Ghosts of War: A Tale of the Ghost

by George Mann

  She'd certainly made an effort to doll herself up for the party tonight. He had to admit she looked stunning in her low-cut silvery dress and high heels. Whatever she lacked in grace she more than made up for in gumption.

  Gabriel felt a tap on his shoulder and tore his gaze away from the window to see Henry standing beside him, a worried expression on his face. “What's wrong, Henry?” He had to shout to be heard over the music.

  “A call on the holotube, sir. It's a policeman. He says it's urgent.”

  Gabriel glanced at Ginny, whose face creased in concern. “Is everything all right?”

  “I'm sure everything's fine,” Gabriel said, rising from his armchair. “Henry, where can I take the call?”

  “In your bedroom, sir. I think it should be quiet enough up there for you to hear.” Henry motioned toward the door.

  “I'll be back in a moment,” Gabriel said to Ginny, patting her reassuringly on the arm. She nodded, reaching for a cigarette.

  As he'd expected, Gabriel found Donovan's face staring out at him from the mirrored cavity of the holotube terminal when he made his way up to his bedroom a few moments later. It was a bad signal, and the inspector's face shimmered and fractured as he leaned in close to the transmitter at the other end.

  Gabriel lowered himself onto the edge of his bed so the other man could see him.

  “Ah, Gabriel, you're there,” Donovan said in hushed tones, as if trying to avoid being overheard by someone off-camera.

  “Is everything all right, Felix?” Gabriel prompted when Donovan didn't continue. It was unusual for the detective to risk calling him at home. Usually he left cryptic messages for Gabriel at his Manhattan apartment. Still, at least Gabriel would be able to assuage Henry's fears by telling him it was related to the mugging the other night, the one Henry had made him report to Donovan the prior day.

  “We've found a body, Gabriel, down in Greenwich Village,” said Donovan.

  “Left by the raptors?”

  “No. In a run-down apartment building. I think it might be related to that…British problem we talked about. Can you meet me there?” Donovan glanced at something behind him. “Yeah, I'm on my way, Mullins,” he called to the sergeant.

  Gabriel glanced at his watch. Nine-thirty p.m. “I can be there in a couple of hours.”

  Donovan frowned in frustration. “No sooner?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “I'm out at Long Island, Felix.”

  “Okay, okay. Two hours. Look, here's the address. I'll get rid of everyone else.”

  Gabriel scrawled the address on his cigarette packet, the only scrap of paper he had to hand. “I'm on my way,” he said, reaching for the switch that would cut the connection. Then, hesitating, he caught Donovan by the eye. “Be careful, Felix. This thing you're getting us mixed up in—you don't know how big it could be.”

  Donovan nodded, and then the connection went dead.

  Ginny was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs when he returned to the party a few moments later. She took a long draw on her cigarette and eyed him through the ensuing haze of smoke. For a moment he felt disconcerted; it seemed as though her eyes were disembodied, floating there in the hallway, watching him. “Do you have to go?” she said, and he couldn't read what she was thinking.

  “Yes, I have to go.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  Gabriel laughed. “No. No, Ginny, I'm not in trouble. Someone needs my help.”

  She gave him a coquettish grin. “Can I come?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I don't think that's a good idea. It might be dangerous.”

  Ginny stepped forward, pressing herself up against him. “I'm in the market for a little danger, Gabriel.”

  “You're drunk, Ginny.”

  She smiled. “Not drunk enough.” She grabbed him by the lapel of his jacket and leaned in, kissing him lightly on the lips. “You can't leave me here, Gabriel. You simply can't.”

  Gabriel didn't know what to say. The party was still raging around them. Henry was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where are we going?”

  Gabriel sighed. “I'm going to Manhattan. Ginny, look, it wouldn't be fair…” He stopped short as she pushed him away, glowering at him. He could see the hurt in her eyes, and suddenly it brought it all back, all the lies and the tears and the mistakes he'd made. No, it really wouldn't be fair, not to do that to her again.

