For Heaven's Eyes Only sh-5 Page 5

  She was the only woman I knew who had a worse reputation than my Molly. A supernatural terrorist, a twilight avenger, the Indiana Jones of the invisible world, been everywhere and done everyone. Isabella had given her life to the uncovering of mysteries and the pursuit of truth, and she didn’t give a damn whom she had to walk through or over to get where she was going. Always out in the darker places of the world, digging up secrets and things most people had enough sense to leave undisturbed. Just to ask questions of the things she dug up, and kick them in the head if they didn’t answer fast enough. She was looking for something, but I don’t think anyone knew what. Maybe not even her. I think she liked to know things. And if Molly was the wild free spirit of the Metcalf sisters, Isabella was by all accounts the tightly wrapped control freak who always had to be in charge.

  I knew we weren’t going to get on. But she was Molly’s sister, so . . .

  Having finally understood why Molly was so pleased to see her alive and well, Isabella grudgingly allowed Molly to hug her, but only briefly.

  “So,” she said coldly, fixing me with an implacable gaze, “someone impersonated me? Someone actually dared? My reputation must be slipping. I did hear there was a rumour going around that I might have mellowed, and I can’t have people saying things like that about me. I can see I’m going to have to go out and do something appalling. Even more appalling than usual, I mean. Can’t have people thinking I’ve got soft; they’ll take liberties.”

  “Trust me, Iz,” said Molly, “no one thinks you’ve got soft. There are still religions in some parts of the world where they curse your name as part of their regular rituals.”

  “Well,” said Isabella, “that’s something. You have to keep the competition on their toes in this game. There’s never any cooperation when it comes to digging up graves, despoiling tombs and desecrating churches. It’s every girl for herself, and dog-eat-dog. Or perhaps that should be god-eat-god. . . . It’s all based on fear and loathing and a complete willingness to take risks no sane person would even contemplate. You still haven’t explained what you’re doing here, interrupting my work.”

  “I thought you’d want to know that the Droods now know you know how to get past their defences,” said Molly. “I hate sentences like that; they’re always trying to get away from you. I had to tell them, Iz; they wanted to know how your duplicate was able to penetrate Drood security so easily. I had to tell them that to avoid telling them other things.”

  “Other things?” I said suspiciously. “What kind of other things?”

  “Later, sweetie,” said Molly.

  Isabella looked at me, and then shrugged briskly. “Don’t take it personally, Drood. I don’t give a damn about you or your family; I wanted access to your Old Library. I did ask nicely, but when that snotty, stuck-up, dog-in-the-manger family of yours turned me down, I had no choice but to find my own way in. Partly because no one tells me to get lost and gets away with it, but mostly because I wanted to read some of the wonderful old books you’re supposed to have. You Droods sit on all kinds of information that would make my job a lot easier—because you can.”

  “You’ve been strolling around the Old Library?” I said.

  There must have been something in my voice or my face, because Isabella actually looked away for a moment.

  “Well, I haven’t personally been in there, as such. Not yet. But I’m working on it!”

  “You’re welcome to try,” I said. “But once you’re in there, watch your back. There’s something living in the Old Library: something very powerful and very scary. It almost killed an Immortal who was masquerading as our assistant Librarian.”

  “You see!” said Isabella. “That’s the kind of secret I want to know about!”

  “Let us change the subject,” I said, “on the grounds that I have been here for what seems like ages, and I still don’t know why. What are you doing here, Isabella? And where is here, anyway?”

  “Can we please all try to keep our voices down?” said Isabella. “This really isn’t the kind of place where you want to attract attention to yourself. This is Lightbringer House, deep in the financial area of Bristol. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Lightbringer House is only another ugly, anonymous office building, where businesspeople do business things. Except they don’t. This whole building is a front, a place for people to come and do things in private that would get them hanged from the nearest lamppost if they even mentioned them in public. This office, and all the others, are for show, something for people in authority to see if they have to be given the grand tour. Everyone here works on the same thing: a purpose so secret even I haven’t been able to scare up a whisper of what it might be.”

  “Yes,” I said patiently. “But what are you doing here? Who are these people? What makes them so important?”

  Isabella looked at Molly. “Just once, I wish you’d go out with someone who doesn’t need everything spoon-fed to him.” She looked back at me. “I’ve spent over a year now investigating a secret underground Satanist conspiracy. And don’t look at me like that, Drood! There are still such things. I’m talking about a worldwide, highly organised cabal involving very highly placed people from all walks of life. All of them worshipping the Devil, and dedicated to the destruction of civilisation as we know it.”

  “I thought that kind of stuff was an urban legend,” I said. “Something for the tabloids to get excited about on slow news days.”

  Isabella smiled smugly. “That’s what they want you to think. And who do you suppose owns most of the tabloids these days? If people could see the birthmark on the back on Rupert Murdoch’s head, they’d shit themselves. All right, I can see you’re not convinced. Quick history lesson. Pay attention and don’t make me repeat myself, or I will slap you a good one, and it will hurt.”

  “She will, too,” said Molly. “I’d stay out of reach, if I were you.”

