The Magpye: Circus (10 page)

Rogers was naturally cautious,
but Hartley was just a desk jockey. A computer expert, his job was
to sift through the criminal's laptops and phones to piece together
incriminating evidence. Before Owen had met him he'd been tracking
paedophiles and terrorists, hacking his way into their networks and
hunting them down without ever leaving the comfort of his office.
In another life he'd have been the FBI agent who caught out the mob
on unpaid taxes. He didn't look right, out in the field, and Owen
had to remind himself that it had been Hartley's call to be here.
He said he owed it to Grice.

With a crackle, Cooper
announced himself through Owen's earpiece. "Reg and I are almost at
the rear gates. Got five, maybe six guys back here."

"It's open?"

"Wide open. The bastards want
us in there."

"We should walk away Owen,"
said Rigby, interjecting. "We've made our point."

"The hell we have!" barked
Cooper. "Don't you dare go soft on me now, don't you..."

"He's right."

Owen smiled. Rosa Blind, the
girl with a mind like a machine. His right hand. "Rosa. I thought
you weren't coming."

"I'm not. I'm already here.
Already inside."

"How the hell did you manage
that?"

"Trade secret. Cooper, get
ready."

Owen heard shots then a muffled
commotion and the sound of Cooper and Rigby running.

"Back door's clear!" Cooper
shouted.

"Not for long, you've got
incoming," reported Rosa.

For a moment, Owen thought that
maybe they might actually pull this off without losing another cop.
Just for a moment. He waved commands at Rogers and Hartley and
sprinted towards the front gates, keeping his body low and his gun
raised.

***

King craned out of the window.
At the rear gate he could make out the bodies of more of his men,
all of them dying bloody on the ground.

"There's a shooter inside the
compound," he spat.

"I'd keep back, boss," said
Taylor. "Lot of bullets flying around out there."

King had fury in his eyes when
he turned back to face his henchman.

"If this thing goes south," he
growled. "There won't be a prison in this country that will be safe
for you, do you understand?"

Taylor didn't answer. Instead,
he simply pulled his gun from inside his suit jacket and headed for
the door. King breathed a sigh of relief. The most dangerous man he
had ever met was still in his corner.

***

In the basement, Able Quirk
groped around inside his memories for anything of worth. Grace was
prowling around him, eyeing him as if he were a new creature that
she had never seen before. Prey, she was certain of it, but just
how to tackle this particular meal? Accustomed to the thoughts of
others inside his head, he could feel her mind, drooling and
hungry, probing the fringes of his. He'd barely mastered the skill
of controlling the thoughts of the unruly dead, the thought of
another living mind inside his skull was more than he could cope
with. If she got in, would there even be space for him?

"Tell me your name," she
purred.

Able shook his head. "No. I
won't tell you who I am." The mask was supposed to stop him getting
blood on him, prevent any unwanted souls from taking residence in
his head. Right now it was also protecting the only two living
people he cared about, Marv and Magda. If he was going to die here,
he would at least protect them for as long as he could.

"Not your real name, silly. The
name you call yourself. Marv said he didn't know what you were, but
I'm sure the old fool was lying to me."

"Marv..." whispered Able,
inside the mask.

Cane King liked television, and
television liked him back. After all, what was there not to like?
Tall, handsome, charming, rich, unattached, and with the
omnipresent whiff of danger and scandal … he was everything that
television wanted its millionaire playboys to be. Sitting on the
couch of a TV talkshow, sandwiched between a B-list actress and a
comedian that the network considered “edgy” enough to be
interesting but not so edgy that they couldn’t trust him, Cane King
was as dangerous here as he was in a boardroom or a knife fight. He
had to be. This was where he did the most important part of his job
- convincing the watching public that he wasn’t quietly screwing
them all.

“
So, Cane, can I call you Cane?”

“
Of course you can, Johnny… If I can call you Johnny, that
is?”

Drum roll. Cymbal. Cue card.
Laughter. A pat on his arm from the host, a fake tear of laughter
wiped away, familiarity and bonhomie packaged and delivered, coated
in sugar just how they all liked it.

“
Seriously though… Cane. Let’s talk about the charity work
you’re doing right now.”

Another cue card. A ripple of
approving applause from the audience. Hands held up in mock
embarrassment.

“
Come on now, Cane. Don’t be shy. A little birdie told me
that you raised twenty
million
dollars for
your charity last year…”

Whoops and hollers from the
crowd. The host was worth every penny Cane was paying, he barely
had to do any work at all.

“…
and that you matched
every single dollar
of that yourself?”

Standing ovation. Cheers,
whistles. Embarrassed grins, nods of acknowledgement.

“
Really, Johnny, it’s about the people on the ground doing
the hard work every day. I just bring a little money to the party,
that’s all. The real work, the stuff that makes a difference,
that’s being done out there on the streets.”

The applause dies down, people
return to their seats. Don’t over do it, that’s the key.

“
That’s great, that’s great… but, here’s the thing
Cane.”

“
What’s that, Johnny?”

“
When are you going to squeeze in time to find yourself
a
Mrs
King?”

Oohs and aahs. A few wolf
whistles. Somewhere in the back a women shouts “pick me!”.
Laughter. No cue cards this time, but all right on schedule.

“
Well Johnny, that’s a tough one. My evenings are pretty
full as it is.”

“
I’ll bet they are! A little birdie told me that you’d been
personally overseeing every single aspect of your new casino hotel,
from the wash-rooms all the way to the penthouse!”

More cheers. More applause.
Cane King, a billionaire before he was even born, but working hard
on the American Dream. A raised hand, more false modesty.

“
Well, Johnny, my grandfather always said that if you wanted
something done right, you had to be prepared to do it
yourself.”

More applause, because America
loves some homespun wisdom and loves grandfathers.

