His name was Mehmet Ozevelat and his heart was pounding. But despite his fear, Ozevelat, a member of the Church of The New Dawn's splinter group named The Free Radicals, was overcome by an intoxicating feeling of euphoria unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. It felt as though his every sense had come alive. Cut off from everything around him he felt…reborn. This, he knew, was the divine ecstasy written about by Archimedes, Socrates and the Blessed Saints.
The ecstasy of serving His purpose.
The cyanide drops had worked exactly as he was told they would. Yet who could have imagined it would have taken three sips of the poisoned water before the big Englishman felt the effects of the deadly toxin cursing through his veins!
No matter for the ox was as good as slain the moment his lips touched the glass.
Despite its quaint history as the preferred assassins’ tool of Ancient Rome, hydrogen cyanide was still the fastest acting poison known to Man. Composed of just three atoms in its molecule, the chemical was virtually untraceable. Unstoppable. And, once ingested, a harbinger of death as sure as a dagger through the heart.
From the instant the deadly toxin entered the Englishman’s blood stream, it began wreaking a path of joyous destruction through his nervous system on its way to his brain. Before his taste buds had time to register the cyanides bitter-almond sapidity it was already too late.
The chain of miniature chemical explosions had been triggered.
By the second sip his arteries’ ability to transport oxygen had been crippled. His tissues, cut off from their vital supply of red blood cells, quickly began the process of asphyxiation. Robbed of air, the electrical activity to his central nervous system slowly ground to a halt. It would have taken just three seconds for his brain to begin the process of shutting down in a desperate, futile, act of self-preservation.
The three seconds may as well have been an eternity.
Before he had time to figure out what was happening the Englishman would have slipped into a coma. And then perhaps a final flicker of electrical impulse to the brain as the cold hand of death squeezed the last breath of life from his lungs.
As Mehmet closed the emergency exit door of the hotel he could hear the distant wail of a police siren drawing steadily closer. A fine evening drizzle had begun to fall and its thin grey sheet softened the outline of the city.
Leaning against the door he allowed the drops of rain to wash the sweat from his brow. Almost without thinking he reached into his tunic to pull out a hand polished silver crucifix attached to a thin chain of white gold. As Mehmet gently caressed the crucifix between his forefinger and thumb a clap of thunder bellowed from the darkened clouds and a peal of lightening momentarily lit up the sky.
Standing in the rain Mehmet kissed the rosary’s Christ figure and whispered to it: ‘*In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.’
Carefully tucking the pendent back inside his shirt he checked his watch. The time was twenty minutes past eight. Good. Everything was going according to plan.
Turning the corner of the hotel building Mehmet hurried to a white large-panel Renault Master van parked a few feet from the intersection of Brook’s Mews and Avery Rows. There was very little traffic and at the end of the road, where Brook’s Mews met Davies Street, he could see a blue and white police car parked near the entrance of the hotel.
The car was empty, its drivers side door open and its occupants obviously inside the restaurant admiring his handiwork.
Taking a final look around he reassured himself that he had been unobserved before unlocking the van’s sliding side door.
Inside the cab of the van the interior loading light was on and in its impassive dim glow he could make out a rucksack holding his change of clothes. And beside it, lying face down on the metal floor was the body of a man. His neck had been slit and his blood had formed a dark patch across the floor of the van.
The man’s eye’s were open and stared accusingly at Mehmet. Mehmet hardly glanced at the body.
Pulling the rucksack over he sat on it, and, reaching between his legs, undid a side pocket on the bag. He took out the mobile phone he had been given earlier. The phone had been programmed to only dial one number. Mehmet pushed the ‘send’ button and, almost instantly, a man’s voice answered: ‘Yes.’
‘It’s done. Everything went as instructed. It was almost perfect.’ There was a long pause at the other end. The man’s voice was unhurried and compelling. ‘Almost? Tell me what happened.’ Mehmet swallowed hard. In his mind he had replayed this conversation over and over. Except in his fancies he had been spared the difficulty of saying that word ‘almost.’
‘I got one of them. But the professor… he didn’t drink the water. I poured for him but he didn’t drink. What do you want me to do?’ There was a long silence at the other end. Then: ‘How did you get away?’
‘I stole a waiters uniform. No-one saw me.’
‘And the waiter?’
‘I had to…I…’ He glanced at the body lying just a few feet. ‘He saw my face…’ Again a heavy silence. The conversation was not going the way Mehmet had planned.
His feeling of euphoria had deserted him as quickly as it had come. Now he just felt alone. Hanging onto the phone. Shivering with cold and waiting for his master to speak.
Mehmet thought he heard a sigh before the voice spoke again. ‘You have done very well my son. We are pleased with the service that you have performed. There is just one last deed I must ask of you. The disappearance of the waiter may cause some…complications. It will be noticed and his death may, eventually, be traced back to you and, therefore, to us.
‘My son, we are too close to our goal to allow anything to hinder us. I must ask you to be strong. Embrace salvation in His glory. Seek everlasting life in the End of Your Cycle. God be with you.’
The line went dead.
For what seemed like hours Mehmet sat holding the phone in the stillness of the darkened van. The dead body by his side was the only witness to his tears.
Breathing deeply Mehmet replaced the phone in the bag. Kneeling, he pulled out the crucifix he wore around his neck, kissed it again and offered the prayer: ‘In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum*’
Closing his eyes he flexed the muscles of his neck to the point where his veins began to bulge. Then with a sharp, sudden, motion he turned his head almost 90 degrees, shattering the bones of his cervical vertebrae and severing his spinal cord.
His lifeless body fell to the carpeted floor of the van with a dull thud.
The rain continued to beat down mercilessly on the van sounding like tiny insects trying to eat their way through its roof. Inside it was quite as the two dead bodies lay facing each other. Both responsible for the others death. Both with unseeing eyes wide open in silent accusation.