Shadow Knight's Mate (21 page)

“No one puts herself forward as Chair. You're elected by acclamation. Wanting to turn down the job is an indication you're right for it. I don't know. I don't know.”

Arden looked around, appearing surprised to find them in a modern-looking city in broad daylight. “What do we do next?”

“Leave here,” Jack said. “You didn't leave anything important in the hotel, did you?”

Arden tapped the shoulder bag under her arm. If he'd planned to take her by surprise with his announcement he would have been
disappointed. She appeared poised and ready. And remarkably fresh. When had she gotten more sleep than he had? Her skin was smooth and pale and her eyes gleamed. Her little secret smile had returned, too. Arden had always looked as if she were sharing a secret joke, possibly only with herself. He hadn't shocked her for long. “Where to?”

Jack started toward an underground station, and within a few paces Arden was leading the way. “Two places, I think,” Jack said slowly. “The peace summit is supposed to take place in Salzburg in four days.”

“Hasn't that been cancelled?”

“On the contrary, we have to make sure it takes place.”

Arden frowned. She knew she'd get an explanation as they went along. “What's the other destination?”

“Israel. Or close by there, anyway.”

That one obviously came as a surprise to Arden. But she shrugged and looked ready. “Which one first?”

Jack stopped and looked at her sternly. “That's not what I meant. We've got two different destinations at the same time. I need you to go to Austria.”

She looked back at him, absolutely unperturbed. “We will. As soon as we finish in Israel.” Jack started arguing and Arden cut him off. “Look, if I'm not with you you'll get yourself killed. Then Granny would kill me. Then there's nobody left who knows about the plot or can stop it.”

She raised her eyebrows, inviting him to try to refute her logic. After a moment Jack gave up. “Come on, then.”

“Back to the airport?”

“Not exactly.” Train doors opened in front of them and they got in the subway.

“I hate calling in any favors at a time like this,” Jack shouted over the noise of the helicopter's rotors. Arden nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Impersonal public transportation was scary because it left them so vulnerable, but arranging more personalized transport was just as dangerous. It pinpointed them.

The pilot in his bomber's jacket and sunglasses slapped Jack on the back. “That's okay, pal, don't worry about it. Anything for the guy who wrote ‘Air Gladiator.'”

Arden gave Jack a look and he shrugged. Yes, a few years earlier he'd written an air combat video game at a time when he was learning to fly himself. All he did, really, was put all his fears about flying onto a video screen, just imagine what he was about to do wrong and see if any players could get out of such a scenario. The game had been popular, not a huge breakthrough, but it remained very well-known to pilots. This one had been glad to take Jack on a hop south once he'd learned who he was.

Jack and Arden couldn't talk about any of the things they really wanted to discuss during the flight. The pilot took up the conversational slack by pointing out features of the jet helicopter to Jack, explicitly making suggestions for an “Air Gladiator II.” Quite clearly he was also willing to pose for the central character. Jack and Arden had to have some kind of cover, and Arden quickly decided their roles: Jack was the internationally famous game designer and she was a groupie he'd picked up at a convention. She clung to him like ball moss to an oak branch the whole way, occasionally squealing delightedly over something he said. This scene fit the pilot's world-fantasy view so perfectly that he didn't even ask them questions. He just grinned and occasionally, very subtly he thought, winked at Jack, two men of the world. Jack gave him as manly a sly smile as he could manage in return.

After what seemed to Jack a long, long flight but in reality was only a few hours, the pilot said, “If I get much closer I'm going to have all kinds of radar locking on me.” He gave Jack a look, half-apologetic, half hoping Jack would ask him to dodge incoming to get them farther inland. But Jack just said, “You've done a great job, Captain. Given me lots of great material, too. I'll be seeing you.”

The helicopter set down on a beach. Most of their trip had been over the Mediterranean, but now they were on a much smaller body of water. Jack and Arden scrambled out, the pilot gave them a thumbs-up and lifted off, all within a minute. The pilot believed
they were traveling under stealth cover to avoid Jack's fans, which was only partially inaccurate.