  I sat down on the edge of the desk, conspicuously within reach of Isabella, and smiled politely. “Go ahead. I love being lectured by strict women wearing leathers.”

  “Oh, Eddie,” said Molly. “You never said. . . .”

  “Later, sweetie,” I said.

  “Young love,” said Isabella. “The horror, the horror. Anyway, the last really big Satanic conspiracy took place during the nineteen twenties and thirties, back when all those bright young things were looking for something new to believe in. Most of them had the good taste to become Communists or sexual deviants; the rest sold their souls to the Devil because they were bored. . . . The whole thing crashed to a halt when they backed Hitler and the Nazis, and everybody else backed the Allies. After the war, people had too much else to think about. There were some brief surges in the sixties, but it’s hard to get people excited about sin when nothing’s a sin anymore.”

  “What about the eighties?” I said.

  “No,” said Molly. “The Satanists weren’t behind that. It only seemed that way.”

  “Right,” said Isabella. “Back then, people were throwing their souls away every day, of their own free will. The Devil didn’t have to do a thing.”

  “I’m not always sure I believe in the Devil, as such,” I said.

  “You’d better,” said Isabella. “He believes in you. Where was I? Oh, yes, the Satanists are back now, and organising with a vengeance. They see the Droods as dithering, without real leadership, and preoccupied with other things. Like the Loathly Ones and the Immortals. So the Satanists have quietly launched a major comeback, while you’re too busy to notice.”

  “Pardon me if I’m not too impressed,” I said. “I can’t help seeing Satanists as so . . . old-fashioned. And what are they doing here? Planning bad business practices? Plotting better ways to avoid paying taxes?”

  “It’s a really good cover,” said Isabella. “But it’s still just a cover.”

  “What brought you here?” said Molly, attacking the question from another front.

  “You know me,” said Isabella. I need to know things.
Secret things. Especially when someone else doesn’t want me to know them. I was looking for something and found something else, which is always the way. I was investigating a local legend of a town where everyone was a werewolf, in Avignon, France, which led me to the abandoned Danse Academie in Germany’s Black Forest that had been a feeding ground for one of the Old Mothers; and that in turn brought me to an outbreak of ancient forces around a circle of standing stones in darkest Wales. But in each case, by the time I got there, someone else had already been there and put a lot of effort and a lot of money into cleaning it all up so that not one trace remained of what had happened there. Everyone I talked to smiled and shook their heads and lied right to my face. Someone had spread some serious money around in a major cover-up that would probably have fooled anyone else.

  I didn’t know who these people were, or what they’d wanted in these places, and I hate not knowing things, so I started digging. I went underground, into the city subcultures, showing my face in the kinds of places the powers that be like to pretend don’t exist, because people aren’t supposed to want such things. . . . And there I asked a whole bunch of awkward questions, stirring up the mud to see what was underneath. A word here and a name there put me on the trail of something unusually big and organised, and after that it was a case of ‘follow the money. . . .’ I followed the bribes through the corrupt officials and the compromised authorities, rising higher and higher, until it led me here, to an office building that had nothing to do with business. Lightbringer House may be only the tip of the iceberg, but this is where the Satanists come to get their orders. This is where things are decided and things are sworn in Satan’s name.

  “One interesting side note: According to the official records, all the businesses in this building are subsidiaries of Lightbringer Incorporated. Which, if you look back far enough, was once known as Fallen Star Associates. The main front for the nineteen thirties Satanist conspiracy. These people are back, and this time they mean business. They have a plan, and I want to know what it is.”

  “Okay,” I said. “All very interesting, and possibly convincing, but I don’t see anything in this office to back it up. The papers on the desk are boring to the point of bland, and it’s not like there’s a knitted sampler on the wall reading, ‘I Love Lucifer.’ Are you sure this isn’t paranoia and scaremongering? We see a lot of that in the Droods. In fact, it’s pretty much business as usual.”

  “If Iz says there’s evil here, there is evil here,” Molly said firmly. “No one knows evil better than Iz. She’s never wrong about things like this. Except when she’s wrong.”

  “Molly, do me a favour,” said Isabella. “Stop trying to help. Look, the evidence is here somewhere! I just haven’t found it yet. They’d hardly leave it lying around, would they? The trail I followed led me to this floor, and this office. Orders come from here, and payments, and even a few not very discreet threats.”

  “If this really is as big a conspiracy as you believe,” I said, “I don’t think we should do anything to let them know we know. I think we should all return to Drood Hall and discuss a more . . . organised response.”

  “Put myself in the hands of the Droods?” said Isabella. “Yeah, right, like that’s going to happen! Never trust a Drood!”

  “Why not?” I said, genuinely taken aback by the anger in her face and the venom in her voice.

  “Your family killed our parents, remember?” said Molly. “Isabella isn’t as forgiving as I am.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re doing with this one,” said Isabella. “I mean really, Molly, a Drood?”

  “He’s different,” Molly said stubbornly. “He’s . . . special.”

