Leopard Dreaming (21 page)

Red grinned with his mouth full of blood and heard the last of the day’s screams echo softer as the other crewmen led their injured comrades away. Despite the restraining hands, he backed up a step, preparing to launch himself again.

‘Stop!’ Kitching ordered as he replaced some of the crew in the small room. He brandished a handgun at the matron, and Red knew weaponry as well as any encyclopaedia at Serenity. He recognised it at once as a sleek little Kimber, Colt 45 variant. Blued steel. Only semi-automatic, but too high-powered to fire aboard a sub unless the goal included perforating the hull like a teabag, yet Red had already heard the warning and stopped long enough to chew thoroughly and swallow. Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth and he licked that too, intimidated not so much by the top dog’s weapon, but the direction he pointed it; at the female.

Commander Kurst entered next; the short stocky Euro-Asian with the odd Russian accent and long plait of dark hair. He wielded a thin bamboo cane and looked more like a drug lord than a submariner with all the tattoos on his face and arms. Or perhaps he’d look more at home in a primitive fishing village. He grinned at Red and straightened the matron’s chair before caressing her hair, as if he owned her.

Red growled, levelling his glare at the newcomer and preparing to accept the challenge, but distracted by the muffled cries of his angel, rippling back to him —
no … don’t listen —
and his brother’s calmer voice, whispering over and over at the same time;
down, boy, I’ve got this … You’ve done enough here.
Red shook his head, feeling the primal throb of a raging headache and frustrated, trying to make sense of it. Not just the echoing warnings, but also the unexpected loss of his silence. It had been so quiet, and yet he could normally hear all the sounds in a place for at least a year ahead, depending on interference from loud noise and how busy the place could get normally from day to day.

Under water,
he thought, momentarily inspired by a different kind of whisper inside his head. One far less primal than him, and far wiser; Fredarick the Sage, who often tempered his rage.

Maybe it’s being down here that makes a difference to how far we can hear. The distances deep under frigid salt water must be limited
.
Or perhaps constrained within this particular thermal layer. That must be why he’s keeping us down here. Not only to avoid detection and capture, but also to contain us in a place that’s remote from where the most critical events shall play out. He doesn’t care about our peace at all. He cares only for secrets and control.

Sit,
Kitching ordered using sign language.
We need to discuss what happened today.
Signing clumsily one-
handed, though, it looked more like
speak things
, and served only to silence the inner sage.

Red got the message anyway and sat, never big on words himself and much preferring to watch and listen before making his next move, no matter how hotly the blood pulsed within him. His angel seemed safe enough for now, and for the fore-hearable future, so long as he behaved and displayed the appropriate respect for his taller brother. Yet part of him resented that too since age should have made him the dominant male, and he scowled, making plans to prove it. The strong always underestimated the meek, and that alone could be wielded as well as any weapon.

Commander Kurst informs me we have a problem.

Red noticed the matron straining to make sounds around her gag and guessed that she’d tried to warn him with
no, don’t listen.
But the moment he saw those words dribble over her lips, that echo rippled over the threshold at the soft end of the sound barrier, into the silent past.

Kurst whipped her lap with the cane, leaving a red stripe across her knees where her short skirt had ridden up, and Red leapt back to his feet to defend her.

Kitching blocked him and pushed him down again with a single finger.

Down
,
boy,
Red read from his lips.
I’ve got this.
Then Kitching pointed at Kurst and signalled for him to leave.
You’ve done enough here.
So now it made sense. That single warning had been intended for two people.

Kurst nodded and obeyed, shouldering into Red on his way out and affording him a long, challenging grin. Red growled again with greater menace, until Kitching patted his shoulder, reminding him of his place. Top mongrel at Serenity, perhaps, but just another underdog in his brother’s much wider universe. For now, at least.

