And that was when he saw the ghost aircraft. The cross shape. The wings. The plumage painted on the tail. It sailed towards John over the sun-struck clouds, growing larger by the second. And then was right there, its metal fuselage right in his face, and he was staring at giant letters emblazoned on the craft. He recoiled and hit his head on the tray table.
“Sir?” said a concerned voice. He blinked. The aircraft was no longer there. In its place was a very pretty and very young-looking flight attendant in robes of blue and silver. And the passenger next to him, an old Indian gentleman who looked quite startled at his antics.
“N-nothing,” John said lamely. His groping hand stumbled upon paper, and he fished out the book he had been reading. The Doomsayer Journeys, by some bloke named Wetherell. “Sorry, just dropped my book.”
The flight attendant nodded primly and moved on, robes sliding back to reveal an extraordinary amount of creamy leg. Both John and the Indian gentleman stared appreciatively, and then pretended they hadn’t. John stared out the window awhile, then dismissed it - probably lack of sleep. He went back to his book. By the time they landed in Constantinople he was deep into Steve Wetherell’s prose and the only thing on his mind was the impending destruction of a planet he’d been rooting for several hundred pages. And of course there was an unlikely hero, and a mad emperor, and a warrior princess, and a planet-sized ordinateur. Just what the doctor recommended.
It was with a great sigh that he finally handed the book over to Ottoman Customs. There was some stuff in there about God, and however fictional, the Ottoman Empire took this kind of stuff seriously. The emin at the gate took the book, leafed through it, and tossed it into a bin labelled CONTRABAND.
“Any other items you want to declare, sir?” he asked, staring down his razor-sharp mustache at the contents of John’s briefcase. “What are these utensils, powders, vials?”
“I’m a doctor,” lied John fluidly, producing his papers. “The powders and vials are medicine. Agues, fevers and dementia. Here’s my letter of invitation. I think you’ll find everything in order.”
The emin made a show of reading the letter from the Süleymaniye Complex.
“Western medicine,” he said distastefully, but they both knew the score. Nobody would dare stop a doctor, especially one with the seal of the esteemed Complex. He stamped John’s passport and waved him in. “Be safe, heal well, Doctor. Welcome to Kostantiniyye.”
John exited the airport with a spring in his step. A taxi trundled up to him almost immediately. A thickset, scarred face poked its head out.
“Good to see you, John. Hop in.”
“Good to see you too, Victor.”
Inside the luxurious darkness of the taxi, John Metcalf opened his briefcase.
It was true, what he had said - the powders and vials were medicines. But not all of them. He brought to his eye a very special vial, filled with a completely colorless liquid, obtained at great cost from one of the most secretive ayurvedic medicine-men of Bali.
In a sense, he was a doctor. Had they put him through a lie-detector, no untruth would ever have registered. He certainly thought of himself as a curer of certain disease. It was all about framing. John Metcalf cured vanity, hubris, and power.
John Metcalf was an assassin.
Twenty minutes later, the taxi dropped him off at very particular church known to be attended by some very particular functionaries in very particular governments. He took perhaps twenty minutes. Anyone passing by who happened to be Sensitive would have smelled the stench of magic being done, but it was the church - there was always magic being done. In twenty minutes, Victor, this time driving a sleek, black car stamped with the coat of arms of the Süleymaniye Complex. John, the smell of magic following him like hot iron filings, walked out slowly and carefully, wearing the robes of a priest, and got in.
That evening, three hundred people took Holy Communion at the newly rebuilt church of Hagia Sophia. Among them were visiting ambassadors from thirteen countries that the Ottoman Empire desperately wanted to court. Within days, all of them were all dead. Despite absolutely no trace of poison or magic in their bodies, accusations of murder filled diplomatic cables. The Ottoman government went into a state of high panic. Within weeks, both the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empires had threatened war, and a Dr. John Metcalf had shown up at the British embassy, asking for asylum from the growing political instability. He was just one among hundreds. They were processed instantly.
