The World Walker Series Box Set

by Ian W. Sainsbury

The fact that Adam had trussed him up facing the wall was surely a good thing. He was still protecting his identity. Why do that if he intended killing him?

  “I am here to collect my payment. You promised you would pay me in full when I wanted it—,”

  “Of course, of course—,”

  “—but I’m afraid I don’t trust you. Granting you exclusive access to my services has made you rather dependent on me. I don’t think you would be prepared to give up all the information I require and risk losing me in the process.”

  The Broker started to say something, then thought better of it. Adam was no fool. Better, perhaps, to play along. For now. An opportunity to talk his way out of this may yet arise.

  “Where is the information I asked you to gather?”

  The Broker named the file.

  “And everything is contained here? All the information I need?”

  “Yes. That’s everything.”

  The Broker had answered quickly. Adam was an excellent liar. He had grown up among people who spent much of their existence lying. He himself only answered to the Father of Lies. The real Father of Lies. So he knew a falsehood when he heard it. He opened the file and pressed print. He walked up to the Broker, stuffed a balled-up pair of socks into his mouth and opened the soundproofed door to the master bedroom. The printer was spitting out paper on the desk in the corner.

  Back in the Games Room, Adam shut the door behind him. He was carrying two heavy hardback books. He dropped them onto the floor next to the dangling man. The Broker was sweating profusely now. Heavy and out of shape, his tendons, joints, and muscles were silently screaming at him as he struggled to find a position that didn’t cause constant agony.

  “I’m going to ask you a question,” said Adam, “Then I’m going to do something a little unpleasant. After that, I will ask the question again. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” said the Broker. He wondered how a creature like Adam defined “something a little unpleasant” and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  “Good. Please listen carefully. The file I just printed is supposed to contain all the information you have gathered for me over the last six years. Now, despite your vulnerable position, and your prior knowledge of my capabilities, you may be tempted to hold something back, so that you still have some chance of regaining my loyalty.”

  “No,” said the Broker, “no, of course not. I—,”

  “Shh,” said Adam and waited until the Broker had fallen silent. “You are an intelligent and successful businessman. I would expect you to lie to me - even in this extreme situation. But I would advise strongly against it. My question is the same one I asked a minute ago. Think carefully this time before answering. Does this file contain every piece of information you have gathered on the subject?”

  The Broker hesitated this time. He couldn’t show weakness, couldn’t give him a different answer. There was no way Adam could know, either way. He took a deep breath.

  “That’s everything,” he said.

  There was silence for a moment, then Adam walked up behind him. He forced the Broker’s legs apart. The agony in his ankles and toes increased. He screamed.

  “Don’t move,” said Adam. “You wouldn’t want my hand to slip.”

  A shiny white object floated into view between the Broker’s legs. For a surreal moment, he thought it was a balloon. He blinked sweat and tears out of his eyes. The balloon tilted, revealing eyes, a nose, and a mouth. It was a bald man. No eyebrows. Adam was completely hairless. He had something in his hand. The Broker wondered if the pain was making him hallucinate. It looked like a tooth. A tooth with a tiny blade sticking out of it. The hand came upwards. Without warning, Adam sliced open the wrinkled skin of his testicles, following this with another quick incision inside his scrotal sac. The bald head disappeared again.

  There was a half-second delay before the pain kicked in. Then there was thirty seconds of frenzied thrashing. The Broker lost control of his bladder and covered the wall with rancid urine.

  When he finally stopped moving, he realized the stream of urine had ceased, replaced by a thin patter of blood seeping from between his legs. On the floor below him was a dark, round piece of gristle. One of his testicles. He moaned, just as Adam’s hand appeared, holding one of the hardback books. The hand slapped the book onto the floor, flattening the piece of flesh below it. The Broker sobbed.

  After a few minutes, Adam spoke again.

