Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (15 page)

And he heard, again, the Blue Sheikh’s words:
I seem to see you—differently. I hear a name. Konz . . .

Carthaga, the battlefield near the olive orchard

The returning gunship settled down on the ground near the scene of the battle. A massacre, really, Dyzigi reflected with satisfaction, as he looked around at the scattered corpses. None of the combatants moved—only human scavengers moved here, starveling locals picking over the corpses. As the chopper landed the scavengers ran off into the darkness of the ravaged olive orchard.

Dyzigi nodded to MacCrawley and the two men got out of the helicopter, with its rotors still slowly beating time overhead, a time slow as a funeral march. They had brought along three SOT operatives this time, including Strucken: a team used to dirty work. They’d had to explain to Simpson, piloting, and Burlington on the gun, that these men were not to be shot afterwards. Simpson had shrugged; Burlington was noticeably disappointed.

MacCrawley signaled Strucken to commence work on the bodies. “We must get through this, and soon; the timetable is crowded . . .” Though a Scot, MacCrawley used no Scottish expressions and had only the faintest burr. He had been educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a shortish man with wide shoulders, a broad-seamed face in which were bristling black eyebrows, pale gray eyes, a prominent chin; he was in fact related to the sorcerer Aleister Crowley, related rather closely, but his father had changed the family name to an older form in order to avoid the association. MacCrawley wore a dark suit, double breasted and expensively tailored; he disdained attempts at camouflage. “Where is the general?” MacCrawley asked, turning to Dyzigi.

“Coggins?” Dyzigi shrugged. “Off checking the ‘nukes’ as he insists on calling it.”

“Best keep your voice down—or better yet, use the code word. Call it ‘The Blossom.’ ”

Dyzigi nodded, though there was little chance that anyone could hear or would care, in this place. “The Blossom is in place, but there is a problem with the launch vehicle in Paris—Coggins is looking into it.” He watched as Strucken and his assistants, their faces covered in black ski masks, set about removing another head.

“Good seed heads,” MacCrawley said. “I can sense it. He will groan with pleasure, and soon.”

“He showed himself quite clearly to those who can see the Hidden World, at this very spot tonight,” Dyzigi said. “I saw it. It was merely Its head—but I saw it clearly.”

“Did the soldiers see it?”

“They saw only their own red fury.”

“Then all is well.”

“I worry, though, about Coggins and Morris—”

“Yes, all that bunch. They may break off from us if they suspect . . .”

Dyzigi lowered his voice even more. “They still think we’re bringing their Christian apocalypse about.”

MacCrawley chuckled. “They will soon be disabused . . .”

“But perhaps they are no longer necessary?”

“They have talents we need. They will interpret everything, right up to the end, as relating to the book of Revelations. They interpret things that way all the time—things that have nothing to do with the book of Revelations. They impose their Rorschach inkblot on the world.” He shrugged. “They will deceive themselves.”

“They may learn how close the world came to triggering their little apocalypse a few years ago. That particular emanation . . .”

“Yes, I understand that a certain Scouse bastard got in the way of that.”

“Who?”

“Oh, John Constantine. The bane of my family, really. Of so many others. A low-class magician, street trash operating out of London last I knew. Still he has his gifts, puzzlingly enough—he seems to have forestalled Lucifer himself. Actually got out of a written contract with him.”

“Really! John Constantine, you say . . . I may have seen his dossier.” Dyzigi turned to point out a third body—they needed three heads from this site. Then he turned suddenly back to MacCrawley. “Constantine . . . He is not a blond fellow, early middle aged? And ah—in a trench coat?”

“He is. Don’t tell me . . . No! I went to such trouble to keep him distracted from this!”

“I recently received word that an Englishman who witnessed one of our assassinations—of the Blue Sheikh in fact—is believed to be one ‘John Constantine.’ ”

“Oh blazes. And they let him get away?”

“So I am told. Trevino and Morris were behind that little task. They seemed to think the Blue Sheikh might bring the Prophet Muhammad into this, or even Zoroaster himself.”

“Idiots! They should know that if the Blue Sheikh allowed them to kill him, the Sheikh
wanted
it to happen!”

“Was he really such an adept?”

