by Blake Banner
Primrose gave me a private smile and said, “I have lots of news for you, Lacklan.”
“I can’t wait!” I said, and we stepped inside. I closed the door behind me. “But I am starving and exhausted. I need a drink and I hope Rosalia has something amazing up her sleeve for dinner.”
Abi grimaced and took hold of my lapels. “Lacklan, I’m sorry. You have a friend here. He turned up on the doorstep and I didn’t feel I could turn him away. I haven’t asked him to stay to dinner, but he did want to wait till you got home to say hello. I hope you don’t mind.”
I frowned. “A friend?”
“He’s in the drawing room.” As I moved across the hall she added, in an undertone, “He looks as though he’s been in an accident or something.”
I pushed open the door and stepped inside. Abi and the kids came in with me. Ben was sitting in my father’s chair in front of the fire holding a glass of whiskey. His face was badly bruised, cut and grazed, and his left arm was in a sling. He smiled at me like we were old friends and raised his glass. “Lacklan. It’s so good to see you. Your taste in whiskey is as good as your father’s was. I hope you are well. As you can see, I have been in the wars.”
I stared at him for a long moment. Every instinct inside me told me to kill him there and then. But another voice, a new voice, told me that I should not bring that kind of violence to my family.
I said, “It looks like you lost.” I sat in the chair opposite him. “I’m afraid I can’t invite you to stay, Ben. I’ve been in the wars myself.” I turned to Abi. “Would you be a sweetheart? You and the kids go and tell Rosalia I’m back, and I am going to need a cow pie for dinner, at least.”
She hesitated. “I think she’s…” She caught my look, smiled and said, “Of course! C’mon, kids, let’s go talk to Rosalia.”
They left the room and closed the door behind them. Ben was watching me. He said, “Did you win?”
I made a question with my face.
He explained, “You said you were in the wars. Did you win?”
“There are no winners in war, Ben. You know that. I withdrew. I retreated. Now I’m like Switzerland, rich and neutral.”
He nodded for a bit, examined his whiskey, rich and amber in the firelight. “You didn’t look so neutral last night.”
“Yeah? Was that around the time you were planning to extract my brain?”
He gave a little snort. “As I recall, by that time you were already there, killing my men.”
“I was there looking for insurance, Ben. I never wanted to be a part of this damned war. My father asked me on his deathbed to look after Marni. Then you wanted me to join Omega. I never wanted any goddamn part of it. Now Marni doesn’t need me, she has Gibbons. And you and Gibbons can go to war with each other, fight for which one of you gets to eat Humanity’s brains and control the world. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“It’s not that simple to walk away, Lacklan.”
“Wrong. It is that simple. You know how dangerous I am, Ben. Look at you, look at the state you’re in. Look at your damned institute. Look at your organization. That’s what I did trying to get out. If I come after you with intent, Ben, I will burn your towers to the ground, I will kill every one of you, from Omega all the way up to Alpha. And, Ben, I know who you are.”
He studied my face or a while, then said, “You tortured Ogden.” He was quiet for a moment, nodding to himself. “That was your insurance policy, so that you could retire with your wife and your stepchildren.”
“Amongst other things. Now, you go away, you don’t ask me any more questions, and you leave me and my family alone. In exchange, I will not kill you. I will not make you tell me who got you out of the institute, who helped you escape. I don’t care. It’s none of my business anymore.”
He thought for a moment, gazing at the flames. Then he took a deep breath. “You are not a threat?”
“I am the biggest threat you will ever face, Ben.” I paused. He frowned. I sat forward. “If I get even a remote feeling that I am not getting through to you tonight, that you are thinking about reprisals, I will come over there and I will break your back and your neck and throw you in the furnace in the basement. I will destroy you and your organization completely. But if you are willing to leave me in peace, then I will leave you in peace. Ben, I want to retire. Leave me alone.”
He nodded. “I want to kill you, Lacklan. I want to kill you very much. But I want you out of Omega’s hair even more. So you have your truce. But if I ever discover that you have returned, I will not come after you. I will come after them…” He pointed at the door.
“Don’t threaten me, Ben. We’re done here. We have discussed everything there is to discuss. Get out of my house and stay away from my family.”
He got to his feet with difficulty, pulled his cell phone from his pocket and sent a message. Then he limped painfully toward the door. I followed him. He stopped, hesitated before opening it, and turned to look around the room one last time.
“I loved your father,” he said. “I miss him. I loved you too, Lacklan. I wish…” He paused, gazing at the floor. “I wish I could make you grasp the enormity of the tragedy. If you had taken your place among us…”
“Get out, Ben. Go away.”
He opened the door and hobbled across the broad hall. He looked oddly like a crippled old man. I followed him. Outside, a waning, sickle moon hung low over the treetops. I heard the sound of tires on gravel and two headlamps flooded the drive with light. A dark blue Audi pulled up. The driver got out and opened the back door for Ben. He climbed in and the driver closed the door. For a moment I saw his face, pale and ghostly, looking at me through the window. The driver climbed in behind the wheel, slammed his door and I watched the two red lights, like the red eyes of a demon, recede into the darkness among the trees.
