Shadow Knight's Mate (19 page)

Arden knew better. Already and from this distance of years.

“Did I say what she looked like? Red hair, that soft red that changes with the light. Gray eyes. That English white skin. Average height. Not thin like one of her models. She didn't work out except for walking. Great legs. She—I don't know, she took me in. Knew how at loose ends I was feeling but didn't give me any advice. She was older and very sophisticated, but wasn't remotely motherly to me. Not remotely,” he repeated, his voice lowering. “And she seemed happy. She laughed like a little girl. For a few weeks she just dropped her regular life completely and stayed with me. I don't know why.”

Arden wanted to shout,
She loved you, you idiot.
She knew that much.

“No one ever meant as much to me,” Jack murmurred. He was crying again. “I've had great friends, I'm close to my family, but nobody ever—” He searched for words. “—ever understood me so well or was so much a part of me. We could spend a day together without speaking. Just touching and glancing.”

Something had gone wrong, obviously. Arden wondered if he'd tell her that part of the story. There were already tears of sympathy in her own eyes, because she thought she knew.

“After those first couple of weeks I was just living with her. She hadn't even invited me and I hadn't asked, we were just together all the time. But after a while she started being gone once in a while. Appointments to keep. I even thought she might be seeing another man. Someone like Madeline would have had a man in her life.”

No,
Arden thought. Again, even this far away in time, she knew better than that.

“You know what happened next?” Jack asked. Arden nodded. He still didn't look at her, but felt the air currents shift ever so slightly, and knew which way her head had moved. “Did I mention I was twenty-one? And immature for my age? And stupid?”

“Anyone would have done it,” Arden said softly. “What did you discover when you followed her?”

“She did meet with a man. An Arab man, dressed in western clothes. They met in a very out of the way place. I couldn't overhear what they were saying, but if they were lovers they were the most discreet ones I've ever seen, even when they thought they were alone. Later she met with a woman in the same secretive way, which I found very intriguing.”

Arden smiled in the dark.

“Madeline began introducing me to people in public, too. Almost like a serial coming out party. At least a couple of people I knew to be Circle members, though I hadn't met them. No one spoke in anything that sounded remotely like code. They were just very gracious. I didn't feel like I was being groomed for
anything, or checked out. I was getting kind of anxious to begin my life by then, but still didn't know what it would be. Madeline asked me to be patient, and she kept me—distracted. But she was gradually returning to her life, too. She began sending me off with some of these new acquaintances. I resented them, as if they were babysitters, but pretty soon I started to find their lives interesting. One woman took me to Paris, introduced me to people who worked at a couple of embassies, including the American one. They let me in on a couple of conversations that were important, that showed me how low-level clerks could influence an international policy.”

“This was your real post-graduate education,” Arden said.

“Yes. And I still don't know whose idea it was. Your granny denies it was hers, but she'd deny that I exist if it fit her plans. So I'm still not sure what I was trained for, or by whom. I didn't think about it much. Because it was always back to that flat in Chelsea at the end of every little adventure. There was always Madeline.” Jack started crying again. Arden let him. She squeezed his hand and Jack squeezed back, but she doubted he even knew whose hand he was holding.

“You don't have to tell me any more.”

He started speaking again as if she hadn't. “She started slipping away. Not just to meetings. While she was with me. She was somewhere miles away in her head. Then she'd come back and smile at me and say my name. She'd start to say something else and stop. Now I know what she was thinking. She had decided to bring me into her real life but she also wanted to keep me safe. That was her dilemma. But I already was part of it. I saw her meet with the Arab man again. This time they both saw me. I let them. They just looked at me, across a street, saw me watching them having tea in a little café far from her usual haunts. Madeline just stared at me. So did the man. Not hostilely, but curiously. Evaluating me. I thought he was speculating about me as her lover.”

“Did you ask her about him?”

Jack shook his head. “Before I could she started coughing. That night she made her first trip to the emergency room.”

Arden stayed quiet. Jack continued, “She got so sick so fast we barely saw it coming. One day she was okay, the next she was—” He broke off, then continued. “She had that skin so white it was almost transparent, you know. I imagined I could see the disease moving through her. Again there were times I thought she was going to have the Big Talk with me, but she didn't. I didn't care about that any more, anyway. I just wanted her to be okay again. I would have done anything, I would have gone away and never seen her again, just to know she was all right.

“But she wasn't. She never would be. One day I came home to the flat in Chelsea—I'd been to a chemist's for some pain medicine—and she was gone. I only went out because she seemed better that day, it seemed like she was recovering, but it must have been that last little boost some people get right before the end. Her eyes were open, staring at the door. I know she'd been waiting for me to come back in. That must have been her last—”

He couldn't finish that sentence. He remained silent, but his body hunched. His shoulders moved. Arden stood up from the chair and lay on the bed with him. She put her arms around him. Jack didn't seem to know who she was. He cried like a child. She wondered if this was the first time he had.

“I'm sorry,” she began murmuring after a while. “I can't say anything to make it better, I know. At least you had her. Think of that. At least you found each other in the short time you were both here. Most people never…”

Jack's crying had stopped. Her words had nothing to do with it. He had just exhausted himself. His eyes were closed. He was breathing very deeply. Just before he fell asleep he said,

“You don't understand. It gets worse.”

The Circle had managed to stall the withdrawal of American forces in some instances. Near-mutinies of some troops had caused the Pentagon to slow the removal of its forces from certain hot spots. A few American diplomatic personnel had simply refused to abandon their posts—and now they could no longer speak for the American government. High-level negotiations continued, with the object of bringing all Americans home, which was just what the Circle wanted: talk. That was their weapon of choice.

