Silver (38 page)
Authors: Steven Savile
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the woman said. She had an accent. It wasn’t distinct, but it was there even though she did her best to hide it. Middle Eastern, Israeli, or possibly Lebanese. Given the trail of breadcrumbs they’d been chasing back to Masada, Israel was the more likely of the two. The accent almost certainly meant it was the same woman who had got the jump on Frost in Jesmond, the old man realized.
“So Devere sent you to kill an old man in his chair?” Sir Charles asked, meeting her eyes in the backwards land through the looking glass. It made sense that Miles Devere would send one of his flunkies after him. It was all about power, showing Sir Charles that no matter how connected he was, no matter who he worked for or who he called friends, Devere could reach him. That was what the third call had been about. He had called London to arrange this little visit. “I’m flattered.”
“You should be,” the woman said, closing the door behind her.
“Perhaps we can make a deal?”
“I don’t make deals.”
“Everyone makes deals, my dear. There is a saying in my game, never send someone to kill a man with more money than you. I have a lot of money, believe me. Whatever Devere’s paying you I’ll double to send you back to his door. How does that sound?”
“Like a desperate man,” she said.
She was right. That was exactly how he sounded.
But then, that was how he
wanted
to sound. Any man in his situation ought to sound desperate. Desperate or resigned; he wasn’t resigned. He wasn’t that kind of man. He made things happen. That only left him with the option of sounding desperate. A desperate man with money would look to strike a deal, so that was exactly what he had done. If she was as good as she no doubt thought she was, she would have been able to see it in his eyes, the shifting gears as one gambit was rejected, thinking quickly, looking for another alternative, anything other than the bullet in the back of the head. It was in-field thinking—reassess, redeploy, react.
He stopped himself from reaching for the phone.
The chair meant he lookup at her through the mirror. It added to the illusion of helplessness. All she saw was an old man in a wheelchair. It would have helped if he had managed to open the drawer, but guns weren’t the only solution.
“Aren’t you going to increase your offer? Isn’t that what people like you do? Beg, plead, offer me riches beyond my wildest imagining?”
“No,” the old man said. “Not today. Today I am going to ask you if you are fond of life?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“No matter how good you think you are, do you really believe you can walk in here, kill me and walk out again without consequences?”
“And here we are again, the dying man’s twelve-step program. Denial, bargaining, and now we’re into the threats. For some reason, the way my client described you, I thought you might be different. This is disappointing. He made you sound like some colossus. I hate to break it to you, but step twelve is always the same. You die.”
“So it is pointless, my telling you about the security here, and what happens when my heart stops beating? My boy Lethe is a computer genius. Did Devere tell you that? Everything in this place is routed through the circuitry of my chair, dependent upon my heartbeat. My heart stops for some reason and Nonesuch goes into lockdown. There is no way out. When my team returns they will find you here. The good news is there is plenty of food, so you’ll be well fed at least.”
“You expect me to believe this is the Bat Cave and I just killed Alfred? It’s more creative than saying you’ve got the place surrounded by armed guards just waiting for your signal, I’ll give you that. But correct me if I am wrong, I don’t remember Bruce Wayne being a cripple?”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, isn’t that what they say?”
“Some do, I am sure, probably the same ones who also say they booby trapped the entire house and have a remote detonating device in the arm of their wheelchair.”
“That was the next thing I was going to try,” the old man said. He smiled, doing his utmost to appear calm on the surface, but inside his heart was racing almost as quickly as his mind. The talk was all about buying time, but once bought it all came down to how he wanted to spend it.
“Given the fact that I can see you whichever way I face, I am not sure it makes much difference, does it? It’s like asking if I want a closed- or open-casket funeral. Back of the head, large exit wound in the face, or bullet between the eyes and the back of your head’s blown out. It really doesn’t matter because I’m going to be just as dead.”
“That you are,” she agreed.
“Let’s do this, shall we? I think I’d rather like a pretty face to be the last thing I see, call me an old fool, but I always was weak for a certain kind of girl,” Sir Charles said, reaching down for the rail on the wheel rims. He pulled back on one, and forward on the other, angling the chair around. The tight space between the bed and the desk made it impossible for him to turn properly. He knew that. That was precisely why he had twisted the chair into it.
