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  Cain’s Redemption

  BOOK 2 of the Masters Series

  A. J. Chamberlain

  Copyright © 2021 by A. J. Chamberlain

  First published 2021 by Storycraft Press

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  The right of Andrew J Chamberlain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-9161758-6-0

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  Cover Design by Esther Kotecha

  For Stan Sexton, Steve Barber, and Stephen Peake. Teachers and companions on the journey.

  Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.

  Psalm 96 v 1 (NIV)

  Cain’s Redemption

  1

  Senate Square, Helsinki, January

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  Darius Lench lost his footing again and cursed the ice. He walked on, crunching across the flagstones and glancing at the ground beneath his feet.

  The maintenance crews were sprinkling salt onto the greying slush, and Lench’s soft, city shoes slithered over the uneven surface. Before him the floodlit cathedral dominated, the ethereal glow on the masonry hinting at things unseen. Elevated above the square, the building spoke of permanence, the saints stationed at each corner, directing the mortals below to a more righteous calling. In the crisp, cold, air he saw the clean points of the golden crosses, and in his heart he despised it all.

  He’d needed to get away from everything so that he could regroup and focus, and an old friend had offered him the space to do that. Here he could clear his mind, listen and submit to the master.

  He was looking forward to this moment, despite the promise of torment. Now, at last, he would find out how to repair the damage, and face the punishment for what had already happened. No amount of success in the other areas of his life would protect him from the reckoning and when it came, and he would offer no excuses.

  He looked at the crisscross patterns of stone receding from him in all directions, and felt the freezing water tease its way into his socks.

  “I am coming, my Lord,” he whispered. “I will submit.”

  He removed a slim silver case from his pocket, took out a cigarette and lit it. The smoke hung heavy in the frigid air. He rubbed at an ache in his shoulder as he continued to pick his way across the uneven surface, his footsteps rapping out a brisk, uneven tattoo on the stone.

  Lench presented himself to the world as a very successful man. He visited the gym regularly and, drawing on sheer strength of will, maintained the brutal regime he had set for himself. He was fitter than he’d been ten years ago, despite his tobacco habit. His body looked good for his age and his mind had lost none of its precision, and his propensity for caustic wit was as strong as ever.

  But none of this would be any use to him when he stood before the master to atone for his failings, but like any good leader, he took responsibility when required, and this was just such an occasion.

  A year ago he had been humiliated by the SLaM debacle, but since then he had enjoyed professional success and now Darius Lench was a seriously rich man.

  His wealth kept him busy; he owned and rented, bought and sold. He had guessed right in the market and made money as others had lost it; and in all this time he had worked and worked on the art of dominance. Darius Lench could be civil when required, but beneath the refinement he cultivated a ruthless edge.

  His personal life reflected the same approach. In the last few months he had refined and purged his group. He had driven out the weak people and cast them aside. The process had started, appropriately enough, with Martin Massey.

  He had only ever let Martin join the group because of his position in a company called Sound, Light, and Music, or SLaM, as they liked to call themselves. Martin and his colleagues at SLaM had their fingers on the pulse of youth culture, and Lench’s Master had determined that these people were a suitable instrument to work his will into that culture. And so, Lench had tolerated Martin Massey’s excitable arrogance as the man developed ‘SEEKA’, a nihilistic, drug-related project that nudged young people towards one of Lench’s favorite creeds: do what you will. That was the basis of Lench’s life and philosophy.

  But Massey had been nervous and stupid, and Lench had always despised him. He had had to endure the sight of Massey’s pathetic little ego bobbing up and down with the ebb and flow of the SEEKA project. When that project failed so did Martin’s association with the group, and he had been discarded like the trash that he was.

  After that, Lench removed some of the others. One by one they had been pruned. Some fell away from the faith; or were tempted by a less demanding regime. There were a couple of New Age “hangers on” who stumbled across his path on their great search, and some who spoke of the master in terms of a vague metaphysics. He had nicknamed them the “lukewarms”. These people weren’t even sure that their Lord existed; they talked glibly of “forces” and “nature” as if the reality of spiritual conflict would pass them by. He despised them even more than the followers of the enemy. There was no place for such people in his group and he was pleased to see them weeded out, disposed of, forgotten.

  The people around him now were of an altogether different order. They had been selected and hardened, and they shared with him a preoccupation for the master’s will. These people understood that life was a contest, and winning was everything. There would have been no room for the likes of Massey in the current line-up. Poor Martin would have looked like a little boy, lost in a museum, frightened by the towering exhibits. With these new acolytes, Lench felt more able to fulfil his ambition and to serve his master and exercise power in all its forms.

  But even as Lench built up his group, so also SLaM had thrived. Time and again he had felt compelled to track the fate of his enemies; to see whether they had disappeared like a cancer succumbing to therapy.

