Maxim Gunn and the Demon Plan

MAXIM GUNN

and

THE DEMON PLAN

By

Nicholas Boving

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2007 Nicholas Boving

eBook ISBN 978-1-896448-06-0

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Witchcraft in the twentieth century? Computer controlled demons? Maxim Gunn didn’t believe it either - until his old enemy Wanda Liszt miraculously returns from the dead with another plan to control the world.

Ambushes, a booby trapped tomb, a demonic attack by the fiend Wanda controls keep Gunn on his toes, until, with a little help from the giant Swedish archaeologist, Torquil Tornquist, the crashing finale is reached.

CHAPTER ONE

In total silence the watcher peered through the grill at the end of the air duct into the well-lit room below, and found it frightening. It was a contrary mixture of hard, practical technology in the shape of a bank of computers, whirring and clicking as they sorted information, the display consoles flickering eerily in the subdued light; and the weird, cabalistic signs inlaid into the cold, tiled floor, and worked into silk hangings on the otherwise bare walls.

At the control console sat a man, some sixty years of age to judge by his almost white hair, busily entering code into the programme, and from time to time checking his progress against a thick file of printouts.

The watcher remained motionless, hardly daring to breathe. The proof, the culmination of months of painstaking work and tracking had led him to where he was now; and just a few more minutes would give him the proof he needed.

For a moment he closed his eyes and lowered his head. God, how tired he was. And then he pulled himself together. One final effort and he’d be able to get out, back to base and report; to hand these people over to those more properly equipped to deal with them.

For some reason that struck him as amusing. Who was he going to hand them over to? A bunch of bloody bureaucrats, bent coppers who could be bought? There was a better way and he knew it. A bomb, a hail of bullets, sling a rope over a branch. All very illegal. He almost laughed but caught himself in time. Christ! Half of what he did was illegal: it went with the job. Do what it takes; that was the order of the day. Just don’t get caught because we’ll deny you with our hands on a stack of Bibles. But then he’d always known that; it was in his job description, or would have been if he’d had one. Plausible deniability. What a stack of horseshit. But it was the way it was. His masters sat in comfortable offices and dined with other faceless powerful men in leather smelling clubs, where the only entry qualification was the right tie and the ability to change sides or sell someone down the river so fast it’d take your breath away.

And he wouldn’t have it any other way. It was the only game in town worth playing. If you wanted safety and a pension when you retired to that cottage on the Downs with roses and a couple of panting sycophantic spaniels, get a nine to five job, work in a bank, die of fatty degeneration and a heart attack on the tenth hole when you finally got a birdie after twenty years of trying. His lip curled with contempt, and then he shrugged mentally. Maybe a wife and two kids at an expensive boarding school would have been the right way to live, rather than risk his life in obscurity and even more obscure places. And who the hell was he kidding?

The man at the console finally finished his work, typed a last group of symbols and closed the file. He glanced at his watch, got up, walked to the door and went out.

The watcher waited until he was sure no one was coming back, and then, grasping the grill firmly, he pushed it off its clips and drew it back into the duct. Then he eased himself forward, wriggled out of the opening and dropped quietly to the floor.

He crouched, listening intently, moved towards the glass windowed double doors at the far end and looked through.

The room was small, not more than eight feet square, and completely featureless apart from a chrome plated chair standing in the centre. Sitting rigidly upright and strapped into the chair was a man, his face expressionless. The eyes were wide open and had the vacant, staring look of one who could no longer call his mind his own.

The watcher instinctively started to push the doors, and then he dropped his arms and bowed his head. He knew there was nothing he could do. Instead, he took a camera out of the bag he was carrying and began to take a series of shots. In a minute he’d email them and the last bow would be neatly tied and he could slip away as unnoticed as he’d come. He decided the first thing he was going to do was spend a couple of hours in a hot bath, drink a couple of shots of whiskey, and then a couple more, and then he’d go out and find the best restaurant in town. After that, well, maybe there’d be some beautiful girl. He grinned. First things first.

So engrossed was he in taking the shots that he didn't hear the door of the computer room open, nor the silent figure which crept across the tiled floor behind him. All he was briefly aware of was a crashing blow on the back of the head and a scrambled mess of flashing lights as he lost consciousness.