I stepped back into the hall and closed the heavy, oak door behind me. Was it over? Was it really over? I looked around me at the magnificent hall that had once been my father’s. I searched for him in the house, with my mind, but could not find him. Maybe his soul was finally at rest. But somehow, in some part of my mind, I knew it wasn’t.
Then Abi was there, at the top of the stairs that led down to the kitchen. She was smiling. “Has he gone?”
“Yes, he’s gone.”
She crossed the hall to me and placed her hands on my chest. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah. I’m OK. I’m better than OK. Where are the kids?”
“Playing cards with Kenny and Rosalia, in the kitchen. Sean is a cheat.”
“What’s she cooking?”
“Steak and mushroom pie, with roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts.”
Later that evening we sat around the dining table and talked and laughed. Primrose was excited because she had decided to do Marine Biology and had received a conditional acceptance to the University of Massachusetts. She was also excited because she had met a boy she liked, and she was pretty sure he liked her. Sean was excited too, because we hadn’t found a school for him yet, and that meant a few weeks of nothing but playing in the woodlands, going fishing, and exploring his huge, rambling new home. He made me promise to teach him how to shoot a rifle and a bow, and I promised him I would.
Then we told them our plans to get married. There was a moment of stunned silence, followed immediately by squeals of joy and a lot of running around and kissing and hugging and laughing and tears of joy. Finally I called Kenny and Rosalia and told them to bring up a bottle of our finest Bollinger, and to have a glass with us.
It was a happy moment in a happy evening.
Outside the sickle moon rose higher over the trees into a darkening sky, and touched the black slate rooftops with silver light. An owl in the church bell tower called out, and its solitary cry was answered by a distant echo, deep among the shadows of the New England forests. And far, far away to the south, a dark blue Audi sped through the black night toward Washington, D.C., toward that great seat of temporal power, and in the
back, Ben Smith wept like a child with twisted, tortured rage.
Later that night, as Abi prepared for bed, I stepped into my study and opened the safe. I knew in my gut I had not seen the last of Ben. I knew, as I slipped that sheet of paper into the safe and locked it away, that if Abi and the kids were ever going to be safe, I was going to have to hunt down each one of the surviving twenty-three, and I was going to have to kill them.
BOOK 7
KILL ONE
One
Pitch black. The painful rasp of breath searing in my throat and my lungs. The crashing and stumbling of my feet running blindly over uneven ground. Twigs like claws tearing at my face and hands. Invisible branches whipping and lashing at me. Behind me, to left and right, the baying and howling of the pack, closing in on my scent. Running blind, it had to happen and I knew it would. My foot hit a rock. My ankle twisted. Shafts of pain stabbed through my leg and I hit the hard ground. Sharp stones bit into my hands.
And then they were all around me. I could not see them in the blackness, but I could hear them and smell them. And feel them. Their presence grew in intensity until they were almost like shapes made of black light: six before me, six behind me, six on my right and six on my left, sniffing the air, tasting my fear, closing in for the kill. My skin crawled, my body arched away, sensing the long, hard steel blades, knowing the terrible killing was about to start.
And then in the darkness I saw the eyes.
I sat up with a gasp.
It was dark, but not impenetrable. I could see the pale oblong on the window on my right. Moonlight was leaning in, soft turquoise beams that lay across the foot of the bed. A cool breeze touched my skin and I realized I was sweating, my heart was pounding and I was breathing hard, as though I’d been running. An owl called out, lonely in the woods, and I half expected to hear the baying and howling from my dreams echoing across the night in response.
I swung my legs out of bed and crossed the wooden floor to the window. The moonlight hung almost like a mist over the lawns. Tall narrow shadows seemed to look back at me from among the trees in the woodland. Invisible, undefined beings, half dream, half premonition, seemed to linger in the air, waiting for their moment to become real. I listened to the house. It was silent.
And in that silence there was knowledge: a kind of truth. I knew with absolute certainty that they would come, and there was only one thing I could do to stop them. I had to kill them first, every single one of them.
I turned from the window and looked back at the bed. Abi was sitting up, with her arms on her knees. The moonlight lay across the foot of the bed, but her face and her eyes were in darkness. Her voice, when she spoke, seemed disembodied.
“You OK?”
I nodded, realized she probably couldn’t see it and said, “Yeah.”
“That’s why you’re standing staring out of the window at four in the morning.”
I smiled. “I do that every morning at four, didn’t you know that?”
“Talk to me.”
I thought of all the things I wanted to tell her, all the things I would have told Marni without hesitation. But it was somehow different with Abi. I wanted more than anything else to protect her—not just keep her physically safe, but protect her from the darkness. It was an imperative need in me to protect her innocence, hers and her children’s, from the ugliness, the ruthlessness and the killing that had been my life for the past twelve years. I had to end it. I had to kill the pack, but I had to do it far away from her.
“I may have to go away for a while, on business.”
She was quiet for a while. “How long?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s not over, is it? You said it was over.”
“I don’t want you to think about it, Abi. It doesn’t affect you. I’m a businessman, going away on business…”
“Don’t lie to me, Lacklan. Don’t patronize me.”
