Silver

by Steven Savile

  Then the question was, of those, how many would realize that what they were seeing was the actual assassination in progress? One, maybe, two. Would they come forward? Why would they when the entire world had already convicted Konstantin? After all it was there in far too many megapixels. So what good would one uncorroborated testimony that contradicted all the perceived evidence be?

  Less than useless was the answer, and Lethe knew it, unless that one person had also been filming the blessing with his cell phone or digital camera and happened to catch the truth in megapixels.

  Lethe wasn't a gambling man, but even he knew these weren't the kind of odds you wanted to stake your life on.

  That was what Konstantin was up against, and all the favors in the world wouldn't change the evidence of two thousand eyes without something concrete.

  So Lethe kept looking.

  This time he blew up the image on the screen as large as it would go without pixilating too badly for him to make out the details and, instead of looking at the main players, turned his attention to the crowd, looking for that one cell phone or digital camera that might have actually recorded the truth. It was like looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack, but what else could he do?

  Frost would be back soon. The ride back would probably take him two or three hours at most--closer to two given the hour and the relatively light traffic, and the way Frost flogged the Monster.

  And he kept thinking about that third phone call Devere had made. The first to Geneva was obviously some routed warning to the dagger man; the second triggered the timer on the sniper rifle; but the third, back to the mother ship in London, made no sense.

  height="0" width="19" align="justify">He turned the music up because it helped him concentrate. The lead singer of the Gin Blossoms lamented that the past was gone and that he had blown his one chance with the hot chick years ago. Because of that, and because all he had been hearing for the last few hours was the screams of the crowd in Koblenz and the crack of the sniper rifle, Jude Lethe didn't hear the muffled sound of gunshots upstairs.

  Sir Charles, however, did.

  Even muffled nothing else sounds like a gunshot, not that a car would be backfiring this far out in the idyllic British countryside. The main road through to Ashmoor was far enough away that the sound wouldn't travel over the hedges and moorland, through the forested strips of field and then through the thick stone walls of Nonesuch. No, the two shots, even suppressed by whatever silencer the assassin used, were distinct and distinctly out of place in the quiet of the manor.

  The old man came out of his bed, struggling to bring his legs around so they reached the floor. The wheelchair was beside the bed, but getting to it was agony. He reached out, trying to claw at the frame and drag it closer, and as it butted up against the bed frame he struggled to stand. Every muscle in his arms shivered as he labored, shifting his weight forward onto legs that wouldn't hold him. Then he twisted and came down hard, falling rather than sitting into the chair.

  Sweat trickled down the side of the old man's face.

  He looked around the room. His walking stick was on the window side of the bed.

  His service revolver, a 1963 Webley Break-Top Revolver--one of the very last commissioned for the armed forces--was in the desk drawer on the far side of the room, under lock and key. It was a fragile lock, but he was an old man. And from the chair it was doubtful he could get the leverage he needed to yank the drawer out, breaking the brass tongue of the lock or the wood around it. There was a box of ammo in the drawer as well. He had hoarded them after the pistol was retired in '63. Two cartridges per man, per year, was the old joke. By the time the gun went out of service ammo for it was in short supply. The double-action revolver could pump out twenty to thirty rounds in a minute, more than the chamber could hold and more than the old man had. The box of ammunition contained twelve cartridges.

  It was one or the oer. The panic button was beside the walking stick, the phone on the desk.

  He held his hands out in front of his face. They were shaking, and not just from the exertion of getting into the chair. Even if he broke the drawer open, his hands were so unsteady there was no guarantee he could load the revolver without spilling the shells all over the floor. Then again, he would only need one shot.

  It wasn't much of a choice.

  He made a decision.

  He steered the wheelchair toward the desk. It bumped against the side of the bed and off the carved legs of the desk itself, rattling everything on the top. He pulled at the drawer, but it refused to budge. He pulled at it again, more desperately this time. The entire desk shook with the force of the movement, but still the drawer didn't budge. He couldn't get any better purchase on it, or exert any more pressure on any of the stress points.

  He heard footsteps in the hall outside.

  The old man pulled so hard on the drawer he nearly pulled the entire desk down on him. The lock held. He slammed his hand off it, spitting a curse, then stopped trying. He gripped the chair and tried to angle it back toward the window.

  The door opened behind him.

  He didn't turn. He didn't need to. He could see the intruder step into the room through the mirror above the desk. Wearing a black knitted balaclava with a ragged slash where the mouth had been cut out, and two narrow eye slits. Black curls slipped out from beneath the bottom of the balaclava. Even clothed head-to-toe in sexless black the woman's well-defined curves gave her gender away.