Kitching closed the door, and winked at the tightly bound matron. He set the Kimber down on the table
with the sharp end pointed at her and hooked his hip on the desk, staring squarely at Red.
Haven’t I been good to you, old man? Forget how many times I’ve saved your little lady from Kurst so far. Look how I respect your silence by talking as much as I can with my hands. Consider how many miles we’ve come to find such a quiet place for you to rest. And that straitjacket? Isn’t it ten times nicer than the one you requested?

Red shook his head, dislocated his shoulders and shrugged out of the jacket.
Too soft,
he signed as he offered it to Kitching.
Needs lining with sandpaper.

You can get out?
Kitching examined it briefly before casting it aside on the bunk.
So why did you want it so badly in the first place?

Freddie’s not allowed out. He’ll run amok in here.
Then he leaned closer and spoke in smaller hand movements, as if his fingers could also whisper.
He’s crazy. Did you know?

Talking about yourself in third person, brother, that’s a little unsettling.
The colonel scratched his turkey neck for a moment, then leaned across to the matron and unleashed her gag.
Anything you omitted to tell me about him?

She spat in his face and clammed up. The little whisper in Red’s mind told him why. If his brother wanted to know anything about him, he should have read one of the annual Christmas cards which had always been sent by staff with a brief summary of his regressions and progress under the various other matrons over the decades.

Kitching toyed with the Kimber, one finger turning it back and forwards by the trigger. Such small movements with the muzzle, and yet so much more menacing than simply waving it.

Red trembled, knowing she’d never answer him with her hands restrained. He’d heard every word and
every way they could be said in this frigid place and knew his time was short in any case.
Freddie’s part of the tribe,
he explained.

Tribe? What tribe? … At Serenity?

He pounded his chest seven times with his fist, one for each new ego, and then once on his forehead.
All in here.

Kitching leaned back, thoughtfully watching him.
Split personality?

Layman’s terms. Misleading in so many ways, but Red nodded anyway, since everything boiled down to simple black and white for him too.

Today then … what’s happening with Mira, the surprise appearance of two detectives, and the punishment Kurst dished out to your little lady as soon as he learned that you’ve been holding out on us with such details? Whose fault was this?

Guilt struck him like a freight train. Red the hunter-warrior shuddered, threw his head back in agony, and when the throbbing in his head eventually eased, he woke again, this time entirely as Fredarick the Sage.

Kitching gripped him by the chin and studied him more closely, as if he’d noticed the change in his eyes that time too. He patted Fredarick twice on the cheek.
Did you hear me, brother?

Fredarick nodded grimly. ‘I hear everything.’

Apparently not, unless you’re lying to me. Mira Chambers has two feds with her as we speak. We’re too deep now to get a visual, but my man in surveillance reports that she just set sail with them, investigating.

‘Matters not,’ Fredarick argued softly. ‘Comes to nothing.’

You can bet it will now. I’ll make sure of it.

‘Yes, yes, by having your alpha team attack in a hijacked police boat, but you must ensure they take care not to hurt any of them.’

‘Trust me, they won’t feel a thing.’

‘Hear me,’ he pleaded. ‘You can’t inflict any harm upon her companions or the whole plan falls apart! I kept nothing from you. It’s not compassion for them that drives me, and I explained all the key points of this stage in the manuscript, I assure you! Turn to the chapter called “Leopard Hunting” and you’ll see their names there, all laid out and staring back at you!’

‘In Braille.’ Kitching slapped a heavy hand on Fredarick’s shoulder, making him shrink and wish he was still wearing the padded straitjacket. ‘I don’t read Braille. You know I can’t. And you told me she’d make the rendezvous.’

‘And so she shall! At the appointed time, in the appointed place — and the meeting at the hotel is still just a ruse, just as I took great pains to explain.’ He’d been there already, taken ashore by Kitching’s men on the fourth day of his captivity and forced to track everywhere Mira would go, while his beloved matron had been kept aboard with Kurst and that evil cane. Withholding information from them couldn’t be any more dangerous, and yet he’d been forced to retain a few small things in order to remain the only one in full command of the potential consequences.

