A Declaration of War (God and Satan's Talks Book 1) Read online

  A Declaration of War

  God and Satan Talks Series

  Matthew Paisley

  Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Paisley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  The story continues…

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  About the Author

  Also by Matthew Paisley

  Chapter One

  “Hello, Esther Zhi speaking, cryptographer for Bath and Avon Somerset Police, how can I help you?” Esther grabbed the phone on the third ring but kept her eyes fixed on the puzzle in front of her.

  She was trying to decipher a coded crossword left behind after a recent theft at a jewellery store. Her superior, Chief Inspector Dakota Ryder, had thrown it on her desk as she walked past earlier that day, mumbling something along the lines of, ‘You’re usually good with this nonsense. See if it means anything.’

  As the sun had set and the night sky turned black, covering the tall police building, Esther was determined to finish the crossword and prove she could be of some use in her new job.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?” Her eyes briefly glanced away from the crossword and the ink stains across its surface as she looked at the main desk phone. The time was still ticking away on the call—the caller had clearly not hung up.

  She waited a minute, listening to the dead air, and was about to hang up when she heard someone take a breath.

  “Hello there. It is certainly interesting to speak to you.”

  “Interesting?” Esther repeated, turning her attention back to the crossword and scribbling quickly with her pen to fill in another clue. The ink nib scratched the surface, indenting the paper. “So far, we have not even passed three sentences between us. I think you should reserve judgement for now.”

  There was a deep laugh down the phone, which distorted slightly, echoing against her ear and making her recoil.

  She turned the paper she was scribbling on at a right angle and quickly doodled two words outside of the crossword:

  Audio distortion.

  After a beat of silence, she quickly made a note of the time of the call.

  She turned back to the crossword, wondering why the strange caller would feel the need to distort his voice.

  “I will keep my reasons for finding it interesting for now. My name is Abner.”

  “Abner? Should I know you?” Esther threw down the pen in frustration, turning her eyes to the clock on her desk. It was quarter to eight—long past the time she should have left for the evening. Yet she had stayed, determined to prove her worth. She was now regretting it. “What is your call regarding?” She attempted a more business tone, wary of the number of hoax calls the department received.

  Around her, the clinical glass office was empty and she could see her reflection in the window. With a mixed Chinese and British heritage, her almond-shaped eyes had narrowed further in suspicion of the phone call.

  “I wish to play a game.”

  “A game?” she scoffed, looking back down to the crossword. “You are aware that you have called the police, sir? And the cryptography department at that.”

  “Precisely. It is with you I wished to speak.”

  “Why me?” Esther’s hand froze around the pen, sudden disquiet growing within her. She flicked the pen back and forth, striking her knuckles.

  “We will get to that later.” The voice paused, dragging out each syllable carefully to emphasise its point.

  “Well, you have my attention.” She clenched her hand, feeling tension rise.

  “That is what I wanted.” The distortion shifted again, proving it was a cheap piece of tech.

  Esther started scribbling more words around her crossword:

  Cheap distortion tech. Possibly a phone app.

  “Tell me, Esther. Do you believe in God?”

  “No, I do not.” Esther underlined the word ‘distortion’, feeling more anxiety bloom in her stomach. “Do you?”

  “I do,” the caller confirmed, the tone betrayed a certainty. “He is an unpleasant thing, don’t you think?”

  “As I said, I don’t believe in him.”

  “He plays games with us all.” The voice clicked on the other end of the phone. “We dance like puppets for him.”

  “You mentioned a game of your own. What game do you wish to play?” She turned the crossword upside down, the old puzzle long forgotten now she had something new to think about.

  “It is a listening game.” The voice paused again, apparently enjoying himself. “I will give you a clue.”

  “A clue? What kind of clue?” Esther looked around the office, suddenly keen for someone to be there to witness the call and ensure she wasn’t inventing the situation.

  “A cryptic one. It is your speciality, isn’t it?” The voice laughed this time. Esther fidgeted in her seat, feeling uneasy.

  “You are lucky I am not busy with work, otherwise, I would have hung up by now.”

  “You would be unwise to hang up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this game is about something important.”

  “What is this something important?”

  “A human life.”

  Esther did not reply. She waited for his next words but he said nothing. He merely continued to breathe heavily down the phone.

  She fidgeted in her seat again, clearing her throat to speak.

  “Are you issuing a threat, Abner?” She hurriedly wrote his name down alongside her other scribbles.

  “Not exactly.” He chuckled again, enjoying her discomfort. “I will give you a clue and you must solve it to save someone’s life.”

  Relief suddenly washed over Esther and she threw the pen back down on her desk, watching it roll across the glass surface.