“You can let go now,” Jack said once they could hear again, but as soon as Arden released his arm he felt her absence. Her coziness on the plane had been annoying and, now that it was gone, comforting. She smiled at him as if she could read his feelings, then glanced up and down the largely deserted beach. Jack, though, was watching large specks on the southern horizon growing rapidly larger.

“Where are we?” Arden asked.

“Gaza, if that pilot knew what he was doing, and I think he did. The West Bank.”

“And who are those?” Because now Arden too noticed the armed convoy approaching them at a speed that seemed angry.

“Israeli troops, I think. Or maybe the Palestinian Authority. Either way, I don't think we can pass, do you?”

“Something's happening in Salzburg,” Professor Horace Trimble said over the phone from New York.

“Yes, I believe I read something about that,” Craig Mortenson said drily. The front pages of every newspaper in the world had been consumed with two things in the past few days: reprises of the attack on America story, and speculation as to whether the peace summit, over a year in the planning, would still be held, now that the American President had announced that America would no longer be involved in world affairs.

“I mean,” Trimble said snippily, “there's something going on behind the scenes. I'm going over to investigate.”

“You're going over personally?” Craig, sitting in the Circle's western headquarters listening to Trimble over speaker phone, glanced at Alicia. She gave him a raised eyebrow in turn. “Don't you have any contacts—?”

“Of course I do,” the professor snapped. “But I want face-to-face contact. Someone over there's been lying to me and everyone else on the planet, and I want to know who it is.”

The Circle so far had made almost no headway in discovering who was responsible for the mysterious plane attacks. They knew from monitoring intelligence sources that the CIA and FBI didn't have a clue either. Nor could they get to the National Security Advisor; those attempts had cost them more in lost personnel than they had suffered throughout the Cold War. Instead they had now been bending all their efforts to make sure that the President still attended the summit. They hoped that somehow this would reengage him in world events. They had influential connections with the president from several directions, and had been using all of them. Even the president's mother had called him to tell him he should go to Salzburg. They were pretty sure they had won that battle.

But now Trimble was saying there was something else wrong. “What have you found out?” Janice Gentry said to the speakerphone.

“Distressingly little,” answered the professor. “I believe, though, it has something to do with our old friend Jack's appearances in recent times. He was up to something when he went to that flat in London. I'm not sure what, but I'm going over there to find out. I'm afraid our beloved Chair may have made a mistake in letting young Mr. Driscoll out of our sights. But maybe I can rectify the situation.”

Craig Mortenson caught every eye around him, and found nothing but shades of apprehension. “Don't rectify anything that can't be un-rectified unless you get approval from us,” he said. That was as precise as he could get, but Trimble was a subtle man. He would understand.

“I shall do no more than what is absolutely necessary,” Trimble sniffed, obviously offended. “Now I have to run. My flight is boarding.”

The small group pictured the tall, thin, extremely dignified professor of applied mathematics actually running down an airport concourse and knew he had been speaking figuratively. Alicia Mortenson called his name, but the line had gone dead.

Alicia looked at her husband. “You're right,” he said, and stood up. “Janice, you're in charge until the Chair gets back.”

“Where are you two going?” Professor Gentry asked in surprise, and Alicia Mortenson looked surprised at her surprise. “Virginia, of course.” Consciously or not, her voice had slipped into a soft southern accent. Her husband nodded as if the question had been silly, and the two walked quickly out of the room. Janice Gentry sat at the console, looked around the small remaining group to see if anyone else had understood that exchange, and saw that she didn't have to feel stupid, because no one else had.

“And where the hell
is
Gladys?” she asked grumpily.

Gladys Leaphorn lay in bed. She had the temperature turned down low and lay under blankets in deepest slumber, like a child
in a crib or a mystic in a trance. At headquarters she'd realized that she was making bad decisions or worse, being unable to decide at all. She had neglected her subconscious. She could get by for days without sleep if necessary, as she'd been proving, but her imagination suffered. Like most artists, she did some of her best work while unconscious. Her mind roamed from her earthbound body and sometimes returned with insights she could never have achieved awake.

