The Devil’s Architect
Book Two of the Dark Horizon Trilogy
Duncan Simpson
Contents
FREE STARTER LIBRARY
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part 2
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part 3
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Part 4
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Afterword
The Logos Code
The History of Things to Come
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Team Blake
About the Author
You Can Make A Big Difference
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Building a relationship with my readers is the very best thing about writing. I occasionally send out newsletters with details of new releases, special offers and other exclusive material relating to the Vincent Blake thriller series. If you would like to be part of my readers group just sign up at:
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* * *
1. The History of Things to Come (e-book)
Book One of The Dark Horizon Trilogy
The mind of a genius can hold the darkest of secrets.
A Bosnian gangster is gunned down in a packed London restaurant. In his possession is a notebook once belonging to Isaac Newton. This is just the latest in a series of shocking crimes connected to objects once belonging to the famous scientist. Naturally, it’s a case for Vincent Blake, London’s leading stolen art investigator.
2. Secrets From The Dark Horizon (e-book)
A Reader’s Companion Guide to the Dark Horizon Trilogy
Discover where the truth ends … and the legend begins.
Designed as a pocket reference book, Secrets from the Dark Horizon brings alive the legends, locations, facts, and background material to the series. Jam-packed with fascinating research and chock full of informational tidbits, the guide opens a window on 3,000 years of history. With this book in hand, you will follow Vincent Blake in his breath-taking race through London and its dark historical secrets
Plus Exclusive VIP Bonus (pdf)
The highly confidential security dossier on Vincent Blake.
I hope you love them.
* * *
Duncan
London
Prologue
The Minories
Central London
One Year Earlier
Professor Roland Ballard stabbed desperately at the black London soil with his trowel. Time was running out, as if the last grains of sand were tumbling through the neck of an hourglass and with them, the discovery of his career. No one had listened: not even the Board of the Museum. But he had been right all along. He knew the monument was buried just feet below from where he now stood.
A loud voice echoed from above.
‘No more extensions, Professor. Four more minutes and your time is up.’
The archaeologist squinted up to the flickering outline of the suited man standing at the edge of the excavation pit.
‘Damn it. I’ve found something here, don’t you understand!’
Ballard’s protests were soon swallowed by the sound of heavy machinery starting up.
The Professor dropped to his hands and knees and hacked at the London ground. He was on his own; his team had already packed up their equipment and were fighting their way through the London traffic. He glanced down at his wrist and wiped the grit from the face of his watch. Within minutes, the bulldozers would be laying waste to the site in readiness for the foundations of a new hospital.
As the sun slid behind the glass office blocks surrounding the site, a cold shadow tracked across the archaeologist’s back. Ballard frantically attacked the earth with the blade of his trowel in a sprint to uncover what he could.
His trowel hit something hard, which sent a painful tremor vibrating up his forearm. A clod of soil fell from the artefact and Ballard’s body stiffened. Staring up at him was a small patch of bone-white stone. He blinked, trying to make sense of the shape of the newly exposed stone design.
Soon his thumbnail was scraping away at the caked-on earth. As he worked, clumps fell away to reveal more of the detail underneath. It was a sculpture of some sort.
A cold splash of rain hit the archaeologist’s face. He wiped it away, leaving a smear of London earth on his cheek. Another hit the back of his neck. Soon heavy droplets were hitting the ground around him.
A triumphant voice sounded from above.
‘That’s it, Ballard. It’s over.’
This time the developer’s voice was amplified through a loud hailer. ‘Need I remind you that I have two police officers with me to make sure you exit the worksite without any trouble?’
The rain began to drum heavily on Ballard’s back and sent a cold trickle of water down the inside of his shirt. He shivered, and then felt a new resolve take hold of his body.
He hauled himself upright, gripped the object and strained with all his might to free it from the ground. The joints in his arms screamed in protest. He released his grip and repositioned his feet. Gasping, he readied himself for one final effort. As he planted his boot heels in the wet soil, he heard voices approaching from behind.
His thighs juddered as he heaved upwards. Then it came free, released from the London earth that had entombed it for almost two millennia. Slipping back from the sudden release, Ballard lost his grip on the statue, which toppled onto its side.