  “We have a dozen prank calls a day. This will be logged as another. Goodbye, Abner.” She hung up the phone, listening to the thud of the device in the cradle and the silence after it.

  A minute passed as she stared at the crossword.

  They had received so many prank calls of late, many in a similar vain. She had only started working at the constabulary a few months ago after graduating from university with a Masters in Cryptography, but even she had seen in that small amount of time how many hoax calls they received in the department.

  Unless there was anything to suggest sincerity, her boss told her to ignore them.

  She turned the crossword the right way up, trying to finish the clues. She breathed deeply, trying to dissipate the knot that had formed in her stomach from the stranger’s phone call.

  She completed two more clues when the phone rang again. She turned her eyes to the screen of the cradle—UNKNOWN CALLER.

  She let it ring three times before picking up the phone.

  “Hello, Esther Zhi—”

  “This is no prank.” Abner’s voice had returned, harsher this time.

  She leaned back in her seat, feeling the knot return tenfold.

  “You sound no different to the prank calls we receive.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Apart from the voice distortion.” As her words made the stranger laugh, she realised how odd this was. Most
hoax callers wouldn’t bother with such a trick. It was excessive at the very least for a prankster.

  She fidgeted as he continued to laugh, realising it was possible that this wasn’t a prank call.

  “I see, I must prove my sincerity to you.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “Well, first, I will give you your clue.” Abner cleared his voice as though about to recite a great speech. “Do you need a pen, Esther?”

  “I have one.” She turned the crossword over, ready to use the blank space.

  “Then listen carefully. You sit in Bath, a Roman town, but though the name was not given to the town by its occupiers, they gave it something else.”

  She hurried to copy down his words, each letter slanted sideways in her hurry.

  “Inside, you’ll find the woman of art, wisdom, and battle too. The lady of creation and destruction who carries a branch to atone for sins. There, you’ll find someone who has taken a little too much of the Romans’ gift to this town.” He paused, letting the silence drag out between them as he breathed deeply. “Understand, Esther?”

  Esther hurried to finish her scribbled words.

  “This is it?” She re-read the text in confusion.

  “It is enough to find the location.”

  “Then offer me a clue to something else.” Esther felt a rising panic. There had been thought put into the clue. As her mind was already working to decode the words, her common sense told her something else… prank callers rarely put such thought into their jokes. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why? Because I want to.”

  The heaviness of the words brought goosebumps to her skin.

  “This could still be a prank.” She shook her head, attempting a smile. “There is no reason for me to believe you.”

  “Then you better decode my little clue, Esther. And hurry. Your time might run out.”

  “Time? You have not given me a timer.”

  “Didn’t I?” The voice distortion adjusted. “Thirty minutes, which started roughly two minutes ago when I gave you the clue.”

  Esther suddenly leaned to the side and switched on her computer again, dragging her keyboard out from the neat place she had tucked it away.

  “Abner?”

  He had hung up. The cold ring of a dead phone on the other side was her only response.

  “Shit!” She threw down the phone, suddenly panicking.

  Chapter Two

  Esther jumped away from the desk and hurried across the corridors of the building, passing row upon row of empty tables, each one sat alone with blank computer screens as their only company. She crossed departments until she reached the open-plan office she had come to detest the sight of.

  It belonged to the CID department and was led by Esther’s least favourite colleague.

  Chief Inspector Dakota Ryder, an American inspector, had not shown any warmth to Esther since her arrival. The animosity had only been reciprocated.

  Dakota could do something Esther couldn’t—she could read people’s behaviour and unspoken feelings very well. Esther knew her own cold and analytical view of life had ruffled Dakota’s feathers in the wrong way on more than one occasion, causing frequent arguments.

  Nevertheless, Esther knew the woman was more experienced in this field than she was. At least fifteen years her senior, she would know what to do about such a strange phone call.

  Esther practically ran to the inspector’s office, her heeled black boots clomped against the sleek tiled floor the whole way. Floor-to-ceiling glass panels boxed in a messy and unkempt desk, but there was no one there beyond the clutter and the empty swivel chair.

  “Shit!” Esther cried again into the empty office, bursting through the room and searching the papers on Dakota’s desk. She sifted through the discarded files, earning a thin paper cut to her right hand.

  She was tempted to dump a bundle of the messy papers in the bin, wondering how the woman ever found anything she needed in the chaos.

  A minute later, she found a post-it note stuck to the bottom of Dakota’s computer screen.

  Personal mobile number – only use for emergencies.

  She grabbed the post-it note and ran back through the corridors to her desk. With each step, her anxiety was rising and she was suddenly sure that Abner was no prank caller after all. It hadn’t sounded like any of the other hoax calls she’d received.

