there in his car, she came over with a sad smile and asked if he’d like to come inside for coffee. He said no, thanks, and apologised for having scared her earlier. He told her the men wouldn’t be back, and that she shouldn’t be afraid.
There was nothing more to say. Nothing more to do here. He’d be on his way, after the funeral.
At ten o’clock in the morning, Father Pascal Cambriel was laid to rest in the graveyard of the church of Saint-Jean where he’d spent so many years caring for his community. Many had turned out to pay their final respects to the much-loved priest they’d known all their lives. Ben stood at the back of the crowd and watched with a clenched jaw as the coffin went into the ground. There were tears and sobs. A younger priest drafted in from a neighbouring town said a few solemn words. Ben spoke to nobody.
He was the last to leave the cemetery. As he knelt alone by the fresh grave, he made his promise. Then, slowly, calmly, he walked back to the car and drove away, never to return to Saint-Jean.
Gentle, kind Pascal wouldn’t have approved of the vow Ben had taken at his graveside. But Pascal hadn’t lived in Ben’s world and had only the smallest understanding of what motivated evil men and the cruelty they were capable of. Those were things Ben understood very well indeed. And whoever was doing this, whoever was hurting his friends, he was going to track them down, and find them, and destroy every single one of them.
They wanted blood. They were going to get it.
‘Gennaro, you are a gift from God.’
When Massimiliano Usberti had uttered those words six months earlier, he’d meant them literally. For a man of such profound religious faith as his, there had been no other way to describe an event so serendipitous. It was the act of Divine providence he had been praying for. Now that it had come, with it came the long-cherished opportunity to start putting his plans into action.
He’d been waiting a long time.
Life was quiet when you were a disgraced former archbishop. Too quiet. For years, Massimiliano Usberti had seen almost nobody, spoken only to the small band of faithful disciples who hadn’t abandoned him since his fall from grace. And what a spectacular fall it had been. The pain and humiliation of his rapid, sudden descent remained with him every waking moment. His private retreat, the villa set into its own four acres on the shores of Lake Como, was his only comfort, though for all its opulence it was a far cry from the magnificent Renaissance palace outside Rome that had been his main residence at the peak of his career as a senior archbishop.
Back in those halcyon days, it had seemed as if nothing could stop him. He’d been on track to become a cardinal. One day, perhaps even Pope. Anything, everything, he dared to dream felt within his grasp. Gladius Domini, the Sword of God, his brainchild, his life’s work, had secretly attracted powerful investors from every fundamentalist Christian enclave across the world and mighty friends in China and the USA. Its goal: to re-Christianise the globe and destroy once and for all the rising Islamic threat that was spreading everywhere like a cancer; to bring about a new golden age of holy crusade against the heathen menace in the East. Its mission statement was Necos eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. Or, in layman’s terms, ‘Kill ’em all and let God sort them out’.
When the crash had come, thanks to the combined efforts of Usberti’s enemies, the blooming flower that had been Gladius Domini had been trampled into the dirt. All but a handful of his powerful friends in high places had deserted him in the wake of the disaster. The investors had dropped him like a hissing stick of dynamite and run a mile. His dreams had crumbled into ashes as he escaped imprisonment by the skin of his teeth, letting minions like the hapless Severini take the fall in his place.
And so, with his power hugely diminished, his ambitions crushed and his once-substantial wealth slowly eroding, Massimiliano Usberti had become a virtual recluse. No longer the proud, physically imposing, leonine man he once had been, he grew scraggy and wrinkled and started paying less attention to his personal appearance. He lost interest in food and gained a little too much interest in strong spirits. His beloved motor yacht, in which he’d once merrily sailed the sparkling blue waters of Lake Como, no longer held any joy for him. He would sometimes be confined to his bed for days on end by fits of black depression from which not even his new assistant, a devoted young priest called Silvano Bellini who had joined his shrivelled retinue a few months earlier, could rouse him.
When he did take Bellini’s advice to get some fresh air and exercise, all he could do was pace restlessly about the lakeside estate, brooding and muttering to himself. Indoors, he became glued to the internet, obsessing over the state of the world. Was he the only one who could see how desperately, now more than ever, God’s guiding hand was needed to avert the catastrophic decline of civilisation? The more he scoured the web for fuel to feed the fire burning inside him, the more evidence he saw of the entire globe’s descent into ruin: heading faster and faster towards utter degradation as the situation that had seemed untenable even at the height of Gladius Domini’s glory days now seemed to spiral ever further into complete chaos.
Usberti was convinced that the age of Sodom and Gomorrah was returning in modern times exactly as prophesied in Scripture, bringing with it a plague of abominations that were the sure signs of the approaching apocalypse. The holy institutions of family and marriage breaking down. Promiscuity and drugs, pestilence and mental illness everywhere, perpetrated and encouraged by a subculture of corrupt intellectual elitists who had turned their back on God’s wisdom and taught others to follow their disgraceful example. Men marrying men now, heaven help us. What next, sheep and goats? As if that perversion were not gruesome enough, barely a day seemed to pass without Usberti wanting to throw up at the sight of yet another aberrant bearded transsexual being fêted by the online media. The Western world was in the throes of lunacy, celebrating bestial sin and surrendering to all manner of vile unnatural passions and self-obsessed neurosis, even as the invading enemy hordes came flooding through their open borders: a never-ending army of so-called refugees bringing with them a wave of crime, rape and violence perpetrated against the decent Christian people who had welcomed them into their lands. Roaring in like a rogue wave, the heathen invaders were set to colonise all of Europe and beyond, one nation after another. The weak, ineffectual puppet governments of those countries, paralysed by the spell of political correctness and terrified of committing what the propagandists defined as a ‘hate crime’, would simply stand back and do nothing, until the faithless and dissolute West ultimately fell to the invasion of Islam and Shariah law.
Needless to say, Usberti had seen the whole ugly mess coming a long time ago; nobody had wanted to listen to his warnings and now it was almost too late to stem the tide. It was left to a brave few to fight back, and Usberti yearned to take his place at the head of a righteous campaign to restore sanity and godliness to the world. But what could he do? His money was dwindling, his influence was dead and his name was a joke.
However badly his frustration over the state of human affairs consumed him, it was his bitter hatred of his personal enemies that ate deepest of all into his soul. He spent hours daily plotting all kinds of bitter revenge against those who had engineered his downfall. One in particular: Ben Hope.
Ben Hope.
Even the sound of the name made Usberti want to spit bile. For years, the only thing that sustained him was to dream about the terrible things he would do to the despicable swine who, more than anyone, had destroyed his future. Not just Hope, but all the others too: a list of names that Usberti recited endlessly in his mind and often wrote down by hand, scratching the letters so deep that his pen would wear right through the paper and mark the surface of his desk.
Those
