by Blake Banner
“Just tell me something.”
“Are you listening to a single word I am saying?”
“Every word. Now tell me, does Marni know you are in bed with Omega?”
He sighed noisily again. “I am not… I am not in bed with them. We are, or have been, having a dialogue. That’s something you would not understand about. But surely it is better to reach an intelligent understanding than to simply go around murdering people…”
“Does she know?”
“No. And I’ll thank you not to tell her. I’ll tell her in my own good time, and my own way…”
“Why did she tell you I was after Theta?”
His mouth worked but no sound came out.
“Do I have to come around there and beat an answer out of you?”
“She was under the impression that…”
He stopped, chewing his lip.
“That what, Gibbons?”
“That we had some operations under way on the continent. I had asked her, as a precaution, if you got it into your head to start any of your cowboy antics in Europe to let me know.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
He was a long time answering. “She thinks… She thinks I have an organization.”
“You lied to her.”
“That’s not exactly…”
“You’ve had her believing that you could pull strings, that you had powerful backing that kept you safe from Omega, and all the while the reason they didn’t come after you was because you were in bed with them, and they were using you.” He opened his mouth to answer, but I cut him short. “Who else was compromised?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Keep bullshitting me and I’ll throw you out of the window. Is Senator Cyndi McFarlane compromised?”
“You keep saying ‘compromised’…”
I leaned across the desk, grabbed a fistful of his shirt and dragged him toward me till his face was less than an inch from mine. “Does Senator McFarlane know you were in bed with Omega?”
“No.”
“Who else knew?”
“Nobody. It was a private dialogue.”
“You’re going to find it is a very one-sided dialogue from now on, Gibbons.” I shoved him back in his chair. “I’m not going to kill you today. Write books, give talks, but if I ever see you getting involved in this business again, I will come after you and I will kill you.”
I stood. I looked down at his shiny, bald head and his angry eyes and realization dawned. I said: “You’re in love with her.” His eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed. “That’s why you didn’t give them my name. You told them about Van Zuydam, and you gave them my number so they could track my GPS. But you couldn’t give them my name, because if they grabbed me, Marni would know who alerted them.” He still didn’t answer. I shook my head. “Don’t call her.”
I limped down the stairs again and stepped into the rain. The gray penumbra of late afternoon had turned to the darkness of night. Wet, luminous amber squiggles lay across the puddles on the asphalt, and all around there was the hiss and patter of relentless rain.
I drove slowly, feeling both heavy and somehow empty inside. I went south, along Magdalen Street and Cornmarket Street until I came to the High Street. There, I turned left and right and parked outside Marni’s block.
I climbed out of my car and stood a while in the rain, staring at her door, wiping the water from my eyes. Finally, I rang her bell and listened to her voice, with a hot twist in my belly.
“Yes?”
“Hey, it’s me, Lacklan.”
“Lacklan?” There was a smile in her voice. The door buzzed almost immediately and I pushed in, climbing the narrow stairs and dripping water on the carpet. She was standing framed in the doorway, a dark, indistinct silhouette with a smiling voice.
“Look at the state of you! My God! Come in, go and dry off in the bathroom…” She reached up and kissed me. “You want to have a shower?”
“No.”
“I’ll put some coffee on.”
I went to the bathroom, dried myself with a towel and stood staring at the mirror, thinking of what Gibbons had said, of how he had described me. I ran my fingers through my hair, sighed and made my way down the corridor again to the kitchen door, where Marni had two mugs on the work surface and was pouring whisky into them. She glanced at me.
“You look terrible. You’re limping. What happened?”
“A lot.”
She smiled, but there was something uncertain about her expression. “When did you get back? Are you OK?”
I studied her face. The anxiety I could see was because of my behavior. There was no trace of guilt or fear.
“I came straight from the airport. I need to tell you something, Marni.”
She was frowning, searching my eyes. “What is it?”
“Gibbons warned Omega that we were after Theta.”
She went very still. Her cheeks colored. “Lacklan, I…”
“He’s in cooperation with Omega. He gave them my cell number so they could track my GPS.”
She shook her head. “No…”
“I’ve just been to see him.”
“No, he wouldn’t…”
I was quiet for a long while. Then, I told her: “I planted the information, Marni. I wasn’t after Theta. I was after Zeta. I suspected Gibbons was pumping you and giving information to Omega. I was right.”
“You planted it…?”
“You think you’re entitled to be outraged, Marni? I asked you not to tell Gibbons, and you went right ahead and told him. It could have cost me and Njal our lives. You betrayed me, Marni.”
Tears sprang into her eyes and brimmed over. She covered her mouth.
I said, “I’m sorry. I know he was an idol for you. But he’d lost his compass.” I pulled my phone from my pocket, found the audio file of the conversation, pressed play and put the phone on the work surface, next to the mugs. She listened to it in silence. When it finished, she stared at me. It was hard to read the expression on her face. I reached out and touched her cheeks with my fingers. “I guess we both lost somebody we trusted today, huh?”