Before he could start to back up, the phone on the desk started ringing.
“I don’t suppose I can answer that?” the old man said, ruefully.
“No,” she said. She didn’t seem all that amused by the interruption.
“Then I suppose I can’t say saved by the bell, either?”
“No,” she said again. “No last minute reprieves. We’ve talked too much already. If you can’t turn the chair around, I will.”
“I can do it,” the old man assured her, looking through the glass at the Rembrandt on the wall behind her.
Judas Repentant
.
The phone stopped ringing.
Ronan Frost killed
the call.
It was the first time in all the years he had been with Ogmios that he had called Nonesuch and Lethe hadn’t answered in a matter of seconds. There was nothing good about the silence. He looked up at the house at the far side of the long, winding drive. As always there were only a few lights on. The cars were all lined up on the gravel drive exactly where Orla and the guys had left them a few days ago. Instead of that being comforting it made the place look like an automotive graveyard, the place where sports cars come to die.
The reason he had made the call was parked, half-hidden in the bushes: an off-road dirt bike.
The drive would take him ten seconds to drive, gunning the Monster’s engine and tearing up the gravel, or two minutes to run, silently. He chose silence over speed. If someone was inside the Manor, he didn’t want to go in there all thud and blunder, even if a few seconds could make all the difference. Noise could just as easily get everyone killed. The old man was sharp. He’d go down swinging. And Lethe had probably turned the basement into his own personal panic room.
Frost kicked down the stand and killed the Ducati’s idling engine. He stripped out of his leathers because they hampered his mobility. The time it spent getting out of them would be made up two-fold running across the lawn. He checked the dirt bike for any clue to the owner’s identity, but there was nothing. Not that he had expected to find anything. It was difficult to be sure, because the mud was fairly hard after several days without rain, but he could only make out a single set of tracks. He pulled the Browning and set off at a sprint across the lawn. He kept his head up, looking frantically left and right for signs of the intruder. Frost knew that the unanswered phone meant they were already inside, but that didn’t mean they weren’t already done when he had called and on their way out. There was plenty of darkness to hide in. Too much of it. The spotlights were on, but they only illuminated the snake of the driveway as it came out of the darkness.
Halfway across the lawn he was breathing hard. His body hurt from the abuse it had taken over the last few days.
Through the portico he saw that the main door stood open.
There was something in the doorway, a dark shadow on the floor. As he got closer the shadow became a shape, and the shape became a body dressed in an immaculate black suit, white shirt, white gloves and bow tie. There was a single entry wound in the center of Maxwell’s forehead, a cyclopean third eye. There wasn’t a lot of blood and there was very little damage. Powder burns rimmed the wound. The gun had been pressed up close to the butler’s head. He had that look of surprise on his face that robbed every dead man of his dignity. Even in death it didn’t look as though Max had a hair out of place.
Nonesuch had that eerie silence that accompanies a death house. It was as though the old stones were aware of the tragedy playing out within them. Frost crept into the hall, listening to the silence. He could hear the faintest hint of voices. The old grandfather clock across from the fireside chessboard told him how late it was. The old man would be in his room by now. The house might have been a warren of mezzanines, hidden servants’ stairs and out of the way pantries, but the old man only used a fraction of the rooms. The chair kept him on the lower level; habit kept him in the same handful of rooms down here.
Frost crept across the hall.
The voices were quiet now.
He preferred it when he heard them. Dead men didn’t talk. As long as they were talking all was almost well with the world.
Just keep them talking
, he prayed silently to whoever was listening. He ghosted toward the control room and tapped his personal code into the lock. The
beep
that acknowledged the right access code and opened the lock mechanism sounded sharp and too loud in the silence. He knew realistically it wouldn’t have carried to any of the other rooms, but that didn’t stop him from biting his lip and easing the door open painfully slow.
Frost slipped inside and eased the door closed behind him.
