Here it comes, he thought.

They were sixty yards from the house when running figures spilled across the patio and down the steps, racing for the lawn. The flat reports of pistol shots popped through the night air. Whether they could be heard from the lodge house, Ben neither knew nor cared at this point. He and the others moved in closer to the crowd of prisoners and the shooting faltered and stopped, the security men not wanting to accidentally hit any of their lords and masters. Which didn’t make for fair tactics; but then sniping at someone from concealed cover with a precision rifle wasn’t exactly fair, just like stabbing a tethered woman to death with a dagger wasn’t exactly fair either. This was war.

Ben levelled his pistol and squeezed off a round. A fifty-yard shot on a moving target, nailed clean. The running figure crumpled to the ground. He added a notch to the tally in his head. Three down. Jeff and Reaper shot two more, making five. One of the security guards was toting an AR-15 carbine whose range and accuracy could have posed a problem, until a bullet from Tuesday blew out his chest and he fell back against the stone balustrade that flanked the steps up to the mansion. Six. Another guy went to snatch up the fallen carbine but a well-aimed three-shot burst from Wolf cut him short before he could deploy the weapon. Seven. After a few more exchanges of gunfire the remaining protectors of Karswell Hall lost heart, dropped their arms and fled into the night.

‘Ha! Look at ’em go, the filthy cowards,’ Jeff jeered.

‘If they’d wanted to stop us they should have brought a regiment,’ Ben said.

Tuesday asked, ‘You reckon they’ll call the cops?’

Wolf looked at him. ‘And tell them what? That some rough big boys broke in and interrupted a perfectly civilised Satanic murder ritual?’

Ben said, ‘Let’s keep moving.’

They marched the huddled circle of prisoners the rest of the way across the lawn and up the steps to the house. Some of the Pandemonium Club initiates were blustering angrily, others weeping in self-pity, others too frightened to utter a sound. Through an open pair of French windows was a room that looked like a country club lounge, with comfortable seating and a bar. One glance told Ben that it wasn’t secure enough for his purposes.

Leaving the others to hold the crowd at gunpoint he jogged on ahead and tried a couple of interior doors. A few steps down a passage he found a large banquet room. The walls were thick, dark, sculpted wood panelling, the furniture was shunted to one side and draped, and a layer of dust covered the grand stone fireplace at one end. The moonlight shining in through the tall bow windows at the opposite end of the room showed that they were barred on the outside.