  “I’m going to ask the question one more time, after which I will do the same thing to your other testicle, with one slight difference. This time, I will flatten it in situ. It’s why I brought two books. They used to use bricks to do the same when castrating cattle, you know. Books seem more appropriate for a man as well read as you.”

  Adam stopped talking. He was making a strange sound. It took the Broker a few seconds to realize it was laughter.

  “How appropriate,” said Adam, tilting the spine of the second book as he brought it over. “It’s Dickens.”

  “There’s a second file,” screamed the Broker, “THERE’S A SECOND FILE.”

  13

  Adam assumed, correctly, that the Broker’s guards would have an armory near the roof and that sniper rifles would be available. The chateau was surrounded by open space so any intruder could be picked off by a shooter at the building’s highest point.

  While the printer continued producing pages of information, Adam—now wearing a black pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt he’d found in the bedroom—used the combination the Broker had given him to open a heavy cabinet on the third floor. He took out an AWSM, a British-made sniper rifle. He made sure the five-round chamber had its full complement of .338 bullets. He didn’t anticipate having to reload. The AWSM held the record for the longest confirmed sniper kill at a distance of nearly two and a half kilometers. Adam had kept an eye on the odometer of the Peugeot as he drove in. The gate was just over a kilometer from the house. It was a virtually windless summer night, and the cloud cover had lifted since he arrived, revealing a three-quarter moon. Adam attached the scope and took position on the roof.

  He dropped to the surface of the chateau roof and crawled on his belly until he could use the scope to check out the gate. He knew the guards’ routine - he had watched them for many nights. Every ten minutes, one of them would leave the small guard hut and move to the gate, listening and watching for a few minutes before returning to the hut. Adam settled down to wait.

  Four minutes passed before there was movement. Adam waited until the first guard was as far away from the hut as he was going to get. The window of the hut was open, as it was a humid night, and Adam had a clear line of sight to the man within. Adam’s breathing was very slow and steady. He inhaled, held his breath for a count of three, feeling the stillness and silence as he relaxed. As always, he felt the darkness inside him swell in approval, his mind clearing and the world shrinking until it contained only his finger on the trigger and the sandy-haired man eleven hundred meters away in the guard hut.

  Adam squeezed the trigger and immediately moved his shoulder a fraction of an inch to bring the second guard into view. Adam saw the man react to the sound of a bullet hitting his colleague in the back of the skull, but he had barely moved before the second bullet caught him in the face, punching a coin-sized hole in his eye socket, emerging at the back of his head just below his military-style hairline. His knees crumpled under him as his brain stopped sending the messages necessary to keep him upright.

  Adam waited. The two guards in the house checked in with the gate eight minutes later. He heard the voice of a man below him growing increasingly tense as he failed to get an answer. Soon, Adam heard another voice. The two remaining guards must have been standing almost directly below his position. Adam’s guess was that the guards would think a communication problem was the likeliest explanation for the sudden radio silence. No one had breached the gates, and they wouldn’t even consider the possibility of an attack from the chateau itself as Katrina was in ch
arge. Such misplaced confidence in the legendary skills of the Majji.

  Sure enough, after a brief conversation one of the guards set off toward the gates. Adam immediately got to his feet and ran silently back to the stairs, the AWSM in his hands, making his way quickly through the house to the main door. He could have waited and shot the guard out in the open, but that would leave the final guard expecting an attack. Messy.

  Instead, Adam placed the rifle near the heavy front door and peered out through the spy hole. Sure enough, the guard was standing with his back to him, watching his colleague jog down the drive. It would only be a few more seconds before he spotted the body by the gates.

  Adam turned off the lobby lights, pulled the door open and was outside before the guard had even half turned. He jabbed him in the windpipe to prevent noise, then followed that blow with another under his ear. This combination—one of Adam’s favorites—completely disoriented the guard, who staggered as if drunk, suddenly onset by severe vertigo and nausea. Adam had plenty of time to take the knife from the sheath on the guard’s belt and bury it in his throat. As the dead man fell, Adam gave him a push that sent the body spinning out of sight behind an ornamental bush. He then ducked back into the chateau, leaving the main door open. Lying on the cool marble floor, he picked up the rifle, slowed his breathing again and looked through the scope toward the gate.

