Order of the Black Sun Box Set 8

by Preston William Child

  “I lied! I lied, of course. Jesus, this is not information one just gives out!” Kingsley argued in words and bubbles through the muddy puddle water. Sickening gulps of rainwater occasionally made it into his throat, making him choke violently.

  “How do I know you are not lying now?” the attacker asked in a calm tone that affirmed his valid argument. He had Kingsley cornered, but when it came to drowning in shit gutter murk, he was willing to lie as long as it kept him alive.

  “You don’t, right? If you kill me, you will never know which of my lies were the truth, would ya? How will you ever know if I could really have helped you if you end me now? Besides, you would not have trailed me if you had other options, so let us not lie to ourselves,” Kingsley retorted. His statements were born in desperation, calling the man’s bluff at the worst time to attempt such a perilous venture, but he utilized his acting skills to deliver the argument convincingly. Thunder clapped above them, lighting up the London night sky. Kingsley momentarily dreaded a lightning bolt sealing his fate before the madman would release him.

  Suddenly he felt the weight of his foe’s boot lift slightly. Through the rumbling thunder he warned, “If you run, I will kill you in your tracks, mate.” The sound of a gun’s hammer clicked in his ears, announcing Kingsley’s liberation as well as a new burden – he would have to come through on his offer. The man lifted his foot, releasing the actor. Kingsley instantly clasped his hand over his blinded eye, gasping for the first proper air he was breathing. The socket of his damaged eye was on fire, sending jabbing agony into his brain with every beat of his heart.

  He sat in the pouring rain, trying to open the sore, mud-riddled eye. The towering attacker reminded him of a cockney thug from a Guy Richie movie, and ugly to match. Lurching, the man waited patiently for Kingsley to recover enough to be taken away. He stepped back in under a corrugated iron roof protruding from the alley wall, an awning of the loading door of a Chinese restaurant. Under the roof, only the glow of his cigarette became visible. The sharp color was a blessing on Kingsley’s useful eye, giving him something to focus on until he could see properly.

  “After this fag, you had better be up and ready, mate,” the thug growled from the darkness of the awning’s cover. Kingsley took note of the amount of puffs that brightened the cherry in the blackness, estimating when the cigarette would be exhausted. He needed every second to compose himself and take some rest from the harrowing fight he had just survived.

  Normally, the effeminate actor would cower at all costs to get out of the rain. His vanity was well founded. Norman Kingsley had the countenance of an angel and he enjoyed the privilege. Not a hair on his head was ever out of place, much like his tailored shirts and designer brand trousers. Green eyes like milky moss adorned his perfectly shaped vampire features and full lips. His dark blonde hair was straight and styled to his collar and his body chiseled by a firm gym membership he rarely used for more manly pursuits, like heavy weight training. Like his face, Kingsley’s body was a product of gentle kindling, instead of active tempering.

  Tonight he found out just how useless his perfectly defined musculature really was. Like a sports car in a monster truck rally, his attractive physical abilities were drastically inferior to the fat buff of the thug who pummeled him into the ground. The orange cherry brightened for what Kingsley guessed was the last puff, so he quickly mustered as much strength as he could to get up.

  For a moment, he considered running for it, but his newly distorted depth perception proved too capricious for a sprint. In fact, he could hardly balance himself by just standing. It seemed to him that the resulting injuries of the beating only exacerbated his ocular handicap and, if he chose to make a run for it, he would not be afforded another chance after his certain capture. He had no choice. From this moment on, it was deception that would keep him alive.

  Like a lost soul Kingsley stood in the rain, waiting for his merciful adversary to call the order. The burning cherry of the fag shot to one side as the thug discarded it, and once more, he appeared from the darkness.

  “Name’s Terry,” he told Kingsley. “You remember that for our communication from now on.”

  “Alright,” Kingsley agreed. He wondered where this new arrangement would lead him and how far he would be able to keep up the charade until they found him out and doused him out like Terry’s fag.