  Besides, when pranksters were caught out, they usually gave up. They did not call back and insist on being listened to the way Abner had.

  Grabbing the desk phone, she quickly dialled the number from the post-it note, trying to calm her pacing feet as they shifted under her. She attempted to take control of her ragged breathing as the phone rang out. Just before it went to voicemail, Dakota answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Ma’am? It’s Esther Zhi.”

  “What do you want? I’m off duty.” Dakota’s American accent rang down the phone in annoyance.

  “I’ve just had a call from someone who called himself ‘Abner’.” She turned the crossword she had scribbled across back over. “He gave me a riddle and said I had to solve it to save a human life.”

  “Slow down, miss robot.” Dakota made other sounds, apparently excusing herself from some kind of social situation. “Let me understand. Someone has phoned the cryptography department, given you a riddle, and said you will find a person at wherever this riddle points to? Is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you don’t think this is a prank call?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why not?”

  “Call it logic.” Esther bit her lip and resisted calling the woman ‘ma’am’ again. She saw no need to give Dakota respect when she was clearly receiving none in return.

  “Listen, Zhi, I know you’re new to this, but think it through. It doesn’t make sense for someone to do something like this and for it to be genuine.”

  “What do you mean?” Esther’s feet stilled beneath her momentarily.

  “This man has threatened to kill someone, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Solve the riddle and you can get there in time to save their life, right?”

  “Right again.”

  “Why warn you?”

  “What?” Esther started fidgeting again, suddenly impatient with the conversation and desperate to return to the riddle to figure out what it meant. She attempted to pull the crossword closer to her, but she gave up when Dakota started speaking again.

  “It’s common sense not to tell anyone you’re going to commit a murder. Why warn them?” Dakota’s voice was matter-of-fact. There was distant chit-chat in the background as though she was in a bar or restaurant.

  Esther couldn’t reply. She stood there for a minute looking down at the crossword she had scribbled over on her desk.

  “Well, perhaps he wants to get caught?” Esther threw the thought out there, not really believing her words.

  “No one wants to get caught. It’s a prank, Zhi. Go home, leave it be. Look, you’ve covered yourself. The record will show you have reported it to me and that I did not find it a credible threat.”

  “Wait, please, ma’am, just listen. I thought it may have been a prank at first, but it doesn’t make sense the more I think about it. When I hung up, he called back. He’s given me half an hour. He was using voice distortion. What prank caller bothers to use voice distortion? And the clue is too sophisticated just to be some prankster taking a chance—”

  “That means nothing. We get hundreds of prank calls a week! Some do it consistently just to have fun. It’s probably someone who rang up last week and got nowhere, so this time, they are upping their game.”

  “Then why the voice distortion?”

  “So that you wouldn’t recognise his voice from the last prank call.”

  “And I’ve heard many of them, ma’am. This was different. Most callers don’t put such thought into their pranks.”

  “What, to
use voice distortion? Bloody hell, Zhi. It’s just a bloody good prank caller. He’s wasting your time and now my time too. Go home.”

  “Home?” Esther’s fear suddenly morphed to anger. “I will not go home now! There could be someone dead at the end of this riddle!”

  “Oh, you really think so? Gullible. Esther, go home.”

  “No. I’m going to figure out this riddle. It could be real.”

  “Yeah, right! Yesterday, we had a call to say someone was going to shoot the mayor. We upped the security and nothing happened—nothing at all. Look, I’ve got to go, some people are waiting for me. If you’re so desperate to do things by the book, just figure out the clue and text it to me. Does the clue point to somewhere in Bath?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, text it to me and I’ll have a patrol car swing around to make sure. Alright, Zhi? Understood?”

  Esther felt her anger spike.

  “You still don’t think it’s credible?”

  “No.”

  Esther suddenly doubted Dakota would send the patrol car at all. She felt as though she was being placated. She was the young newcomer at the constabulary, determined to do a good job and being belittled for it.

  “Understand, Esther?”

  At the patronizing tone, she hung up the phone.

  Chapter Three

  “Shit!” Esther mumbled as she plonked down in her seat with a huff. She threw the post-it note at the nearest bin, no longer caring to return it to its home. It drifted like a feather, bobbing to and fro before landing in the metal basket.

  She looked at the time on her watch. Ten minutes had already gone. Fear knotted in her stomach, writhing like a snake.

  She pulled over a fresh piece of paper and re-read Abner’s clue on the back of the crossword. She flicked the pen back and forth between her fingers as she read, striking her knuckles in her usual habit.