Omega (22 page)

Ben Stoddart, after a quick consultation with Quentin White before he had to appear on the BBC 2 news, had agreed that gallant defiance was the appropriate image for him especially after White's remark about 'the front rank of the hosts of God'; so Stoddart, while being careful not to contradict his colleague on the question of the reality of the powers of darkness, told his BBC viewers that he doubted whether 'these people could raise enough magical power to fry an egg' and challenged them to do their worst. His statement was printed next morning alongside White's, and most of the picture editors reinforced them with White looking like Savonarola and Stoddart looking like St George.

In Beehive, Harley needed to do nothing except sit back and smile. 'How about your associative links now, Sir Walter?' he asked Jennings triumphantly. 'These Angels of Lucifer have played right into our hands. They've branded every witch in Britain as a potential black-magic murderer.'

'Poor sods,' Sir Walter said. 'If you could take a referendum among witches today, ninety-eight per cent of them would condemn the Angels of Lucifer by every rule in their book. You do know that, don't you?'

'Of course I do - but the public doesn't.' He chuckled. 'And all achieved by one five-second pirate broadcast. Marvellous, isn't it?'

Sir Walter looked at him .thoughtfully. 'You didn't set it up yourself by any chance, did you?'

'No, I didn't. But if I'd thought of it, I might have done.'

Sir Walter said nothing; he still wasn't altogether sure.

Five people, at least, were sure. Moira and Dan's coven had not heard the original pirate broadcast, but the BBC, having the tape in their possession, had naturally re-run it as part of their 10.40 news report. The coven, listening, had gasped simultaneously. They all recognized the voice as that of Bill Lazenby, a member of John Hassell's coven. He had never been publicly active so his voice was unlikely to be on file anywhere; but to the few who knew him, it was unmistakable. 'Oh
, G
od,' Rosemary had cried. 'So they really meant it! It's that bitch Karen. What's she done to John - to
all
of them?'

'John was a ripe plum after Joy was murdered,' Sally said. 'Someone a lot less clever than Karen could have made him go black. And Karen
is
clever. She won him over and swept the rest along with them.'

'All the same, I never expected
this
- an all-out public
attack, so soon
’

‘
Have
they the power?'

They all looked at Moi
ra, who said: 'Frankly, I don't
know. She
is
powerful - and harnessing J
ohn's bitterness -
plus all the others
..
They might do it.'

'I know it sounds crazy,' Rosemary said, 'but since we know where the attack's coming from - shouldn't
we
work to protect Stoddart?'

'Him?'
Dan snorted.

'I know what Rosemary means,' Greg put in more calmly. 'Ben Stoddart's a bastard, of course - but
if
they managed to kill him, think of the repercussions. The Crusaders would go berserk.'

They thought, they discussed, but as usual it was Moira who had the final say. 'Greg's got a good point but I'm afraid we'll have to stay clear of it. One of these days -I'm sorry, dreadfully sorry, but it's true - one of these days we're going to have to fight John and Karen head on. They've put themselves beyond the pale and Gods knows what they'll let loose. But when we do, we've got to win -and that means all the allies we can get. This isn't the time. We must wait for it - and meantime, no skirmishes with them. At the moment, we're too vulnerable. Karen's highly clairvoyant and she'd pick us up at once and turn on us. Right now we've got other things to concentrate on. Ben Stoddart must look after himself.'

Dr Friell knew the outlines of the plan and many of the details - after all, he had suggested it in the first place and had provided all the inside information the Angels would need. The only thing he did not know was the timing of the raid; it had not been possible to finalize the date or the hour during their discussions in Savernake Forest, and they had agreed that any more communication between the Angels a
nd Frie
ll, once he had returned to Banwell, would be unwise. They had not even been certain, then, how the public threat to Stoddart's life would be made. John Hassell had merely said he had 'an idea about that' -an idea which had apparently borne fruit as the pirate broadcast. The threat
had
been made and all Stanley
Friel
could do was wait for the raid which might come any day, any hour.
...
It was always possible, he realized, that the Angels of Lucifer did not entirely trust him; he doubted if that slant-eyed vixen Karen, who was clearly the driving force of the group, trusted anyone. Friell didn't resent it. Mistrust was sound procedure in guerilla operations. Outside the Savernake Forest group,
Friel
was the only one who knew the part the Banwell Emergency Unit was to play or even that it entered into the picture at all. They were right to be wary of him; if they had not been, he would have thought them naive and feared for the success of the plan.

As it was, he had confidence in their ability to carry out the practical side of the plan; there were by now about thirty witches in their group, most of them young and determined and fit-looking. One of them, a little older, was an ex-Sergeant of the Royal Marines and he had been organizing and training the others from the moment they arrived in the Forest. It was clear that John and Karen did not intend their group to survive on magical weapons only.

Yet as far as the Banwell raid was concerned, it was the magical operation that mattered; the military operation was merely to make it possible. And about the magical success Friell had no doubts whatever. He was satisfied, from his studies and his own experience, that psychic attack worked given sufficient emotional force and a capable directing will. He knew what a psychic volcano smouldered at Banwell and he knew that Karen and John had the nerve and the knowledge to harness and direct it. It
could not
fail
...
and he, Stanley Friell, was both instigator and observer in an experiment few psychic researchers would ever have the possibility - let alone the courage and freedom from scruple - to conduct or even contemplate.