  “Now, come on,” Terry commanded, grabbing the actor by the upper arm. He dragged Kingsley along like this for at least five blocks in the rain, before they came to a cobblestone stairwell between two buildings that dropped down two stories’ worth. Halfway down the grimy stairs, a lone door opened into the wall, the basement of one of the two buildings. Upon it was a crudely painted symbol of a sun and Kingsley recorded the image just in case.

  The blindness in his right eye was becoming a serious inconvenience, one he would quickly have to learn to adjust from now on. Not only did he find it difficult to measure the distance of objects, but even little things, like telling the detail of the door knob, was immensely difficult.

  Terry pushed Kingsley back and positioned him like a mannequin. “Stand still over here.”

  Kingsley obliged, pretending not to take note of what the man was doing. With his right eye pinched shut, he glanced at Terry’s hands. He did not knock, nor did he turn the doorknob, as one would expect. His fingertips simultaneously rested on selected parts of the tarnished doorknob, as if he was going to pull the thing free from its socket. But instead, the unintelligible and invisible sections of the knob read the heat signature of Terry’s fingers in sequence. With four consecutive clicks, the combination lock from the gods opened the main lock, and the door creaked, lazily ajar.

  “Come in,” Terry said as he stepped aside. “Hurry. I cannot let the whole outside world see us come in here.”

  “Why?” Kingsley asked, risking a punch.

  “Because I fucking said so, that is why,” the cockney thug reasoned. “Now get in and close the door before I change my mind about killing you, you fucking pansy.”

  “That was unnecessary,” Kingsley scoffed. Terry slapped him so hard on his back that it propelled the actor forward down the flight of stairs. “Where does this go?”

  “That matters not, does it? All that matters is that I have not caved in your goddamn pretty boy skull yet, eh,” Terry grunted in Kingsley’s wake. It was hard to see where he was going, but falling down the stairs would be preferable to ending up in the morgue, so Kingsley bore on. His feet carefully found each slippery step, wet from the leaking masonry above them. He was surprised at how patient Terry was, but there was a reason for that. Kingsley was correct in his previous assumption – he was all Terry and his people had, the only lead in an otherwise dead end. Faintly, he could hear Irish folk music playing in the dark and unknown distance. The fiddles and whistle almost made him happy, but the circumstances greatly diminished the pleasure.

  “Terry, I cannot see. Honestly,” he reported sincerely.

  “No worries, mate. Just a few more paces and we are there,” Terry answered.

  Three paces later, in mid-stride, Kingsley walked right into an iron door that knocked him back to the floor. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed at the sobering and unpleasant shock. His hands responded too late, leaving him to the merciless punishment of coccyx on concrete. He felt the thug’s powerful forearms under his and the sensation of being lifted effortlessly off the ground and back on his feet.

  “There,” Terry sighed. With his hand in a hammer fist, he knocked three times in deliberate cadence. From inside he heard a man’s voice cry, “Come!”

  As Terry opened the door, the Irish folk grew louder, enveloping Kingsley’s entire mind. He felt as if he had been immersed in his heritage with brutal clarity, removed from all he had achieved in London and thrown back to the Isle.

  The room harkened back to the 1940’s, perhaps earlier, and at the end of a long wooden table a man sat – a man with a fiddler cap and a skin like the trunk of a Redw
ood. He looked up with eyes of blue ice – well, one eye, as he shared Kingsley’s new physical encumbrance – and he smiled through lips thin as a knife wound. He slammed his hand on the table and invited the theater actor. “Sit down, Mr. Kingsley, and tell me that which has kept you from the grave this night.”

  3

  Kingsley’s Bluff

  “Have some whisky, Mr. Kingsley,” the man said cordially. His accent was thick, but Kingsley still recalled the twists and drawls of County Cork, and gradually, as the man spoke, his ears adapted more and more to the inflection.

  “My name is Keating,” he told the actor. “That is me, there, son.”

  He planted an old group photo in front of Kingsley, nodding as he did so. The actor scrutinized the black and white picture, scanning the faces with his one good eye. Soon enough, he located the old man’s face on the picture. With a bloody index finger he pointed, “There you are.”

  “That is correct, boy,” Keating affirmed.

