Better the Devil Read online

  But never the one holding Matty. Matty had been defiant almost until the end.

  Matty was just the codename, of course, in this case for Amelie Green, an Anglo-French, dark-haired and elfishly attractive young woman with perhaps too much of the tomboy in her for her own good... but then surely mustn't they all have had, these women who volunteered to abandon their tractors, bedsides and production lines to fight against the Axis? Matty had first been parachuted into France two years earlier, and at the time of her capture was on her third sojourn into occupied territory. Over those twenty-four months she had made quite a name for herself, beginning her insidious resistance career as a runner for a local cell before graduating to more advanced stealth and infiltration operations, then sabotage, assassination, destabilisation - anything and everything, in fact, to put a bug - as the then recently arrived Americans liked to say - up the ass of the Reich and its ambitions. She had eventually been promoted to cell leader and was in the midst of organising a resistance offensive that by itself might have tipped the balance of power in those parts, when she had been betrayed by a man named "Fishy" Soire. The appellation Fishy was neither a codename nor a reflection of any suspect status on his part but merely the fact that he had been a fishmonger before he had started sticking his gutting knife into entirely different, grey-uniformed chunks of blubber. The trouble with Fishy was that he also wanted to stick something of his own inside Matty.

  The man had done everything with fish except to sleep with them, to borrow another American phrase, Ravne thought back. And because he had had little more than self-interest in the worldwide petty squabble that had been raging then for four years, Ravne had respected, even admired, what Matty had achieved within it. When he had learned how such a promising girl had come into his possession, he had ordered Fishy to be stripped, castrated and then boiled alive in the public square, ostensibly for belonging to the resistance, but actually in retaliation for betraying Matty for failing to get into her knickers. It was not a method of execution that had ever been considered by the Nazis - indeed, even they baulked at it - but in the end they seemed to find it grimly amusing.

  Poor Matty. In many ways she had reminded him of Hannah Chapter - a born survivor. He had even considered keeping her for himself, but the fact was that too many generals were already aware of her capture and wished her gone. He had really had very little choice.

  All that he had been able to do to compensate was make the deed as psychologically pleasing for himself as possible.

  For that reason he had accommodated in the tube next to Matty her husband, a British fighter pilot who unbeknownst to her had been shot down a week earlier. It had almost broken her when she had seen his tortured and barely conscious, naked form incarcerated next to hers, and he remembered how long she had hammered on the glass between them. He couldn't possibly let her suffer like that, and so had showed her how the processing hangar worked.

  It was what he considered his small gift to the Sonderkommando Thule homunculus programme. The problem with making these "little men" was that it had always been such a tiresome and laborious process, and every alchemist from Paracelsus to David Christianus had their own recipes for success. The ingredients for creation of a life form born without woman had over time contained such delights as the semen ejaculated by a hanged man, or the mandrake root that grew where it had fallen, as well as various skin and bone cuttings, menstrual blood and a selection of forcibly-extracted bodily fluids ranging from the vaginal to the cranial. The gourds or cucurbits that acted as a womb in which it had to be nurtured, in turn, could range from just that to the stomach of a dog fed with milk and honey, or the even more improbable egg laid by a black hen that then had to be buried in dung on the first day of a March lunar cycle. Yes, only March!

  Frankly, Ravne had found the whole palaver faintly ridiculous, and certainly over-complex and anachronistic. If the Nazis wanted an army of these things, it was going to take forever. And so applying his own scientific methodology he had devised the process by which he could - given the addition of certain outside catalysts like the plant roots and the dung - quite literally keep all his eggs in one basket, and even improve on the basic model, growing it full-size for a start.

  Ravne remembered smiling as he had flicked the switch on the tube containing Matty's husband, and how for the first time since her capture the young woman had screamed and screamed, so out of character in the depth of her hysteria. Because the molecular and chemical wash that was subsequently pumped into his tube had in seconds reduced her husband from a human being to a half-melted caricature to a shifting, shapeless thing. Finally, even that dissolved, leaving only a rich sludge that lined the base of his glass prison to the depth of thirty centimetres.

  As he had watched Matty shuddering and sliding down the inside of her own tube, he had wished he could explain to her the beauty of his process, but it would have fallen on deaf ears, the woman already slipping into insanity. What did she think? That this war was actually going to be won with guns, knives and resistance pitchforks? This was the meting out of death on an industrial scale... and industry needed its production lines.

  He had flicked her switch and closed his eyes as Matty was reduced, screaming, to the same sludge as her husband, then slammed his fist on the button that vented both tubes. The liquefied remains of the couple mingled in the outflow pipe and flowed into the huge central bath that already contained so much more of his raw material, and there van de Graaff generators arced high-voltage electricity over the turgid sea.

  At least they were together, he thought. The future of the Third Reich waiting to be born from its own primordial soup.