She shook her head. “Lacklan, I had no idea…”
“That doesn’t change anything, Marni. I trusted you and confided in you. I asked you not to tell him. That’s trust, Marni. If I had told you the truth, that we were going after Timmerman, your betrayal of that trust would have cost us our lives. You believed in him, but you didn’t believe in me.”
“Lacklan, I’m sorry…”
“So am I, but it will always be like this, won’t it? You, never quite committing. Never quite being there.” We stood in silence for a moment. Then, I picked up my phone and put it in my pocket. “Take it easy, Marni. I’ll see you around.”
On the drive back to Heathrow, the news on the radio was full of the crash of the European stock market. It was being billed as the worst since the ’30s, but experts were struggling to identify exactly what had caused it. One senior economist was saying:
“…‘What is notable, Robert, is the suddenness with which it has happened, and the fact that it is extremely difficult to point to a single trigger, like the Lehman Brothers going into receivership in 2008. It is, quite literally, as though billions of euros in stocks had simply vanished into thin air. There are rumors, and I must stress that at this stage they are only rumors, that a number of major financial institutions experienced a total IT wipe out, and that has resulted in a sort of apocalyptic loss of assets. This, I have to say, is very hard to believe. However, it is what is being rumored in the city and, I might add, on Wall Street. Sources on the continent, by contrast, are deafening in their silence…’
“Matt Johnson there from the city reporting on the sudden, devastating collapse of the European stock market. In other news, reports that the missing European Commissioner, Jean-Claude Timmerman’s body has been found in Cadiz, in the south of Spain, have been confirmed…”
I turned off the radio and drov
e on through the dark and the rain, laughing quietly to myself. The neutron bomb had finished spreading and had detonated. It had clearly gone beyond the confines of the mainframe in Luxembourg, but it had stopped short of the apocalypse that Philip had feared. I wondered if Omega was finished now, and how far the devastation had spread within the organization. It was impossible to know—would be impossible to know for a long time to come. But one thing was for sure, Omega tonight was not the organization my father had known, not by a long shot.
I had destroyed that Omega.
EPILOGUE
I flew to Los Angeles instead of Boston. Njal collected me at the airport at eight P.M. in a convertible Mustang and we took North Sepulveda south most of the way. The sun had gone down, but the sky was still pink and powder blue over the ocean. Over the hills in the east, it was dark, with a crescent October moon peering over the rim of the world. We didn’t talk. He handed me a pack of Camels and we smoked instead.
As we turned onto Paseo de la Playa, on Malaga Cove, he said, “Maria is cooking a big meal tonight. Jim is in the mood for celebrating.”
I smiled at the western horizon as the pink faded to dark gray and the powder blue turned navy.
“Good, me, too.”
Maria had been joined by two girls who were notable for how pretty they were. They were engaged in setting the table out on the terrace. There were terracotta bowls of salad, wooden boards with freshly baked whole meal bread, there was a wheel of cheese and there were plates of smoked ham.
Flaming torches had been set around the garden and down the winding path, the fire was burning where we had sat and made our plan in September. A pretty girl, who might have been Japanese, bowed to me and said, “Would you like a beer, or wine? Or maybe some whiskey?”
Njal answered for me. “Bring us two beers, Mioko.”
She bowed again and withdrew. I shook my head. “This is absurd, Njal. I’m not sure I even like it.”
He shrugged and I followed him down the path to the big fire, where Jim was sitting in his weathered oak throne. He stood as he heard us approaching and I was struck again by how massive he was. We embraced and he clapped me on both shoulders. “Welcome home, Lacklan. I heard the news on the TV and on the radio. I would never have believed that two men alone could have achieved so much.”
We sat and I watched Mioko approach down the path with a tray holding three large jugs of beer. She handed them around and withdrew. Jim raised his. “To you both, to your great victory.”
We drank, then sat in silence for a while, listening to the crackle of the fire, feeling the gentle October breeze moving off the Pacific.
Eventually Njal said: “You killed Timmerman.”
It wasn’t a question, but I said, “Yes. I had to. I had intended to from the start.”
Jim frowned at the fire. His long hair and his red beard looked like burnished copper. “What about Van Zuydam and General Bisset?”
“I am not sure yet.” I thought a moment. “There is also the question of Omega Three in Latin America. We’ll have to wait and see exactly how much damage was done.”
He nodded his big, shaggy head. “Before we get onto that, tell me about Gibbons.”
“I had suspected him for some time. There was nothing specific, but his attitude unsettled me. He was hungry for power…” I paused. “There is nothing wrong with wanting power over your own life, but when what you’re looking for is power over other people, that becomes a problem.”
Jim gave a wolfish, diabolical smile. “That is exactly it, Lacklan. Exactly it.”
“So I planted some information with Marni. I was pretty sure she would pass it on to Gibbons and she did. What I didn’t realize was the extent to which he had gone over. I thought there was a degree of cooperation and dialogue, but that he was basically still sound.” I shrugged. “Hoping to win them over to ‘our side’. But it was worse than that. He had not only alerted them to the supposed threat to Emanuel Van Zuydam, he had also supplied them with my cell phone number so that they could track me. Fortunately, we had our cells switched off most of the time, but it was enough for them to home in on our general location.”
