The God Complex: A Thriller (26 page)

Antoine had ushered everyone out of the room, leaving Blake and himself alone in the library. Antoine normally loved to spend time with Blake, his mind and memory for every detail within the archives was astonishing. Thousands of years of history instantly available, Blake could recall any event and knew exactly where the detail lay in the vaults below. The mind was an astonishing thing but Blake Noble’s mind left others truly wanting.

Antoine poured Blake a glass of water, himself a glass of Scotch.

“Numbs the mind,” he said accepting the water and nodding toward Antoine’s glass.

“Sometimes it’s nice to feel a little numb,” said Antoine taking the seat opposite Blake.

Blake nodded. “It is a trying time for us all, our family has worked towards this day for millennia!”

“Yes, I feel the weight of a world on my shoulders
.”

“You feel the weight of two worlds on your shoulders,” Blake
said.

“Very true,” smiled Antoine
. “Two worlds, but only one can survive.”

“Only one will survive.”

Antoine took a sip. “Twelve minutes?”

“I spoke out of turn, I shouldn’t have said anything,” said Blake.

“I know you well enough, if you think something is worth saying, it’s worth saying.”

“Twelve minutes, the difference in age of your father and
his brother Bertie.”

“Twelve minutes, the difference in time that made him the second son,” said Antoine.

“And destined never to head the family,” Blake summed up.

“But you meant more than that, I saw the look on your face
. This wasn’t only about what he did recently.”

Blake sat quietly, taking a long sip of water, contemplating whether to speak further.
“Twenty years ago, this family suffered a tragic loss. Our leader, your father, had an accident out at sea. His boat capsized and he and his three crewmen died.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” said Antoine
. “I was supposed to be with him but Chantal had just told me she was pregnant.”

Blake nodded and stayed silent.

Antoine stared at him, waiting for the old man to speak, but he didn’t. “No, Bertie was in America,” Antoine said, “he was already a powerful Senator.”

Blake remained silent.

“If we had both been on the boat, Bertie would have been leader.” He let the words hang. “We don’t kill our own!”

“No
, we don’t. And until recent events, I had my doubts but deep down, I didn’t believe he could have. Bertie, though, has spent his life outside of the family. His life has been spent with the people who have traits that we have used to shape the world to where we want it to be— aggression, confrontation, contempt, love, loyalty, belief, devotion… all of those traits that make them what they are. The things we used to control them, he has assumed. He has become one of them. He wanted the power and, as the people would have done, he devised a plan to take it.”

“And ignored everything that makes us who we are?”

“He stopped being one of us the day he coveted your father’s position,” said Blake.

“But the investigation was thorough
. It was an accident.”

“And we don’t have any knowledge of a group that can do that?”

Antoine nodded dejectedly. “They’re watching him now.”

“Bertie Noble is the single biggest threat to our success
. He is a loose cannon who believes he should be king and I don’t just mean of the Nobles,” said Blake.

“I can’t order him killed,” said Antoine
. “His watcher might. Her orders are to protect the family and myself from anything he might try.”

“Clever,” Blake
said thoughtfully. “But I’m afraid you need to make that call. He is a liability that we can ill afford. There are precedents in the past, the grand council has the power to take the decision to take a Noble’s life, but it must be unanimous.”

Antoine considered Blake’s proposal.
His ambiguous instructions were already sitting heavily with him. Asking for another Noble’s life to be taken, even given what Bertie had done, was against everything they believed. He had been surprised when Bertie had fallen for his bluff in the PEOC, obviously Bertie thought Antoine was capable of breaking their most sacred rule, something he most certainly was not. Nobles did not kill Nobles

“I’ll have him brought back to Anieres and placed under house arrest. We’ll keep him within our control.”

“That is your decision to make but rest assured, his ambition has not been satiated,” cautioned Blake, taking a final sip of water and stood up, lifted his cane, and left the room.

Antoine
picked up his phone; council or Bertie. He thought of Blake’s caution. The wise old man was telling him to deal with it once and for all. But that wise old man wasn’t the one who’d be calling the vote or leading the council to a decision.

He hit the speed dial
. The cell rang out and went to voicemail. “Leave a message,” instructed the female voice in a seductive Eastern European accent.

He dialed
the number again. It was his call anytime, instant connection to Katya number. He was the only one with the number and as the client, would always be answered , but it went to voicemail again.

He called Conrad
. “Get someone over to Bertie’s place now!” he commanded.

Conrad called back within thirty minutes
. His people couldn’t get in. Bertie’s house was surrounded by police. A number of ambulances were in attendance but all his men could see from the road were body bags being loaded into them.

Travis Davies had just finished his latest draft for Cash when the notification of a new message pinged into the inbox of his secret Hotmail account. No one knew the address, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t get offers to enlarge his manhood or earn money from any number of bizarre sources. He saved the draft and clicked on the inbox icon. Bertie Noble was the sender. He had never given Bertie Noble the address. The Senator with too many unanswered questions hanging over him for Travis’ liking had just added another question to the list.

Travis clicked on the message
. It was empty, save for the subject heading, four letters, capitalized: ‘HELP’. Travis clicked the reply symbol and began to type.
Good afternoon, Senator, I believe you may have sent me this message in error.
He stopped. Senator Bertie Noble didn’t do errors, certainly not to email addresses he had no business knowing even existed. Everything Senator Noble ever had or did was calculated and deliberate.

He checked the sender email address and not
only the displayed name. It wasn’t from the Senator’s senate account, it was from a Hotmail account. Whatever message he was sending, it wasn’t going to show in his system.