“Well done, John,” said Victor, back when they were both safely on the ground in London. The scarred man drew out a book. The Doomsayer Journeys. “By the way, Management wanted me to give this to you. Said you might just have time to finish it on the next assignment.”
Not for the first time, John wondered how Management knew these things. And, on the heels of that, he remembered the ghost aircraft. It had gone completely out of his mind.
“Bit creepy, if you ask me.” said Victor.
John shrugged, picking up the book. “You’ll get used to it,” he said. They all did. Or they all died. That was how it worked with Management. He reached for the bottle of whisky he kept in the bottom-right drawer for times like these. Black Lake, Irish, ‘86, a good drink for anyone with Sensitivity. He poured for both of them.
They knocked back their whiskies in silence. It hit their throats and spread warmth like a cancer, sending tendrils of softness into their bodies. John’s Oculum Sphere, left to idle on the table, briefly glowed a dull gold.
“Good whisky.”
“Good whisky, yes.”
Silence for a while, broken only by the pouring of another.
“So I know they say not to ask -”
“Then don’t.”
But Victor ignored him. “How long you been doing this, John?”
He thought about it. It seemed like an eternity. “Nine, maybe ten years,” he said at last. “Doesn’t matter.”
“That’s a long time. When do I get out, John? When am I going to be done?”
John looked at the scarred man with sympathy. Victor, despite being three times John’s size, and a fantastic getaway driver, was still young in these matters. He debated giving his apprentice the speech again. A magician’s choices came down to very few in these times; either you worked for the Church, or you worked for the Caliphate, or you worked for the Management, or you were dead, carved up in a gutter somewhere or screaming as they nailed you to a cross and set a fire in your flesh. It was simple reality.
“We’re out when Management says we’re out,” he said. “You know the score. It’s a hard world for people like us. You know the Church keeps tabs.”
Victor made a face. “What about you, John? You have dreams, maybe? Things to do? You tell me you’re okay with spending ten years living like this?”
“I had dreams,” John said, not without a touch of bitterness. “But I learned they’re a luxury for people like us, Victor. All this crap other people talk about. Aspirations. Morals. God’s commandments. All of it’s a story. There’s only life. We do what we have to do to stay alive.”
Victor was still making that face, so he poured him another glass. “It helps if you don’t count the years,” he said. “Think of it as just one day, always starting over, and it’s given to us when we wake and taken from us when we sleep. All that matters is what you do with that day that’s given to you.”
“I can’t live like that, John,” said Victor. The drink seemed to give him courage. “Look, you don’t have to live like this either. You’re powerful, John, you’re on a different level, you’re telling me you can’t decide to do your own thing one day and give them a good run for their money?”
“And do what? Spend a few years with the Church and Management hunting me?”
Victor’s eyes were gleaming: perhaps with alcohol, perhaps with fire. “You’d be free, John, free. Doesn’t that count for something?”
Ah. The topic had emerged, somehow. John dreaded this talk of freedom. His wife had ta
lked about this, often and loud.
What did freedom even mean, anyway? Freedom to live like dogs, forever looking over your shoulder, knowing you would die screaming? Or freedom to travel the world, with a dignified death at the end of it? There was a price to be paid either way. But not many people understood these things. They believed in ideals. Some believed in God’s commandments. Others in freedom. Or love. Or glory. Or any number of useless fictions. And then they got angry when the world failed to give them space to act these scripts they had written for themselves.
John wanted to tell Victor this - to drag the fool up by his collar and show him the photograms of himself, years ago, to point to that starry-eyed idealist, and say this man is dead, and point to that other set of photograms, the ones he kept in the darkest drawer, and say this is why.
“I’d rather be able to drink a good whisky than be free,” he said instead, pouring again. “At least I get to choose what my cage is made of.”
They drank in silence. Eventually, Victor shook his head, presumably to clear himself of his disgust. “So are you going to tell me what comes next?”
