Gilgamesh

Christoph John

Description

Two years after the harrowing events in Brno, Drago is now a successful author whose private life is a recurring cycle of golf, good food and drink, one-night-stands and nightmarish memories. Against his better judgement he is persuaded to meet the antiquities professor Paul Gainsborough and is intrigued by the mystery surrounding a hoard of stolen Babylonian art works and the curious figure of Andre Chagall, whose name is linked to all of them.His investigations lead him to Abu Dhabi where Chagall's allies begin to answer the questions, answers which only open doors to even deeper mysteries. Caught up in a crazed world of power-mad revolutionaries, Drago is forced to travel to war-torn Iraq where the Islamic State is beginning to assert its authority. There Drago and the beautiful historian Sylvia Lavoilette discover a horrific secret: a bloody counter revolution which no one seems able to prevent.It can only mean violence, suspense and terror for Jon Drago.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781785897788
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Gilgamesh




Christoph John
Copyright © 2016 Christoph John
Front cover image © Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador®
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781785897788

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Acknowledgement:
Thank you to all those who have encouraged me in my writing; there are many of you and I know you care.
Contents
Acknowledgement
One:
Two:
Three:
Four:
Five:
Six:
Seven:
Eight:
Nine:
Ten:
Eleven:
Twelve:
Thirteen:
Fourteen:
Fifteen:
Sixteen:
Seventeen:
Eighteen:
Nineteen:
Twenty:
Twenty-One:
Twenty-Two:
Twenty-Three:
Twenty-Four:
Twenty-Five:
One:
The Devil’s Breath
Andre Chagall stared into the blue flickering light as if transfixed.
The voice soothed.
The words haunted.
“Now, now, Andre, let me help you.”
His flesh crept along his bones, retreating from the sting of the knife. They’d cut across his fingertips. One at a time. They’d used a tiny polished khanjar, the dagger beloved of the Bedouin, its blade as fine as a razor, a single tooth honed on stone and leather, drawn with the delicacy of a surgeon, designed to make him scream.
The tall silent Bedouin had made the incisions. His face revealed no emotion. It was passionless, empty like the desert he came from. In his large powerful hands, the khanjar was as tiny as a scalpel. As he sliced into the skin the Bedouin’s eyes finally blazed.
It had been the young Arab, the one with the gold tooth, who asked all the questions. He’d asked them urgently, excited, sentences tumbling into each other, the words lost, but not the message. It was understood.
Chagall was a thief. The ceaseless pounding of the truncheons had convinced him to admit it. He wasn’t a fit man. He had boxed in his youth, before women and wine had seduced him. Those days had long gone. Now he thought an arm was broken. They hadn’t cared to investigate. He’d held it, protectively like a mother would hold a child, and they’d torn his baby away and as it flopped, they had laughed. Through the barrage of thudding blows, scared for his life, Chagall told the Arab what they wanted to hear: the details of every single piece he’d stolen, who had bought them and for how much money.
He thought that would be enough. He was wrong.
They dragged him to the torture table. He was bent over onto his chest, still standing, arms out front, palms up, his wrists fixed into stocks bolted onto the wooden surface. And then came the khanjar and the screams and the weeping.
Now having told them what they wanted, having endured the punishment, having come out the other side alive, Chagall felt the breath of the devil in his ear.
The voice was almost a whisper.
It spoke in un-fractured French. There was no natural accent, the vocabulary, the pronunciation, the grammar, was perfect, too perfect, impossibly so.
“I can stop the pain.”
The sound drifted down the tubular canal, tickled the membrane of his eardrum, vibrated the ossicles and entered the cochlea, that labyrinthine coil of microscopic nerve fibres, each one reacting to tiny frequencies of sound, each one sending a pulse, an electrical charge, to the thalamus and on to the temporal gyrus where the human brain began to interpret, to process, to perceive what had entered the ear microseconds before.
The conclusion his brain reached was that the voice was a threat. The voice could no longer be trusted. The voice was his enemy.
Yet his brain had also been receiving other signals, from the extremities of the body, from the corpuscles, the nerve endings which register pain, the receptors which had been sliced away from each fingertip that had cried out all at once and made him scream. Now there was only silent agony, only the memory of pain pulsed in the cerebral cortex, only the memory petrified him, only the memory told him what to fear.