Travis reached for his phone and dialed the Senator
’s office. He was told that the Senator was working from home that afternoon.
Nothing unusual
, thought Travis. He dialed Bertie Noble’s home office number and the call was answered instantly.

“Hello?” replied the voice Travis recognized as the Senator.

“Senator—”

“Ah
. Mr. Davies,” he cut him off. “I was expecting your call. I believe those two young men have been causing us problems again. What a shame we missed shooting them down when we had the chance.”

The two men he had vouched for and who he had fake
d shooting down.

“Although if you ask me, there’s only really one of them that’s a problem, the other one just listens and does what he’s told.”

“Well I thought I should keep you in the loop, Senator. We’ve tracked them down and are about to take them out. You did say you wanted to be kept in the loop, sir.”

“
Most definitely, I’m very keen to be kept in the loop.”

“Leave it with me
, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Excellent, thank you.”
The Senator hung up.

Travis had quickly caught on
. Somebody was listening. The Senator had cut him off before he could say anything that would have exposed the cry for help. If Travis understood the situation correctly, the Senator was telling him that there was one person holding him and that he wanted Travis to come and get him. Of course he could have been completely wrong, it was as clear as mud; but nothing else seemed to make any sense. The call itself didn’t, certainly not given their prior conversation about Cash and Rigs.

Cash and Rigs
would have been perfect for the job.

He picked up his phone, and stopped
. He was about to call his Clandestine Services Director, a man he had known for twenty years, but he was wavering. It was ridiculous. He placed the call and arranged for a team to visit the Senator’s house, to check things out.

Katya had listened in to the Senator’s call with passing interest. It had not been dissimilar to many of the other calls he had received throughout the day, nor any of his subsequent calls. She watched the screen in front of her, it was mirroring his emails, both in and out. He was behaving and taking the threat seriously. She did not know about his burner smart phone, the one he had smuggled into the restroom and with which, over the past few visits, he’d sent his help message to the CIA, entering a couple of letters at a time until at last he hit the send button.

The first sign of a problem to Katya was the bird
song stopping. To most people the random and occasional sound of birds was undetectable. To Katya it was a warning. The Senator’s house was unsurprisingly, given his family name, grand. Sitting on top of a small hill, the mini White House style mansion was surrounded by lush and extravagantly furnished gardens securely enclosed by eight-foot walls.

Katya was on her feet and reaching for her MP7 sub machine gun, a compact high powered machine pistol.

“Stay there!” she commanded to the Senator, moving to the window. She looked down into the back garden. No movement. She moved across the hallway and looked out the front. The second floor gave a view out across the walls to the street beyond. No movement, no cars going past, no pedestrians. The street was closed.

Katya looked back
at the grounds. No movement. She listened . Not a sound.

“Shit!” she said.

“Senator, with me!”

The Senator was in no position to argue
. Her demeanor had changed, her beauty was gone completely, all that was left was a killer.

He was placed in a small restroom at the end of the hallway. Katya closed the door and slid the bolt she had added to lock him in place. With him
secure, she grabbed her ammo belt and placed it around her waist before venturing downstairs in a classic stance. Her weapon was up at the ready, and she swept the area in front of her. A pistol and knife were strapped to the ammo belt, along with a number of extra magazines and kit.

The first floor was clear. She hesitated at the top of the stairs that would take her to the ground level. She listened.
She heard whispered voices below her. They were in the house. She reached around and withdrew a flash bang from her belt. They hadn’t heard her. Their whispers continued. They were making plans.

She edged towards the top of the stairs, keeping out of sight of those below.
She carefully removed the flash bang pin, counted to three, and tossed it below, closing her eyes when the initial flash exploded. She rolled down the top few stairs and into a crouched shooting position as the flash dissipated. Four men were caught in its glare. She swept across them, two bullets to each, then rushed back up to the safety of the floor above, avoiding the bullets which began to ping where she had been standing.

A tirade of bullets
soon rained down on the staircase as the men below pushed towards her. Katya moved back and waited. Bullets were exploding all around her. The small room she had stepped into was nothing more than a broom cupboard at the top of the staircase. She remained calm when two bullets blasted through the door, one catching her side. She felt the blood flow but ignored the pain. The bullets moved off beyond her. The men assumed she had moved further into the house and had not stayed near the staircase. Katya waited while the footsteps tentatively worked their way up the stairs.

“Check that door?” she heard,
and the footsteps neared. She was cornered. Never a good place to be.

Katya crouched, ignoring the pinching of flesh from her side where the bullet had pierced her.
The door opened. She paused, the man’s view was head height, not two feet from the ground. With no initial reaction from the door opener, his colleagues had moved their attention along the corridor. That infinitesimal pause was all Katya needed. She had them on the back foot. Her silenced pistol put a bullet through the chin of the door opener even before he had looked down to where she was crouched. Before his body had even reacted to the trauma, it was being shoved out of the way and Katya was already shooting. Three head shots, four more down and out of the game. Katya didn’t like to be cornered.

She listened for more voices or noises
. Nothing from below, but there was plenty from above.
Helicopters
. They had come at them from top and bottom. Stealth choppers. From the number of footsteps rushing across the floor above it was fight or flight. She heard the Senator’s voice booming from above.

“It’s one woman, what are you waiting
for?!!”

They had him
. She had failed.
Fight or flight.

“No, let me stay…” she heard him shouting, his voice disappearing.

He was already gone.
Flight
. Katya disappeared into the night. She would fight another day.