  No lies. No secrets. He'd promised himself that. He owed it to her. She'd meant so much to him before, and he'd never told her. He'd allowed her to think he was just a drunken playboy, allowed himself to push her away, keeping the real Gabriel hidden beneath layers of secrets and lies, protective barriers. This time it would be different. This time he had to trust her. He took a deep breath and lowered his voice to a whisper. He realized he was trembling. “Have you heard of a man called ‘the Ghost,' Ginny?”

  She nodded, unsure where this was heading. “Yes. The crime fighter. The vigilante. I've read about him in the Globe. But what's he got to do with it?”

  Gabriel put his hand on her arm.

  “Well, there's something I need to tell you….”

  “One of the neighbors reported gunfire, so a couple of the boys from uniform came down to check it out. They were expecting to find some kids playing around with a handgun. They weren't expecting this.” Donovan said this as he led the Ghost along the hallway to the door of the apartment where the body had been discovered.

  The apartment block was a dingy sort of place, probably inhabited by more rats than humans. What was more, it stank. The Ghost had to cover his mouth and nose as he picked his way along behind Donovan, trying not to step in any of the heaps of discarded trash that had gathered in the stairwells or lobbies. It didn't fit at all with his mental image of the sort of place a foreign spy would set up shop. He supposed that was precisely the point.

  He'd left Ginny in the car, keeping watch on the door. He still wasn't entirely sure if he'd done the right thing telling her about his double life. She'd seemed to find the whole thing terribly exciting, bombarding him with questions in the car all the way to Manhattan. He'd tried to impress upon her the gravity of the situation, the need to maintain the secrecy of his separate identities—the risk he'd taken by letting her in on his secret.

  He'd also explained to her why he'd done it. Why he'd felt the need to be honest with her about it, about who he really was. At this she'd gone quiet, serious, circumspect.

  Later, she'd watched in awe as he'd stripped in his apartment on Fifth Avenue, running her fingers over his scars, silent as he'd donned his black trench coat and fastened his buckles, collecting weapons from his armory in the back. She'd helped him to strap his fléchette gun in place, watched as he'd loaded pistols and secreted knives in hidden sheaths all over his body.

  When they'd returned to the car to drive down to Greenwich Village, to the address Donovan had given him on the holotube, something had changed between them. Some slight alteration in the way she was acting. He wasn't quite sure what it was, but she'd looked at him differently. He'd wondered if she was judging him, if by telling her the truth he'd made a terrible mistake. Had he simply caused the rift between them to widen? When he'd sat behind the wheel, she'd looked over at him as if she didn't recognize him anymore. It went deeper than the change in appearance, too. She seemed to be seeing him for the first time.

  He hadn't known how to respond, so he'd started the engine and the car had hissed away from the curb, trails of soot belching from its exhaust funnels. The way she'd looked at him—it was as if she'd seen into the core of him. It was as if the lines between Gabriel and the Ghost were blurring, merging, and he didn't know who he was any longer. The two halves of his life had collided, and the resulting confusion had been too much to deal with. So he'd buried all thoughts of it while he focused on helping Donovan, and he'd told Ginny to wait in the car, despite her protests. He'd put her in enough danger simply by bringing her along. He'd never forgive himself if something happened to her.


  Donovan had been waiting for him in the lobby. He'd shut the lights off and ushered the Ghost in quietly, trying to remain inconspicuous. Then he'd led the way to the dead man and the apartment, where, it seemed, the British spy had based all of his operations.

  The corpse was lying in the hallway, just behind the door. He'd clearly been there for a while—a day, at least—and if the pool of sticky blood beneath him wasn't testament enough to the damage that had been inflicted upon him, the butt of the penknife jutting out of his left eye socket was.

