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He heard a sound that was all too familiar.
The swish-click of a flick knife.
Then he felt it against his cheek, the point gouging into his flesh, digging deeper until blood began to run from the wound. And yet the knife was wielded with immaculate skill, drawn in light quick movements through the skin of Weller's face to expose the network of muscles beneath his forehead then down the other side of his face.
When it reached his neck he did pass out.
The figure with the knife cut the last piece of flesh free then slid two fingers beneath the skin as if it were some kind of mask.
Pulling carefully, the figure pulled the skin free, coaxing it away from the eyes with the aid of the blade.
It came away in one piece.
One dripping piece of skin.
The figure turned to those watching and held the mask of living flesh aloft like some kind of bizarre trophy.
Two of the others stepped forward and began removing Weller's clothes, tossing them aside until he was naked.
Then they set to work.
Catalyst
The priest was mad.
The men who forced him into the back of the ambulance had seen the face of insanity before and they recognised it now in those haggard features.
He screamed, he cursed, he threatened.
All to no avail.
He warned them that they were committing heresy. A word none of them had heard spoken before. A word better suited to distant years. To superstition.
And, as he fought to escape their grasp and return to his derelict church they found that superstition was a word which circulated with greater intensity inside their minds.
He told them they were making a mistake, told them they were desecrating Holy Ground, destroying something of untold value but they didn't listen. The old priest was insane. Who else but a madman would have lived in a derelict church in London's East End for the past eight months with only damp, mildew and rats for company? The windows had been broken, the holes boarded over in places but the priest had not left. He could not leave he had told them as they hauled him from his haven and into the waiting vehicle. They must not enter the church, must not disturb its contents.
When they told him that the remains of the church were to be demolished, that a block of fiats was to be erected on the site he had grown even more uncontrollable, flying into a paroxysm of rage which the uniformed men found difficult to cope with. He had run back towards the church screaming words which made no sense to them.
Someone had suggested sedating him but one of the men had feared the effect which a calming drug might have on a man of such advanced years and such precarious health. So, they had let him scream.
Scream that he had something valuable in his possession.
Scream that he guarded a secret.
That he and he alone knew that secret.
That he, in that stinking, vermin infested shell which had once been a place of worship, had kept the thigh bone of a Saint hidden.
One of the ambulancemen had chuckled quietly to himself as he'd listened to the aimless rantings.
To the priest's exhortations that the bone could bring life to the dead. That these men, these builders who were coming to destroy his home, were also eradicating a power which came from God himself.
The power to raise the dead.
He must have the bone.
He had to have it. Had to retain the power. The secret.
They strapped him to the stretcher inside the ambulance to prevent him damaging himself, then they drove off, one of them seated in the back of the vehicle still listening to the madman's insane ramblings.
The church must not be destroyed.
Must not be ...
Must not ...
Must ...
He had lapsed into unconsciousness within a few minutes, his eyes bulging wide for a split second then his chest falling as if all the air had been drawn from him by a powerful suction pump.
Despite the efforts of the man in the rear of the ambulance, the priest had died before reaching hospital.
A day later the builders moved in.
Within a week, the church, and all it contained, was rubble.
Tuesday, 3 September
Prologue
It looked like a battlefield.
Thick clouds of dust and smoke rolled like banks of noxious fog across a landscape of devastation. The thunderous roar of collapsing buildings was punctuated occasionally by the sound of explosions and the ever present rattling of caterpillar tracks.
But this was no war. It was organised destruction. Not the hectic random obliteration which comes with conflict but a carefully contrived scheme, plotted and planned by experts and now executed not by an army of uniformed men but of civilians.
There had been three tower blocks on the East End development originally known as Langley Towers. Three blocks designed to house up to a thousand people - they had intruded onto London's skyline like so many before them, jabbing towards the heavens like accusatory fingers. Around them shops had been built, even a youth club, but the residents of the blocks had been more concerned with the structural faults in the buildings than with how to occupy their leisure time. Countless complaints of cracks appearing in walls had flooded into the local council offices, some within less than a month of the blocks being occupied but, as is their way, the civil servants had seen fit to ignore the complaints.
When the stairwell in the second of the blocks had finally collapsed, five people had died.
No one knew how it happened. The builders didn't know. The architects were baffled. The complaints which had been filed were relocated to avoid embarrassment.
The decision had been made there and then to re-house the residents and demolish the blocks. Besides, those who owned the land had seen the sense of selling off the acreage for development.
Hence the arrival of the demolition men.
JCB's and other vehicles battled over and through the tons of fallen concrete and steel, like vast metal dinosaurs over some surreal new world. Men in yellow overalls swarmed over the ruins like termites - only their business was destruction not construction. Others watched from a distance as the tower blocks were brought down, men in white overalls untouched by the dirt and grime of this devastation they had engineered.
The ball of the crane swung into the side of one of the buildings smashing through the stone as if it had been balsa wood. As the metal ball swung back it carried fragments of the tower's interior, pieces of girder which hung from it like metallic intestines.
There was a loud explosion as one of the men clad in a white overall pressed a button on the console he held. Bricks were sent flying by the force of the blast and the third of the blocks fell like a house of cards, several hundred tons of concrete and steel crashing to the ground, adding to the piles of debris which already rose into the air like eroded cliffs.
The smaller buildings such as the youth dub, the supermarket and one or two of the other shops which had once served the residents of these vertical housing estates were still intact as yet. Their windows were smashed, their insides gutted, but their exteriors remained untouched by the ferocious attentions of the men and machines whose only function was to eradicate these final testaments to the stupidity of modern architecture. It had cost more than fifty million pounds to erect the trio of blocks two years earlier. More than one man on the site thought that it would have made as much sense to merely shovel the money into a furnace. The blocks had been built too quickly, too many comers had been cut but it had taken the loss of five lives to demonstrate such niceties as architectural inadequacies. Still, five lives were small change in the world of property speculation.
And how grand were the replacement buildings to be? Fine new houses, fit for anyone to live in. Provided they had an income in excess of half a million a year. The East End was being cut up, split down the middle between the poor and the rich, the 'haves' and the 'haven't got a hopes'. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer.
And more resentful.
A bulldozer moved effortlessly across the uneven terrain, pushing a huge mound of debris ahead of it, its tracks scraping the very foundations of the first block.
The foundations had been laid deep but even they had been laid bare by the strategically placed explosives planted by the men in white.
Smoke and dust mingled with the clouds of bluish fumes which belched from the exhaust of the bulldozer as it tumbled past.
Half a dozen mechanical diggers drove their buckets into the shattered remains of the buildings, lifting tons of brick into the backs of waiting lorries.
The massive iron ball on the crane continued to swing back and forth.
The destruction continued.
No one saw the hand.
It protruded from the cracked concrete foundations of the first block, mottled green in places, caked in dust and dirt.
And as the ground shook the concrete cracked open even more widely.
The arm attached to the hand appeared. Slowly at first.
No one noticed.
Just as no one noticed when the fingers on that hand flexed once then balled into a fist.
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