The Reluctant Assassin (11 page)

Chevie scowled. She knew this guy from back home. His name was Duff, and he had been tight with Cord Vallicose, her favorite instructor from Quantico. Vallicose had seen potential in his young student and taken Chevie under his wing.

“Hilarious, Duff. You won’t be laughing so hard when I get out of here and rearrange your hairdo.”

Duff scowled back, obviously proud of his perfect do. “Can it, Savano. You and your little mystery buddy are in serious trouble. I’m hearing talk that our hazmat boys are MIA. The AD is on his way down from a meeting in Scotland, so until he gets here, keep your trap shut.”

Chevie swallowed her anger; she’d have words with this guy when this was all over. “Okay, Agent. I realize you’re doing your job, and I would probably do the same thing myself if I was in your nineteen-fifties shoes, though possibly with a little more empathy and less jargon. But we have a scared boy here, and with good reason. There’s a pretty impressive guy on our tail, who probably took out the entire hazmat team with a musket.”

Duff sighed like this crazy talk made him sad. “Yep, the BOLO said you were delusional. London does that to a person. Can’t get a decent pizza in the entire city.” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, you know who I should tell about this?” Chevie stiffened. “Don’t you dare!”

Duff pulled a phone from his pocket and made a big deal of focusing the camera. “No, no really. Cord needs to know about this. He said you were his finest student. This is gonna break his heart.”

Duff snapped a couple of shots of Chevie cuffed to the toilet and texted it across the Atlantic to Cord Vallicose.

“Take this seriously, Duff!” said Chevie, struggling to keep her voice down. She knew this guy; the moment she shouted at him he would simply walk away and slam the door. “People are dying, and it’s not over yet. Take your weapon off safety, tell your guys to look sharp.”

Duff seemed on the point of taking her seriously when a text jingled through on his phone. He consulted the screen and smiled broadly.

“It’s from Cord. You should read this—he’s devastated.” And with a nasty chuckle Duff backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Albert Garrick arrived at the Garden Hotel seconds after the London team, and could do little but scowl in frustration as he watched them hurry through the entrance. Six agents in Windbreakers, blending in about as effectively as a half dozen penguins would in the chic lobby.

Garrick cursed them for fools, then treated himself to a coffee from a nearby café while he adjusted his plans. His BOLO had yielded an almost immediate callback from Agent Waldo Gunn, and Garrick had hoped to reach the safe house before the inevitable band of heavy-handed federal overkillers. Except in this case it was not overkill. An entire garrison of agents would not be enough to keep him from Riley and the Timekey.

Had Garrick succeeded in reaching the scene before the away team, he could simply have taken what he wanted and disposed of Waldo Gunn; but with six armed agents keeping watch, improvised violence could not be relied upon. The odds were still in Garrick’s favor, but Riley had skill in the martial arts, having been taught by a master, and Garrick had no desire to be felled by a lucky strike from a child.

For a moment he allowed himself to be mildly distracted by the changes that had overhauled Monmouth Street since what he had begun to think of as
his day
. Even though Smart’s memories had prepared him for the bright, shiny wonders of the present, it was quite another thing to spy them first hand.

In
his day
Monmouth Street had been mainly penny digs, and by this time of night it would be lined with residents taking great amusement from the japes of juvenile beggars trying to pry coin from the theater crowds. Now, there were no beggars on the street and barely an Englishman to be seen, though if Smart’s memory served him correctly, they let anyone call themselves British these days.

I might have something to say about that, thought Garrick. When I am king.

He was, of course, joking. He had no desire to be king. The prime minister held the real power.

Garrick finished the really rather excellent coffee, thanked the waiter, then strolled across the street to the Garden Hotel.

Inside the safe suite, Waldo Gunn was not happy. This place was blown, and he knew it. After nearly a decade of caretaking this wonderful location, with more than two hundred at-risk subjects sheltered, the FBI away team had rolled up in their black SUVs and marched mob-handed into his discreet haven. Discreet no more.

And, though Waldo was slightly miffed that his own cushy posting was jeopardized, his main worry was professional.

I don’t even know for certain who the bad guy is, he thought. Agent Orange makes strong claims against Agent Savano, but nothing in her file suggests such a violent nature. There was that infamous incident in Los Angeles, but in my opinion she acted heroically and lives were saved.

So now she’s a mass murderer? It didn’t make sense. Everything was topsy-turvy today. Instead of protecting fugitives, he was detaining suspects. Even more irritating was the sight of those clodhopping agents tramping all over his beautiful Italian rugs, and now they were even trying on jackets from the closet.