  Terry sat down beside Kingsley, putting forward his own tumbler for the old man’s generosity. As Keating filled the glass, Terry leaned in to Kingsley and whispered, “Check the back.”

  Puzzled, Kingsley obeyed. He smelled the thug’s smoky breath in his face as he added, “You might want to swallow that drink first.”

  “Why?” Kingsley asked, hearing the old man chuckle on the other side of the table. Terry grinned and scoffed before throwing the Jameson Black Barrel in the back of his mouth. Kingsley needed a stiff drink anyway. After what he had endured tonight, he direly needed the blessing of devil’s piss to alleviate the pain and panic. He chugged back the drink. For a man who never ventured heavier than a glass of wine, it was a bit overwhelming and a coughing fit ensued from his gullet.

  The two Irishmen laughed at him, but something in the way of dark wisdom lingered in the death rattle of their snickering. Burning its way down to his unfortunate and delicate stomach, the whisky settled and allowed him to breathe. Kingsley flipped the picture over. On the back, it read Perceval Chapter, 1944. Kingsley looked up and shrugged. “So?”

  A blinding wallop upside his head readjusted his perception. Terry’s smack held a hell of a clout, prompting Kingsley to quickly see the error in his response. “Uh, of course. I get it. I get it!” he shouted. With his unharmed eye barely collecting enough information, he looked at the old man and read his face. “Christ! That is you! That was you in 1944? How old are you, Mr. Keating?”

  “I was born in 1910, son,” Keating answered nonchalantly, pouring another round for the three of them. Kingsley’s weak fortitude for the drink already impaired his ability to truly understand the phenomenal revelation he was part of, yet he displayed the correct amount of awe for the fact.

  “My God, Mr. Keating,” he marveled, “that makes you about a century old?”

  “He is one-hundred and seven years of age, mate,” Terry corrected him and lifted the glass in a toast. Astonished, Kingsley sat mute. His companions found it hard to tell whether it was the strong drink or the strange disclosure that distorted his face in befuddlement. Nevertheless, Keating lifted his glass to meet Terry’s, persuading Kingsley to do the same. Terry smiled, “To the Holy Grail!”

  The expression took Kingsley aback somewhat, but being an actor, he knew how to take a feed line and improvise. Along with Mr. Keating, Kingsley cheered, “To the Holy Grail!”

  Along with the melodies of old Ireland, in the smoky atmosphere of cigarettes and whisky, the two men sang while the flabbergasted actor sat in a daze. He experienced so many sensations he was not familiar with. The pain of the beating Terry had given him persisted throughout his body while the blind eye pulsed in anguish under the sticky dry blood exterior of his face. That, and the eerie revelation before him, threw Kingsley into a haze of doubt, fascination and fear. What had his lies plummeted him into this time?

  He felt locked in a cement coffin with the two strangers, one of which gave him the creeps. It was clear that Mr. Keating was well beyond his expiry date, yet he looked half a century younger than he was. Now they toasted to the Holy Grail, a random subject that roused an intense curiosity in the actor to delve into. Why the Holy Grail? What did it have to do with the current merriment? He dared ask.

  “Mr. Keating, bear with me,” he requested amicably from the old man.

  “Certainly, son,” Keating answered.

  “Terry enquired,” he started, flashing a glance of perpetual torment at the thug, “from me, where he, and you, I suppose, could locate the nearest affiliates of the Knights Templar. Dare I venture a guess that it has something to do with this toast we are drinking on?”

  Terry scoffed into his tumbler as he killed another double. Mr. Keating smiled nostalgically. “Aye, it has everything to do with that…enquiry…son,” Keating replied. If he had had two eyes, he would have winked at the young man seated opposite him. “See, you being a mere bitch in this equation, you are not privy to why or what, see? However, I can tell you this much. The Holy Grail, by its fashionable name at least, was once in my possession. With your information we aspire to locate it once more, but before you go thinking to keep it to yourself...,” Keating explained, lighting his pipe. Through tufts of white smoke, he leered at the wiry Kingsley. “That new look you are sporting is no accident.” He pointed with his pipe to the young man’s missing right eye. “Consider yourself marked. If we find the Grail, that injury will be reversed, whether you believe in miracles or not.”