  “You always say that,” said Isabella. “And you always end up sleeping on my couch, crying your eyes out. You have the worst taste in men. . . .”

  “Molly and I have something in common,” I said. “It’s possible that my family was responsible for the death of my parents, too.”

  Isabella looked at me sharply and then shook her head. “None of this is important. The truth is here, and I will find it, even if I have to tear this whole office apart.”

  “Oh, not again . . .” said Molly.

  Isabella glared at both of us. “Get out of here. Both of you. Go back to your precious Drood Hall. I don’t need your help, and I don’t want you here.”

  “Too late,” I said cheerfully. “I’m intrigued now. The return of the Satanists! It’s all so very Dennis Wheatley. . . . Molly, my dear, do you think you could keep a lid on any booby traps I might set off by persuading this computer to talk nicely to me?”

  “Don’t see why not,” said Molly. “Silicon sorcery’s always been a specialty of mine.”

  “You haven’t gone back to cloning credit cards, have you?” said Isabella.

  “Of course not!” said Molly. “I’m into a much higher class of lawlessness now.”

  “If you could concentrate on the computer, Molly . . .” I said.

  “Oh, sure! No problem!”

  I half expected her to work some dramatic chaos ritual over the computer, or sprinkle fairy dust on it, but she sat down before the machine, fired it up and worked some subtle magic through the keyboard, until the computer dropped its pants and showed her everything it had. Molly pushed back the chair, grinned at me and got up so I could take her place.

  “There you go. Ask it anything you want. I’ve got the security systems eating out of my hand. You could pry this computer open with a crowbar and piss in the back, and it wouldn’t shed a single tear.”

  “You always did have a delicate touch,” I said.

  “Later, lover,” said Molly.

  I subvocalised my activating Words, and sent a tentacle of golden armour racing down my arm from my torc, until it formed a gleaming golden glove on my right hand. Isabella watched, fascinated. Not many outside the family get to see Drood armour at work. And live to tell of it. I set one golden fingertip against the computer, pressing lightly, and delicate golden filaments shot through the computer’s silicon guts, bending them to my will. I had no idea how my armour’s strange matter did this; I supply the willpower, and the armour does everything else. Which has been known to bother me now and again. When I got the chance, I was going to have to ask Ethel some very pointed questions, though I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like the answers.

  I asked the computer some blunt questions, and the answers appeared on the monitor screen in swift succession. Of course, there was so much information in the computer that the trick lay in asking exactly the right questions, and I was operating pretty much in the dark. But with Molly and Isabella leaning over my shoulders and yelling suggestions in my ears, it didn’t take me long to scare up a whole bunch of records and secret files I wasn’t supposed to be able to get at. Passwords and encryptions are no match for Drood armour.

  And it turned out, everything Isabella had said was true. Lightbringer House was the central meeting place for Satanist groups from all over the world. This anonymous office building was where policy was decided and all important decisions were made. This was where they came to talk to one another, to boast and brag of all the awful things they’d done and the worse things they planned to do. This was where they came to kneel in dark churches and worship the Devil, and celebrate evil in appalling ways. Lightbringer House organised everything and was the motivating force behind a horribly large number of plots and conspiracies buried deep within all the governments of the world.

  I jumped from file to file, my stomach muscles tensing painfully as I took in the sheer size and scale of the operation. These people wanted to rule the world, and they were going about its slow and certain corruption with cold, focused precision. It soon became clear that there had been a lot of comings and goings from Lightbringer House recently. Really important people, familiar names and faces from politics and big business and a dozen other spheres of influence, were in the building right now, discussing . . . something. There was no specific information
in the computer about this, only a sealed file name: “the Great Sacrifice.” And a whole bunch of serious new security measures that had been placed throughout the building to keep this meeting secure and very private. Molly leaned forward suddenly, pointing at the screen.

  “There! What was that? Go back, go back. . . . Yes! The big meeting is being held in the main boardroom, directly down the hall from here! And given the sheer number of high-level Devil-worshipping scumbags attending, I think it behooves us to go and take a look and listen in.”

  “And possibly slaughter the whole lot of them, on general principle,” said Isabella.

  “Given the sheer amount of magical and technological weaponry that’s been installed, specifically to keep people like us out, I don’t think we can afford to start anything,” I said firmly. “We need to discover exactly what’s going on, and then concentrate on getting that information out of this building and into the hands of those who can best decide what to do about it.”

  Isabella looked at Molly. “Is he always this stuffy?”

  “A lot of the time, yes,” said Molly. “It’s one of his more endearing qualities.”

  “Let us go look in on this meeting,” I said resignedly. “But nobody is to start anything until we’ve found out what this Great Sacrifice is all about.”

  I retracted the golden strange matter into my torc and shut the computer down. Molly quickly removed her interventions, and when we went to leave the office there was no sign the computer had ever been tampered with. I’m a great believer in not leaving any traces behind; you never know when they might turn up again to bite your arse. Isabella eased the office door open a crack, looked out and then nodded quickly. We moved out into the corridor, shut the door carefully behind us and strode down the corridor towards the boardroom as though we had every right to be there.