but it was softer than brass between his fingertips, and weighed almost nothing.
It was a cigarette butt. A very particular and distinct type, a brand Ben had come across before. The shiny foil filter was emblazoned with a minuscule Russian imperial eagle, emblem of the Czars. The filter was pinched and crumpled from the pressure of stubbing it out. The smoked end was blackened, crushed and trailing bits of unburned tobacco soaked with blood. Ben flicked the thing away in disgust. It had left a small circular burn mark on the dead monk’s brow.
To shoot a defenceless man in the head was one thing. To stub your cigarette out on him when he was down, that was another. The ultimate insult added to the ultimate injury.
Bastards.
Ben made himself remain calm. He stepped around the blood and walked inside the open door of the church. The cool interior smelled of incense and death. The mosaic stone floor laid centuries ago by master masons was smeared with more blood.
There were thirteen bodies inside the church. Either they must have congregated in here when the shooting began or they’d still been at prayer when the attackers hit.
One of the bodies was Père Antoine’s.
The old prior was as dead as the rest. The final expression frozen on the octogenarian’s face was one of serene calm. He looked almost beatific. As if he’d met his end in the quiet certainty that he was going to meet his maker, that this life was just one small stage in the journey and there was nothing to fear in leaving it behind.
That didn’t make it any easier for Ben to deal with. He crouched over the prior for a long moment, remembering their conversations and their chess games and the old man’s kindness to him.
He said out loud, ‘I’m going to find who did this.’
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Ben was pretty certain that would have been Père Antoine’s reply. Or words to that effect. He’d have counselled Ben to leave it be. To find within himself the strength to walk away and resist the growing urge that was firing up his veins and making his hands shake and his heart pound and his breathing heave with anger. To go with God, walk the path of peace. Or as Jesus had said, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.
Ben wished he had that strength. He wasn’t the man Père Antoine had been. He wasn’t Jesus either. Not by a long shot. And the path of peace was no longer his to walk.
He stood up and left the church. Headed slowly back down the bloody steps. He made his way through the arch that led into the shady cloister and found three more bodies spread out on the stone floor.
Including one in particular who shouldn’t have been there at all.
The man was no monk, that was for sure. He was from the outside, but he was no ordinary outsider either. It seemed strange to see anyone here not clad in monastic garb, and even stranger to see a man in black combat trousers, black high-leg military boots, black multi-pocket tactical vest, black ski mask, shooters’ gloves and utility belt. Then again, under the circumstances, maybe not so strange.
The dead man had been packing some sort of semi-automatic pistol before someone had disarmed him and left him with an empty holster. Presumably, the same somebody who had shot him twice in the head with the same nine-millimetre ammunition that had been used to dispatch the other victims. The empty shell cases were lying nearby. His eyes were open and glazed in the holes of the ski mask.
Ben touched three fingers to the guy’s neck and held them there for a moment before he whipped off the ski mask and looked at his face. The guy was somewhere in his mid-thirties, white, dark-haired, not ugly, not handsome, not a memorable face, but one Ben wouldn’t be forgetting for a long time. It wasn’t a monk who’d shot him. Aside from the obvious reason why that couldn’t be the case, Ben could think of an even more compelling one. This guy had been alive much more recently than any of the monastery’s dead residents. He wasn’t quite warm to the touch, but he was in a considerably fresher state than they were. Ben grabbed the black-clad right arm and wagged it from side to side and up and down and then let it flop limply to the guy’s side. No sign of rigor mortis yet. The shoulder and elbow joints were loose and flexible. The blood on his face and all down the front of his combat vest was still wet, barely tacky. He’d been dead for well under two hours. Maybe even less than one.
Which told Ben two things. Firstly, unless something extremely bizarre had taken place involving two rival armed gangs happening to choose this spot for a shoot-out and managing to hit almost nobody except bystanders, this fellow had been killed by his own team. The precision of the gunshot wounds in his head made it impossible that he could have accidentally taken a stray bullet intended for one of the monks. This had been deliberate. Ben had absolutely no idea why.
Second, it told him that the perpetrators hadn’t long since left the monastery. If he’d turned up even just an hour earlier he might not have missed them. In turn, if he was right that the attack had happened at around 4.30 in the morning, it meant they’d lingered here quite some time. After killing everyone and securing the place for themselves, they’d then hung around for the next four or so hours.
Doing what? He had no idea about that either. What had they wanted? What could have kept them busy for so long?
Ben kneeled by the body and removed both gloves to examine the dead guy’s fingers for nicotine stains, wanting to know if this was the bastard who’d stubbed the cigarette out on Père Jacques. No stains. He let the hands flop in the dead guy’s lap and next frisked him for any kind of ID. No big surprise to find none, but he did find a phone. He slipped it into his own pocket with a view to checking through it later, and then turned his attention to the small black zippered haversack the guy had slung over his left shoulder. It felt unnaturally heavy, for all the size of it. The black nylon strap was dragging on the man’s clothing, weighing him down. At first Ben thought of spare armament, extra magazines, boxes of ammunition.
But then he unzipped it and looked inside, and frowned.
Now he was really confused.
There were two items inside the bag, both identical in size and shape, both cool and smooth and hard. Between them, they accounted for the unusual weight. They weren’t boxes of ammo or backup weapons.
Ben lifted one out with each hand and stared at them.
The gold bars glittered in the sunshine.
Ben remained kneeling, the dead man half forgotten, blinking in amazement at the items in his hands.
The last one of these he’d been this close to, years ago, had been part of an old cache of Nazi gold, marked with a German imperial eagle perched atop a swastika. That had made it pretty easy to identify, as well as to take an educated guess that it had been manufactured sometime between 1933 and 1945. He hadn’t known if it had been minted or cast or whether the highly recognisable emblem had been stamped or moulded on to it. Only that it was shiny yellow and damned heavy, damned valuable and had some major history behind it.
These
