The Doomsday Prophecy by Scott Mariani

spat in his face. Slapped him hard across the cheek.
    He turned away from her. His cheek was stinging. He looked down at his feet. He could feel all their eyes on him. Two nurses had come running when they heard the raised voices. They stood staring, frozen in alarm.
    Rhonda was bent double, racked with sobbing, shoulders heaving. Her mother put her arms around her. ‘Come on, darling. Let’s go.’ They turned to leave. Rhonda’s father shot Ben a last look of venom as he pushed past the nurses.
    Her mother hovered in the doorway, clutching her daughter tight in her arms. She turned and looked Ben in the eye. ‘God damn you,’ she said, ‘if you can live with this on your conscience.’

Chapter Eighteen
    Paxos The same day, 8 a.m.
       
    Just over thirty miles away on the island of Paxos, the fair-haired man called Hudson was sitting at a table in the empty house by the beach. The woman, Kaplan, was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder as they both stared intently at the laptop screen in front of them.
    The digital video image was as crisp as it had looked through the lens when they’d filmed the scene from the apartment window the previous day. The camera was zoomed in on the two men sitting at the table near the edge of the terrace. For now, they were calling them Number One and Number Two. Number One was the man they’d been monitoring after he’d started asking questions about Zoë Bradbury. Number Two was the man who’d unexpectedly come to join him. They knew less about him, and that bothered them.
    What bothered them more, in the aftermath of thebombing, was that he was still alive. It was what was keeping them here, when they should be packing up this job and heading for home.
    On screen, the conversation was intense. Then the child with the ball appeared. After a moment one of the two men jumped up from his chair and ran out into the road. Seconds later, the café terrace was engulfed with flames.
    ‘Pause it,’ Kaplan said.
    Hudson tapped a key. On screen, the unfolding fireball and flying debris stood still, sudden terror frozen on the faces of the victims caught in the blast.
    ‘Scroll it to the left,’ she said.
    He held down another key and the image panned across. The green delivery van was slewed at an angle in the road. The other side of it, the man who had leapt from the café terrace was sprawled on the ground, shielding the child.
    She watched him thoughtfully, pressing a finger to her lips in concentration. ‘Did he know something?’ she said. ‘Did he see it coming?’
    ‘Doesn’t look like it to me,’ Hudson said. ‘He ran out to save the kid. A second later, he’d have been caught up in it too.’
    ‘What if he saw Herzog? What if he remembers him? He’s a witness.’
    ‘No way. It was just chance. He had no idea what was coming.’
    She frowned. ‘Maybe. Go back. OK, stop. Replay.’
    ‘We’ve been through this a hundred times,’ Hudson said.

    ‘I want to know who this guy is. I get a bad feeling about him.’
    They watched and listened again. The sound was scratchy and filled with background sound – jumbled conversation from other tables and passers-by, traffic, general white noise.
    ‘The sound is shit,’ Kaplan muttered.
    ‘Yeah, well, we didn’t exactly get much time to prepare,’ Hudson said. ‘If I hadn’t thought to bring the stuff just in case, we wouldn’t even be listening to this conversation at all.’
    ‘Just shut up and let the damn thing play.’
    He went quiet. Kaplan was in charge, and he already knew she could be pretty mean if he pushed it too far.
    ‘Pause,’ she said. ‘Did you hear that? He mentioned her name again. Go back.’
    He rewound the image a few frames. ‘It’s hard to be sure.’
    ‘I’m sure. Turn up the volume,’ she said. ‘Can you clean it up any more?’
    ‘I’ve cleaned it up all I can,’ Hudson replied irritably. He’d been up most of night working on it, painstakingly whittling away as many