"What makes you think it wasn't your ex-husband?" I ask.
"Nothing, at the time. He just turned round from the counter and smiled at me and said, 'Can I give you a lift home?' and I sort of…" she trails off.
"It offered you a lift home," I echo.
"What do you mean, it?"
I close my eyes. "You got yourself into some really smelly shit there. Say some son of a bitch wants to abduct somebody. They have to get a victim profile, samples from the victim-it's not simple, not just messing around with hair or fingernail clippings for the DNA-but suppose they get it. Then they invoke, um, generate a vector field oriented on the victim's-"
"Yeah, yeah, I'll take that bit on trust."
"Okay then. I'll give you some references tomorrow. Basically it's what used to be called an incubus: a demon lover. Something the victim won't resist because they don't want to resist. It's not actually a demon; it's just a hallucination, like a website generated by customer relationship management software from hell."
"A lure?"
"Yes, that's it exactly. A lure." I placed my unfinished mug down between my feet.
She shudders, looks worried. "Maybe I wasn't over him as thoroughly as I wanted to be."
"I know the feeling," I say, thinking of Mhari.
She shakes herself. "Anyway. Next thing I know I'm sitting in the back of a Lincoln and some guy I don't know who's wearing a Nehru suit and a beard is sticking a pistol in my side. And he says something like, 'American bitch, you have been selected for a great honour.' And I say, 'I'm not American,' and he just sneers."
Her hand is shaking so badly that coffee slops on the floor.
"He just-"
"It doesn't matter, what happens next?" I ask, trying to get her over the emotional hump. Over there they hold grudges for a long time. Some of the Pathans are probably still plotting their revenge for Lord Elphinstone's expedition.
"We drive around for a bit and head out of town, northbound on Highway 1, then the car pulls up to this house and the driver opens the door and they push me in through a side door into the house. The driver's wearing that long, baggy shirt and trousers you see on TV, and a scarf around his head, and he's got a beard, too. They push me through the kitchen and into a closet with a light then shut the door, and I hear them chain the door handles together. Someone else comes in and they talk for a bit, then I hear a door slam. That's when I pulled out my mobile phone and called you."
"You overheard them talking. What about?"
"I-wasn't concentrating much. Tell the truth"-she puts the cup down on the floor; its saucer is swimming in coffee-"I was afraid they were going to rape me. Really afraid; I mean, this was kidnapping, what would you expect? When they didn't, when they were talking, it was almost worse. Does that make any kind of sense? The waiting. But he-the one I didn't see-he had a deep voice, some accent-sounded German to me. Thick, gravelly, lots of sibilants. Had to keep repeating himself to the others, the Middle Eastern men. 'The Opener of the Ways requires the wisdom,' he kept saying. 'It needs information.' I think one of the Middle Eastern guys was objecting because after a bit there was a noise like-" She pauses, and swallows. "Like downstairs. And I didn't hear him again."
I shake my head. "This isn't making any sense so far-" Hastily: "No, I'm not saying you're wrong, I just can't figure out how it fits together. That's my problem, not yours."
I drain my coffee and wince as it hits my stomach and sits there, burning like a lump of molten lead. "Sounds like they were talking about a blood sacrifice. That's the Sacrifice of Knowledge rite. Middle Eastern guys. An incubus. German accent. You're sure it was German?"
"Yes," she says gloomily. "At least, I think it was German; Middle European for sure."
"That really is odd." Which distracts me and catapults my train of thought right into terra incognita because there are no usual suspects in the occult field in Germany; the Abwehr's Rosenberg Gruppe and any survivors of the Thule Gesellschaft were "shot trying to escape" by late June 1945. The camp guards were mostly executed or pulled long prison sentences, the higher-ups responsible for the Ahnenerbe-SS were executed, the whole country turned into a DMZ as far as the occult is concerned. After the Third Reich's answer to the Manhattan Project came so close to completion, that was about the one thing that Truman and Stalin and Churchill all saw eye-to-eye on-and the current government shows no desire to go back down that route of blood and madness.
"He went on a bit," Mo adds unexpectedly.
"Really? What about?"
"He wanted to go home, to take help home, something like that. I think."
I sit up, wince as my ribs remind me not to move too fast. "Help. Did he say what kind?"
Mo frowns again. Her thick, dark eyebrows almost join in the middle, looming like thunderclouds. "He went on about the Opener of the Ways a bit more. Oddly, as if he was talking about me. Said that help for the struggle against the Dar-al-Harb would wait until the ceremony of, uh, 'Unbinding the roots of Ig-drazl'? Then he would 'Open the bridge and bring the ice giants through.' He was very emphatic about the bridge, the bridge to living space. That was his term for it: living space. Does that make any sense?"
"It makes an oh-shit kind of sense." I watch as she picks up her mug and rolls it round between her hands. "Was that all?"
"All? Yes. I waited until I heard them go out, then I phoned you. I obviously got things wrong, though, because the next thing I knew they yanked open the door and the one with the gun grabbed the phone and stamped on it. He was angry, but the other-with the accent-" She judders to a stop.
"Can you describe him?"
She swallows. "That's the crazy thing. From the voice I kind of expected Arnie Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, except he wasn't. There were just these four Middle Eastern guys, and one of them had-I can't, uh, can't remember his face. Just those eyes. They seemed to glow, sort of greenish. Like marbles. Like there was something luminous and wormy behind his face. He-the one with the eyes and this weird German accent-he was angry and yelled at me and I was so afraid, but they just smashed my phone then shut the door on me again. Chained the door shut and overturned a table or something against it. And I-hell." She finishes her coffee. "That was about the worst hour of my life." Pause. "It could have been worse." Pause. "They could have." Pause. "You might not have answered." Pause. "They might not have found me."
"All in a day's work," I say with forced lightheartedness, which has nothing to do with the way I feel. "When the cops brought you out, did you see anything?"
"I wasn't paying much attention," she says shakily. "There were gunshots, though. Then what looked like a whole SWAT team kicked the cupboard door in and pointed their toys at me. You ever had two guys point assault rifles at your head, so close you can see the grooves on the inside of the barrels? You just lie there very still and try very hard not to look threatening." Pause. "Anyway, one of the agents in charge figured out I was the hostage in about three seconds flat and they led me out through the front. There was blood everywhere and two bodies, but not the guy with the weird eyes. I'd recognize him. Thing is, there were strange symbols all over the wall; it was whitewashed and it looked like they'd been painting on it in thick black paint, or blood, or something. A low table under it, with a trashed laptop and some other stuff. Candlesticks, an arc-welding power supply. It was weird, I guess you'd know how weird it looked. Then they drove me away."