midnight on 20 December 2012 – one aimed at Tiraspol, one at Kiev, and one, for good measure, at Moscow. Frankly, he didn’t expect the Moscow one to make it through the Russian Federation’s missile shield, but by that stage it wouldn’t matter anymore. The die would have been cast and the gamble taken. Russia would respond to the destruction of its 14th Army outpost in Transnistria in the only way it knew how – with force. And Lupei had always hated the Ukrainians, so destroying a virtually unguarded Kiev would be an unforeseen bonus. Nobody would imagine Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, to have access to nuclear weapons. So Russia would strike at Romania, thereby involving the rest of the EU and NATO. The whole thing would be immensely satisfying. With luck it would spiral out of control and wipe out the whole seething lot of them.

Lupei still found it almost inconceivable that his followers had not clicked that the cross they had had tattooed across their foreheads constituted the ‘mark of the beast’. Did none of them read their Bibles? Did none of them know that it was idolatrous to worship graven images? And that ‘graven’, in the strictest biblical sense, merely meant the ‘engraving of an image onto a surface’? Wasn’t skin a surface, then? Hadn’t they read Revelation, Chapter 14, Verses 9 to 11?

Lupei knew that his followers had doomed themselves from the moment they agreed to the forehead tattoo. This tattoo had become a passion with his people – they clearly felt that by permanently marking their flesh they would curry favour with him, and, via him, with God. Instead, they were simply marking themselves out as victims for the ‘fire next time’.

The thought pleased Lupei immeasurably, and further reinforced his view that people were swine to be led wherever their herdsman – and that herdsman was he – chose to lead them. And like swine, they had no earthly clue that the butcher awaited them. They were content to linger at the trough and await their swill, in the blind belief that they were part of an everlasting charity programme designed to allow them to live without thinking.

Well, he would show them. Those who had the most faith in him would suffer most. And chief amongst these was his sister, Antanasia. Named after a saint who was beheaded by the Emperor Diocletian because she didn’t have sense enough to sway with the wind, Antanasia’s absurd goodness in the face of all the evils that had befallen her during her life made her a worthy successor to her namesake. Lupei would only be able to consider himself totally evil, and thus worthy of the Devil’s trust, if he was able to destroy or undermine all that was totally good.

His sister had betrayed him. With whom, he did not know. But he would find out. He had the time. And the inclination. And what was that thing his father had always said to justify his abominations? Ah. He remembered now. The sweetest crime of all is to outrage those who love you the most.

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an Pass, Romania
Saturday, 6 February 2010

64

‘This is it, then. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’

Sabir watched as Radu and Alexi struggled with the lock of the massive snow-gates that barred the entrance to the Transf
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an Pass. Just as he was on the verge of advising them to give up on it and climb back inside the car, Radu stepped triumphantly backwards, dragging the right-hand part of the gate with him.

After Alexi had secured his own section of the gate, he gave a mock bow, sweeping his hand across his chest as if he were flourishing a musketeer’s hat. ‘You see, Damo? Gypsy know-how. We can get in and out of anywhere. Houdini was a Gypsy, did you know that?’