Blow Down Boy

Chris Page

Description

A young priest who was abused by a male tutor at a London seminary plots revenge. He has gathered a group of down-and-out ex-soldiers to help him. As the body count rises, it includes an undercover agent and Albie's parents who were assassinated in Australia. On his way back from the funerals Albie is joined by a rugged former South African mercenary. Now he has a former fellow soldier alongside whose version of Law and Order is kill or be killed, the same as his. The destruction of Westminster Abbey and St Paul's cathedrals are targeted.Will they remain upright and who will be in them if they come down?

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 14 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785382611
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
BLOW DOWN BOY
By
Chris Page



Publisher Information
Blow Down Boy
Published in 2015
by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © 2015 Chris Page
The right of Chris Page to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.



Quote
‘We have guided missiles and misguided men’
‒ Martin Luther King, Strength to Love , 1963



Albie Cork - The Life so Far
Name: Albert Cork. It would have been Albert Finney Cork because his mother liked the actor but his father was jealous and they had a row in the maternity hospital and compromised on plain Albert. He didn’t mind, nobody called him that anyway, apart from his mum when she was mad at him, which was all the time before his parents moved to Australia.
Born: 31 October 1973, a Halloween baby and a Scorpio.
Education: Left school at sixteen a frustrated virgin with bugger-all qualifications and a love of football.
Family: One younger sister, Debbie, and his parents, all of whom moved to Australia when he was seventeen. He stayed in a bedsit in Tottenham, chased girls and drank a lot of beer. Now lives in Ealing, London.
Work record: From age sixteen to twenty-three many menial jobs, all poorly paid. Then he joined the army.
Married: Twice, aged twenty-three and thirty-nine. No kids. The first one was a disaster, divorced after two years. His second wife was killed by an assassin’s bomb meant for him.
Military career: A disposal bomb head with fourteen years in an EODC (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company). Double row of pips and associated gongs including the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, gained in Iraq. Was a WO1 (Warrant Officer Class 1) when he was invalided out. Holder of high status Russian medal presented by Putin.
Income: Meagre army pension and monthly salary from current job with SO13 in bomb-based counter-terrorism.
Languages spoken: Epithet-laden laconic English laced with military banality.
Hobbies: Sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, more sex. Likes small boats but they get blown up under him.
Pet hates: Sexual abstinence after long periods in war zones without any female contact.
Manner: Detached, cool, unless watching Spurs play at home.
Physical disability: Only has one leg ‒ a distinct disadvantage with his main hobby.
Height: 5ft 11in/1.83m.
Weight: 176lb/80kg (without prosthetic ).
Profile: If it takes losing a leg above the knee to an IED in Afghanistan, having no luck with long-term girlfriends and being hunted by sinister, unknown professional killers to become a modern hero, then Albert ‘Albie’ Cork is one. If it doesn’t, then he’s just another flawed ex-soldier in counter-terrorism with a vigilante approach and an over-abundance of lustful genes who attracts a great deal of unwanted attention from the bad guys.
And he certainly didn’t consider himself disabled; embarrassed and inconvenienced perhaps at having to remove his prosthetic for sex with a new lover for the first time...
But that never held him back.
You choose ‒ he’s too intent on getting his good leg over, seeking those who would place bombs in and around London and staying alive to waste any time thinking about it.



