The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani Page A

the prisoner and raised his hands up to the man’s face. He had his back to the camera and it was hard to see what was happening. The prisoner’s screams were becoming shriller and he was struggling wildly against the chains.
    Then the hooded man stepped away. There was something hanging from the prisoner’s mouth. It was a thin rope or cable. As the hooded man stepped away the cable was pulled tauter and Ben realized with a horrified lurch what was happening. The camera was beginning to shake badly.
    ‘Oh Jesus !’ Leigh exclaimed in horror. ‘They put a hook through his tongue!’
    The hooded man stopped and turned to face the audience. The cable was pulled as tight as it would go. The prisoner couldn’t scream any more. His tongue was stretched six inches out of his mouth. His eyes were bulging, his body quaking.
    The second hooded man came forward. Something glinted in the candlelight. He raised the ceremonial dagger above his head.
    It came down in a flashing arc. The prisoner’s head was thrown backwards as his tongue was sliced off. The cable snaked away like a bowstring with the glistening tongue attached. Blood spurted from the prisoner’s mouth and his head jerked from side to side, his eyes rolling.
    But his suffering was cut short. The hooded knifeman stepped forward again. The dagger came in low and stuck deep into the man’s abdomen. The blade sawed and stabbed like a butcher’s knife, slicing a path from groin to ribcage.
    When his guts began to spill, even Ben had to look away.

Chapter Fourteen
    It had taken a long time to calm Leigh afterwards. Eventually, the tranquillizers began to take effect and she lay sleeping on the hotel bed, her black hair spread across the pillow and her body rising and falling slowly.
    Ben covered her with a blanket and sat beside her on the edge of the bed, watching over her and thinking hard. Then he stood up, went back to the desk and watched the video-clip again.
    He watched it three times, pausing it frequently to study the details. He watched it right to the end. After the victim was disembowelled the cameraman had had enough. The picture went jerky, dark, then jerky again. He could hear Oliver’s ragged breathing. He was running.
    Ben kept pausing the clip, staring at the screen. Stone walls. Some kind of staircase. The picture was crazy but by pausing frame by frame he could just about make it out. As Oliver ran on, the rough stone walls disappeared and he seemed to be in what looked like a very opulent house. A doorway, then a corridor. Shiny wood panels. A painting, brightly illuminated by a lamp above its frame. Ben paused the clip and studied it closely.
    It was hard to tell, but the painting seemed to show some kind of meeting. The setting was a big hall. There were columns that looked a lot like the ones in the room where the victim had been executed. The same tiles on the floor. The men in the painting wore wigs and were dressed in what looked like eighteenth-century clothes-brocade jackets and silk stockings. There were symbols around the walls, but he couldn’t make them out.
    He let the clip run on. Oliver’s breath was rasping out of the speaker as he staggered down the corridor. He stopped, swung round as if looking back to see if someone was following him. Nobody was.
    Ben paused the clip again. He could see something. An alcove in the wall. Inside the alcove stood a statue that looked Egyptian, like a Pharaoh’s death mask.
    Then the clip came to an end. Oliver must have turned off the camera. Ben was left staring at a black screen.
    He struggled to understand what he’d seen. He clicked on the file properties. The video-clip had been created at 9.26 on the night Oliver died.
    None of this made sense. The official version of the story, that Oliver had been drunkenly messing about on the lake with some woman he’d picked up at a party, was impossible to reconcile with the fact that, not long before his death, he’d witnessed a brutal