The King's Deception_A Novel

by Steve Berry

  “Gary said you were once a secret agent for the government. Like James Bond.”

  “Kind of. But for real. Did you ever know your father?”

  Ian shook his head. “Never saw him.”

  “You ever wonder about him?”

  “Don’t care much one way or the other. He was never around. My mum, too. Never had any need for parents. Had the wit early on to know that I had to count on me.”

  But that can’t be good. Kids needed moms and dads. Or at least that’s what he’d always thought. “Is it hard living on the streets, with no home?”

  “I got a home. I got friends.”

  “Like who?”

  Ian gestured at the plastic bag. “The book lady. Miss Mary. She gave me those stories. She lets me stay in the store sometimes at night, when it’s cold. That’s when I read whatever I want.”

  “I like reading, too. I own a bookshop.”

  “Gary told me.”

  “You two seemed to have had quite a chat.”

  “It was a long flight and neither of us slept much.”

  But he wasn’t surprised they’d talked. Who else would Gary have to talk to? Not his mother. She’d offered little to nothing. Or his father, who hadn’t learned the truth till recently, either.

  “What did you tell Gary about his birth father?”

  “To not be a wee ’un. All’s fine until we come a cropper.”

  He scrunched up his face in puzzlement.

  “Wee ’un. Children. That’s me and him. And we get into trouble. Come a cropper. All’s good until that happens. Then we get told what to do.”

  Silence passed between them for a few moments.

  “I told him to do something about it,” Ian said. “Get you to help.”

  He assumed that was the boy’s best attempt at a compliment.

  “Why didn’t you want to come back here?”

  No reply.

  Thoughts of Norse and Devene filled his clouded brain. “Is something bad going to happen to you here?”

  Ian just glanced out to the night.

  Which was the answer he feared.

  Twelve

  ANTRIM OPENED HIS EYES.

  He lay on the stone floor within the Round, beside the Templar effigies. His muscles ached and he knew what had happened. Two projectiles had pierced his chest and 50,000 volts had sent him into unconsciousness. He’d been stunned by a Taser. Better than being shot, but still an experience.

  The Daedalus Society.

  What the hell was that?

  He’d love to dismiss them as crackpots, but those old men killed Farrow Curry and his man in St. Paul’s and knew nearly everything he’d been doing. Clearly, they were a force that had to be dealt with. Just as clearly, he was on to something. His men had methodically acquired historical artifacts and manuscripts from repositories all around England. They’d managed to photograph relevant texts in the British Library. They’d even breached the tomb of Henry VIII. No hint of anyone being aware of their efforts had ever surfaced. Yet this Daedalus Society knew he would be in St. Paul’s Cathedral tonight. He wondered, did they know the most important thing? No mention had been made of Ian Dunne, a flash drive, and what may be on that.

  And that gave him hope.

  The past three years had been a string of stinging setbacks, the most notable in Poland where his failure had generated consequences. One thing Langley detested was consequences, especially from its special counter-operations unit. His job was to turn things around, not make them worse. Washington was looking for a way to stop Scotland from handing back a convicted mass murderer to Libya. Great Britain was America’s ally. So his instructions from the beginning were clear.

  Do it. But don’t. Get. Caught.

  He rubbed his sore chest and massaged his eyes with the flat of his palms.

  What happened in St. Paul’s, and what happened here, certainly qualified as being caught.

  Maybe he should end this?

  Five million pounds.

  He slowly came to his feet, his damp coat rustling in the silence. The Round and the choir remained empty, the same few lights burning. His mind seemed incapable, as yet, of forming coherent thoughts, but he realized whoever they were had connections with the Middle or Inner Temples. How else could so much privacy have been assured?

  He rubbed his scalp, sore from the fall. Once he’d sported a thick patch of auburn hair. Now the crown was nearly bare, only the sides shaded with a gray-brown fringe. His father had gone bald in his forties, too. He’d inherited almost everything else from him, why not that?

  He found his phone and checked for messages.

  None.

  What was happening with Cotton Malone and Ian Dunne?

  He needed to know.

  Something on the floor between the effigies caught his eye.

  A business card.

  He bent down and retrieved it.

  One of his, from Belgium, part of his State Department cover that noted his office phone and address at the embassy, along with his title, DEPUTY INFORMATION LIAISON OFFICER.

  On the back was writing, in blue ink, printed neatly.

  THE PENETENTIAL CELL

  He knew what that was. Here. A tiny room at the top of the stairs where Knights Templars who disobeyed the Order’s Rule would be confined for punishment. He’d been inside once as a kid.

  His head turned toward the choir.

  What was there?

  He stepped through the dim interior and found the staircase. Hinges and the catch of a long-missing door still remained. He climbed to the cell. Two small apertures admitted light, one facing the altar, the other opening into the Round. The space was no more than four feet long and two feet wide, impossible to lie down in with any degree of comfort, which, he thought, had been the whole idea.

  His man who’d used the alias Gaius Wells, shot dead in St. Paul’s, lay propped against the wall, the body contorted into the tiny space, his head unnaturally cocked to one shoulder.

  They’d brought him here?