If one of them even looks at the Zegna suit, I will shoot him myself, vowed Waldo.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he called to a lanky agent sprawled on the sofa. “Take your shoes off the furniture. That’s a Carl Hansen!”

Waldo’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and it was the dedicated buzz that meant the message was on a coded channel and therefore official business. He checked the screen and saw the text was from Agent Orange. Short and sweet:
Coming up.

Great, thought Waldo, twisting his gray beard to a point. Another fly in our overcrowded ointment.

The doorbell to the suite chimed, and half a dozen agents instantly threw various combat shapes, training their weapons on every flickering shadow.

“At ease, storm troopers,” said Waldo drily, crossing the small lobby to the intercom. “It’s one of our own.”

Waldo Gunn knew that he would probably choose to retire when this post went belly up. There was no way he could integrate with an office full of gun monkeys after twenty years of culture at Covent Garden.

The intercom screen showed a single figure outside the door.

Waldo pressed the talk button. “Identification, please.”

The man glared at the camera, as though reaching into his pocket was an inconvenience he didn’t have time for, then sighed and pulled out his badge, flipping it close to the lens.

It was Agent Orange, all right. Not a great photograph, but definitely the same man.

Maybe so, thought Waldo. But the FBI doesn’t operate on mugshots in our own facilities anymore. Why would we, when we have biometrics?

“Thumb on the scanner, please,” he ordered curtly.

“Really?” said the man with Agent Orange’s FBI badge and card. “I’m in a hurry here. Don’t want to be stuck in the cold just because some bucket of bolts can’t read my digit.”

“Thumb on the scanner, if you please,” insisted Waldo, not bothering to argue. If Orange was in a hurry, he should simply press the glass and be done with it.

“You’re the boss for now,” said Orange, and he placed his right thumb on the scanner bar, which took about five seconds longer than usual before matching the print to the one on file.

“See?” said Waldo. “That wasn’t so difficult. It’s just protocol.”

Waldo opened the door and shivered as a chill wrapped itself around his legs.

Must be a window open, he thought. I could have sworn I closed them all.

“The legendary Agent Waldo Gunn,” said Agent Orange, extending a hand. “Protector of lost sheep.”

“Legendary in certain circles,” said Waldo. He shook the offered hand and thought involuntarily, I don’t trust this man’s hand.

Waldo could not help glancing down. He noticed that Orange’s fingers were slim as a girl’s and the nails were as long.

Why the instinctive dislike? wondered Waldo, and then he remembered one of his mother’s various long-winded sayings:
Never trust a man with long nails, unless he’s a guitar picker. A long-nailed man has never done a day’s work in his life, not honest work at any rate.

Orange relinquished Waldo’s hand and stared over his shoulder into the suite.

“Quite a gathering you have here, Waldo,” he said, his Scottish accent making the sentence five seconds longer than it would usually be.

That accent would drive me crazy, thought Waldo. It could take all day to finish a conversation.

“What can I do for you, Agent Orange?”

Orange’s smile was wide and thin. “Isn’t it obvious? I need you to release the suspects into my custody.”

Waldo bristled at the idea, which was so outlandish that he initially thought Orange was joking. “Your custody? That’s hardly procedure. These are suspects in an investigation. You are not an investigator.”

Orange seemed saddened by this attitude. “Perhaps not, but I do outrank you, Waldo.”

Suddenly Waldo did not appreciate this man calling him by his first name. “That’s Special Agent Gunn, if you please. And for your information, nobody outranks me in this suite. As officer in charge, I can trump the president himself if I deem it necessary. At any rate, the Assistant Director is on his way, and he has ordered that nobody interfere with the subjects until he arrives.”

“But they killed my entire hazmat team!” objected Orange. “No quarter was given, though it was asked. I was lucky to escape with my life.”

No quarter was given, thought Waldo. Quaint choice of words. “You do seem remarkably
alive
. And unscathed, too. Where are the bodies?”

Orange coughed into his fist. “That’s delicate and strictly
need to know
. It’s connected to our operation, which is about fifteen grades above your security clearance. I could tell you, but then . . .”

“You’d have to kill me,” said Waldo, completing the hackneyed phrase.

“And your family,” added Orange, straight-faced.

Waldo’s instinctive dislike of this Scot burned brighter. “There’s no call to be rude. We have a procedure in place here, and that’s the end of it. You may wait in the lounge if you wish, but there will be no contact with the suspects. After all, we only have your word for it that the detainees are guilty of anything.”