***

Cane locked his phone and
slipped it back into his pocket. Robert had been his double for so
long that most of America would think that Cane was the imposter if
the two of them stood next to each other. Robert was Cane’s
walking, talking alibi in any situation, a stooge who lived a life
in the public gaze so that Cane could live his life in the
shadows.

And if Cane ever needed to
vanish?

Well, Robert could always turn
up in some hotel room, dead as a doornail and with all the evidence
of an night of epic adventure strewn around him.

That was how Cane would like to
go.

Marv shoved clothes in a bag.
He'd run away before, lots of times, and he'd made shoving clothes
into a bag something of an art-form - a tiny piece of theatre
amongst all the others in his life. He travelled light, always
had.

"Are you running away again,
Dad?"

Marv hadn't heard Marissa come
in.

"Not alone this time," he said,
forcing a crooked smile onto his craggy face. "You're coming with
me."

"Are there bad men coming?"

"Yes, honey, I think there
are."

"You left me with the bad men
before."

Marv zipped up the bag and
threw it across the room where it landed with two others.

"I knew you'd be safe," he
said. Magicians, the born liars. "I... I made sure of it."

"The lady who came said you'd
abandoned me."

Marv reached out to embrace his
daughter, but she pulled away. Looking at her, looking at the
strange and broken thing that she had become, he cursed himself for
what he'd done. She was a like a china doll, smashed and
reassembled. The same basic shape, but forever crazed and cracked
and so very, very fragile.

"It wasn't like that," Marv
said desperately. "You can't believe anything that woman says."

"Able doesn't know, does he?
That you knew the bad men were coming and you ran away?"

"No," Marv replied, hanging his
head. "No, he doesn't know. I didn't think you did either."

"I know," replied the
magician's daughter. "And that's why I'm not coming with you."

Marv grabbed his daughter's
forearm. "The hell you aren't!" he said angrily. "This time, I'm
getting it right, I'm getting you out of here myself. Able can take
care of himself."

Marissa looked down at where
her father's strong hand held her arm tight, as if the sensation
had taken its time to work its way along her arm, up to her
shoulder, and across to her brain. Gently, she peeled his hand off
her, one finger at a time, as if she were skinning a banana.

"No, Daddy, you're getting it
very, very wrong," she said sweetly. "But I can help with
that."

Without another word, Marissa
lifted her hand and tapped her father gently between the eyes with
one finger.

Marv, the great escape artist,
the magician who hid in plain sight, felt something he hadn't felt
in a long time. He felt magic. Real magic. And in a burst of white
light, he lost consciousness.

The mill was a maze, a building
that had grown and changed like a spreading fungus. They didn't
make them like this anymore, because places like this were never
really "made". They grew, eating up the lives of the people who
worked there, a vast external cancer. When places like this were
left to rot, they went... strange, first.

Owen, Rosa, Cooper and Rigby worked their way in slowly.
Room by room, sweeping each one clear. Always checking behind them,
sticking to the tried and tested routines they had had drilled into
them. Owen always found it amazing how good Rosa was at
breaches
; despite her petite frame and general aversion to
physical confrontation, she could sweep a room faster than most
other cops and he'd never known anyone get the drop on her. Cooper
and Rigby were another story though. Cooper was reckless, pushing
them forward too fast, but Rigby was the real liability. He knew
what to do and how to do it, but every move was hesitant. A brains
and muscle partnership like Cooper and Rigby could work on the
street, but here either one of them could be the one that made the
mistake that got everyone killed.

At least, that's what Owen was
thinking when he felt his ankle snag on a thin length of wire
stretched across the corridor.

"Get ba-- !"

***

Three levels down, in the
basement lost among the rusting hulks, Able Quirk was screaming.
Not the Magpye, just Able, the boy who should be dead, hiding
behind a mask, and screaming. He'd never asked where the name came
from, never questioned the voice that called itself "Magpye". He'd
let it drive him, let it move his limbs and speak with this voice.
It was the thing that kept him going when he thought that the
others; the other voices, the other memories, other lives that were
going on in his head; were going to overwhelm him. Magpye was the
thing that reached down into the maelstrom and pulled Able to the
surface.

And Magpye was gone.

Instead there was Grace
Faraway, throwing her mind against his like a wild dog, howling and
snarling whilst, in the real world, she beat him ruthlessly,
raining down blow after blow. Unable to move, trapped somehow in
this spot, Able did his best to dodge the worst of it, to roll with
every kick and punch and claw, a reflex reaction more than anything
else. All Able knew, somehow, was that he had to stay conscious.
His mind, his rag-tag of memories, was the only thing keeping Grace
out.

And so he screamed. He screamed
to remind himself that he was still there, still alive.

"Kid, am I going to die
again?"

It was Malcolm. The sharp
shooter who died in his cowboy hat and underpants, thinking out
loud in Able's head.

"I don't know..." gasped Able.
He could feel the others, slowly returning. Wherever they had gone,
wherever the witch had banished them to, it hadn't been for long.
In his head, Able tried to smile. Before all of this, before the
blood and the madness and the revenge, the ghosts had been his
friends. His real friends. He'd lost count of the times he'd wished
he'd died with them. Maybe this was his chance.

Grace's foot slammed against
the side of his face, snapping his head to one side. He felt a
tooth shift inside his mouth, and he swallowed blood inside the
mask.

"You're tough," she said,
taking a moment to catch her breath. "Whatever you are."

Able looked up. Her body was
young, firm, strong, but Able could see the truth. Somehow he knew
that he was looking at something ancient, something from a place
that came before our world. The dark blue and black of the tattoos
on her skin seethed and writhed, making her skin tighten and twist
as if it could move her limbs for her. A story, written in some old
language, tugging its vessel along and insisting that it be
told.