  The Ghost dropped to his haunches so he could take a closer look. The dead man had clearly been well built, and, judging by the thin white scar running along the line of his jaw, he hadn't been a stranger to violence. The man's left eye had putrefied and dribbled out of the socket, leaving a terrible, gaping hole, caked in blood around the handle of the knife. The knife itself was buried all the way to the hilt. The killer had struck with considerable force, driving the blade right through the eye and piercing the brain behind it, killing the man instantly.

  It wasn't a precision killing. Of that much the Ghost was sure. It looked more like the dead man had disturbed someone who'd panicked and used whatever weapon they had available. The dead man had been the one who'd fired the shots, it seemed—he had powder burns around his right wrist, and his corpse was still clutching the handgun.

  “Have you checked his pockets?” the Ghost asked Donovan, who was standing behind him, regarding the corpse through narrowed eyes.

  “Not personally,” Donovan replied, “although the men who found him said they were empty.”

  “Completely empty?” The Ghost dug into the man's jacket pockets. When he found nothing, he turned out the pockets of the man's pants, too. Donovan was right—they were completely devoid of any belongings.

  “Either he was a pro, a killer sent out to find our man, or the British agent stripped his pockets after he killed him.” Donovan stepped back to give the Ghost room to stand.

  “I suppose either is possible,” said the Ghost, but I'd wager he's a government agent. That would explain what he was doing here. He probably tracked the spy back here and tried to take him out.

  He glanced around, taking in the rest of the apartment. It was functional, to say the least. It didn't look as if anyone had actually lived here, but rather used it as a safe house, a place to hide away anything suspicious that might otherwise endanger his position. From what he knew about this spy, he'd managed to successfully infiltrate some impressive New York political circles, and that would have brought with it a high risk of exposure. He probably kept another apartment somewhere in the city, too.

  The Ghost walked through to the bedroom, where it was immediately clear there'd been a struggle. The bed was mussed up and there was a pockmark in the wall where a gunshot had blown away a fragment of plaster. On the floor by the side of the bed was a shotup holotube transmitter, still wired into a socket in the wall.

  “I left everything as we found it,” Donovan said, framed in the doorway, watching the Ghost as he paced back and forth, taking it all in. “Looks like the spy was trying to make a call when he was disturbed.”

  The Ghost nodded. “That adds more credence to my theory about the dead man,” he said. “If they were trying to get to him before he passed his information back to London, or wherever, they'd have had people trailing his every move. If the dead guy had picked up his trail and followed him here, found him in the middle of making a call…well, it seems like he soon put an end to that, possibly at the expense of his own life.”

  “How so?”

  “He spent two shots disabling the holotube transmitter. He must have missed the spy with his first shot, here, on the wall,” he pointed out the pockmark to Donovan, “but then took the time to put two shots in the machine before going after the spy himself, giving the spy a chance to find a weapon.” He rubbed a hand over his chin, thoughtfully. “My guess is the call had already connected and the dead man didn't want the person on the other end hearing anything of what was going on. Either that or he was worried the spy would call out some code word or something, immediately alerting the person at the other end.”

  Donovan frowned. “But still…if they heard the shots after the call had already connected, surely they'd want to know what was going on? Especially if they couldn't raise the spy again afterward.”

  The Ghost shrugged. “You've got me there.” He crossed to where Donovan was standing in the doorway. “Anything else of note?”

  “Oh yes,” Donovan said with a smile. “It's like your place. A veritable armory back there.”

  He led the Ghost into the back room, stepping carefully over the corpse in the hallway. It was like walking into the incident room of a police investigation. The walls were plastered with photographs, maps, notes, schematics. Half of these had been torn off, some of them left where they fell, others clearly missing. The windows had been blacked out with thick paint, and there was nothing but an overturned chair and a small table by way of functional furniture. Folders and files had been flung all over the floor, a spray of multicolored paperwork, and three large, wooden chests lay open in the middle of the room.

  The Ghost approached the chests with interest. They were full of weapons. One appeared to contain knives and blades of all possible shapes and sizes, another handguns and pistols, the third explosives, grenades, and what looked like a portable rocket launcher. He turned to Donovan. “Someone clearly left in a hurry. And if the contents of these chests are anything to go by, he's armed to the teeth.”