In the hole where the base of the statue had been, Ballard spotted something that appeared incongruous with the soil. He moved closer and blinked through the deluge of rain now filling his eyes. Falling to his knees, he looked down at a small metal disc whose shape was disappearing in a muddy pool around it. The
Professor scooped it out from the gritty water and as he held it up to his face, he could see that it was a coin. A silent fork of lightning then lit up the sky, followed moments later by a tremendous roar of thunder, as if the very fabric of the sky had just been torn in two.
Part I
Revelation 12:9
And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Chapter 1
Broadmoor High-Security Psychiatric Hospital
Crowthorne, Berkshire, England
Present Day
Enoch Hart sat Buddha-like on the floor of his darkened cell. His naked body was perfectly still, apart from the gentle rise and fall of his back. The staff at the Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital had gradually grown to accept Hart’s daily practice. In any case, quiet times at an institution that housed some of Britain’s most violent and disturbed men were always welcome. But no one was complacent. Hart’s history left no one in any doubt of his potential threat.
Nearly an hour had passed since Hart had effortlessly lowered himself from standing position into his cross-legged posture. His meditation practice had begun in the usual way with the silent recitation of the medieval Mantra of the Marshall: ‘Inner stillness is the key to outer strength’. Within seconds, Hart’s attention had turned inwards, as his breath flowed freely between the words of the mantra.
As the minutes went by, a single shaft of light appeared through a gap in the window shutters of his cell and moved across Hart’s muscular chest. At first the prisoner merely accepted the narrow pencil tip of heat warming his skin. But as he continued to sit, his mind’s eye was drawn down to the point of energy journeying across his flesh. With every subtle rise and fall of his breath, he felt his perception moving closer to the tunnel of light. Then something disturbed his concentration.
Hart’s eyes snapped open. The sound had returned. The prisoner parted the curtains of long matted hair in front of his eyes and looked at the sink basin attached to the wall of his cell. A low buzzing emanated from the ventilation grille below the sink. He crawled over until his face was up close to the grille. The droning vibration began to rise and fall in pitch. After stealing a glance towards the door, Hart lowered himself onto his chest. The grille was a light metal mesh some six inches across and three inches high and provided air-conditioning to the small cell. Hart carefully unclipped it from its wall housing and tentatively peered behind it. A slow grin crept up his face. Today was going to be a good catch.
The small space behind the grille was alive with shadowy movement. Hart carefully slid his hand into the gap and felt the smooth surface of a plastic cup. His fingers moved around the cup’s circumference and then he gently raised it upwards to trap the contents inside, before easing it out of its hiding place. As soon as the cup was free, his other hand quickly covered it.
The banana had already been overripe when delivered to his cell as part of his breakfast five days earlier. Now, it had decomposed into a pool of dark mush at the bottom of the cup. Feasting on the remains of the perishing fruit were half a dozen crawling wasps. Hart stood up and leant over the sink. He could feel the small black and yellow bodies brush against the skin of his palm. With his elbow, he opened the sink’s faucet. He wrapped his thumb and forefinger around the flowing spout and directed the water into the vessel. Once the cup was full, he covered it again with his flat palm and gave it a rigorous shake. He stopped and then did it again, this time harder, before emptying the contents of the beaker into the sink. With greasy hair hanging in his eyes, he quickly picked through the detritus covering the basin like a man panning for gold.
Moving quickly, Hart plucked up a wasp and brought it close. His eyes locked onto the insect. The wasp was dazed but still alive, and for a moment he was unsure whether the gentle throbbing in his fingertips came from his pulse or the gentle rising and falling of the animal’s abdomen.
With his thumbnail, he cut the insect in two at the narrow waist dividing its yellow and black abdomen from its thorax and discarded the upper part of the body to the floor. While carefully rotating the abdomen in his fingers, Hart held it up to the shaft of light coming through the shutter. The gentlest of pressure was all he needed for the wasp’s black stinger to shoot out of its body like a dagger.
Chapter 2
‘It’s a fake,’ said Blake as he returned the yellowing sheet of paper to the table.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ exclaimed the dealer, who stood up so quickly his chair almost fell over.
‘Please calm down,’ pleaded the buyer from the British Museum. ‘Vincent do you need more time?’
‘If you want me to authenticate this document as belonging to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then no, I don’t need any more time.’
The dealer smacked his fist in his palm and began to stride around the table. ‘Go on, Blake, grace us with your amazing insight. How on earth can you be so sure?’ he asked, his face white and furious.
