The Babylon Idol - Scott Mariani Ben Hope

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own gun and fired first. And so far in his life, Ben had always been quicker.

      But he wasn’t about to do either of those things when the person with the gun was a little old woman as frail as a sparrow, so frightened that the weapon was fluttering in her skinny hand. ‘Who’s there?’ she quavered.

      ‘Don’t shoot,’ he said in French. ‘It’s all right. I’m a friend of Father Pascal. My name’s Ben.’

      The woman hesitated, then reached tentatively out and clicked on the wall light. She was in her seventies, with thinning grey hair, wearing a dressing gown topped by a shawl draped around her shoulders. Her eyes were reddened as though she’d been crying.

      ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I saw the car lights. I thought perhaps they had come back.’

      ‘You thought who had come back?’

      ‘Those men. The men who—’ Her voice trailed off. She sniffed.

      ‘You don’t have to point the gun at me,’ Ben said, eyeing the antique revolver and her finger on the trigger. It might be a relic, but if it had been good enough to kill Germans in two world wars, he didn’t want to be on its business end. ‘I promise I won’t hurt you. Where’s Pascal? What men are you talking about? Is everything all right?’ But it obviously wasn’t. He sensed something was terribly wrong.

      The gun drooped in her thin hand, pointing at the floor. The old woman’s eyes filled with tears. And now Ben knew for sure, and he felt his own shoulders sag.

      ‘When?’ he asked.

      ‘Two days ago.’

      ‘What happened?’

      ‘There was an attack. At the church. The police think it was two intruders. Nobody knows. Nobody saw anything.’ She sniffed again, and shook her head. ‘Pascal … I knew him all my life. And now he is gone.’

      Ben’s throat was so tight that he could barely speak. ‘What did they do to him?’

      ‘They beat him. They killed him, les salauds. The funeral is this morning.’

      Ben was numb as he walked back to the car. He watched the old woman disappear inside her house, her head bowed. He sat and smoked, letting his mind become empty.

      Dawn came; the sky lightened in gradual shades. A fog hung over the mountains in the background. The old woman reappeared, dressed in boots and a coat. If she was still carrying the gun out of fear that the attackers might return, it was hidden in a pocket. She let Pascal’s hens out and fed them, moving stiffly in the morning cold. Seeing Ben sitting 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.

       Chapter 14

       ‘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

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