“You have no idea! And Constantine was with him—which is something I arranged, to take the Scouse sorcerer out of the picture. I would have killed him, but he had certain people allied with him I did not want to make my enemies, the so-called ‘Swamp Thing’ amongst others. And now Constantine will have taken an interest!”

“The word has gone out,” Dyzigi said, shrugging, “to kill Constantine as soon as possible.”

“It isn’t enough to kill him! John Constantine is too dangerous. Now that he is against us, Constantine’s soul itself must be controlled—or
utterly annihilated!”

~

Morris was afraid of what the others might do when they found out he had taken the girl to his yacht.

Dyzigi had marked her with the Sign, to contain her psychic powers, but he insisted that she was to die, and soon. He wanted to feed her to his pet in the jar, to increase its powers. The thing that was what remained of Josef Mengele.

What was the point of killing her, really? All evil would soon be eradicated from the world. They were on the verge of the Transfiguration and all evil would be gone, including that thing in the jar. Dyzigi himself would have the evil in his own soul wiped away. Evil was a necessary ingredient in the recipe for the great libation the world would be drinking, and it would be digested soon enough.

Morris looked at the young woman on the bed of his cabin, barely conscious, her eyes slitted, murmuring to herself. She was tied down, she was passive—he could have her, in the gross, purely physical way, anytime he wanted. But he hoped to find some way to make her voluntarily his. He wanted her spirit to open to him, not just her legs. He sensed some great unconscious rapport between them. She could be his consort in Paradise, if she would only convert. Perhaps, a bit later, he might read the Bible to her. Just now, he took a certain satisfaction in gazing at her the way his father had looked at some new piece of art, purchased for his collection. Oh, her tender young breasts . . .

He thought he heard voices, coming from the deck overhead. Had Strucken returned already? He had truly begun to fear Strucken.

There should be only one man there, only Beerfield. He had sent the other guards away, after Strucken had gone off on an errand with MacCrawley—the guards were Dyzigi’s men and he did not trust them with the girl here.

He shook his head, wondering what was becoming of the complete commitment he’d felt to Dyzigi and the Servants of Transfiguration. He should trust them implicitly if he was going to work with them, shouldn’t he?

Persistent footsteps on the deck overhead. Someone coming to the hatch, thumping down the ladder.

“Beerfield!” he called. “Who is here?” It might well be Coggins, back from Tel Aviv. Hopefully with good news about The Blossom.

There was a clattering of steps in the passage, and then Beerfield stumbled into the cabin, his hands raised. Someone was forcing him in with an assault rifle poked in the big, red-faced guard’s back.

“I’m sorry, boss,” Beerfield said, “They got the drop on me. Jeez, the guy had a uniform on like he was from the government or something; they said they were just here to get your papers—”

Three men crowded into the stateroom behind Beerfield. One of the men, an Arab in uniform with his mouth slightly open and his eyes unfocused, Morris immediately suspected to be under an enchantment, or possibly hypnotized. The others were a man who looked like he might be Iranian, and a blond fellow in a trench coat, scowling at him as he looked at Mercury on the bunk.

Morris suspected he knew who this was. Someone whose death he had ordered, recently. That assassination didn’t seem to be working out.

“Untie her, you vile dirty-fingered wanker,” John Constantine said. “And get this floating mansion under way. Where we’re going, I don’t know. But we’re buggering out of bloody Carthaga before anyone else fires a fucking missile my way.”

8

A HEART FULLA NAPALM

The Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of North Africa

“W
hat brought you here, to this vessel?” Morris asked, as he eased off the throttle in the bridge of the big motor yacht. “A simple impulse to piracy? You’d make a helluva pirate, Mr. Constantine—you lack only the parrot.”

“I had information that she’d be on the biggest yacht in that marina,” Constantine said, “and this was it. Right—we’ve gone far enough for now. Set it to just coast along, say a knot at a time . . .”

“You don’t know what a nautical knot is, do you, Mr. Constantine?” Morris sniffed.