  The last guard had just spotted the body. He stopped jogging and turned back to the chateau. When he registered that his colleague had gone, he had to choose quickly: run on to the gate, or go back to the house. He hesitated for approximately quarter of a second, which was long enough for Adam to release a shot that made either choice obsolete.

  Upstairs, the printer had fallen silent. Adam found a finely balanced Japanese meat knife in the kitchen and a briefcase in the ground floor office. He took them upstairs and placed the few hundred sheets of paper inside the briefcase. He stood in the doorway of the Games Room for a few moments. The Broker was whimpering, the full weight of his body now on his wrists, arms, and shoulders as his toes and feet had finally cramped and given way. Adam stepped forward and, using the knife, sliced open the femoral artery in the groin. Blood started pouring down his leg. The Broker then understood the long, slow, painful death Adam was planning for him. His voice was a shaky whimper.

  “You can’t leave me like this. Just kill me, make it quick. Please.”

  Adam shook his head, even though he knew the Broker couldn’t see him. He despised the dying man’s weakness. It came from a lack of understanding about life. About the order of things in the natural universe. Amazing how otherwise intelligent people couldn’t see the truth that was right in front of them.

  “Embrace the pain,” said Adam. “Learn from it. In life, you were a merciless, powerful, self-serving man. Be the same in death and claim your reward.”

  In the few seconds that followed the only sounds were the labored, ragged breathing of the naked man hanging on the wall, and the regular drips of blood still falling from his groin.

  “You’re insane,” said the Broker.

  “By almost every measure known to science and medicine,” said Adam. “Yes, I am. But the measures by which I will be judged are far greater.” He turned and walked away.

  “No!” shouted the Broker. “I lied! There’s more information, there’s more!”

  “You didn’t lie. Goodbye. You could always try shouting for help.”

  With that, Adam closed and locked the heavy door of the soundproof room on the second floor of the isolated chateau. He placed the key in his pocket and went back to the Peugeot, retrieving the AWSM from the lobby. It was a very fine rifle.

  The next shift change for the guards was due at dawn, still nearly four hours away. If they realized the whereabouts of their employer and could lay their hands quickly on some industrial cutting equipment, they might get through the soundproof room’s heavy door in another hour. But the man inside would have bled out long before that.

  Adam had meant what he had said; the Broker had shown great potential in life. He might yet be rewarded by the Master. Although, Adam considered, as he remembered the whimpering sound the Broker had made as he walked away, his legs covered with blood and shit after finally losing control of his bowels, probably not. Probably not.

  He rested one hand on the briefcase as he drove. He was going to spend the next few days carefully perusing its contents. The information the Broker had tracked down for him was beyond price. He knew people must have suffered and died to assemble the reports he now had in his possession. And there would be many more who would kill to know what was contained in the few hundred printed pages. The Broker’s computer security would be unbreakable - his reputation had depended on it. After his death, all the information would be erased. If the Broker did not log in at least once during any twenty-four hour period, using a password which changed each time according to an algorithm only he knew, a virus would be automatically released which would turn all the data into incomprehensible garbage.

  Sometimes, the offline, old school approach could have its advantages. Once Adam had memorized the most pertinent information, he could simply burn the documents, and their contents would be lost for ever. He had glanced at the titles. The first one had caused a surge of excitement as he realized he was finally within sight of his quarry. The second one meant nothing to him. Yet.

  The first file was titled, Sebastian Varden. The second, Innisfarne.