Orange’s smile never wavered. “That’s an excellent point. Unfortunately, I am not in a mood to be detained at the moment, and as you pointed out, you outrank me only inside the suite. And I am outside. So I shall partake of another excellent coffee from the establishment across the street and return later when the big-knob bluebottle has joined the party.” Orange stopped suddenly and his eyes brightened as though lit from within. “Can it be?” he cried, his accent suddenly less Scottish. “Why, I swear that it is.”

Waldo was reluctantly intrigued. “What is? It is what?”

Orange gazed past the suite’s custodian into the room itself. “Blow me if I haven’t been here before.”

“I think you’re mistaken,” said Waldo in the most patronizing tone he could muster. “I have a log of every single person who has set foot across this threshold in the past twenty years, and you are not on it.”

Orange was so delighted that he actually clapped his hands. “This was years ago, Waldo.
Many
years ago. If I remember it right, an exceedingly dodgy character answered the landlord’s rap in those days.”

“Fascinating story, really. But if you won’t come in, you must leave. Security and all that.”

Orange doffed his cap, revealing a head of hair that seemed gray or black depending on the incline of his head. “And all that, indeed, Waldo. A quick coffee bath for the ivories, and I shall return. Watch for me, won’t you?”

Neither man offered his hand upon parting, but Waldo Gunn flicked through different camera views on the security screen so that he could watch Orange all the way to Monmouth Street.

“I will watch for you, Agent Orange,” he said between his teeth. “You give your ivories their coffee bath, and I will watch for you like a hawk.”

Waldo placed a hand on his round stomach, the result of too many fried Cumberland sausages and late night hot chocolates with Chantilly swirls.

What is that feeling? he wondered, trying to match an emotion to the acid churning in his belly.

Waldo Gunn realized that, for the first time in twenty years, he did not feel safe in his own fortress.

Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. Orange is a disconcerting character, that is all. He’s not dangerous.

But Waldo Gunn’s subconscious was trying to tell him something, and the portly agent really should have listened.

Garrick ignored the coffee shop and virtually skipped down the Garden’s service alley, still hardly crediting his good fortune at having previously cracked this establishment.

He found that he could roll through his memory like a moving-picture show and find each frame as clear as reality, smells and all.

He remembered this house well. In his day, a flourishing bootmaker’s shop had stood on the ground floor, with a brass plate in the window claiming Charles Dickens himself as a patron, which was difficult to contest as by then the great novelist had been dead for nigh on a decade.

Above the bootmaker’s lived the dodgy character with a curious name. Billtong . . . no . . . Bill
toe
, that was it. George Billtoe had passed a sheaf of homemade pound notes in Barnet Horse Fair and incurred the wrath of a certain gang, who did not appreciate their turf being poached without ask nor license. The gang’s wrath was embodied in the form of Albert Garrick.

Vengeance from above, thought Garrick. As I came down the chimney.

George Billtoe had heard rumors that papers had been passed on him, and he grew increasingly secretive and prudent, barricading himself into the upstairs apartment, employing an urchin to run his errands. Garrick was forced to use all his skills as a contortionist to inch his way down the man’s chimney.

Garrick chuckled. On that night he had actually roused Billtoe before slitting his throat, just so the mark would realize that his precautions had counted for nothing.

Happy days. How he and Riley had chortled over that faker’s folly.

Garrick remembered acting out the entire episode, right down to Billtoe’s stunned final plea for mercy before he gave him a close shave across the Adam’s apple.

The magician smiled at the memory as he scaled the hotel fire escape to the third floor, sliding silent as a shadow across the cast-iron steps. The top step stood eight feet below a flat copper roof, which offered a wide lip and ample grip for a man of Garrick’s abilities. He trusted the strength of his fingers and launched himself upward from the railing, grasping the cold copper rim and swinging himself bodily onto the flat roof.

Across the dull copper he ran, hunched to avoid the prying eyes of curtain twitchers, bent so low that his torso was horizontal and Orange’s sharp nose cut the night air like a beagle’s.

This is indeed the life of champions, thought Albert Garrick. A fresh breeze from the Thames, preternatural quantum powers, and a room full of Yankee bully boys to test my skills against. Magic is real and lives inside my person.

The chimney was where he remembered it, a red and yellow brick stack bound with crumbling mortar, weather-stained, perhaps, but otherwise virtually unchanged. Even during Billtoe’s residency the chimney had been out of service, plastered up at the base with a line of cracked clay pots that had not diffused smoke in many a decade. Garrick brushed the pots aside with a cavalier sweep of his arm and heaved the chimney cap from its perch.

The chimney pipe stretched below him from dark to pitchdark. There was no comforting smell of soot that would have reminded Garrick of home, but there was the feeling of depth and drop and the sour gust of damp. The magician swung his legs easily over the stack and sat on the rim, peering down.