  Ravne's reminiscences were curtailed as he came to a junction in the sewer channel, and he pulled himself into the left fork. But after a few metres he found his way blocked by a concrete wall that simply terminated the channel for no apparent reason. And it looked new. Some kind of building foundation? But odd that it should be so deep, and so intrusive. He turned back, and as he did his hand became entangled in a knot of something flat and roughly textured, like an armoured tapeworm. He panicked momentarily, but then from some mental catalogue identified what it was, realising with relief that he was simply caught in the kind of wide-mesh plastic netting that was used to shore up scree and loose earth at the edges of building sites. It was harmless and could even be useful as a tourniquet for his leg. Ravne slipped a penknife from his pocket and began to slice a section away.

  He stopped. The netting was imprinted with the logo of the firm that used it. CapCon. He did, of course, recognise the name. It was getting to be somewhat ubiquitous. But what the hell was Capek Construction doing way down here?

  Ravne realised that it was a question that was going to have to wait for now. Because he had also noticed something else, something that this underground world had probably never experienced before.

  It was getting foggy.

  No, Ravne thought, his heart quickening again. One had found him. A ripper had found him.

  He stared ahead in the dark making out a black-grey shape crawling towards him from the opposite sewer, shadowy sockets just visible in an angular face. He heard the clacking of blades on broken brickwork and then saw the creature tense as it sensed him nearby. A screech began to build from somewhere deep down in its infernal throat.

  Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Ravne kicked himself back against the concrete blockage - his leg flaring with agony - and grabbed desperately at his pocket for his gun. All efforts to remain calm were gone now: he knew what it was he faced, how trapped and helpless he was, and his breath became panting, his armpits prickly, his sweat starting to break through rapidly chilling flesh.

  The ripper leapt towards him and Ravne did the only thing he could. He filled the sewer with lead.

  Then all too soon his gun began to click, out of bullets.

  Not enough, Ravne thought. From what he'd seen of their staying power on the surface, not nearly enough.

  But the rip
per did not finish its leap.

  Inhaling two sharp and uncertain breaths, Ravne stared into the cloud of smoke generated by the shots, ears ringing from the still reverberating noise they had produced. There was no movement. Nothing.

  Puzzled, he crawled slowly forward, swallowing, tensed to avoid the flashing blades that still might come.

  The ripper stood twitching and apparently dying in the mouth of the right hand sewer tunnel. But it was certainly not his meagre six bullets that had reduced it to this state.

  Some kind of trap had impaled the thing against the brickwork. A thick slab of wood embedded all over with rusty knives.

  What the hell, Ravne thought?

  And as he did, something strong grabbed at him from the shadows, pulling him off balance and cracking his head onto bricks. Losing consciousness he found himself being dragged into the unexplored sewer, deep down into the dark.

  Chapter Five

  "Traps," Jenny Simmons said. "First in Germany, and then at the Eye. Loverboy thinks we were set up and for once I agree with the little shit. Conrad Capek wants us out of the game."

  The demoness delivered her opinion as she stared at herself in the night-blanked windowpane of the main lounge of Exham Priory. She took a long, slow drag on a cigarette and allowed the smoke to curl gently from the sides of her mouth, emulating her currently suppressed hellfire form. Her dark abilities were not fully at rest, however, and, as she stared, the last of the lacerations to her face - the deepest, a vicious slice from jawbone to temple - that she had suffered during their flight from London healed visibly, as if it were the subject of some accelerated time-lapse photography. She prodded the line where it had been a moment before, growled softly in anger, then turned to face the others.

  "No argument from me on that score," Lawrence Verse responded. He still remembered how it had felt to have five slavesouls inside him. "But the question is, why?"

  "Bigger question, how?" Hannah added. "Machine guns in the bunker I can understand, but what happened yesterday morning?"

  "Mebbe it isnae jus' Capek," Ness said. "But one way or another the bastard's involved. Ah can feel it in ma piss."

  "Water, Ness. Feel it in my water. Jeezus, I feel dirty just being in the same room with this guy."

  "Thas wha' ah like ta hear," the Scot growled at Hannah. "There's nae shortage o' people we've pissed off lately, thas for sure. An' ah use the term people lightly, o' course."

  What he said was true. The caseload for Caballistics, Inc over the past few months had been considerably heavier than it had been in the first weeks, with an apparently endless stream of phone calls soliciting their aid. It was good that Ethan Kostabi's desire to make a commercial success out of the privatised Department Q was bearing fruit - it kept him and the others well paid, after all, and in his case beyond the clutches of the law - but Ness wasn't the only one in the team who had begun to wonder why it was only since their formation that so much supernatural shite had begun crawling out of the woodwork. Especially as a great many of the cases were referred to them by Kostabi himself, safe and snug in his mountainside mansion overlooking Berne. The tactician in Ness found the spectrum of these cases deeply suspicious - not just your odd satanic sociopath or demonic possession, but really weird stuff - almost as if Kostabi wanted them to test the water in every dirty pool there was, to recce on his behalf just to see what was there. Not that they'd all been a pain in the arse, mind - he'd actually quite enjoyed the Beg, Bruvver! fiasco and, o' course, the casebook Brand had filed as Hell on Earth.