  Terry leaned on his elbow, staring at Norman Kingsley. “Aye.”

  Mr. Keating chuckled. “If you choose to betray me, and you flee with it, it will be the end of you. Not by my hand, or Terry’s. No. There is something far older and bigger in the Grail, son, and it knows.”

  Terry got up in the smoky room, the movement of his large body sweeping the billows up in curling shapes around him. He picked something up in on the sideboard against the wall and came back to the table. With ceremony, he set the old black telephone down on the table in front of Kingsley. “Call your contact.”

  “Now?” Kingsley gasped. “It is the middle of the night.”

  “Undertaker is always open,” Keating warned with a shrug.

  With nervous fingers, Kingsley got to it and dialed the contact he lied about to save his life before Terry granted him mercy. “Hello,” he stammered nervously. “May I speak with Nina, please?” With only the serenade of the Clancy Brothers and their whisky warning, Kingsley could feel the two men pierce him with their glares, awaiting some sort of redemptive statement from him. He hoped to God that Nina was there. This being the only contact number for her that he had, Kingsley realized that the call could well be a dead end. However, if he could get in touch with Dr. Nina Gould, the historian might be able to help him bluff with information.

  “Well?” Keating suddenly exclaimed.

  Kingsley held up his hand, gesturing for the old man to hush and wait. Again, he used his training to act as if he was listening intently, but in truth, the person on the other side had already hung up the phone. The declaration that Nina was no longer at this number punched Kingsley in the gut, but he bought some time to devise a new bluff.

  Terry grabbed at the phone, but Kingsley dodged and quickly became vocal, all still in character, of course. “Well, alright, but as soon as she comes in, could you ask her to call Norman Kingsley? She has my cell number. And Jenny, it is rather urgent, please,” he acted. Another attempt from Terry hurried along the last bit of Kingsley’s charade. “Thanks. Bye now.” He quickly threw the earpiece down on the hook, looking victorious. “She will call back first thing when she arrives back from her expedition in the Urals.”

  “Urals?” Terry hissed.

  “Yes, she is apparently involved in a dig there, you know, historical dig for, uh, some museum in Scotland. They say she will be back in a fortnight,” Kingsley stumbled through the fib, hoping the alcohol had drenched their common sense enough to fall for it. ‘Two weeks should buy me enough time to get the f
uck out of London, at least,’ thought Kingsley. At first, the two Irish men looked suspicious of what Kingsley relayed. Long they sat without a word, just staring at him as if they were scrutinizing his intention, making him nervous. Finally, Keating slapped the table with his left palm and announced, “Aw-right then, son. Terry will be moving in with you tomorrow when he takes you home.”

  “What?” Kingsley gasped.

  “Aye!” the old man replied, surprised at the actor’s response. “Of course he has to. How else will we keep track of you until we get you to Nina’s house, then? It is Nina, right?”

  Terry nodded, “Aye. Nina. And she will be coming home in a fortnight from the Urals. Isn’t that right, mate?” He slapped Kingsley so hard that the actor almost fell from his chair. Kingsley nodded affirmatively. “There, then,” added Terry, sounding like Jason Statham with bronchitis. “Looks like we are flat mates.”

  “Now, when she comes back from her expedition, she will call you,” Keating told Kingsley. “You will arrange to meet her at home or whatever, and then you will do what you have to in order for her to connect you to the associates of the Knights Templar we seek. She cannot know why we are looking for an emissary and you will not tell her anything, unless you want to earn a cozy spot at St. Leary’s.”

  “No headstone,” Terry threatened in amusement, his breath reeking against the tender skin of the actor. Kingsley winced at the smell, but he tried not to flinch. All he could do was nod to appease the crazy bastards. It would prove difficult to wedge his way free from Terry’s supervision in the next two weeks, but at least they bought it. As for Nina Gould, wherever she was, he stuck by his decision to approach her for help. Not only was his stepsister intelligent, but she was connected well enough to people who could help Kingsley survive the new trouble he had gotten himself into. If only he had kept his mouth shut. If only he did not try to sound more important than he actually was.