I sighed. “You, Sean, Primrose. You are the only good, wholesome things in my life. You are untouched by…” I hesitated. “Untouched by my past, by my father. I want it to stay that way. These people—this pack—they sully everything they touch. I don’t want you to know about them.”
“I already know about them.”
I smiled and shook my head. “No, you don’t.” After a moment I added, “I have to finish it, Abi. If I don’t finish it, it will never end. If you…” I struggled to say it, but forced myself. “If you feel this isn’t what you signed up for, if you feel you want to leave…”
“What I signed up for is standing by your side, for better for worse. I’m not a quitter. I’m not going anywhere. What do you need from me?”
I went and sat beside her on the bed and took her hands. Now I could see the pale luminescence of her face, and her eyes watching me. “I need you to stay wholesome and sane. I need you to be something I can hold on to, and come back to. You can’t know about it.”
She was quiet for a long while, staring at me. Finally she smiled and said, “About what?” I kissed her and she whispered, “Come back to bed, I have a going away present for you…”
* * *
Abi and Rosario had set themselves a project to create an orchard and a herb garden at the back of the house, outside the kitchen. A local gardener had been recruited from Weston and, after breakfast, the three of them had gathered on the large stretch of lawn that separated the house from the forest at the back and started pacing up and down, standing around gazing with their hands on their hips and pointing at where they visualized plum trees and apple trees in neat, shaded rows, and nearer to hand, rosemary, sage and thyme, ready in good time for Christmas.
I withdrew to my study which, since I had rearranged all the furniture, I was now beginning to think of as my study, and withdrew from my safe the documents I had taken from the Richard John Erickson Institute, including the list of the Omega cabal, and sat at my desk to study them.
It began to dawn on me as I worked through the papers that, though I probably knew more than anyone alive, outside the cabal, about Omega, I actually knew very little about them, about their structure and workings. All I knew was their purpose and their objectives—and even that I knew only in the most general terms.
I took the list of members that Michael Donnelly, Senator Cyndi McFarlane’s husband, had printed for me before I killed him and studied it with care for the first time. There were twenty-four members of the cabal, each designated with a letter from the Greek alphabet. This much I knew. My father, before he was killed, had been Gamma. They had offered his seat to me, and when I had refused and declared war on them, they had given that place to Donnelly. That place was now, as far as I knew, vacant.
What I hadn’t known till now was that the cabal was divided into six groups, and each group had a geographical jurisdiction and what they called a competence. The first group was designated Omega Alpha. It appeared to be different from the others. Its geographical jurisdiction was the United Kingdom, New England, New York, the District of Columbia and Virginia, California and Belize. I sat for a while thinking about this, then had a look at its ‘competence’. It said ‘Oversight and general administration’. Its members were only three, Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Beside their titles in the cabal were their actual names. Gamma, as I said, was deceased, Alpha I knew well and Beta was a household name within the IT industry.
The other five groups were numerical: Omega 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Omega 1 covered Canada, USA, Greenland, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand. I had a look at its competence: free market capital, mass production and mass distribution, technological R&D in non-biological fields, IT, social cohesion, tension and conflict. Its members were the same as Omega Alpha, with the addition of Delta (Saul Cohen) and Epsilon (Aaron Fenninger).
Omega 2 covered the European Union plus Turkey, Norway and Iceland, Omega 3 covered Latin America, Omega 4 covered Africa and the Middle East and Omega 5 covered Russia, the Far East and the islands of the Philippines and Indonesia. Their competences seeme
d to cover everything from the movement of capital—free market, central planning and black market—as well as research and development in all areas of technology, but especially what they listed as ‘behavior and motivation management’ and ‘unregulated biological and genetic IT interface’.
It was beyond science fiction. But as I read through it I was haunted by the images that George Stevens had filmed on entering Dachau, and Hitchcock and his British team’s record of Belsen. That was not science fiction. It had happened, seventy years earlier. It was a reality: a program to exterminate an entire race of human beings. And it had been organized by a small cabal of people who, for no good reason, considered themselves somehow superior, and reinforced their fantasy with classical and pseudo-occult trappings. The parallels with Omega were striking.
But where the Third Reich’s agenda had focused on Jews, homosexuals and ‘short-legged Mediterraneans’, Omega did not discriminate on the basis of race. They were more politically correct than that. They were happy to exterminate everybody who wasn’t in the cabal, or serving the cabal as a happy slave.
That right there, I told myself, was the reason for the second amendment. I didn’t want to preserve the second amendment. I wanted to abolish a world that made it necessary. Until then, I would keep my right to bear arms.
And use them.
Twenty-four men and women who believed themselves somehow superior to the rest of humanity, whose objective was… I paused in my thinking and realized that I did not really know, precisely, what Omega’s objective was. My father had begun to explain it to me, though at the time I had hardly listened. It was based on Malthus’ proposition: population grows exponentially, resources grow arithmetically.
Basically, population grows more, and faster than energy and food production. Of course, the Industrial Revolution meant that we were able to produce food on a scale that Malthus had never dreamed possible, and capitalists crowed that Malthus had been proven wrong, that production could keep pace with population.