No, not that kind.

Not yet, but it’s started. You did lash out, didn’t you?

He looked around the cab, certain that someone had spoken, the voice strangely familiar. The wheel twisted slightly so that he felt his heart skip a beat before he readjusted, fearful of sending the rig off the road and onto the slope, fearful of tumbling, of ending up trapped in his cab, trapped almost within sight of the old motel.

Not yet.

Where had that voice come from? And then he remembered: a warehouse, its walls cracked, its roof leaking, a consequence of the earlier bombing and the poor workmanship that had gone into its construction; a man, little more than a pile of bloodied cloth now, the life already leaving his eyes. Tobias was standing over him, the muzzle of his M4 carbine, the gun that had torn the man apart, pointing unwaveringly at the fighter’s head, as though this bloodied rag doll could pose any threat to him now.

‘Take it, take it all. It’s yours.’ The fingers, stained red, indicated the crates and boxes, the shrouded statues, that filled the warehouse. Tobias was amazed that he could even speak. He must have taken four, five shots to the body. Now there he was, waving a hand in the flashlight’s beam, as though any of this was his to give or to retain.

‘Thanks,’ said Tobias, and he felt himself sneer as he spoke the word, and heard the sarcasm in his voice, and he was ashamed. He had belittled himself in front of the dying man. Tobias hated him, hated him as he hated all of his kind. They were terrorists, haji: Sunni or Shia, foreign or Iraqi, they were all the same in the end. It didn’t matter what they called themselves: al-Qaeda, or one of the bullshit names of convenience that they made up from their stock jumble of phrases, like those collections of magnetic words that you stuck to your fridge and used to create bad poetry: Victorious Martyrs of the Brigade of Jihad, Assassination Front of the Imam Resistance, all interchangeable, all alike. Haji. Terrorist.

Yet there was an intimacy to death in moments like this, in giving it and in receiving it, and he had just breached the protocol, answering like a surly teenager, not a man.

The haji smiled, and some white was still visible through the blood that had filled his mouth and stained his teeth.

‘Don’t thank me,’ he said. ‘Not yet…’

Not yet. That was the voice he heard, the voice of a man with the promised virgins waiting for him in the next world, the voice of a man who had fought to protect what was in that warehouse.

Fought, but not hard enough. That was what Damien had said to him: they fought, but not as hard as they should have.

Why?

The motel came into view. To his left, he saw the line of boarded-up rooms and shivered. The place always gave him the creeps. No wonder Proctor had become what he was, holed up here with only the trunks of trees behind him and his bequest, this dump, before him. It was hard to look at those rooms and not imagine unseen guests, unwanted guests, moving behind the walls: guests who liked damp, and mold, and ivy curling around their beds; guests who were themselves in the process of decaying, malevolent shadows entwined on leaf-strewn beds, old ruined bodies moving rhythmically, dryly, passionlessly, the horns on their heads-

Tobias blinked hard. The images had been so vivid, so strong. They reminded him of some of the dreams he’d been having, except in those there had only been shadows moving, hidden things. Now they had shape, form.

Jesus, they had horns.

It was the shock, he decided, a delayed reaction to all that he had endured the evening before. He pulled up within sight of Proctor’s cabin and waited for him to emerge, but there was no sign. Proctor’s truck was parked over to the right. Under ordinary circumstances, Tobias would have hit the horn and rousted the old bastard, but it wouldn’t have done to blast the woods, particularly not since Proctor had a neighbor who might be tempted to come and take a look at what all the noise was about.

Tobias killed the engine and climbed down from the cab. His burned hand felt damp beneath the bandages, and he knew that the wounds were seeping. The only consolation for the pain and humiliation was the knowledge that payback would not be long in coming. The wetbacks had crossed the wrong people.

He walked up to the cabin and called Proctor’s name, but there was still no response from inside. He knocked on the door.

‘Hey, Harold, wake up,’ he called. ‘It’s Joel.’

Only then did he try the door. Even so, he was careful, and slow. Proctor slept with a gun close by, and Tobias didn’t want him coming out of a drunk’s sleep and loosing a couple of shots at a suspected intruder.

It was empty. Even in the gloom created by the mismatched drapes, he could see that. He hit the lightswitch and took in the unmade bed, the wrecked television and the demolished phone, the laundry spilling from a basket in the corner, and the smell of neglect, of a man who had let himself go. To his right was the kitchen-cum-living room. Tobias saw what it contained, and swore. Proctor had lost it, the asshole.

The remaining crates and boxes, the ones that were supposed to stay hidden in rooms 11, 12, 14 and 15, were stacked almost to the ceiling, visible to anyone who might just happen to stick a nose into Proctor’s place to see what was going on. The crazy old bastard had hauled them up here by himself instead of waiting for Tobias to come and take them off his hands. He hadn’t even bothered closing most of them. The stone face of a woman stared out of one; another contained more of the seals, their gemstones glittering as Tobias approached.

Worst of all, on the kitchen table, entirely unconcealed, stood a gold box, about two feet long, two feet wide, and a foot deep, its lid comparatively plain apart from a series of concentric circles radiating from a small spike. There was Arabic lettering along the margins, and its sides were decorated with intertwined bodies: twisted, distended figures with horns protruding from their heads.

Just like the figures I imagined in the motel rooms, thought Tobias. He had helped to move the box on that first night, recalling how they had opened the lead casket in which it was contained, revealing it to the flashlights. The gold had gleamed dully; later, Bernie Kramer, who came from a family of jewelers, would tell him that the box had recently been cleaned. There were traces of paint still visible, as though it had once been disguised to hide its true value. He had barely glanced at it then, for there were so many other artifacts to take in, and adrenalin was still coursing through his body in the aftermath of the fight. He hadn’t even seen the sides until now, just the top. There was no way that he could have known about the creatures carved into it, no way that he could have pictured them so clearly in his mind.

Warily, he approached the box. Three of its sides were sealed with twin locking devices shaped like spiders, with a single large spider lock on the front: seven locks in all. He heard that Kramer had tried to open it, but hadn’t been able to figure out how the mechanisms worked. They had discussed the possibility of breaking the box open to see what it contained, but wiser counsel had prevailed. A bribe was paid, and the box was x-rayed. It was found to be not one box but a series of interconnected boxes, each of the interior boxes having only three sides, the fourth in every case being one of the walls of the larger box surrounding it, but every box still appeared to have seven locks, only the arrangement of them differing slightly, the locks themselves growing smaller and smaller. Seven boxes, seven locks on each, forty-nine locks in total. It was a puzzle contraption, and it was empty apart from what the radiographer identified as fragments of bone, wrapped in what appeared to be wire, each wire connected in turn to the locks on the boxes. It might have looked like a bomb on the x-ray, but the box, Kramer had suggested, was a reliquary of some kind. He had also translated the Arabic writing on the lid. Ashrab min Damhum: ‘I will drink their blood.’ It was decided that the box should remain intact, the locks unbroken.