Fiddleback Trilogy 1 - A Gathering Evil

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  He shook his head and looked, for the first time, hopeless. "I apologize that this elaborate charade was necessary, but only by forcing you to see the world through the eyes of a normal person could I communicate to you how desperately I need someone with your skills to replace me. If you take up my mantle, you will have the resources to build where you previously tore down. You may create where before you have destroyed. You may not be able to leave the world a better place than it was when you found it, but you can slow its descent into the depths of hell."

  I spoke around the lump in my throat. "I can pay forward."

  "Precisely." Coyote pressed his hands together. "I took your life, and you took mine. Jytte has an injection for you that, if you so desire, will unblock your drug-induced amnesia. You may return to your old ways and, with this explanation, Fiddleback may even accept you back again. If not, I am certain there are other Dark Lords who would be happy to take you into their stables."

  I shook my head. "I don't know, I just don't know."

  "Jytte can tell you more, much more, but it's your choice, Tycho Caine." Coyote shrugged and the world began to darken around him. "My time as Coyote is up."

  "Wait, answer me one question: Why Coyote?"

  The fading phantom laughed. "The Dark Lords—things like Fiddleback and worse—consider us varmints and seek to exterminate most forms of life on Earth. When varmint extinction programs were tried before, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the coyote not only refused to die, it flourished. Coyotes moved into cities and bedeviled those who sought to destroy them. What other totem animal could I chose?"

  The world outside the red circle collapsed into blackness. I turned to Crowley and saw lights begin to play through the dark. As the color slowly drained from our circle, the light built behind him, and I found myself back in Phoenix, on Camelback Mountain, looking southwest over Frozen Shade and the rest of the city. Looking behind me I saw we had returned to earth near one of the vast mansions built on the side of the mountain.

  The occultist silently pointed toward the stairway carved into the rock. He followed me as I climbed up to the front door and opened it. Crowley closed it behind me, then led me in and down to the basement level through a steel door hidden behind an oaken wall panel in the study.

  The hidden rectangular room had been simply furnished. I entered at the narrow end and saw, all the way across from me, a large screen projection television. Off to the right stood a bank of Hitachi computers and opposite it a row of 10 file cabinets lined the wall. In the center stood a long conference table with an even dozen chairs distributed about it. Nearest me, filling the walls, were workbenches with equipment that ran the gamut from chemical analysis units and scanning electron microscopes to electronics construction stations and gunsmithing tools.

  A single tear rolled down Jytte's perfect face as she stood beside the table. She set a silver tray with a full syringe on the table next to a cellular phone. A single droplet of liquid glistened at its tip. I looked up at her and wondered what was going on behind that plastic mask of a face.

  "Coyote said you had information for me, to help me make my decision."

  Jytte nodded. "According to an agreement Coyote made with Nero Loring, you will be acknowledged as his nephew, Michael Loring. You will become the CEO of Lorica Industries, with all the rights and privileges that entails. Nero has handpicked a board to run the company for you, so the burdens of day-to-day activities are limited to those you personally choose to assume."

  "Or," I noted, "the ones allowed by the rigors of becoming Coyote."

  "As you wish. Lorica has facilities throughout the world. Your legitimate resources will be vast, and those assets that Coyote has prepared for his work will allow you to work in secret with unparalleled ease."

  I felt a shiver run down my spine. "Who was he, Jytte? Who was Coyote? What was his real name?"

  She blinked her eyes once. "That information is unknown to me. He was Coyote. I do not know if he was the first, was the only or will be the last Coyote. What you have seen is who he was."

  Coyote. He was a man who set a trained killer on his own people to find out who among them was betraying him. He was a man who coerced others into working for him. He stole my identity and led me on a wild chase that not only put my life in danger, but caused me to kill a number of people—including aides he had trusted in the past. He also caused the deaths of innocent people, like Hal's wife.

  I looked at the syringe. Were Coyote and I that different, really, at the core of it? I killed for rewards that brought me satisfaction, and he did the same. That he let himself believe he was making the world a better place meant nothing.

  Or did it?

  He caught a bullet in the head to take a chance that his crusade would not die.

  I reached my hand out and picked up the phone. I punched up a number quickly and waited for someone to pick it up on the other end. I smiled as a sleepy voice answered.

  "Hello, Mr. Sinclair MacNeal?" I smiled as he cursed at the time. "I understand you are at loose ends at the moment. I think we could work well together. Listen, it doesn't really matter who I am, but just for the sake of simplicity, you may call me Coyote."