The room was empty. The array of screens either showed Konstantin Khavin in various frozen frames as he hurled himself at the Pope, or the shadow-wreathed shape of Orla Nyrén, naked and chained to the wall of a dank cell. Frost hadn’t seen the images before. They took his breath away for a moment. He wanted to do something. Anything. Every instinct screamed at him. These were his people, his team, and they were in trouble. The only one who wasn’t in trouble was Noah, which, given the usual series of events, was just plain wrong.
The staircase down to Lethe’s den was still covered. It wasn’t the only way down, but if he was going to go sneaking down there to stage a rescue, that was the way to go. He wished he’d paid more attention when Lethe gave them the briefing on the tabletop computer. He was pretty sure he could call up images from hidden cameras in all of the rooms, but he didn’t have the slightest idea where to start and was more likely to set the sprinklers off than turn the security cameras on.
The set-up had appealed to Lethe’s sense of the theatrical. The whole idea of a retina scan seemed far too
Blade Runner
for Frost, and the recessed steel doors like something out of the Death Star, but right now he couldn’t argue with the genius of any of it. If the lad wanted to recreate his own movie sets, so be it. The one unarguable fact was that no one was leaving Nonesuch without the right eyes.
Lockdown established, Frost had a binary decision to make: down to Lethe or back to the old man. He had only seen one bike and one set of tracks, meaning one intruder. The fact that he had heard voices in the old man’s room decided it.
He slipped out of the room.
He had been in there less than thirty seconds. The hand on the grandfather clock hadn’t moved.
The main door out to the grounds was blocked by a thick metal plate. It had sliced through Max. The cut hadn’t been clean. If it was the difference between his murderer escaping or not, he knew Max would forgive him.
Frost heard the voices, louder now. The old man and a woman. The old man was begging. Frost didn’t hesitate.
He ran toward the old man’s study.
“What the hell
was that?” the woman barked at him. The echo of the steel sheets slamming into place reverberated through the floor.
Sir Charles smiled. Frost had arrived. There was a chance he might make it out of this alive, but if not, at least he had the consolation of knowing that his killer was not about to disappear into the night. It all depended upon the woman and whether her pity outweighed her killer instinct. It wasn’t exactly a sure thing, but he was playing the only hand he had—the helpless old cripple card. With any luck she’d underestimate him, or his blathering would buy Frost enough time to find them. “The Bat Cave,” the old man said.
He had wriggled the chair around so far he couldn’t see her face in the mirror anymore. The benefit of that was that she couldn’t see his, either. The old man twisted hard on the wheel with his left hand, wedged his foot beneath the edge of the bed and pulled down on the other wheel with his right, deliberately unbalancing the chair. He leaned forward and fell, sprawling across the rug. The chair came down on top of him.
He clawed his way out from under the chair, emerging on the window side of the bed. His walking stick was tantalizingly out of reach.
“You really are something,” the woman said, dragging the chair out of the way. “It’s a pity I have to kill you.”
“It’s a pity I have to die,” Sir Charles said. He dragged himself another six inches across the floor, toward the stick leaning against the wall. He willed her to keep on underestimating him. He twisted to look up at her, then deliberately, slowly, let his gaze drift back longingly toward his walking stick, knowing she would follow it, and knowing she wouldn’t think for a minute what a devious old fool he was. The walking stick was more than just an old man’s affectation, and he wasn’t about to beat her over the head with a stick of wood. It was a sword cane. One twist of the elaborately carved handle and the brass coupling would break. There was an eighteen-inch blade secreted inside the wooden shaft. If he could get to it, and get her close enough, there was a chance. A slim one, but that was infinitely preferable to none.
He dragged himself to within touching distance of the stick.
“Well, no, there’s no pity in it at all, is there?” she said, coming around the side of the bed to stand over him. “This feels like killing my own grandfather,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t enjoy that, either.”
The old man was on his stomach, one leg twisted uncomfortably because it was still trapped beneath the bed frame, the other up by his side. He looked like a chalk outline waiting to be drawn around. The sword cane was six inches from his fingers. So close yet so far away. Everything around him developed a sense of hyper-reality. He saw the threads of the rug and smd the rubber that had worn itself into them with all of those back-and-forths in the wheelchair. Even the grain in the wooden bed frame seemed so much starker, like seeing the truth of a treasure map for the first time.