  At first he thought SLaM would wither, as the misfits who took it over struggled to make themselves heard in the cacophony of contemporary culture. He smiled when he discovered they had taken on Lewis Ashbury as some kind of consultant. He jeered as he recognized little Conner Adams and his band achieve some notoriety at the fringes the music scene. He actually laughed out loud when he discovered that the woman, Alex Masters, had taken on her whore of a cousin to dream up bits of merchandise for them. They were a pathetic collection of amateurs and he was confident that their little venture would flounder and die.

  But SLaM did not die. Indeed, it flourished and gained something of a reputation for what it did. He watched it all from a distance, and uncertainty stirred in his gut. Perhaps he had underestimated them, this raggedy crowd; perhaps they had more money than he realized; perhaps they would not just disappear into the noise. Over time the derisive laughter stopped, and the smile became a grimace. The success of SLaM was his failure, and so now he felt compelled to present himself to the master, to give an account, receive instruction and endure the appropriate punishment.

  He did not immediately notice a man approaching him from the edge of the square, a black outline against the floodlights, coming into his field of vision. When he did see the figure, Lench recognized immediately the bulky silhouette of his old friend Tarmo Ketola. Tarmo lumbered up and Darius Lench took one last resentful suck on his cigarette before
dropping it into the slush.

  “You are eight minutes late,” he said.

  In response Tarmo laughed, his mirth turning into a rattling guttural cough. He spat out phlegm before he spoke.

  “Darius, my friend, you need two things: decent shoes and a drink.”

  Lench smiled despite his mood. “Maybe,” he said, “but first I have work to do.”

  The wind blew across the open square and snagged at Lench’s thin jacket. He pulled it around himself as they walked together away from the floodlights of the cathedral and into the darkness.

  “Tell me,” said Lench, “does it ever get warm in this god forsaken land?”

  “Not forsaken by the gods though, eh?” Tarmo turned and inspected his friend, like a doctor examining a sick patient. “You most definitely need a drink.”

  “You do know why I am here, don’t you?” said Lench impatiently.

  “Ah Darius, you are so clever, but you are also a fool. I will help you to rescue yourself from this mess.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” said Lench, stamping into slush as the cold seeped into the bones of his feet. “And why are we meeting outside this dung heap of a place? Is this another example of your warped sense of humour?”

  Tarmo laughed again. “It’s an easy landmark to find. I didn’t want to make things any more difficult for a foreigner like you, Darius, now come!” Tarmo picked up the pace and Lench followed on, taking an extra stride to catch up with his friend.

  “At least let me get you some proper boots,” said Tarmo. “You are not in the City of London now.” The big man launched into another coughing fit, and the pair of them trudged on.

  “I should tell you,” said Lench, “that things have deteriorated again. SLaM is now a running sore. That woman, Masters, has kept the thing afloat somehow.”

  “Our friend,” said Tarmo softly, “is he not able to remove this woman you spoke of?”

  “If only it were that simple,” said Lench. “She is…” he searched for the right words, “…she is not open to us. We cannot harm her, although we may yet have opportunities to do a great deal of harm to the people she loves. But she is closed to us, and I have spent several hours trying to explain this to Josef.”

  “Ah, poor Josef,” said Tarmo, smiling. “He could never quite grasp the subtleties, eh? I think that’s why I am fond of him. He’s always ready to slip the blade in first and ask questions afterwards.”

  “Yes, well that’s not always the answer, is it!” snapped Lench. He continued before Tarmo could respond. “Josef has his uses but it doesn’t take much to get him into a rage, just someone spelling his name wrong, ‘Joseph’ instead of ‘Josef’, is usually enough.”

  Tarmo nodded and smiled.

  “Yes, that’s Josef for you,” he said, “I know you have to handle him carefully.”

  “There are other reasons why Josef has become something of a liability,” said Lench, “and you know them well enough.”

  “The scar,” said Tarmo, “and the blood.”

  “Yes,” said Lench, “the scar and the blood. The current restrictions are for his own sake as much as any question of strategy.”

  The hulking figure betrayed no reaction to this; but Lench could sense the disappointment and anger. Josef was one of Tarmo’s favourites.

  “I am sorry for him,” said Tarmo.

  “Yes, yes it’s a shame,” said Lench, “but there it is. Josef’s trade carries a certain amount of risk. His contact with the outside world is our point of weakness and it should be minimal. He should move unseen. But that is all rather difficult now that he has been compromised.”

  “I think you have not told me the half of it, Darius,” said Tarmo. “I know he failed with the Bridget Larson job, as did you for sending him there in the first place; but what else is there, what else has he done?”

  Lench sighed; he had not intended to spend time going over the Assassin’s indiscretions.

  “Alex Masters runs a café,” said Lench, “and without my permission, Josef visited the place. I understand that he became ‘upset’ while he was there. He thought I would be asking him to dispatch one or two of them, and so he decided to go on a little reconnaissance mission.”