Garrick’s breadth of shoulder could barely squeeze down that shaft, even on the diagonal.

Last time descending this box took some time and a fifth of nerve, thought Garrick. This time will be different.

Garrick used his quantum abilities to order his shoulder ligaments to slacken so that the ball of his humerus popped out of his socket.

No pain, he told his sensory neurons. I need my senses sharp, and last time I descended through this shaft the agony was a chink in my plate.

Garrick had always been a touch shortsighted but enjoyed excellent night vision, which he attributed to boiled vegetable poultices that he molded into his eye sockets two nights a week, then ate for breakfast in the mornings.

Even so, he thought, using his good arm to hoist himself into the black shaft, no harm in opening my pupils a little to trap the ambient light.

Garrick smiled, his teeth shining like candied lemon drops in the gloom.

Ambient light? Smart, my friend, I cannot thank you enough for educating thyself so thoroughly on your multifarious interests.

Garrick’s pupils zoomed till they filled his irises and he could see black spiders hiding in the black hole of a dark chimney at night.

This is what magic really is, he thought. An open mind. Garrick cranked his knees apart until they braced his body weight, then lowered himself into the darkness like a demon descending into hell.

Inside the bathroom of the safe house, Riley was wondering if his brain had been somehow etherized by his trip. Or if he had suffered some form of mind malady brought on by a life of continual terror.

I feel nothing. Even my fear is fading. Perhaps I am in a sanatorium somewhere wearing the lunatic’s overalls.

And yet this futuristic fantasy was particularly detailed. Miss Sav-a-no was plainer to him now than any individual he had ever spied. He could make out the drops of sweat on her brow as she worried the plastic ties on her wrists. He could hear her teeth grind in frustration and see the cords of her long neck stand out like a schooner’s rigging.

“Are you looking at something in particular?” said Chevie.

Riley started to mumble a denial, but Chevie interrupted him.

“You want to hear something ironic, kid?”

“Yes, miss. As you please.”

She tugged on her cuffs, which held her arms fast around the toilet’s plumbing. “I find it ironic that I could really use a bathroom right now.”

Riley tried not to smile.

“And this is
ironic
because you are tethered to a bowl and yet cannot use it?”

“Exactly.”

“Thank you, Chevie. I have often encountered the term
irony
in my reading but never truly understood it till now.”

“To educate and protect,” said Chevie. “Though I’ve been falling down a little on the protecting.”

“It was bad luck that you came up against Albert Garrick. Of all the coves you could have scooped out of the past, he is the worst, no doubt about it.”

“He’s just a man, you know, Riley. Whatever you think about him, that’s all he is.”

Riley slumped in the bath. “No. There are men who are somehow more than men. Garrick has always been one of these, and now even more so. The trip from the past has given him gifts, I would swear on it.”

Gifts, thought Chevie. Or mutations.

“Garrick is truly beyond your experience,” continued Riley. “Mine too.”

“You make him sound like Jack the Ripper.”

This casual reference caused the blood to drain from Riley’s face as a memory hit him like a mallet, and while his mind wandered, Chevie shifted her focus to the room beyond. For the last fifteen minutes the only sounds had been typical agents-on-babysitting-duty noises: sharp comments, jock laughter, coffee percolating, and an almost incessant flushing from the second bathroom.

“Hey!” she called. “Waldo! Duff! You want to open the door? We’re feeling a bit unloved in here.”

In response someone turned up the TV. The loud bass of dance music bounced off the door.

“I hate those guys,” muttered Chevie. “I am going to work real hard, get promoted, then fire every last one of them.” She noticed Riley’s stricken face. “Are you okay, kid? Riley?”

Riley’s eyes came back to the present. “Garrick told me a story once about old Leather Apron, Jack the Ripper. He playacted the whole thing in our digs.”

“Don’t tell me, Garrick
is
Jack the Ripper.”

Riley’s head jerked backward as if Garrick would hear this accusation. “No. Certainly not. Garrick
hated
Jack the Ripper.”

Chevie kept one ear on the noises outside and the other on Riley’s tale.

“He hated the Ripper? Weren’t those guys like peas in a pod?”

Riley sat up as far as he could. “No. Oh, no. Old Jack did what Garrick would never do. He courted the bluebottles and the press gentlemen. Sent ’em notes and so forth. Gave himself a nickname. Garrick prided himself on being a like specter with his business, and here was this night slasher leaving kidneys and hearts strewn about all over Whitechapel.”

Riley’s eyes glazed over as he lost himself in the story.