  Of course.

  To show him what they could do.

  Against the corpse’s chest, both arms wrapped around it, was a book.

  Mythology of the Ancient World.

  He slipped the volume from the dead man’s grasp. Another of his business cards marked a place about halfway into the text. He should check Wells’ pockets and make sure there was no identification, but he realized this body would never be found.

  With the book in hand he descended the stairs and stepped close to one of the choir’s incandescent fixtures. He opened to the marked page and saw a passage circled.

  Ovid tells the tale, in his Metamorphoses (VIII: 183–235), of how Daedalus and his young son, Icarus, were imprisoned in a tower on Crete. Escape from land or sea was impossible, as the king controlled both. So Daedalus made wings for both himself and his son. He tied feathers together and secured them with wax, curving them like a bird’s. When finished, he taught Icarus how to use the wings, but he provided two warnings: Do not fly too high or the sun will melt the wax, or too low as the sea will soak the feathers. Using the wings, they made their escape, passing Samos, Delos, and Lebynthos. Icarus was so excited he forgot his father’s warnings and soared toward the sun. The wax melted and the wings collapsed, sending Icarus into the sea, where he drowned.

  At the bottom of the page, beneath the circled text, was more blue lettering.

  HEED THE WARNING OF DAEDALUS AND AVOID THE SON

  He immediately noticed the difference in spelling.

  Son, as opposed to sun.

  These men were indeed knowledgeable.

  Beneath was another line of scrawl.

  CALL WHEN READY TO DEAL

  And an English phone number.

  Sure of themselves. Not call if you want to deal—when.

  He sucked a few deep breaths and steeled himself. He was close to panic, but fear and urgency provided his flagging muscles strength.

  Maybe they were righ
t.

  This was gestating out of control, more so than he was accustomed to handling.

  He tore the page from the book and stuffed it into his pocket.

  Thirteen

  KATHLEEN FOLLOWED MATHEWS FROM THE HALL, OUT INTO the rain. They crossed Middle Temple Lane, turned left, and entered one of the many office buildings, this one with windows opening to the Pump Court. The little courtyard was named after its mechanisms, once used to fight fires. The reservoir was located deep beneath the flagstones, fed by one of London’s underground rivers. The ancient well remained but the pumps were long gone. On the court’s north side she saw the dark outline of a sundial, legendary thanks to its caption. Shadows we are and like shadows we depart.

  All of the office doors inside the building were closed, the hallway quiet. Mathews led the way up the stairs to the fourth floor, his cane click-clacking off the wooden steps. The Inns of Court acquired their name because members once studied and lived on the grounds. Once, they were independent, self-governing legal colleges, a graduate called to the bar, becoming a barrister, able to appear in court as a client’s advocate.

  But always under the discipline of the Inn.

  The custom then was for clients to consult with their barristers not in chambers but under the porch of the Temple Church or at Westminster Hall, where the courts sat until the end of the 19th century. All of those time-honored practices were now gone, the many buildings within both the Middle and Inner Temple grounds converted to working offices. Only the upper floors remained residences, used collectively by the two Inns.

  She climbed with Mathews to the top, where he opened the door to one of the apartments. No lights burned inside. A Regency sofa, chairs, and a glass-fronted curio cabinet loomed in the dark. Bare hooks were evident on the walls, where pictures should have hung. The smell of fresh paint was strong.

  “They are remodeling,” he said.

  Mathews closed the door and led her to a window on the far side. Below stood the Temple Church, smothered by the surrounding buildings, fronted by a wet courtyard.

  “Much history has occurred down there, too,” Mathews said. “That church has existed, in one form or another, for nearly 1,000 years.”

  She knew that a condition of James I’s royal land grant to the barristers was that the Temple Church must be perpetually maintained as a place of worship. The church itself had garnered an air of mystery and romance, giving rise to improbable legends, but she knew it only as the Inns’ private chapel.

  “We Brits have always prided ourselves on the rule of law,” Mathews said. “The Inns were where legal practitioners learned the craft. What has this place been called? The noblest nursery of liberty and humanity in the kingdom. Aptly put.”

  She agreed.

  “Magna Carta was the start of our faith in the law,” Mathews noted. “What a momentous act, if you think about it. Barons demanding, and obtaining, from their sovereign thirty-seven concessions on royal power.”

  “Most of which were never applied and eventually repealed,” she had to say.

  “Quite right. Only three still remain in effect. But one overriding principle came from Magna Carta. No free man could be punished except through the law of the land. That singular concept changed the course of this nation.”

  Below, in the courtyard, the rain quickened to a drizzle.

  The side door leading into the church opened and a figure emerged. A man, buttoning his coat and moving away toward King’s Bench Walk and the gate that led out of the Temple grounds.

  “That is Blake Antrim,” Mathews said. “He’s the lead agent on a CIA operation known as King’s Deception that is presently ongoing within our country.”

  She watched as Antrim vanished beyond the pale of the wrought-iron lights.

  “How close were you and he?” Mathews asked.

  “We were only together a year. It was when I studied law at Oxford, then applied for membership here at Middle Temple.”

  “And Antrim changed your career path?”