Slowly consciousness returned, and with it a painfully throbbing head and a dry mouth. As his eyes focused he tried to move and found himself bound hand and foot in a sitting position, and realized with a cold chill of horror that it was now he who was strapped to the chrome plated chair.

He straightened and lifted his head, staring with dulled eyes at the double doors, and waited.

It seemed like hours, but was probably no more than a few minutes before he heard footsteps and voices in the computer room, and then the double doors opened.

Two people came into the room. One was a man; tall and imposing with a fine head of white hair, who might have been a great artist or musician if his eyes hadn’t been like those of a cobra with its prey cornered. He looked coldly at the man in the chair and turned to his companion, a woman of dark and startling beauty. The prisoner felt his skin crawl with fear.

The woman spoke, her voice low and musical, but with the chill of Arctic ice.

No doubt you have some idea of the work we are carrying out, Mr Henderson, she said. Oh yes, I know your name. If so, you know too much. We must therefore ensure that your knowledge goes no further.

Henderson heard the death sentence, and against all odds became calm. When there is no hope, then emotion dies. But at least he had got one report away. Whether it would reach its intended destination was another matter.

The woman went on. You will not die in vain, and you will find out the truth in the process. Good-bye, Mr Henderson. The doors swung silently behind her as she left.

***

Maxim Gunn strode along the short oak panelled corridor like a man with a mission. Which was exactly correct, as he was on a mission to blow the house he was in to hell and put one more under rock crawling drug dealer out of business. The fact that the dealer was a renegade colonel wanted for war crimes in an eastern European country made it all the more satisfying.

He reached into the backpack he was carrying, took out grenade and opened a door. He took one disgusted look at the metal shelving stacked with polythene bags of raw heroin and tossed the thermite grenade inside. He slammed the door and moved on to the next door. The first grenade exploded, blowing the door off its hinges and blasting a cloud of white into the corridor. The lurid red of the fire made it sweeter.

The second door opened to a communications room. There were two men inside, slouching casually at desks, earphones and mikes attached to their heads like growths. Gunn deliberately chose a stun grenade from the pack and, as the first man realized all was not as it should be and he didn’t know the dark-clad man at the door from Adam, he tossed it in and quietly closed the door. The bang and the flash that ripped through the gap under the door were very satisfying. The men would be incapable of thought, hearing or sight for a couple of minutes.

And then, on cue an alarm bell added to the chaos with its harsh, insistent clangour.

Gunn reached the end of the corridor, turned sharp left and came face to face with a man coming out of a door marked with the universal stick figure sign for Men.

Gunn skidded to a stop and pointed urgently over the man’s shoulder. The man spun around and Gunn hit him, very hard. The man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and banged against the wall. Gunn shook his head, stepped over him and murmured.

I can’t believe he fell for that.

The alarm seemed to gain in strength and there were confused shouts. It was time to get out. He raced to the end of the corridor, banged open double glass doors that lead to a balcony, and without breaking stride, vaulted over the rail and vanished.

He landed cat-like on a sunroom roof below the balcony where he grabbed a rope already attached to a serviceable and well made drain pipe, and abseiled to the ground.

As he landed on the gravel path beneath, a siren added its raucous voice to the mounting cacophony. Gunn raced along the path, cut over a well manicured lawn and vanished into the cover of a stand of pines.

For a few moments he paused, pressed against the dark bole of a large spruce. The fire was taking hold nicely with flames licking out of a couple of windows. From what he’d seen of the fire fighting arrangements in the house, there wouldn’t be a whole lot anyone could do. It was an old house, well panelled with dry timber and pine floors. He gave it about an hour before the walls began to collapse. He thought it was a pity about the house as it was quite a nice one, at least a couple of hundred years old: but then they shouldn’t have had a ton of cocaine stashed in it. Gunn hated drugs; what they did, the lives they wrecked, and above all he hated the men and women who took advantage of it. Prison was too good. If he had his way it would be a quick rope over a convenient branch: cheaper than bullets and reusable.

Men were running around, shouting, barking orders, getting tangled in garden hoses, and some were starting to quarter the grounds with flashlights. It was time to stop admiring his handiwork and get the hell out.