‘She’d better be,’ Kitching whispered.
Or the commander may be unstoppable next time with your pretty matron. He’s an artist with a needle and a butcher with pliers, but just now I caught him working himself into a lather with her upside down and that cane, preparing to get more … intimate.

Fredarick clamped his eyes shut, tortured enough by the idea. His sweet cherub’s tears still trickled upon her cheeks and yet each one seared like acid into him. All Mira’s fault ultimately, thanks to her selfish little quest for freedom. He never did understand why she’d want to leave their extended family at Serenity in the first place. Sufferance of similar problems had always formed much stronger bonds than blood in his
experience anyway, but she remained as dear to him as any grandchild. Since losing his father to the Vietnam war, his mother to hepatitis, brother to the ranks of the army and all the women he’d ever laid with to suicide, he’d craved nothing less than the company of someone who cared for him so unconditionally. Six decades alone. Or so it seemed. Until the kind-hearted Madonna came into his world as the new matron. So fragile herself, and yet so brave and successful.

Still, Fredarick knew he wasn’t blameless and he banged his head against the wall again, all too aware of it. He’d heard distant rumours of this future amongst all the others and chosen it — deliberately written it down in Braille and worked towards shaping it despite all the arguments raging on inside him. Of all the lives he kept juggling, always seeking the least painful outcome for as many as possible, this choice remained the fastest and least harmful way to save his beloved matron from the fate that would have been in store for her if he’d let things go on as they had been. So said all the echoes he’d been able to find so far in every part of his world.

Left alone, Mira’s way would result in five deaths, starting with those three who — so far — had only been injured. Ben, his mother and Lockman.

On the colonel’s corner desk, he could see the Braille pages of his testimony, written in the guise of a tragic play, and he didn’t need to see or feel the embossing on that first page to recall the words that had come to him in the flickering candlelight of an old dungeon:

Mira noticed the body in the fog the moment she walked into the alley. Pale flesh gleamed against bitumen. Young, blond and naked …

He’d heard that story in the shadows at Serenity too, whispered from the weeks still to come by the new matron as she recounted the full story to federal police in her office, and by other staff as they gossiped
about events which, for their future-spectres, had already passed into legend. Yet he knew his dream of an almost-perfect outcome was still achievable, and he knew his sweet angel could still be strong enough to endure the fight for it, if only he could be man enough for her now to go through with it.

To save her — the angel who remained the only pure soul in the whole mess — he had to help his evil blood-brother lay his hands, finally, on Mira Chambers.

This time under the pretence of breeding her; the only shortcut to making more agents with her talent.

Before I send in a team to ensure the feds leave,
Kitching signed,
should I know anything else?

Fredarick shrugged and glanced again at the Braille manuscript.
It’s all in there,
he signed.
Every word that I heard.
It didn’t include much about the upcoming events at the hotel, he recalled, but it didn’t need to. It only needed to keep Kitching busy for a while, distracted.

‘Just tell me the dot points,’ Kitching demanded. ‘I told you, I can’t read Braille.’

Fredarick tapped his head and crossed his eyes to give the appearance of senility.
Would an elephant have such a good memory without its trunk to store the kernels of memorabilia?

‘Then read it to me.’

‘Dearest brother, I am ears, not eyes. Deaf, not blind. I used a keyboard that encoded it for me. So I can’t read it either.’

‘And yet you expect me to decipher all that?’

‘It was intended for her eyes only. As a warning.’ In truth, though, he knew Kitching could never kill her as long as he needed her. ‘She’ll require both hands free.’

She didn’t. He knew she could read it by sight as well as the more traditional touch, but his brother didn’t need to know that. ‘She’ll also need a soft towel to wipe her tears and a glass of water in order to speak.’

He summoned the courage to look upon her again to see if she needed anything else, but instead he saw her precious lips moving and shaping the words
Oh, Fredarick.
Fresh tears welled in her eyes, and he realised from her sweet expression that she hadn’t been crying for herself at all.