“The Ripper was busy before Garrick got me, but the case obsessed him for years after. I knew to stay clear if the papers were running a story on Jack. Until one night Garrick comes home, just as the sun hangs between the spires. He shakes me gentle, like we are genuine family, and his touch was so soft that I came out of my dream thinking my father had come and I says, ‘Father?’”

Riley paused to spit toward the plughole. “I was barely eight years in the world and knew no better, but the word is magical to Garrick, and he smiles like Alice’s cat. ‘I suppose I am,’ he says. ‘That is my responsibility.’

“I am full awake by this point and more than a little afraid. Garrick is covered from head to foot in blood, like he’d been swimming in the slaughterhouse trough. Even his teeth are red. He must’ve seen how scared I was, for he says then, ‘Don’t worry, son. This is not my blood. Jack will be ripping no more.’ And then he waits for this nugget to sink in.

“It takes me a moment, but I gets it. ‘You killed Leather Apron? Ripper Jack himself? But he is from hell,’ says I.

“This draws a guffaw from Garrick. ‘He’s in hell now,’ he says. ‘His soul, at any rate. His body is sleeping with the rotting corpses of common hoodlums in the sludge on the Thames’s bed.’

“I know Garrick doesn’t like questions, but one pops out before I can stop it: ‘How did you find a demon, sir?’ But he isn’t angry; he seems to be in a mood for questions.

“‘Aha,’ says he, tapping his forehead. ‘With man’s deadliest weapon: the brain. Jack was a creature of habits, and that was his undoing. The first five girls were done in a frenzy, but after that Jack calmed himself and used the moon as his clock. For three years now I’ve been patrolling Whitechapel and Spitalfields on the nights of the full moon, and finally he shows outside the Ten Bells.’ Garrick laughs then. ‘It’s barely credible, this so-called genius plans to snatch yet another girl from the Bells. I spotted him right off, a toff in common getup, all twitchy with nerves.’

“Garrick leaned over me then. I remember blood dripping onto my forehead and I thought, That’s Leather Apron’s blood.”

Chevie was so enthralled by the story that she wouldn’t have moved even if the plasti-cuffs had miraculously fallen from her wrists.

“‘I let him take a girl, just to be sure,’ Garrick says. ‘And I trail him from the rooftops down to Buck’s Row. I can hear them talking and joking about poor Polly Nichols, who was done for at this very spot. Old Jack had a surprisingly feminine giggle on him, something he never boasted about to the papers. And all the time I am looming overhead with my favorite Cinquedea blade all blacked up and ready for blood.’ He showed me the short sword then. It had not been washed, and the blood was thick and lumped with gore.”

If Chevie had not been so engrossed in the tale, she might have noticed that, while there was still noise coming from outside the bathroom, the sounds of agents joking had ceased and there were thumping sounds that could not be attributed to the music pumping from the television’s speakers.

“‘As soon as he pulls out his own blade, a common-as-muck scalpel, I leaped down from on high and had him open from neck to nave. It was a clean swipe, like something from the theater. He went down like they all do, no special powers, no memorable last words. The girl was rightly grateful and fell to her knees, calling me Lordship. I should have killed her, I know, me lad. But the street was dark and my face was blacked, and so I simply says, “Tell your friends that London is rid of Bloody Jack,” and lets her run off for herself. It was a moment of weakness, but I was feeling well disposed toward the world. And then, what’s this? A little moan from the cobbles. My boy Jacky is still breathing. “Not for long,” says I, and set to work. Before he goes, Jack confesses to nineteen murders, with something of a gleam in his eye. “Nineteen?” says I to him. “I done twice that last year alone.” His heart gave out after that.’”

Riley drew a shuddering breath. “And that was when I realized that Albert Garrick was indeed the devil.”

The bathroom door buckled suddenly as a body was hurled forcibly against it. The crash startled Riley from his reverie. Again the door heaved, this time coming away from its hinges entirely, falling into the room, weighed down by the unconscious form of Agent Duff.

A dark figure appeared in the doorway and seemed to glide into the room.

“Orange?” said Chevie, but she saw almost immediately that, while the figure resembled the FBI agent, it was not in fact him.

Riley looked into the man’s cruel, dead eyes. “No. No, it’s my master. Now do you understand?”

Albert Garrick hammed it up for Chevie, striking a pose, then he gave a deep bow.

“Albert Garrick, West End illusionist and assassin-for-hire at your service, young lady—come down the chimney to introduce myself proper.”

As he bowed, a drop of someone else’s blood fell from his nose, landing on Chevie’s forehead, and she was struck to her core with a terror that she could barely contain.

“Now I understand,” she said.