And fear is the greatest subjugator. The histories of civilisations are littered with stories of heroes, of men who battled fear, who overcame anxiety and won a private war against their own will. Those warriors, from the Elysian Fields to the mud wretched Somme may have died in triumph, but the victory was won inside their mind, inside their soul. Chagall saw no victory. His mind had already surrendered to fear.
The voice defeated him and even though Chagall was breathing and his heart was beating and his brain was processing, he died at that moment.
“You have been very good to us, Andre,” continued the mesmeric tones. “I would not have wanted our friendship to end in bloodshed. You have sadly made it so. But even now I can help you. You must trust me.”
Chagall jerked his head down once.
The voice hardly murmured.
“Who is Jonathon Drago?”
The occasion had started so well: the ritual washing, the lavish dinner, the light conversation. He was courteous, restrained almost. He was nervous, but he’d been nervous before. This time, like all the other times, he was certain his tracks had been covered; all traces of his deception had been wiped away. And there was nothing in the conversation to assume this wasn’t a routine business meeting, just like all the others which had gone before.
Once the dinner ceased, Chagall had cautiously begun to tell of the new sources he had uncovered during the riots of the Arab Spring: the rich and reviled establishment figures who sought to offload their treasures quickly and quietly. The information had been well received. The relief came in little victories. Chagall considered he was doing well. It was a consummate performance. An actor could not have done more. Yet it was the bland enquiry about the Egyptian which betrayed him. One nervous cough and the atmosphere in the room changed. The single stumble was enough for the piercing eyes to grow wide.
“What prices did you negotiate for the shipment?” was the sonorous question.
The inquisition went on for two hours. Every antique was discussed in detail. Every item on the inventory had been memorised. They ran out of water. Chagall started to sweat. Hunched over his own lap he became faint, his head lolling as his muscles, cramped into a cross-legged seat, turned numb, dead. He thought, for a moment, that he was sleeping. The air was heavy. He could almost taste it. Lavender, he thought. The inquisitor hardly noticed.
Finally the question came: “And what of the pieces from Nineveh?”
“They are certainly of great value,” he began. “There is a certain exquisiteness and refinement.”
“Like the Hammurabi Death Mask?”
It was a copper mask, decayed at the edges, but beautifully etched. It would fetch a good hundred thousand on the black market. Chagall wanted to use the cash for the annual rent on the penthouse in Monte Carlo. The recession had hit hard. Profits were down. Share prices had fallen. Dividend payments had been suspended. It wasn’t the first time he’d stolen. Pieces went missing from almost every consignment, which was why he stored them in Beirut, waiting to ensure he had enough crates to blame the paperwork if an item should inadvertently go missing. It had never been questioned before. The artefacts were contraband anyway. Someone at some time had stolen them: representations of the dragon headed Sirrush and the winged god Pazuzu, the Prayer Tablets, the identification stamps and many, many more.
When Chagall answered his voice was flat.
“His reign did deliver some excellent artwork.”
“But not delivered to me.”
The heavy air suddenly turned vile, as if hatred was pouring into the room like a waterfall.
The snake-like fingers clicked.
He didn’t know how they heard the order or how they got there so quickly. The guards seemed to surge towards him through the silk curtains, hands and batons outstretched. Something solid hit him on the side of the head.
He woke up in pain. Everything was dark, oppressive, malodourous and the beating hadn’t stopped.
“Who is Jonathon Drago?”
The voice was as soft as a girl’s and he couldn’t help but think of Michelle, her slightly faded looks, her off-centre smile which seemed to always read his thoughts and her dark, hushed eyes. Perhaps for the first time he missed her. It wasn’t the kisses he missed or the lovemaking; no, it was her practical nature, the companionship that had demanded nothing from him, simply accepted her position in his life, as he accepted hers. It wasn’t a marriage made by love. But it worked. She allowed him his dalliances. He allowed hers. They shared what mattered: the haulage business, the apartments in Saint Germain, Monaco and Marrak