  “And?”

  “And,” said Lench, impatiently, “rather than slip in and out unobserved, an activity in which he is supposed to be an expert, he made a spectacle of himself, frightened the customers, and got himself noticed.”

  Tarmo sighed. “I did not realize that he had let himself go.” He slowly shook his head. “So you have been quite merciful with him really.”

  “He has been a good servant in the past,” said Lench, “and I respect loyalty despite what others might think. But his usefulness is probably coming to an end.”

  Tarmo grimaced, the pockmarks showing on his face in the floodlight.

  “I understand,” he said, “but don’t discard him just yet.”

  “Oh, I won’t do that,” said Lench. “I still have plenty of work for him to do.”

  There was silence between them as they continued across the square towards a row of parked vehicles.

  “Anyway,” said Lench, “let’s not get too morose, we still have much to do and the service of the master brings both rewards and penalties. Josef has had his share of rewards in the past, and, like me, now has to face the penalties, which I am sure he will take like the man he is.”

  “He will,” said Tarmo.

  “But I am not here to talk about Josef, or to decide what is to be done with him. My business with the master is my real concern. I obey his call.”

  “And the woman is protected?”

  “We cannot harm the woman,” said Lench, “or that tart of a cousin she hangs around with. They are protected.”

  “That is a pity,” said Tarmo, “but I presume there are others.”

  “Of course, and any one of them might warrant further attention – that idiot brother of hers perhaps – but I need to identify where the master wants us to direct our attack.”

  “It will be revealed to you,” said Tarmo. “Come, the car is here.”

  Tarmo’s four-wheel drive was warm after the bitter wind of the square, and Lench was soon cocooned in the comfortable, leather interior as they drove away. He was exhausted and he knew it. He had taken an evening flight to come here directly from work, and he feared that Tarmo would find him asleep and snoring when they got up to his villa. It wasn’t a prospect that he relished. He needed to remain alert and strong for this encounter.

  He thought again about power, his own power, and pride, both of which had been diminished by this girl. He used the anger to keep himself awake.

  “I take it everything is prepared,” he said as the car picked up speed.

  “Of course,” said Tarmo, “you may spend yourself as extravagantly as you wish.” Then with an abrupt movement, the driver’s side window glided down and the warmth that had built up in the car fled in a moan of icy air. Tarmo broke into another coughing fit and hawked a gobbet of phlegm out into the racing darkness.

  The window purred back in to place again.

  “You will have your answers, Darius,” said Tarmo, “and no doubt you will pay dearly for them, but maybe you can have some relaxation after that, eh? I have a little wine, and maybe I can arrange for some company for you?”

  Lench felt tiredness creeping on him as again the interior of the car warmed up. “Keep your whores to yourself tonight, Tarmo.”

  The big man grunted and the car lurched across the highway, sloughing through the snow that banked up on the side of the road.

  Twenty minutes later, Tarmo’s villa loomed before them, a dark grey mass amid the faint glow of the night. A single light shone from the attic room. The car crunched to a halt on an expanse of gravel and Lench noticed the glitter of settled snow on the ground and in the trees.

  “Do you wish me to stay with you?” said Tarmo, switching off the ignition.

  This was no small offer and Lench di
d not answer immediately; the world around him was silent except for the occasional tick of the car engine as it cooled. He rubbed his shoulder as pain stabbed down his left arm, adding to the general tiredness he felt.

  “No, thank you,” he said, “but I appreciate the offer. I have to do this alone.”

  At the oaken front door of the villa, Tarmo dug into the pocket of an old leather jacket and fished out a formidable collection of keys.

  “Again, I welcome you to my house, Darius, I hope you find what you are looking for here.”

  They walked through to the lounge. The embers of an earlier fire were still glowing in the grate of a soot-caked fireplace and the air was heavy with stale smoke. A large sofa draped with animal pelts sat before the fire, facing the flames.

  Lench noted the familiar wood panelling, darkened with the years of smoke, and the trophies of the old gods on ledges and window shelves around the room, memories of the power of deities long since forgotten by the rest of the world. In one corner, he saw a heavy black oak table laden with spirit bottles.

  “Lead the way,” said Lench. “I want to engage with our master as soon as possible.”

  He followed his host through the house and up two flights of well-trodden stairs, to the door of the attic room. At the door he stopped and removed his shoes and soaking socks. Tarmo wheezed over and picked them up without a comment, and then he placed his heavy hand on Lench’s shoulder. It was an expression of support and Lench accepted it as such.

  “I will come and find you when you are finished,” said Tarmo.

  Lench nodded, then he entered the room alone, shut the door and quickly set about the preparations. He shivered, and stretched his neck left and right against the persistent shoulder ache, and then he sat down on the bare oaken floor, breathed deeply to centre himself, and closed his eyes.