He heard the study door burst open, but didn’t waste time trying to turn. He knew it was Frost. He used that fraction of a second to push himself the last six inches to the sword cane. He reached out, barely grazing it with his fingers, then stretched, finding another inch in his reach. His hand closed around the thin wooden shaft. He pulled the sword cane to his chest and broke the shaft. It took less than a second, an entire second where he expected to hear the silenced gunshot and be swallowed by the nothing of death.
As soon as the blade was clear of the sheath he lunged upward with it. He didn’t have the reach, but after years in the chair what he did have was incredible upper body strength. He thrust with all of his might, feeling it hit bone and scrape off it as it sank deeper into her side. He twisted savagely, opening her up. She screamed. The sound was cut brutally short. Her body twitched on the end of the blade, then stopped moving completely. For a long second she stood, held up only by the sword in her side and the strength of the old man’s arm.
He heard a single shot but didn’t feel anything.
A fountain of blood sprayed across his face and more poured down the blade and down his arm. Then gravity caught up with her corpse and pulled the woman down the length of the sword. He couldn’t hold her dead weight. She carried on falling, landing awkwardly across his body and pinning him to the rug. He struggled, but he couldn’t shift her.
He heard the floorboard creek beneath cautious footsteps.
A moment later the old man saw Frost looking down over her shoulder.
“You took your sweet time,” he said. “Is Maxwell . . . ?”
Frost didn’t say anything. Instead he hauled the dead assassin off the old man and dumped her on his bed. He pulled the sword from her side and dumped it on the bed beside her, then he peeled off her balaclava and grunted. It was a grunt of recognition. Next he righted the old man’s chair and helped him up into it. All of this was done in silence.
The old man sat there soaked in his erstwhile killer’s blood.
He looked at her lying there on the bed. There was no way anyone could confusher death for sleep. She really was beautiful, or had been. He wondered what could have turned her into a gun for hire, but then realized the stupidity of that kind of thinking. It was like wondering what turned Frost into the man he was, a life of conflict in Derry and Belfast or the fields of blood in Kosovo, or something else entirely, something coded on a genetic level.
“Lethe?” Sir Charles said, finally.
“As far as I can tell, she came alone, met Max at the door, then came looking for you. If Jude’s got any common sense, he turned the basement into a panic room and is sitting down there waiting for the cavalry.” He didn’t voice the alternative—that Lethe had tried to be the cavalry himself and was lying somewhere inside the big old house with a bullet in his head. The second alternative explained why the phone rang off the hook when he called, the first didn’t.
The old man wheeled his chair toward the doorway, then stopped, looking back toward the bed. “I will need fresh sheets,” and in that horrible second where reality comes rushing in, he realized that without Maxwell no one was going to be changing his bed linen and that his world had just become a little smaller without his companion in it. He shook his head, clearing it. “All right, first things first,” he said, all business. “What are we going to do with her?”
“I suggest we find a big mailing pouch and send her right back where she came from,” Frost said.
“Appealing as that notion is, I was thinking something a little less problematic. One option would be burying her in the grounds. I doubt very much anyone save Devere knows she is here, and he’s hardly likely to draw attention to his role in this. So given the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make like we never saw her. Another alternative is the incinerator.”
“That works as well,” Frost said, “but I’d still rather post her.”
“I am sure you would, sealed with a kiss, no doubt.”
“A line of C4 and a short fuse seems more fitting,” Frost said. “Okay, better get this over with. Let’s go find Lethe.”
As it was, they didn’t need to go far. Jude Lethe stood beside half of the butler’s corpse looking down at it. He heard them approach and looked up. “The cameras,” he said, as though that explained everything. It did in a way. The old man took it to mean he had seen the assassin shoot Maxwell on one of his many screens down there in the basement and he’d locked down the nerve center of Nonesuch. No second thoughts, no heroice’d followed the protocols to the letter, even if it meant leaving the old man in harm’s reach. Sir Charles nodded.
He looked down at his friend.
“Mister Lethe, would you be so kind as to reset the shield
doors. Frost, Maxwell was one of ours. I would count it a personal favor if you would take care of things.”