  Donovan nodded gravely. “I had the same thought. If these are the weapons he chose to leave behind…”

  The Ghost turned to study the wall. There was a large, scale map of Manhattan, upon which a series of locations had been marked out in thick, black ink. They all appeared to be residential properties. Beside each of these the spy had pinned photographs of well-known politicians, businessmen, and public servants. The Ghost stepped forward and tapped one of these photographs with his gloved fingertip. “Senator Isambard Banks,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at Donovan.

  “Indeed. But have you seen what's even more interesting?” Donovan came to join him, pointing to one of the photographs attached to a residence on the Upper East Side, right by Central Park.

  “Commissioner Montague,” the Ghost said in surprise. “You think these are the people involved in whatever this spy got himself mixed up in? One of the ‘circles' he'd infiltrated?”

  Donovan shook his head. “I don't know. Perhaps. Maybe they're targets. They're all high-profile public figures. If he was here to cause trouble and sow seeds of terror, these are the people he'd hit. With that arsenal…perhaps he was here to assassinate one of them. Maybe more?”

  “Perhaps,” the Ghost replied, noncommittally. He didn't want to press the point with Donovan, not yet, but it seemed far too much of a coincidence to him that two of the people implicated by this web of conspiracy were the very same people who had—rather irregularly—charged Donovan with finding the spy.

  The Ghost continued to examine the wall. There was a patch of bare plaster where something had very obviously been removed in a hurry, torn from its place so that little shreds of paper still clung to the pins. Beside that was the schematic of an enormous airship, a blueprint for its construction. It was one of the huge transatlantic vessels that regularly ferried passengers—or at least those of them fortunate enough to be able to afford it—back and forth between Europe and America. It was weeks faster than steamship and, the Ghost was led to be believe, significantly more luxurious.

  While it was true that the cold war had caused movements between Britain and America to become very restricted, London was still one of the world's centers of commerce, and many American people had valid business there, or in Brussels, Paris, Berlin. Business had been booming for the airship providers, and as their routes around the world had grown in ambition, so had their vessels grown in size and scope.

  “I can
see you're as baffled as I am by that one, Gabriel. What would a British spy be doing with the construction plans of a transatlantic passenger-class airship?” Donovan said this as though to suggest he'd already deciphered the meaning behind it.

  “Go on,” said the Ghost.

  “Look at those crates of weapons, Gabriel. I think he might be planning to make a strike against one of these passenger ships.”

  The Ghost shook his head. “No. It doesn't fit. What would be the purpose of it?”

  “Assassination? Terror? To ignite a war between America and the British Empire?” Donovan spread his hands.

  “None of that makes sense. If that was his aim, he could do that more effectively by picking off the people on this chart, one by one, just as you suggested. And if it's war they're looking for, why trigger it like that? Why give us the chance to muster our forces? Surely the most effective way to start a war is to invade?”

  Donovan shrugged. “I don't know what to make of it,” he said, reaching for his cigarettes. He offered them to the Ghost, who shook his head. “And we're missing a big piece of the puzzle.” He waved his cigarette to indicate the empty space on the wall where the spy had torn down part of his collage.

  “I think the most interesting thing here is perhaps the least obvious, Felix,” the Ghost said, pointing to a small, grainy black-and-white photograph pinned to the wall, just beside the map of Manhattan. It was crumpled, as though the spy had attempted to tear it free and then given up, changing his mind in his haste to get away. Donovan came closer, peering at it myopically, trying to make out what was in the picture.

  “Is that what I think it is?” he said. He didn't even try to disguise the surprise in his voice.

  “Yes,” the Ghost replied, reaching up and plucking the photograph from the wall. It was blurred, but its subject was clear. It was one of the raptors, perched on the top of a building, surveying the street below with its glowing red eyes.