“Moscow,” said John. “Management wants a bit more fuel on the fire.”
They drank again and began debating the assignment. Then, because it was protocol not to spend too much time with each other, John let Victor out the back door and watched him drive off.
“Good man,” he said to himself, thinking about the poison he’d added to Victor’s whiskey. Management’s orders. The man was fraying. Either he did it or they did it. And John had chosen to give him a painless death - better than dying screaming in a Management cell somewhere.
He made his way back to the house and went up the creaky stairs to his study and the bottle of whiskey. On the table, a photo of a woman stared at him in judgement. Underneath it, in slim gold letters: Lisa Metcalf, 1980-2018. Requisat Au Pace.
Only with Lisa had he ever been able to be himself. To everyone else he was the Inquisitor, the boss, the apprentice, the merchant of death, the faithful hand of Management.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the photo. “I didn’t -”
In his head, he could still hear her voice, gentle yet firm. Didn’t what, John? Mean to kill people? Didn’t mean to turn out like this? You had a choice, John. We all did.
John Metcalf, magician assassin, put his head down on the table and began to cry. Not for the hundreds dying in Turkey; not for Victor, who by now would be weaving very slightly; not for Management, with its dark master plans. He cried for himself, and for Lisa, and for the dark world that had made him who he was. The lights darkened in sympathy.
Meanwhile, in a world not too far removed, Dr. John Metcalf, physicist and engineer, sat in his study. He seethed.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Ten years of research, almost on the verge of breakthrough, and the bastards had cut his funding.
He had tried, of course. He’d raged. He’d yelled. He’d made every single phone call he could - to the University, to the funders, to CERN, to the Department of Defense, and even, giving up every last shred of dignity, to Lisa, because ever since the divorce she’d been hanging out with some venture capital types who had serious money. But the Dean was apologetic, the funders disinterested, the Europeans thought he was mad, the DoD wanted only to know the military potential, and Lisa - well, Lisa had shrieked in laughter and kissed him goodbye, but not before sending him a photo of herself in the arms of some oil tycoon.
He was so far gone it barely hurt anymore.
So he had done the right thing. He’d dismissed the staff, even Victor Klein, his faithful research assistant. Klein had a good brain on him and didn’t deserve his career tanking because of the project. And here he was, drinking cheap whiskey.
“Face it, John,” the Dean had said, trying on that fake-consoling voice of his. “Theory is all very fine, but it’s been ten years and we haven’t got a single good paper out of this. We need more than just potential. We need results.”
There was just one last place he could take his work to: Moscow. The university would disavow him, of course, and the DoD would call him a traitor, and god alone knew what yarn Lisa would spin from it. But this was his magnum opus, and there was no way in hell that he would let it die like this.
Which is how, in two different worlds, two different aircraft bearing two different John Metcalfs bore down on Moscow. One was an old Snapdragon, its whale skin bags full of hydrogen, its steel and wooden carriage creaking ever so slightly. The huge Church-sanctioned Mobius engine spat out fire. The other was an Airbus A330, all steel and electronics. John Metcalf the magician saw the ghost aircraft again, just before his own landed. Both Metcalfs disembarked, disturbed by their own thoughts.
And both, in an act of remarkable coincidence, found their way to the same rambling street on the outskirts of the Moscow State University. There, under the iron-grey skies, occupying almost an entire block in a lazy, gone-to-seed fashion, was the hotel they had been directed to. It had probably been fit for princes a century ago. Now it loomed dark against the sky, a lone steeple inclined at an ominous angle, and the windows seemed to stare at them like empty eyes. Beggars sat outside the gated doors.
“The Grand Moscow Hotel,” said John Metcalf, the physicist. His contact in Moscow had said they’d meet him here tomorrow. Damned odd place for a meeting, unless one had a flair for the gothic and a pressing need to be away from anything useful. Still, it was Moscow...