“If it’s not some bloody thing to do with tying a rope to the mainbraces then it’s some bloody thing about how fast you’re going, eh?” Constantine looked out at the blue, sun-sparkled sea. There was land, off to starboard a mile or more: a strip of pale dun, some cumulus clouds on the horizon, and nothing else. They’d just released Abbide on that coastline, Constantine giving him posthypnotic suggestions to come out of his trance after a hundred steps up the beach. “Now—” Constantine gestured with the pistol he’d taken from Beerfield, who was tied up in a supplies hold, and wondered if he was really prepared to use it on this odd little American if pressed. But when he thought about Mercury—the way this bastard had been looking at her, and the state she was in—he could almost shoot him right now. “Let’s nip back down the cabin and see about Mercury . . .”

They found Mercury as they’d left her, wavering on the edge of consciousness in the bunk, her head turning from side to side as if she were in a fever dream. Spoink watched over her, sitting in the deck chair beside the bunk, looking grave; the look made it seem as if the man who’d taken this body over was gone, and the comatose terrorist awakened.

“Spoink?”

“Yeah, dude?”

“Just checking if you were still there. Any change in her?”

“No, man. I tried to, like, talk to her or get some kind of telepathic thing going, but I’m, you know, more about telekinesis, and not very much of that. It’s your department, you gotta try it.”

“Which devil gives you your power, Constantine?” Morris asked, as if trying to shame Constantine into an admission. “Some pagan god, perhaps?”

Standing over Mercury, touching her forehead to see if she did indeed have a fever, Constantine snorted. “Bacchus, when I can afford a drink, does me a good turn.” He looked at Morris. “She’s not feverish, but she acts as if she’s in a delirium. What did you do to her? Is this drugs? Did you torture her?” With each question his hand tightened on the pistol a little more.

“Eh? No, I did nothing to her. It was . . . another. I don’t know how he does it. Magic is not my specialty.”

“Oh? And what is?”

“The service of God.”

“You had a different kind of service on your mind when I came in here, you bastard!”

“Now I know where I remember this guy from!” Spoink burst out. “When I was alive—he was one of those televangelist assholes! He used to sell prayers on TV! You’d send him money and he’d pray for your kid to get well or something!”

Morris shrugged. “Years ago.”

Constantine looked Morris over. He could see him with the well-greased helmet of hair fitting neatly into the television screen. “So you made your fortune exploiting other people’s grief and misery, then, did you?”

“I offered them hope. I prayed for them.”

“All those people? You prayed for each one?”

“I, ah—some I prayed for, you know, as a group.”

Constantine took out a cigarette. “Get a big pile of mail, take out all the money, put your hand over it, say ‘Have mercy on them Lord,’ and move on to the next pile. That it?”

Morris shrugged sullenly.

Constantine started to light the cigarette, then looked at Mercury and decided to smoke outside. “Who did this to her?” Constantine asked Morris. “And what’s this agenda having to do with God? What’s the service of God have to do with kidnapping young women, then?”

Morris scowled. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s about the greater good.”

“Everything from the Inquisition to the fucking Holocaust was some bastard’s idea of the greater good! Way I heard it, you’re part of some group of circle-wankers planning a big war . . .” Constantine was largely bluffing. He wasn’t at all sure Morris was connected with the world war that Futheringham had nattered on about. But Morris had Mercury in his yacht, and whoever had abducted Mercury was likely to be tangled up in that cryptic agenda. Constantine had picked up that much from the ghost in the pub.

Morris dropped his gaze. “I’m not disposed to say anything more. I took an oath. Were I to betray the oath, they would know it. My death would be quick but awful. You can’t scare me with worse than that.”

On the word
scare
an image floated telepathically from Morris to Constantine’s mind: a spider. A big hairy black one . . . the televangelist’s phobia. Could be useful . . .

Constantine stuck the cigarette in his mouth, stuck the gun in his belt, and straight-armed Morris with all his strength so that the thin dark American staggered back through the open cabin door to fetch up against a bulkhead in the corridor. “Can’t I scare you with worse? You bloody underestimate me, mate.” Constantine stepped through the door and stood over Morris, literally radiating menace. “I can make you, your mum, your old da, your grand-da, your grand-mum, and your fucking family dog all wish they’d never been born! I’ve got spells that’d pull your soul out of that little cage of bones and stick it in every fly that’s about to be eaten by a spider for the next ten years sequentially, you bleeding pustule! Now you pray on that for a while!” Constantine grabbed Morris’s arm, spun him around, and shoved him so that he staggered down the hall to the storage hold.