Prologue
It had been sexual abuse. Rapacious and brutal sexual abuse.
Sodomy.
Enslavement.
The systematic and bestial buggery of an innocent child.
He’d been too young then to know what these emotive, pain-racked words meant. But he sure as hell knew now. He knew Thomas Aquinas’s argument that ‘sins against nature, in which the very order of nature is violated, are an injury done to God himself, who sets nature in order’.
He hadn’t even heard of Aquinas back in 1993 when he was trapped in an Anglican religious seminary just outside London. Those words were meaningless then, just like his anguished screams, unheard by the world outside and, more pertinently, inside, where his and others’ treatment was ignored by the Anglican Synod. Those malign Church Fathers who buried their hear-no-evil-see-no-evil monkey heads in the sands of an immoral desert and prayed the problem would just go away.
They should have taken notice and acted immediately and strenuously. The pious, quiescent bastards.
Communion and the body and blood of Christ? It was Nico’s body and Nico’s blood; Christ, in the form of his elected High Churchmen here on this turning, mortal earth, sat on their apathetic hands and pretended all was well.
Nothing in the way of suffering had been invented that wasn’t good enough for his abuser and those who protected him. The pain didn’t exist that could equal that which had been forced upon him when, as a foundling, he’d clambered aboard the institutional life raft. And, like all children thrown overboard from the parental ship, he had needed and responded gratefully to the kindnesses offered and eagerly accepted the warm, open welcome...until he was considered old enough for the depravity that was to be his fate and the real purpose manifested itself.
Just six years old enough.
For the next six years he’d lived in an empty, cruel continuum like a caged bird with a broken wing. The seminary was his cage, the constant pain his broken wing, the days full of learning and the nights of loathing. Crushed sleeping pills in his bedtime milk followed by the wolfish face peering down at him, lips drawn back in a snarl, eyes bright with lust.
As a practising man of the cloth himself now, Father Nico would never allow such language to pass his lips in the company of others. But there was nothing to stop him thinking it. There were no religious shackles on individual thought, or on making plans, provided you kept them to yourself.
As he grew through his ninth and into his tenth year, and his religious teaching began to take on shape and meaning, he had learned that, as was the case for any deviation or impairment, it was God’s will. But he knew it wasn’t; he knew that was wrong. No God of any colour or creed would wish that on one of his young followers. No religious philosophy, however deviant, abstract or material, would dismiss child buggery as the fucking will of their supreme being. Unless that God himself was in favour of it, and that was so rank an apostasy that even he, with all his hatred and determination to bring down the High Church, couldn’t accept it.
The abuse had stopped abruptly, and it had taken him some time to realise that he had become too old and too used for the sexual tastes of his religious mentor and guardian.
Just twelve years of age too old.
At last his years of pain, terror and then numb isolation were over. His repellent abuser found another unsuspecting angelus puer to lavish attention upon, this time from the cherub-soaked grooming ground of the choir. Nico had tried hard to tell the boy to run, run as fast as his six-year-old legs would carry him, away from this place, but the boy was too young and drawn-in, too grateful and desperate for the attention to understand.
As he had been.
So he cauterised his painful memories and set his mind to the future, to a just revenge for the great wrong that had been done to him.
Although Nico had since qualified as a vicar, devotion to the Anglican creed was not the reason he joined the priesthood. He felt no responsibility to their apostolic heaven. The way he saw it, instead of his soul being illuminated by the blaze of Christ, his was more backlit by the dull glow of acceptance.
He reserved his blaze for vengeance.
He wore the black, full-length widow’s weeds and white dog collar and went through the correct motions purely for the advantages it gave him. He preferred and adopted the Catholic form of appellation ‘Father’ to the Anglican ‘Reverend’ ‒ it somehow made up for the male parent he’d never known, and the female one who had abandoned him. He’d have gladly taken the Catholic vows and followed Rome in its interpretation of the Christian teaching, but there were a couple of glaring reasons why he couldn’t. The first was the obvious fact that he had been brought up in and was already on the inside of the Anglican faith, a position that would be invaluable for the access that was vital to the success of his plans. Second, the Catholic Church simply didn’t have the buildings in London that were central to his fermenting stratagems.
Even now as he went about his daily mission with the poor and homeless on the streets of East London, the young priest’s thoughts occasionally drifted back to the fact that eternal fire and damnation was the answer for all those who perpetrated these crimes or knew about them and turned a blind eye, and that eternal suffering should become the first and most supreme Christian message for their sins. But since that plainly wasn’t going to happen and the leading clerics of the day continued to cover for the brutal bastard and work for his elevation within the Church, Father Nico would just have to attend to it in his own way.
As we forgive those who trespass against us... Well, no, actually, he would never forgive. He preferred another well-known phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, with a slight change: For mine are the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.
A-bloody-men. H