So she had left good people in charge, come home, put on her favorite pajamas, and gone to bed. And it worked. The next morning, after six hours' sleep, her eyelids snapped open and she smiled grimly. She knew what she had to do. Jack Driscoll was key. Gladys needed to get in touch with her granddaughter right away, and wondered where she was. For just a moment, still under the influence of her dreams-filled sleep, she imagined she could reach out with her mind and touch Arden's.

But it was in that moment that Gladys Leaphorn realized something else.

Someone was in her house.

She climbed out of bed, groaning like an old woman, doing an excellent impression of one. Stealth was no use now. She wouldn't be able to slip past the people in her house. She had a good idea of who they were.

So instead she got out of bed, put on a robe sloppily, and shuffled in slippers out to her small living room. A man and woman waited there, wearing matching dark suits, tight mouths, and expressionless eyes. Grim as the situation was, Gladys almost grinned. Because the man's hair was slightly mussed and there was an indentation on the woman's sleeve she felt sure had been caused by a hand. These two stony-faced agents had been kissing while waiting for her to wake up. Gladys wondered how she could use that to her advantage.

“Mrs. Leaphorn,” the woman said, not asking a question. “We need you to come with us.”

Gladys Leaphorn didn't move. She was eighty-seven years old, and on the best day of her life she couldn't have outrun either
of these two for three steps. Nor had she ever been any good with guns, and she knew these two would be. She recognized their types, if not these particular two. “Identification?” she asked.

Both immediately held out flip wallets. Yes, she'd been right: United States Secret Service. That meant nothing. They could be here on official orders or they could be under the control of someone who had infiltrated the government better than the Circle had. Or they could be rogues. It didn't matter. They had her.

She looked at the woman, at her sleeve, and her lips, then her eyes, and had the satisfaction after a moment or seeing her begin to blush. “I'll be right with you,” Gladys said, and shuffled back toward her bedroom.

The woman went with her.

Jack kept saying one sentence in Hebrew, and it didn't seem to be working worth a damn. The Israeli soldiers had them face down in the sand within five seconds of reaching them, and Jack's protestation won them as much respect as if he'd been announcing he was the leader of a neo-Nazi movement. Arden tried her own more subtle methods of insinuation, which didn't require speech at all, and she thought she was getting through to a couple of the men, but unfortunately half the soldiers were women, and they just glared at Arden and handcuffed her hands behind her back. She whimpered at that, again drawing some sympathy, but only from the half of the troops with whom she'd already succeeded.

She had enough Hebrew to understand, she thought, that Jack was telling them he had some information. But the soldiers didn't seem to care. They had Jack and Arden stowed in the back of an armored personnel carrier—American-made, Arden noted wryly—and were taking them away at top speed without anyone's ever acknowledging that Jack could speak their language at all. Maybe he was getting it wrong, in fact. “What's he saying?” Arden asked in English, but that didn't work either.

The small convoy roared down the beach. Within minutes it stopped, and Jack and Arden were shoved out the back of the
carrier. They found themselves in the center of a small military compound. Jack and Arden were marched up to a small tent. Arden, slightly in the rear, noted that the soldiers had completely immobilized Jack's arms with some kind of restraint with a bar that kept his elbows apart while handcuffs held his hands close together. Did they think he was some kind of X-Man, who could smash them all if he got free? The complicated restraint was kind of flattering in a way, and Arden felt slightly insulted that they'd only handcuffed her.

Then they were both shoved inside the tent. The soldiers didn't follow. A woman looked up at them from a small field desk. The woman was not very tall, and she was thin in a wiry, energetic way. Her skin was several shades darker than Arden's, with spots of color on her cheeks and surprising green eyes. Her dark brown hair was thick but cut short. Overall she had a boyish but sexy look, as well as an air of authority.