  Her left arm was considerably thicker than her right, misshapen. The old man realized it was sheathed in a light cast. He remembered Frost's initial report from the house in Jesmond. This was the woman he had interrupted while she turned Sebastian Fisher's apartment over. He had broken her arm in the struggle. And here she was breaking in again. The old man reached for the phone. He knew he couldn't call, but knocking the handset out of the cradle would open a line, and an open line would blink on every telephone in the house. All he could do was hope that someone would see it. But who would see it? Max? Lethe? He had heard gunshots a moment before. She wouldn't have just fired at an offending umbrella stand. Max would have gone to investigate the noise. Max. The old man couldn't allow himself to regret or mourn. Max was dead or Max was alive; either way worrying about it now was pointless. He had his own sorry carcass to worry about/span>

  "I wouldn't do that if I were you," the woman said. She had an accent. It wasn't distinct, but it was there even though she did her best to hide it. Middle Eastern, Israeli, or possibly Lebanese. Given the trail of breadcrumbs they'd been chasing back to Masada, Israel was the more likely of the two. The accent almost certainly meant it was the same woman who had got the jump on Frost in Jesmond, the old man realized.

  "So Devere sent you to kill an old man in his chair?" Sir Charles asked, meeting her eyes in the backwards land through the looking glass. It made sense that Miles Devere would send one of his flunkies after him. It was all about power, showing Sir Charles that no matter how connected he was, no matter who he worked for or who he called friends, Devere could reach him. That was what the third call had been about. He had called London to arrange this little visit. "I'm flattered."

  "You should be," the woman said, closing the door behind her.

  "Perhaps we can make a deal?"

  "I don't make deals."

  "Everyone makes deals, my dear. There is a saying in my game, never send someone to kill a man with more money than you. I have a lot of money, believe me. Whatever Devere's paying you I'll double to send you back to his door. How does that sound?"

  "Like a desperate man," she said.

  She was right. That was exactly how he sounded.

  But then, that was how he wanted to sound. Any man in his situation ought to sound desperate. Desperate or resigned; he wasn't resigned. He wasn't that kind of man. He made things happen. That only left him with the option of sounding desperate. A desperate man with money would look to strike a deal, so that was exactly what he had done. If she was as good
as she no doubt thought she was, she would have been able to see it in his eyes, the shifting gears as one gambit was rejected, thinking quickly, looking for another alternative, anything other than the bullet in the back of the head. It was in-field thinking-reassess, redeploy, react.

  He stopped himself from reaching for the phone.

  The chair meant he lookup at her through the mirror. It added to the illusion of helplessness. All she saw was an old man in a wheelchair. It would have helped if he had managed to open the drawer, but guns weren't the only solution.

  "Aren't you going to increase your offer? Isn't that what people like you do? Beg, plead, offer me riches beyond my wildest imagining?"

  "No," the old man said. "Not today. Today I am going to ask you if you are fond of life?"

  "What kind of question is that?"

  "No matter how good you think you are, do you really believe you can walk in here, kill me and walk out again without consequences?"

  "And here we are again, the dying man's twelve-step program. Denial, bargaining, and now we're into the threats. For some reason, the way my client described you, I thought you might be different. This is disappointing. He made you sound like some colossus. I hate to break it to you, but step twelve is always the same. You die."

  "So it is pointless, my telling you about the security here, and what happens when my heart stops beating? My boy Lethe is a computer genius. Did Devere tell you that? Everything in this place is routed through the circuitry of my chair, dependent upon my heartbeat. My heart stops for some reason and Nonesuch goes into lockdown. There is no way out. When my team returns they will find you here. The good news is there is plenty of food, so you'll be well fed at least."

  "You expect me to believe this is the Bat Cave and I just killed Alfred? It's more creative than saying you've got the place surrounded by armed guards just waiting for your signal, I'll give you that. But correct me if I am wrong, I don't remember Bruce Wayne being a cripple?"

  "Truth is stranger than fiction, isn't that what they say?"

  "Some do, I am sure, probably the same ones who also say they booby trapped the entire house and have a remote detonating device in the arm of their wheelchair."

  "That was the next thing I was going to try," the old man said. He smiled, doing his utmost to appear calm on the surface, but inside his heart was racing almost as quickly as his mind. The talk was all about buying time, but once bought it all came down to how he wanted to spend it.

  "Enough talk," she said, as though she had been able to tap into his mind. "Do you want to die facing the end or with your back to it? Some people would rather not see it coming."

  "Given the fact that I can see you whichever way I face, I am not sure it makes much difference, does it? It's like asking if I want a closed- or opencasket funeral. Back of the head, large exit wound in the face, or bullet between the eyes and the back of your head's blown out. It really doesn't matter because I'm going to be just as dead."

  "That you are," she agreed.

  "Let's do this, shall we? I think I'd rather like a pretty face to be the last thing I see, call me an old fool, but I always was weak for a certain kind of girl," Sir Charles said, reaching down for the rail on the wheel rims. He pulled back on one, and forward on the other, angling the chair around. The tight space between the bed and the desk made it impossible for him to turn properly. He knew that. That was precisely why he had twisted the chair into it.

  Before he could start to back up, the phone on the desk started ringing.

  "I don't suppose I can answer that?" the old man said, ruefully.

  "No," she said. She didn't seem all that amused by the interruption.

  "Then I suppose I can't say saved by the bell, either?"

  "No," she said again. "No last minute reprieves. We've talked too much already. If you can't turn the chair around, I will."