He was tense with anticipation and his tension was aggravated by the impossibility of knowing when the action would be launched. Being a sensitive, he felt the tension as an increasing static charge, a potential which must be released - and he released it in a very practical manner, by responding at last to the silent invitation which his assistant, Nurse Parker, had been directing at him ever since she was allocated to him and which he had so far been too preoccupied to bother with. Jenny Parker had an average figure and a rather plain, unsmiling little face, so the temptation had not been great. But when he did take her to bed, with the minimum of preparatory gallantry and nothing more in mind than the release of tension, he found to his surprise and pleasure that she was a dedicated sensualist of considerable ingenuity and stamina, as impersonally hungry as he himself. They suited each oth
er very well and in Friell
's bedroom they took advantage of the fact in periodic fierce encounters whose intensity no one could have inferred from their professional relationship.

They were, in fact, about to be so engaged when the raid came, just after
8
pm four days after the pirate broadcast. Jenny had begun to undress, stripping to the waist first because she knew he liked that, to see her topless and loose-haired above her uniform skirt. Friell had come behind her while her arms were raised to unpin her hair and had squeezed her breasts in his two hands almost to the point of pain - which
he
knew
she
liked. It was at that instant that they heard a commotion in the corridor outside and momentarily froze. Then the door burst open, the lock splintering, and one of the Angels of Luci
fer was covering them with a Lu
ger. Friell recognized him even through his stocking-mask and he knew the boy knew him, too; though as planned neither gave it away, and Friell shouted 'What the hell?' at him in suitably convincing anger. At the same time he could not help noticing Jenny's reaction; she clasped her hands to her breasts as most women would when intruded upon, but over
his
hands which she squeezed even more fiercely to herself - while her face, which Friell could see in the minor, stared in fascinated excitement at the gun.

The man-said 'Outside!' and the brief tableau dissolved.

Jenny reached for her blouse which she had thrown on the bed, but the man stepped forward and pointed the gun at her face. 'I said
outside.
There's no time for that. Move
!
'

The next moment they were herded along the corridor to the landing, where the man handed them over to a woman with
-a
shotgun, who stood guard over the half-dozen staff who had already been driven from their rooms. It was obvious that none of them had been allowed any time, though only one - a middle-aged woman doctor in a wet bathrobe, with bare feet - was in anything like Jenny's state of
deshabille.
The Angels were ignoring the babble of protests and clearing the corridor with speed and efficiency. Jenny had not uttered a word since the door burst open but the glint of excitement was still there in her eyes and she seemed indifferent to the fact that she was naked to the waist. The detached scientist in Friell observed her reactions curiously.

He was still wondering about it when the entire roll-call of the Unit - twenty-nine staff and twenty-six strait-jacketed patients - had been herded into the staff dining-room. Of the Angels of Lucifer, ten men and four women were in evidence, all armed. Friell could not see John and Karen. Again, the same swift efficiency; the Unit had once been a school and this room the gymnasium - and all fourteen patients had been tied to the wall-bars which lined one end of the room. The male nurses had been ordered, at gun-point, to tie them there as they were brought in, and in fact had obeyed quickly, since all twenty-six were never taken out of their rooms at once and would have been too much for the staff to control, even in strait-jackets.

Some of the patients were quiet for the moment, glancing around with bright ferrety eyes; several rolled and swayed as far as the ropes allowed, making a high keening noise. Two, just out of reach of each other's teeth, were straining and snapping - and at any moment at least three or four of them would be uttering a stream of words, at anything from a croak to a shout, without coherence but somehow conjuring up wild and terrible images.

At either end of the line, the staff were bunched under guard, some still protesting, some pale and terrified. With everyone in place, four of the guards cleared the room in front of the patients, sliding chairs and tables quickly out of the way. In the middle, about three metres apart, they stood two squat butane cylinders with open-ended burners on them, which they lit. Two roaring tongues of flame, each a metre or more high, shot up from the burners and illumined the room with an infernal brightness, made more eerie when the Angels turned the electric lights off.

Almost quicker than the bewildered prisoners could take it in, the stage was
set; a two-metre-high head-and-
shoulders caricature of
Ben Stoddart hung from the bars
on the opposite wall; a tab
le slid below it as an altar on
which a skull grinned beside a live and terrified hare in a wire-fronted cat-basket; o
ne of the Angels squatting over
a bongo drum and buildi
ng up an insistent, inescapable
rhythm Then Karen and John dancing.

They seemed to appear from nowhere, weaving in and out around the roaring flames and each other, their glistening skin naked except for barbaric ornaments - slowly at first, but rapidly building their tempo in time with the drum. Also in time with the drum, the rest of the Angels had begun to chant: 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!', directing their chanting at the patients who, entranced by the flames and the drum and the erotic dance, were already beginning to pick it up, to join in. 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!' -
twenty-six people, incurably insane, suddenly becoming a choir of united purpose, simple and terrible: 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!'

Most of the staff stood appalled and speechless but one or two of the nurses were weeping uncontrollably. Stanley Friell observed, feeling the avalanche of psychic power building and building. Suddenly, beside him, her bare arms and shoulders and breasts dripping with sweat, Nurse Jenny Parker began to shake like a dervish; then she, too, was crying out 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!'

Even Stanley Friell gasped.