  She shrugged. “Not directly. I was drifting toward law enforcement while we were together. I had already applied to SOCA when we separated.”

  “You don’t impress me as a woman who would allow a man to affect her so profoundly. Everything I have read or been told about you says you are tough, smart, independent.”

  “He was … difficult,” she said.

  “Precisely what your supervisors say about you.”

  “I try not to be.”

  “I notice that you have little to no accent, and your diction and syntax are barely British.”

  “My father, a Brit, died when I was eight. My mother was American. She never remarried and, though we lived here, she remained American.”

  “Do you know an American named Cotton Malone?”

  She shook her head.

  “He’s a former intelligence agent. Highly regarded. Competent. Quite different from Antrim. Apparently, Antrim knows him, and made it possible for Malone to be here, in London. There is a young man, Ian Dunne, whom Malone returned here a few hours ago. Antrim has been searching for this boy.”

  She had to say, “You do know that Blake and I did not part on the best of terms?”

  “Yet he provided a glowing recommendation for your SOCA application.”

  “That was before we split,” she said, offering nothing more.

  “I chose you, Miss Richards, because of your past relationship with Antrim. If that was hostile, or nonexistent, then you are of no use to me. And as you painfully know, your usefulness to SOCA has already waned.”

  “And you can fix that?”

  He nodded. “If you can assist me with my problem.”

  “I can re-ingratiate myself with Blake,” she said.

  “That is what I wanted to hear. He must suspect nothing. At no point can you reveal any involvement with us.”

  She nodded.

  In the spill of light that leaked in from the window she studied England’s top spymaster. A Cold War legend. She’d heard stories, the exploits, and had often dreamed of being a part of the SIS. But to see and speak to Blake Antrim again? What a price to pay for admission.

  “I am of the Inner Temple,” Mathews said. “A member fifty years. I read the law just over there.” He pointed out the window, beyond the Temple Church dome.

  “And you opted for law enforcement, too.”

  “That I did. See, you and I have something in common.”

  “You still have not told me what this is about.”

  Mathews stepped toward a tiered desk. He slid out a chair and beckoned for her to sit. She complied and, for the first time, noticed the dark outline of a laptop before her.

  He opened the machine and pressed one of the keyboard’s buttons. The screen sprang to life and bathed her in a harsh light. She squinted and gave her eyes time to adjust.

  “Read this, then do as instructed.”

  Mathews headed for the door.

  “How will I find Antrim?” she asked.

  “Not to worry, you will have additional information when needed.”

  “How will you find me?”

  He stopped, turned, and shook his head. “Don’t ask silly questions, Miss Richards.”

  And he left.

  Fourteen

  MALONE LED IAN AWAY FROM THE MEWS, BACK TO LITTLE VENICE where there were plenty of taxis. No return call had come as yet from Devene. The fact that Gary was in jeopardy tore at his heart. How had he allowed this to happen? It ran counter to everything he’d tried to do when he retired from the Justice Department.

  “I’m quitting my job,” he said to Gary.

  “I thought you loved what you did.”

  He shook his head. “The risks have become too great.”

  It happened in Mexico City. He was there helping prosecute three defendants who’d murdered a DEA agent. During a lunch break he’d been caught in the crossfire of an assassination attempt in a public park that turned into a bloodbath. Seven dead, nine i
njured. He’d finally brought down the shooters, but not before taking a round in his left shoulder. He’d spent a month recovering, and making some decisions about his life.

  “You’re thirteen,” he said to Gary. “This is going to be tough for you to understand, but sometimes life has to change.”

  He’d already tendered his resignation to Stephanie Nelle, ending his twelve-year career with the Magellan Billet and an even longer stint with the navy. He’d made it to full commander and would have liked to have been a captain, but no more.

  “So you’re leaving,” Gary asked. “Moving to another country.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  But he was.

  By the time he quit, he and Pam had lived apart five years. He’d come home from an assignment one day to find her gone. She’d rented a house on the other side of town, taking with her only what she and Gary needed. A note informed him of their new address and that the marriage was over. Pragmatic and cold. That was her way. Decisive, too. But neither one of them had sought an immediate divorce, though they only spoke when necessary for Gary’s sake.

  A lot of life had passed between them while together. He’d changed from a navy recruit, to a lawyer, to an agent for the Justice Department. She’d become a lawyer herself. He spent his time traveling the world. She prowled the halls of Atlanta’s courthouses. They saw each other every week or so, dividing their time with Gary, who was growing up faster than either of them realized. They’d lived in a neighborhood with friends neither of them really knew. But living was the wrong term. More like existing. Taking that bullet in Mexico City had finally made him ask—was this the life he wanted? Neither he nor Pam was happy. That much they both knew. And the leap from unhappiness to anger was one Pam had easily made.

  “Will you ever be satisfied?” she asked him. “The navy, then flight school, law school, JAG, the Billet. Now this sudden retirement. What’s next?”

  “I’m moving to Denmark.”

  Her face registered nothing. He might as well have said he was moving to the moon. “What is it you’re after?”

  “I’m tired of being shot at.”

  “Since when? You love the Billet.”