Blake exchanged a quick glance with the man from the British Museum, who gave him a ‘go on’ look with his eyes.
After breathing out audibly through his nose, Blake picked up the magnifying glass from the table and passed it to the dealer. ‘It’s undoubtedly a fake,’ said Blake as he kneaded his lips with the knuckles of his right hand. ‘Take a close look at the paper fibres.’
Huffing to himself, the dealer leant over, his large stomach brushing the edge of the table as he examined the paper. ‘No idea what you are talking about,’ he said, the impatience building in his voice.
Blake rocked back in his chair. ‘A good forger takes their time looking for the right type of paper, spending months rummaging around sales rooms for unframed prints or pictures. The best sources are lightly drawn sketches, as soft pencil can easily be removed by a little rubbing with dilute detergent. Another good source of original paper is antiquarian bookshops. If they’re lucky, they can stumble over books with lots of end-papers. These blank pages are much more valuable to the forger than the actual work itself. Sometimes you can find unlined ledgers or account books. They are often dated to the year by their first entry.’
‘All very interesting Blake, but what the hell does that have to do with Mozart?’ demanded the dealer.
‘It’s all to do with the fibres,’ answered Blake. ‘All paper was made by hand until 1798, when a Frenchman, Louis Robert, invented a paper-making machine. Prior to 1798, paper was made one sheet at a time. A rectangular wooden frame with a fine wire mesh attached to its bottom was dipped into a vat of paper pulp, essentially a soup of fermenting rags. Just before the frame was dipped, the vatman would give its contents a good stir to loosen up the fibres. Once the frame was removed, and the water pressed out of the pulp, the paper was then allowed to dry. This method always left a random distribution of paper fibres.’
The man from the British Museum pinched his eyes in confusion.
‘The fibres don’t all line up in the same direction. Hand-made paper doesn’t have a grain,’ said Blake, pressing home the point.
The dealer replaced the magnifying glass on the table, his face set in stern lines. The buyer from the British Museum immediately picked up the magnifying glass; after blinking through it for several breaths, he let out a long laboured sigh.
‘Ah, I see, this has a grain. You can see the parallel fibres quite clearly.’
‘It’s been machine made,’ continued Blake. ‘It must have been produced after 1798.’
The dealer slumped in his seat. ‘1798,’ he said quietly to himself, his eyes now blinking with the dawning realisation that he had just lost a considerable sum of money.
Finally, the penny dropped for the man from the British Museum. ‘And Mozart died in 1791, so this can’t be his signature.’
Both men looked over to the dealer, who was now staring up at the ceiling with deep worry lines across his face. He had been well and truly scr
ewed over. Buying the document up front from the Latvian middleman had been a gamble, even though the supporting material had appeared to confirm its provenance.
‘I’m sorry, but the museum will have to pass on this one.’
The metallic beep of an incoming message sounded from Blake’s phone. He dug it out of his pocket and entered his passcode. The screensaver image of his daughter cleared and he read the message. His face instantly drained.
* * *
VINCENT, I’M OUT AND HEADING FOR LONDON. ROSALIND.
Chapter 3
By the time the four-man team burst into Enoch Hart’s cell, the loud drone of the emergency alarm was reverberating down the corridor. Hart was writhing on the floor, his arms wrapped around his stomach, his legs flailing out in all directions. The tallest man of the team readied himself to examine the prisoner but was stopped in his tracks by what he saw.
Hart’s face was almost unrecognisable. His skin was covered in a patchwork of red lumps, with sweat streaming from his forehead. The tendons in his neck were locked taut beneath his clenching jaw. After snapping on a pair of pale blue surgical gloves, the tall man edged closer. Through the white shirt pasted to Hart’s body, he could see the prisoner’s chest rising in fits and starts. Hart’s head thrashed from side to side, leaving a smear of sweat on the floor beneath his ponytail of greasy, unruly hair.
Not looking up, the tall man shouted something and one of the guards turned and ran out of the cell. With his eyes, he then signalled to the other men to move closer. In a moment, Hart’s arms and legs were pinned to the floor by the guards. The tall man grabbed the prisoner’s left wrist and attempted to locate a pulse. It wasn’t hard to find. The double beat pounded out from his skin like a racing train. Suddenly Hart’s body went slack and foam, like egg whites, started dripping from the side of his mouth.