Free The Soul Collector by Paul Johnston Page A

our collection, fear not.”
    The supplicant stood up slowly, licking his lips nervously. The masked figure seemed to be alone, so Faustus allowed himself to relax.
    Then, with a high-pitched snarl, the beast came bounding across the cave floor, his jaws wide apart and the yellowed incisors bared.
    Faustus forced himself to stand firm. At least the mandrill called Beelzebub did what his master told him. There was a human animal, thankfully not present tonight, who had The Soul Collector
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    begun to find their activities insufficiently visceral. Faustus swallowed hard and steeled himself. He could kill as well as anyone else and the Lord Beneath the Earth knew that. Five
    I parked my black Saab 9-3 sport sedan at the designated rendezvous two streets away from Dave’s house in North Dulwich. Roger van Zandt and Peter Satterthwaite were waiting for me in the latter’s Grand Cherokee. A minute later, Andy Jackson arrived on his new 600 cc Hornet. We all got into the Cherokee to prepare.
    “Any idea where Ginny and the kids are?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” Andy said. “Dave said they were going to visit her aunt today. He was going to spend the morning cooking lobster.”
    “So he was on his own in the house,” Rog said. “The place is like a fortress. How could anyone get in?”
    Pete glanced in the rearview mirror. “Maybe the entry we’re going to use isn’t as hidden as Dave thought.”
    As I was the one who was going to be using that entry first, Bonehead’s comment didn’t make me feel great. Rog turned around. “Did you call him back, Wellsy?”
    “Several times, and on his cell. The messaging service cut in both times. I wasn’t going to identify myself.”
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    “What do you mean?” Andy demanded. “Whoever’s got him will know he called you.”
    I shook my head. “Cool it, guys. We talked about this when we set the reporting system up. He called me, which suggests he was free at that time. Maybe he saw trouble coming.”
    “What, up the garden path?” Pete said. “If he was on his own, he wouldn’t have used the code.”
    “He might have,” I replied. “If he suspected his line was being tapped or his cell phone frequency scanned. Anyway, that’s what we’re here to find out. Let’s get geared up.”
    We each made sure our phones were switched to vibrate and checked our weapons—we all had the same pistols, knives and knuckle-dusters. In the quiet time after the White Devil’s death, Dave had encountered some piss-taking because of his insistence that we carry such heavy-duty weapons when the alert codes were used. Now I could see he’d been right. There could have been a squad of hard men hired by Sara in his spacious house.
    “What about silencers?” Pete asked.
    “The book says put ’em on,” Andy replied. He was referring to the operations manual Dave had given each of us.
    “The problem is, the Glock doesn’t fit in a pocket when it’s that long,” Rog said. He shrugged and screwed his silencer on when he saw the way Andy was looking at him. Slash had spent a couple of deeply unhappy years in the marine corps, but at least he’d learned to accept orders—when he agreed with them.
    “You’re taking the rifle, aren’t you, Boney?” I said. He nodded. Dave had obtained a Walther WA2000 sniper’s rifle with Schmidt and Bender telescopic sights 76
    Paul Johnston
    from the same dodgy East London arms dealer who had supplied our pistols and silencers. Pete was the best shot apart from Dave, so he got the big gun, which was actually shorter than an ordinary rifle and fitted into a tennis player’s bag.
    “Okay,” I said, “we’ll play this by the book, as Slash said.” I opened the copy that Pete handed me; I’d forgotten my own in the rush to leave home. “Rog, you’re on the front, behind the inner hedge and by the garages.”
    Dave’s house was detached and surrounded by tall trees and thick bushes. I once asked him how he could afford it on an