Njal said: “What I don’t understand is why he only gave them scraps of information. He could have told them who you were, where and when you were arriving—he could have shopped you completely…”
I smiled. “Not really. I left a false trail and I gave him a false target. But even so, you’re right, he did hold back information, because he is in love with Marni. She doesn’t realize it, but he is pretty obsessed with her. If he had given them too much, she would have known it was him. Only two people could supply that kind of information on me, her and, through her, him.”
Jim grunted. “That leak is sealed now?”
“It’s sealed.”
“Why didn’t you kill him? Because of her?”
I took a long pull on my beer to hide my uncertainty about the answer to that question. I wiped my mouth with my hand and shook my head. “No. I am not sure how much damage we have done to Omega. If they start to resurge, Gibbons and Marni could prove useful as a source of information.”
“Good.”
We were quiet for a while then. The warmth of the flames against the cool of the night was oddly restful. It felt good. Despite the absurdity of it, there was something sane and solid about Jim Redbeard’s chosen way of life.
“I had some surprises in Luxembourg,” I said.
Njal raised an eyebrow. “I thought so. What kind of surprises?”
I raised two fingers. Jim was watching me carefully.
“The first was discovering that the people who hit us in Cadiz were not Omega. They were French Special Forces. Turns out what I told Carmen was true after all. They arrested me in Luxembourg and took me to a chateau outside the town where they were planning to interrogate me. I thought they were Omega troops, but their captain had no idea who Omega were. He thought I was being employed by British Intelligence.” I reached in my pocket, pulled out Captain Berger’s ID and tossed it over to Jim. “This was the guy.”
He examined it for a moment and put it in his pocket. “That is interesting. It suggests they were under strength. Using national forces is risky.”
“Under strength, or they were ready to make their move and take control in the EU.”
He nodded. “That is also possible. What was the other surprise?”
I made the face of confusion and stared into my beer. “Weird one. The European mainframe was being run by a young woman. Timmerman didn’t tell me she would be there. He said nothing about her at all. I thought perhaps he was hoping to get me trapped while I was underground and couldn’t detonate the C4 strapped to his back. She called herself the Librarian, and she was as crazy as a soup sandwich. Vicious, cruel…” I stopped and shook my head again. “But that wasn’t it. There was something about her that was… wrong!”
Jim made a rumbling noise in his chest. “Can you be more precise? What was it about her that was wrong?”
“It’s hard to put my finger on it. She was dispassionate and cruel at the same time. She wasn’t fazed by any threat to her personally, but when the computer was threatened, she went hysterical.” I thought a moment. “She said her name was Athena Noctua.”
He frowned and pouted. “That was Athena’s owl. You killed her?”
“Pretty thoroughly.”
He seemed to study my face for a moment, then asked abruptly, “What about Ben?”
I answered without hesitation. “He’s dead, Jim. I have no doubt about that.”
As I said it, I watched Mioko descend the path toward us. Beyond her, I could see Maria and the other girl loading the table with roasted meat. Mioko bowed to us, smiling.
“Dinner is ready.”
Jim rose. “Thank you, Mioko.”
Njal stood and they made to go. I said, “I’ll catch up with you in a couple of minutes. I need to make a phone call.”
As they moved up through the shadows, with
the light from the flames playing against their silhouettes, I pulled out my call and called Bat Hayes.
“All right, sir? You got back OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, Bat. How’s everything?”
“Yeah, great, nothin’ to report. You, uh, manage everything OK…?”
I was hearing something in his voice and I couldn’t pin point it. “Yeah,” I said. “It was successful. You been watching the news?”
He gave a small laugh. “Oh! Right. Good on ya’, sir.”
I waited a moment, then asked, “How’s Abi? How are the kids?”
“Great! Yeah, excellent. They’re lovely kids. I can see why you care for them… And, uh, Abi, sir, she’s an exceptional woman. One of a kind…”
Now I knew what I was hearing in his voice. I felt sick for a moment, then a twist of pain in my gut. I looked out at the great Pacific Ocean, still and peaceful under the vast sky. I fought to keep the hurt from my voice and said, “She surely is, Bat. A good mother and, for the right man, a perfect wife.”
“Yes, sir…”
“How does she feel about you?”
He was too honest to bullshit. He was quiet for a moment and said, “We haven’t talked about it. I wouldn’t do that till I’d spoken to you. But I know she likes me. She still loves you, sir, I think she always will, but given time… I think I could be a good husband for her.”
I nodded. “I think you are exactly the kind of man she’s been looking for, Bat. I hope it works out.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Give them my love, be happy.”
I stood and made my way up to the great feasting table. Jim was at the head. He was laughing his big laugh, pouring good wine from a stone jug into his absurd goblets. Njal was smiling, with the light from the flames turning his skin amber and the beautiful Maria, Mioko, and the third girl whose name I did not know were smiling and laughing also, carving the meat and bringing dishes of roasted vegetables.