The Circle was not designed for quick response to an unforeseen crisis. Their plans sometimes took generations to mature. A decade was nothing. The slow building of relationships, the “chance” meeting in college that matured into a lifelong influence, the casually-dropped remark that led one person to say something slightly different than what he'd planned to say to someone else, which led in turn to…. This was the way the Circle moved, slowly and very meticulously. They were not good at prompt reaction. None of them would be the kind to throw himself on a hand grenade that had just been thrown through the window. Their job was to make sure that the hand grenade never got thrown; indeed, that it never got manufactured.

Now something much, much bigger than a hand grenade had been thrown into their laps. Some of the members wasted too much time worrying how it had happened, how such a major catastrophe, something that obviously took years of planning, could have happened without their having a hint it was coming. There was only one precedent for that: 9/11.

The Chair kept them focused. Gladys Leaphorn seemed not to sleep. She had never needed as much sleep as an average person, and in her eighties she seemed to have given up the habit altogether. She was living on strong tea and the occasional five-minute meditation, from which she returned to work apparently
completely refreshed. Craig and Alicia Mortenson looked at each other significantly when this happened. They didn't have to say what they were thinking, which was that their beloved Chair might be headed for situational psychosis: be driven quietly mad by this nightmare, so calmly that no one would notice. The Mortensons remained alert, while doing their own jobs.

One midnight, five days after the faster-than-sight planes had passed over America, Gladys dropped into a chair in frustration. “We just can't get to this damned NSA. We've lost too many people trying. And we have absolutely no one from his past to reach out to him now.”

“No, that ship sailed a long time ago, it seems,” Craig Mortenson said. He lit a pipe and stared into space, envisioning a different past. “One of us should have discovered his potential when he was a boy. We needed to be cultivating—”

“He didn't
have
any potential,” Gladys snapped. “You've looked at his records. Everywhere he's been and everything he's done, his work has been average at best. At
best.
There was absolutely no way to predict his rise to such prominence. I almost think that infamous paper of his must have been plagiarized. But we've been scouring all our sources without—”

“There are precedents for this,” Alicia said quietly. She was the only one still standing of the three, willowy in her blue dress, her eyes red-rimmed but still very alert. “General Grant springs to mind. Miserable at everything he tried except war. And who could have predicted he'd be a brilliant wartime commander until we were at war? This is somehow similar. We can't predict everything, Gladys. We can only try to keep the country on a generally correct course. We can't handle every little crisis that comes along.”

“This is hardly little,” Gladys Leaphorn muttered. Then she suddenly stood up. “I'm going home,” she announced.

This was a big announcement. None of them had ever been to the Chair's home, or even knew exactly where it was. And if she was quitting when they were nowhere near solving this enormous problem—well, that just couldn't happen.

“Just for a little while,” she said. “You two take charge. You know what we need to do.”

“All except for one thing,” Alicia said. “What about Jack? Why did you send him away, Gladys, and what is he supposed to be doing?”

“Doing nothing, I hope,” the Chair muttered, with a flash of anger. “And you know very well why I sent him away. I don't know what he's been up to these last few years. Neither do you. I don't know if he can be trusted. If he's as resourceful as we all think he is, maybe he can accomplish something on his own. But at any rate he's out of the way. I don't think he can do much damage to the cause on another continent.”

Craig and Alicia didn't even have to glance at each other to complete the thought:
Plus she's got Arden to report back to her if Jack does do something of significance.

But even they didn't know if that was Arden's only function in the Chair's plans.

Arden and Jack went to breakfast earlier than anyone else in Prague, apparently. False dawn lured them outside, but then it was as if night fell again. They walked through a dimness that could have been the mists of time. Jack felt unwatched, unpursued. Arden seemed to have an instinct for that sort of thing, and this morning he trusted her instinct. He had cried himself out during the night, showered in darkness, and now felt very refreshed. He walked in the dark, but it was noon in his mind.

It was a beautiful old city. Somehow even shop windows were prettier than their counterparts in America: smaller, less bold, with arrangements inside that invited one to stop and peer. These shop windows compared to the arrogant displays of American commerce were the equivalent of a half-smile and darting glance compared to a shouted invitation.

Arden's shoulder bumped his occasionally, but she didn't take his hand. She respected that last night had been a vulnerable moment that didn't extend into daylight. She wouldn't take advantage of his confidences. At least not overtly.

They watched a cafe open up, as a sleepy, aproned waiter, or perhaps the owner, pulled a few tables out onto the sidewalk and set spindly-legged metal chairs around them. He smiled at them and gestured, and they took their seats as if this had been prepared solely for them. Moments later he brought them two cups of very strong, heavily flavored coffee and disappeared without taking an order. These things were done more leisurely here. Why would they be together, the waiter seemed to say, unless they wanted to be together? So he gave them a few minutes of privacy.

A breeze sprang up with the sun. The street slowly came to life. Arden moved her chair around to sit closer to Jack, maybe for warmth, maybe protection. She became more watchful. He let her. Jack's senses were exhausted in that regard. She could be his bodyguard this morning.

After their cups were emptied, the waiter returned to refill them and brought what was apparently the daily special: croissants smeared inside with a fragrant, yellowish, slightly lumpy something that could have been either dairy or fruit in origin. They didn't inquire. It tasted wonderful, but anything would have inside the freshly-baked croissants, which almost flaked into nothingness between their plates and their mouths. The breakfast seemed very delicate, but they found themselves satisfied after a few bites.

Jack sat and watched the shops opening for business, the foot traffic begin, cars move slowly down the street. He didn't feel at home, not at all, but somehow better than at home. In this setting even breakfast seemed an adventure.