  Beg, Bruvver! had been the latest and, as it turned out, shortest entry into the voyeuristic reality TV show stakes, an Enditall production whose USP had been that the contestants were eight homeless people invited "at random" to live in the Beg, Bruvver! house. Over the course of six weeks, the one who proved to be most popular with viewers got to - hey, how generous are we? - live in it until the next series. Sadly the producers miscalculated in two ways: one, that the people who voted for such things actually wanted to be in the house themselves, and therefore resented what they perceived as some scrounger from the street getting what they couldn't; and two, the fact that the house had rather carelessly been built over a soul-suppurating plague pit, the writhing inhabitants of which resented their presence even more.

  The subsequent spectacle of a group of universally resented people suddenly erupting in pustulous boils and starting to rot mid-shag naturally boosted the otherwise flagging viewing figures for the episode in which the phenomena began, and in a hastily convened meeting the producers actually considered scheduling a second slot for the night. But even they balked when one of the victims exploded on camera, and Enditall decided they should do just that. The only problem was, they couldn't shut down the transmission. And they couldn't open the doors. Thus had arrived his moment of televisual fame when, along with Chapter and Verse, he had performed an SAS style raid on the house to initiate the Matheson pulse that cleansed it of crap. He'd had to wear the usual disguise, of course - you never knew who was watching - but bespectacled and bearded or not, he knew who it was heroically saluting the camera. He still had the tape upstairs.

  Hell On Earth he had enjoyed for a different reason. That had taken them to Boswell, a small town on the Yorkshire coast, where for countless centuries a fallen angel had lain dying beneath the hill known locally as Scratch Tor. Nurtured at first by the Brotherhood of the Fallen, a bunch of monks who wanted to domesticate it, and then by the cult led by the Sonderkommando Thule agent Helen Earth, the angel had mutated into something it should never have been. Only Brand and the others, locating an ancient artefact known as the Eyes of the Angel, had prevented the unholy hybrid and its army of soul-stripped townspeople from instigating its own version of Judgement Day. 'Course, he hadnae given a stuff about any o' that. What had enlivened this particular case for him was the chance to get an eyeful of the almost sacrificed Hannah Chapter leaping around caves in the buff.

  Not that he'd found the sweaty dyke bitch that interesting', o' course. Nah... not at all.

  "What the hell are you staring at, Ness?"

  "When ah work out wha' the hell i' is, ah'll let yer know."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  Jonathan Brand listened to the faint but increasing murmur of an argument from his seat in the room next door, a room that many years before had been the study of the arch-Satanist Malcolm Critchley. While Brand had refurnished it as his office - everybody's office, actually, but one that he used more than most - he had retained some of Critchley's possessions as a reminder of the evil of the man, and stared at a line of bell jars holding unspeakable contents, lost in thought.

  The unexplained phenomenon, the attack of the rippers, and the subsequent escape past the Capek Construction site had aroused Brand's suspicions, and prompted him to do more research into Conrad Capek than he had previously thought necessary. Biographical details of the man had proven to be strangely elusive - all he could determine were the most basic of facts, the potted history of a rich Russian made good, which all struck him as somehow a bit too neat - but what had proven easier was the work in which his company was currently engaged, the mammoth construction site in the heart of the capital. An endeavour of such size - even if it had something to hide - would have had difficulty avoiding reportage of some kind, and sure enough, in an online newspaper of three weeks before, he had come across a photograph of Capek and other dignitaries at the groundbreaking ceremony on the site.

  Brand had fully expected to see the bearded and glowering face of Emmanuel Konterman alongside Capek. He just knew now that whatever was going on somehow involved his missing homunculus, but Konterman had not been there.

  It was the others with Capek who had given him the link to begin exploring why the construction magnate, perhaps, wanted Caballistics, Inc out of the game. Because it went some way to solving the mystery of Peenemunde.

  Four dead homunculi, the academic mused - AH/2, JS/1, LPH/0, and the one identified
as Richard Brown, RB/3. The slashed numbers he had already guessed referred to the generation of homunculus. Such things were rarely perfect first time out of the tank, but the generation was unimportant. It was who they were that mattered, and in particular what they had in common.

  The same thing that the four people with Conrad Capek had in common now.

  Gah! Brand thought. Commonality he might have, but what purpose did it actually serve? Just why was Capek interested in a chunk of prime London real estate that two groups of people had responsibility for, only seventy years apart?

  He broke his gaze from the bell jars and stared at the desk, where the papers Verse had rescued from the bunker lay. He plucked up the Konterman folder and frowned at the almost faded writing in the centre of the cover, writing that had gone unnoticed until he had begun his researches. It was apparently the name of the project with which the bunker laboratory had been engaged.

  Lehmverkund.

  Back to the same question that had stymied him all along. What the hell was Lehmverkund?

  Brand nudged a mouse and stared at the computer screen on which most of his research had been done. He had been running a net search programme for relevant matches to the phrase since he'd first spotted it, but so far had nothing of any interest other than a few variable translations. But there was something here now, something that looked as if it had been plucked from an old MoD accountancy file accessed through the Freedom of Information Act. Just a short entry but...

  Brand sat up.

  My God.

  The academic moved quickly through to the next room, eager to tell the others what he'd found. The brewing argument with Hannah apparently over, Ness had retired to the security room, leaving the other three alone. Jenny Simmons was now seated, Hannah had taken her place by the window, while Verse was just putting down the phone.