He turned away, trotted down the pine needle covered slope to a small forest track and within a couple of minutes had reached the silver Porsche, parked and shining in the rising moonlight.

Behind him a group of heavily armed men erupted from the house. A crisp order rang out clear above the noisy confusion. The men piled quickly into two black Mercedes saloons and drove away, gravel spurting from beneath their wheels and rattling against the downstairs windows.

Moments later an explosion ripped the front door off its hinges and the upper floor windows blew out. The flames no longer licked hungrily, but roared greedily, reaching up to the guttering and onto the roof. The men who had been vainly trying to bring the fire under control knew a lost cause when they saw it and backed away to a safe distance. They no longer shouted, but watched in awe as the inevitable began to take place.

Gunn heard the explosions and saw the red glow of fire through the trees. He smiled without humour and started the Porsche. He was about to drive away with a good job done, when he saw the Mercedes’ headlights stabbing through the tress. They were being driven at speed. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they were looking for him.

He engaged first gear and floored the accelerator. Pursuit was not exactly unexpected and Maxim Gunn had prepared for it. He flipped up through the gears until the black trunks of the serried rows of pines were flashing past at eighty miles an hour. It was a dangerous speed for a single lane forest track, but even so the lights of the car behind seemed to be gaining slightly.

He pressed the sunshine roof control and as it opened he flipped the lid of a flat leather briefcase on the passenger seat. Inside it was a neat row of explosive charges and a nest of those wicked four-pointed metal stars known as caltrops. The Romans had used them to great effect against cavalry, and the Resistance in France had resurrected them to burst tires. He glanced in the mirror and tossed a couple through the sunshine roof.

The lead Mercedes ran over the first star and a front tire blew. The car swerved violently, clipped a tree with its right wing, then yawed out of control and plunged off the road into a ravine, finishing up smashed against a tree. The front seat passenger had gone through the windshield. There was a lot of blood. The second car didn’t bother to slow down, but it missed the other caltrop and came on, fast.

The road took a long, fast, looping bend to the left, dipping hard towards a single lane wooden bridge across the same ravine. The Porsche hit the bridge with a bang, rattling the ancient timbers. Gunn slowed for a moment steering with his knees, took a couple of charges, flipped the detonator and tossed them through the roof. The charges landed on the bridge, rolled, stopped and three things happened. Gunn floored the accelerator, the Mercedes also hit the bridge, and the charges went off like thunderclaps.

As the Porsche roared up the slope on the other side of the ravine Gunn saw broken timber flying like confetti, the bridge collapsing and the Mercedes plunging headlong into the muddy waters of the ravine. Gunn smiled happily.

So perish the ungodly. He looked up through the open roof at the band of stars that formed the Milky Way. He thought it was particularly bright. He also thought it was a nice night for a drive. Fifteen minutes later he was driving slowly along the perimeter fence of an airfield.

At regular intervals warnings were posted about the inadvisability of unauthorized access. To the average person it was apparent that anyone being so foolish was likely to get themselves shot. The notices were in the Cyrillic alphabet and Roman. Gunn was not the average person, could read both alphabets, and had every intention of ignoring the warnings.

He stopped the Porsche in the shadows of a stand of pines, got out, took a pair of wire cutters from the trunk and cut himself an opening in the fence. He waited. There were no alarms blaring, no dogs barking, no flashlights probing. He thought that sometimes a fence was just a fence. He put the wire cutters back in the trunk and crawled through the opening.

Standing up, he brushed dry grass from his pants and looked towards the lights of the group of buildings that marked the operational part of the airfield. There was a quarter of a mile to go and not a lot of cover. He looked at the Porsche, sighed and started towards the buildings: someone was going to score a very nice car and he doubted that someone would be below the rank of colonel.

Gunn stood in the deep contrasting shadow at the corner of the building. The light over the one door shone directly down. A sign on the door translated as Flight Crews. Gunn waited. He was very patient when necessary. No one moved. No one coughed. There was not even the telltale smell of tobacco smoke. Either a watcher was as patient as he was, or he was alone. He decided he was alone, walked quickly to the door, opened it and slipped inside. A corridor stretched out twenty yards. A door at the end was ajar, and through the opening he saw lockers. It could only be the