The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani

pistol jabbed painfully at his eardrums and echoed far across the lake. He fired again, and again, then waited.
    The ice cracked. Fifteen yards from the shore, the spare wheel slipped into the water with a gurgle.
    Kinski wasn’t thinking about the cost of replacing an expensive Mercedes wheel. He was thinking about the weight of a man. Thicker ice would take more cracking. How much more? Would twenty-one rounds of 9mm do it? He felt in his pocket and heard the dull jangle of the spent cases that his gut was now telling him had been lying here since last January.

Chapter Thirteen
    Oxfordshire
    The video-clip was shaky and the picture quality was poor and grainy. The camera panned slowly around a big stone-walled room that was lit orange-gold by hundreds of candles. Long shadows lay across the black and white tiled floor. Three thick stone pillars stood in a wide-spaced triangle around the edges of the room, reaching to the vaulted ceiling. Against the far wall stood a raised platform, looking like a small stage. Above it, a golden sculpture of a ram’s head with long, curled horns glittered in the flickering light.
    Leigh frowned. ‘What the hell is this place?’
    ‘I can hear something,’ Ben muttered. He turned up the volume on the laptop. The sound was the heavy breathing of whoever had been filming. Suddenly the camera whipped sideways and the picture became confused. ‘Oh, fuck’ , said a frightened voice, close into the microphone.
    ‘That’s Oliver’s voice,’ Leigh whispered. She was gripping the edge of the table with white fingers.
    They watched. The camera righted itself. A dark, craggy edge obscured a third of the picture. ‘He’s hiding behind a pillar,’ Ben said.
    Some people were coming into the room. Blurred at first, the picture jerky, then sharpening up as the autofocus kicked in. The men filtered in through an archway. There were twelve or fifteen of them, all wearing black suits. The camera retreated further behind the pillar.
    ‘Olly, what were you doing ?’ Leigh said with a sob in her voice.
    Now the men were arranging themselves in a semicircle around the raised platform. They all stood in the same way, like soldiers standing to attention with their feet together and their arms clasped behind their backs. Their faces were hard to make out. The nearest was standing only a few feet from where Oliver was hiding. The camera hovered on the man’s back, travelled up to his neck and his cropped sandy hair. It autofocused on his ear. It was mangled and scarred, as though it had once been half torn off and sewn back on.
    Ben turned his gaze on the platform, straining to make out the details. He realized what he was looking at was an altar. It was the focus of the room, illuminated by dozens of candles set in recesses in the wall. The centre of whatever was about to happen. It was like some kind of religious ceremony. But none that he’d ever seen before.
    In the middle of the altar was an upright wooden post, maybe a foot and a half thick and about eight feet high, rough and unvarnished. Lengths of chain hung from it, two of them, thick and heavy, fastened to a riveted steel belt around the top of it.
    Now there was movement. A tall iron door behind the altar swung open. Three more men came into the large room. Two were wearing black hoods. The third seemed to be their prisoner. They were clutching his arms. He was struggling. They dragged him across the platform to the altar.
    The camera wobbled and the heavy breathing was quickening. In the background, the prisoner’s cries were echoing off the stone walls.
    ‘I don’t think you should see this,’ Ben said. He could feel his own heartbeat beginning to race. He reached for the Stop button.
    ‘Let it play on,’ she snapped back.
    The men in black hoods shoved the prisoner against the wooden post and manacled him to the chains. His cries were louder now.
    One of the hooded men stepped forward with something in his hand. He went up to