The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) by Layton Green Page A

understand why you didn’t mention the Diabolist angle sooner. Keeping things to yourself is fine, Viktor, we all have our secrets. Just make sure it never impacts an investigation I’m working on.”

PARIS
    F rom a booth in the corner, Luc Morel-Renard watched the crowd gather at the working-class bar in the eighteenth arrondissement. The neighborhood was home to Sacré Coeur, but also to some of the worst neighborhoods in metro Paris, and for some time Luc had seethed as North African and other immigrants overran his childhood home, bringing unemployment, crime, and gangs.
    Luc had been a rising star in the far right Unité Radicale, but when that organization disbanded after the failed Chirac assassination, Luc, gifted in both oration and the ideology of hate, had been approached by a member of L’église de la Bête. Though shocked at first by the group’s depravity and the requirements for membership, Luc realized that both his carnal and political ambitions could be furthered by joining the underground society.
    Luc had never been comfortable with Xavier’s leadership, which was too blunt for his taste. Xavier’s misguided Arceneau kidnappings had almost exposed them, and if the press got a whiff of Luc’s affiliation with L’église de la Bête, even his own radical followers would shun him. His church helped his political career from the inside out, not the outside in.
    As a fight broke out in the corner, Luc pondered his good fortune. Xavier was dead. Luc was now in charge of the direction of the church, and the only person he had to answer to was far more closely aligned with his own goals. In fact, Luc had come to realize the beauty and power of the Magus’s vision,and counted himself a loyal disciple. The Magus had promised to help Luc’s political career and more.
Much
more.
    The fight in the corner ended, a rare silence encasing the crowd as the bartender cranked the volume on the television. Simon Azar was speaking again, and every union man, biker, anarchist, Satanist, and local thug was listening. Luc watched in awe as Simon, sitting in a high-backed chair, spoke with a potent cocktail of intelligence, charisma, and self-effacing wisdom, his humanist message somehow managing to please intellectuals, blue-collar types, and social outcasts all at the same time. Religious leaders had already denounced him, but everyone else, the vast swaths of humanity swimming in the murky waters of agnosticism, clung to his life raft of hope. As Hitler said and proved, the power of the spoken word had started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history.
    Luc listened to the translator.
    “This morning I logged on to the Internet, and do you know what the three top news stories of the week were?” Simon ticked them off on his fingers. “One: another earthquake in Haiti. Two: Severe flooding in Brazil destroyed thousands of homes and millions of dollars’ worth of crops. Three: An Italian man living in an upper-class neighborhood, less than a mile from Vatican City, kidnapped and dismembered two local schoolchildren.”
    Simon paused to reflect on the gravity of the events. “Do you know what these three atrocities have in common? They happened, you see, in three of the most devoutly Catholic countries on the planet, and all in the same week. How many tens of thousands of people in those countries, how many millions, had prayed just that week for peace and prosperity? How far did it get them, how did it help the poor souls who died in those events? To think that God would kill our children or allow such atrocities to occur, under any theological system, is beyond ludicrous. We are not a rational species; rather, we rationalize. We do what we must to fit God within the framework we know.”
    The crowd murmured in approval.
    “And what if such tragedies were to occur in the countries of the godless, where original sin brings them hobbled into the world, and eternal damnationfinishes the job? What