  14

  Innisfarne

  Joni couldn’t have said why she didn’t tell Mum what had happened. She knew she had said nothing when she’d fallen out of the tree as a child. It wasn’t that Mee wouldn’t believe her - she had seen too much crazy stuff not to. But the few times she’d spoken at length about Seb - her dad - she’d made it clear that his power had caused as much heartache as it had joy, if not more. And it had changed him. The man Mum loved would never have left her, but that’s exactly what Dad did. Mee never spoke in detail about the time when he left, but it was clear that she blamed the power, for changing him and taking him away from her. And she was only kept from despair by her certainty that he would be back. Well, that and the fact that she had a daughter to bring up.

  The first few days after Joni returned, she tried to spend as little time around Mum as possible. Mee wasn’t stupid. She could see something had happened, that Joni was quieter, unhappy, dealing with some kind of internal struggle, but she could also see it wasn’t a conversation Joni was ready to have. Like all mothers of teenage daughters, Mee knew there was a time when you had to back off. It didn’t come easily to her. She was especially puzzled by how sudden the change in Joni had been.

  Joni started taking a long walk around the northeast tip of the island every afternoon to help her process what had happened, as well as to avoid Mum’s questioning glances.

  In reality, the long walks were as much about getting over Odd as mulling over the physics-bending trip she’d initiated on the train home. It was her feelings for the Norwegian boy that convinced her, more than anything else, that she hadn’t had some kind of mental breakdown and imagined the whole thing.

  She knew she’d been in love with Odd. She was sixteen years old, well-read, very imaginative, and had grown up on an island where she hadn’t mixed with many people her own age on a regular basis. She knew an objective observer would think it highly likely she would have fallen head over heels with the first boy who’d paid her attention. But Joni wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t ignorant. She was naive—certainly—but she was aware of her naivety and took it into consideration when examining her feelings. The connection between her and Odd had been intense, considering it had been formed over the course of a few afternoons. But that didn’t mean it could be trivialized. It was real, and it was deep. They had begun to open up to each other in a way that she had never felt before, never been able to truly imagine. As they got closer, she had begun to see herself as Odd saw her, and that had begun a process of transformation which
was still continuing. She was growing up - and the person she was going to grow up to be would be partly determined by the way an eighteen-year-old blonde boy had looked at her. And spoken to her. And kissed her.

  And kissed Mell, she reminded herself. It was doubly bitter because she’d lost Mell, too. Although she could understand Mell more easily. She’d just been told she wasn’t going to make it as a writer, she would have been glad of the attention - and the distraction. Joni had kept her burgeoning relationship a secret. And Odd was irresistible. Joni only had to glance at the other girls on the course to see that. But she still couldn’t understand why he had behaved as he did.

  A week after her magical return—Joni thought of it as a reset—she managed to face the worst of it. The sea was pounding against the rocks as she picked her way along the shingle in bare feet, her sneakers knotted together and slung around her neck. She watched the waves for a long time. It was something she loved to do, but it freaked Mum out for some reason, so she only indulged herself when alone. Joni loved the enormity of the sea. The curve of the Earth visible at the horizon where tiny-looking ships were silhouetted against the sky. The cry of seabirds searching for scraps. And, most of all, the constant growl, roar and shuuuush of the waves as they clawed at the beach then withdrew.

  Joni faced the thought head on, at last. It’s not that I will never see him again. The writing course won’t start for weeks yet. He doesn’t know me. He never will.

  She allowed the truth of it to settle over her like a clammy fog, before taking a deep breath and howling her anguish, as loudly as she could, at the uncaring waves.

  It took an hour. Afterward, she walked slowly back to the Keep. The keep was the center of the community on Innisfarne. A collection of stone buildings, plus a few wooden dwellings added at times when visitor numbers were greater. The biggest building held a dining room, kitchen and meeting/meditation room, plus bedrooms upstairs for the longer-term residents. Which meant Kate, Mee, Uncle John and Joni, usually. It had only been known as the Keep since Joni had read a book on castles and started imagining she might be called upon to repel invaders from their tower. She had been about seven at the time, and no one had pointed out that a long, low, two-story building was hardly a tower. Instead, the name stuck.