  "I can do it," the old man assured her, looking through the glass at the Rembrandt on the wall behind her. Judas Repentant.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  Ronan Frost killed the call.

  It was the first time in all the years he had been with Ogmios that he had called Nonesuch and Lethe hadn't answered in a matter of seconds. There was nothing good about the silence. He looked up at the house at the far side of the long, winding drive. As always there were only a few lights on. The cars were all lined up on the gravel drive exactly where Orla and the guys had left them a few days ago. Instead of that being comforting it made the place look like an automotive graveyard, the place where sports cars come to die.

  The reason he had made the call was parked, half-hidden in the bushes: an off-road dirt bike.

  The drive would take him ten seconds to drive, gunning the Monster's engine and tearing up the gravel, or two minutes to run, silently. He chose silence over speed. If someone was inside the Manor, he didn't want to go in there all thud and blunder, even if a few seconds could make all the difference. Noise could just as easily get everyone killed. The old man was sharp. He'd go down swinging. And Lethe had probably turned the basement into his own personal panic room.

  Frost kicked down the stand and killed the Ducati's idling engine. He stripped out of his leathers because they hampered his mobility. The time it spent getting out of them would be made up two-fold running across the lawn. He checked the dirt bike for any clue to the owner's identity, but there was nothing. Not that he had expected to find anything. It was difficult to be sure, because the mud was fairly hard after several days without rain, but he could only make out a single set of tracks. He pulled the Browning and set off at a sprint across the lawn. He kept his head up, looking frantically left and right for signs of the intruder. Frost knew that the unanswered phone meant they were already inside, but that didn't mean they weren't already done when he had called and on their way out. There was plenty of darkness to hide in. Too much of it. The spotlights were on, but they only illuminated the snake of the driveway as it came out of the darkness.

  Halfway across the lawn he was breathing hard. His body hurt from the abuse it had taken over the last few days.

  Through the portico he saw that the main door stood open.

  There was something in the doorway, a dark shadow on the floor. As he got closer the shadow became a shape, and the shape became a body dressed in an immaculate black suit, white shirt, white gloves and bow tie. There was a single entry wound in the center of Maxwell's forehead, a cyclopean third eye. There wasn't a lot of blood and there was very little damage. Powder burns rimmed the wound. The gun had been pressed up close to the butler's head. He had that look of surprise on his face that robbed every dead man of his dignity. Even in death it didn't look as though Max had a hair out of place. Frost knelt and closed his friend's eyes, then he stepped over the dead man and into the house.

  Nonesuch had that eerie silence that accompanies a death house. It was as though the old stones were aware of the tragedy playing out within them. Frost crept into the hall, listening to the silence. He could hear the faintest hint of voices. The old grandfather clock across from the fireside chessboard told him how late it was. The old man would be in his room by now. The house might have been a warren of mezzanines, hidden servants' stairs and out of the way pantries, but the old man only used a fraction of the rooms. The chair kept him on the lower level; habit kept him in the same handful of rooms down here.

  Frost crept across the hall.

  The voices were quiet now.

  He preferred it when he heard them. Dead men didn't talk. As long as they were talking all was almost well with the world. Just keep them talking, he prayed silently to whoever was listening. He ghosted toward the control room and tapped his personal code into the lock. The beep that acknowledged the right access code and opened the lock mechanism sounded sharp and too loud in the silence. He knew realistically it wouldn't have carried to any of the other rooms, but that didn't stop him from biting his lip and easing the door open painfully slow.

  Frost slipped
inside and eased the door closed behind him.

  The room was empty. The array of screens either showed Konstantin Khavin in various frozen frames as he hurled himself at the Pope, or the shadowwreathed shape of Orla Nyren, naked and chained to the wall of a dank cell. Frost hadn't seen the images before. They took his breath away for a moment. He wanted to do something. Anything. Every instinct screamed at him. These were his people, his team, and they were in trouble. The only one who wasn't in trouble was Noah, which, given the usual series of events, was just plain wrong.

  The staircase down to Lethe's den was still covered. It wasn't the only way down, but if he was going to go sneaking down there to stage a rescue, that was the way to go. He wished he'd paid more attention when Lethe gave them the briefing on the tabletop computer. He was pretty sure he could call up images from hidden cameras in all of the rooms, but he didn't have the slightest idea where to start and was more likely to set the sprinklers off than turn the security cameras on.

  He had come in to the control room for a reason. Lethe had designed the room as a digital fortress. From here Frost could lock down the most vulnerable areas of Nonesuch, protecting the team's identity, and more importantly, their benefactor's. He could also isolate various parts of the house. He hit the panic button. There were no sirens, no flashing lights. Lethe's design didn't need it. In ten seconds flat the manor house became a steel trap, literally. He heard the rumble and felt the shiver of inch-thick steel sheets slamming into place. They were interspersed in various strategic points around the manor, isolating the wings, key rooms and the exits. There was no way in or out of Nonesuch. And this time the noise would have carried to every room in the house, but as long as the intruder didn't pry Max's eyes from his dead head, Frost had the only key: his bright blue eyes.