“The Grand Moscow Hotel,” said John Metcalf, the magician, squinting. It was completely unlike Management’s usual accommodations. They usually went for bright, expensive places, the kind of place you would least expect an assassin to work from.
Still, it was Moscow.
“Three days,” they said to the reception desk, and in two different worlds were given the keys to room 222. Both settled down, and both went to work.
John Metcalf the physicist examined the room - large, but rather threadbare. Some rather despondent-looking bags of tea and a slightly melted-looking electric kettle occupied an otherwise usable desk. He changed his clothes, plugged the kettle in and spread out his papers, going through the draft one last time in hardcopy. There were still some things to fill in, proofs they hadn’t got around to exploring, definitions that needed work, or at least a mention…
There was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” said John the physicist. He flung open the door. A thin young man in a badly fitted grey suit almost toppled in.
“Yes?” said John imperiously.
The thin man scowled. He was clearly not used to people yanking the door open just as he was about to pick the lock. “The Director will see you day after tomorrow,” he said in heavily accented English. “He says, bring your research. But you waste his time, you not receive his funding, not a cent, nyet.”
“Thanks for the message,” said John, excited and irritated at the same time. “Next time, call. Or text. I have a phone, you know.”
The man gave him a look. “Day after tomorrow,” he repeated heavily.
“Alright,” said John. “Now are you going to stay in my room? Because if not, I’d like to get some sleep.”
The thin man seemed to realize he was in John’s room. With a curious look at the papers on the table, he brushed past John, and disappeared into the hallway. John stared after him, slightly disturbed, then closed his door and went back to his table immediately.
Christ. Seven in the morning. Seven. He had only so many hours….
He began to work feverishly.
Meanwhile, John Metcalf the magician spread out his copy of the Litany of Babel and rifled through the spellbook. The target was a politician, with armed bodyguards. He needed something long-rang, something almost untraceable…
Not Abraxas’ Mirror. Not Bacon’s Disembowelment. Not -
Aha. Theodric’s Basilisk.
The Basilisk was a truly nasty spell. Cast right, it reconfigured every living cell within a certain radius t
o a stiff calcium approximation of itself. Not exactly turning a man to stone, but close enough for Management work.
That night, he put on his dark clothes and made his way to where Management had said the target would be most vulnerable: a mansion to the East, heavily guarded with cameras and sharpshooters. Daedric’s Ghost let him slip inside the outer wall with relative ease, and he cast Frost’s Revealing as he ran, outlining the location of every guard on the perimeter. It cost him a lot, but within moments he was at the inner doors, the guards no wiser for it. A magnificent marble hall and a gleaming wooden staircase greeted him. He wove a Lesser Spell of Unnoticeability around him and took the stairs, flying wraith-like past maids dressed in too-short uniforms and sneering, suited guards. The spell ran out just as he got to the study.
He knocked.
“Come in, Vasily,” said a rough voice inside.
He slipped in. There was a man inside with his shirtsleeves rolled up. He was sweating slightly. Another one of the maids in too-short dresses cowered and whimpered in a corner. The man turned, a look of surprise sketching itself on his face, and John cast the Basilisk. The man calcified before his very eyes, the look of surprise now permanent.
Perfect.
A whimper from the maid in the corner.
Oh no. Not perfect. The Basilisk had caught her, too, grabbing her by the legs and slowly creeping up her body as the spell took hold.
John crouched, aghast.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. “I’m so sorry.”
She mumbled something. It sounded like she was begging. Then it crept up her chest, and he knew her heart had stopped. Only her eyes remained moving till the end, pleading, and then they, too, froze over.
John stood there for a long time, cursing himself. He had come prepared to kill any number of guards, but not the innocent.
Still, he was a professional. On the way back he knocked a guard out, tinkered with his memories to show the politician casting the spell on the maid and it backfiring in his face. He laid the guard by the door, and left by the window, creeping under the silent stares of the maid and the master.
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 23