“Is that the drawer...?” Miranda asked softly.
“The drawer that Professor Houseman opened to get a face full of sphinxes?” I asked and then answered the question myself, “Yes, it is. Did you notice how carefully that particular drawer was selected? That means that they knew exactly what she was going to need to make the translation and that means that they knew exactly what she was going to translate.”
Grayson looked away from the screen as the figure exited back through the window, dropped to the ground and disappeared from the frame. “Who else knew?”
“Escobar in Cryptography, us … and you. There was no time for anyone else to find out. We went straight from that meeting to London. The time difference between finding out about the translation and reaching Professor Houseman was only a couple of hours and yet in that short time they knew exactly where to strike and how to do it.”
“What are you suggesting?” Grayson demanded, taking a precautionary step away from me. That step was all the confirmation that I needed. He saw it in my eyes and his hand darted for his desk drawer, but I was faster than that. I slammed the drawer shut on his wrist, causing him to grunt in pain and then hit him full in the face with the hardest punch that I could manage.
Though he may have spent the past couple of years behind various desks, Grayson had been a field agent once upon a time and he had kept himself in good shape. His reflexes were still pretty sharp and he was able to twist away from the punch, but his imprisoned hand stopped him from getting far enough away to dodge it completely. My fist caught him on the side of his head and he fell awkwardly onto one knee, momentarily stunned. I wasn’t about to give him a second chance and followed up with a kick to his kidneys, but my initial blow hadn’t done as much damage as he’d let on and he swept out at my other leg, knocking me off balance.
He would have liked to get hold of the gun that was still in the drawer, but both of us knew that the only way either of us would take possession of that was when the other was lying on the floor in a pool of his own unconsciousness. I feinted left, he feinted right. We were fairly evenly matched and could probably circle each other like this for an hour or more before one of us made an error that the other could exploit. Except that I didn’t have an hour. Grayson and I both knew that time was on his side. The Director’s office could be removed from the coverage of the internal security cameras whenever he wished for private or politically sensitive meetings, but normally the room was surveyed by security and sooner rather than later somebody would notice that Director Grayson appeared to be involved in a fist fight with someone and pop by to check whether it was a friendly martial arts demonstration or whether someone needed to be arrested.
So I gave him what he needed.
I left my guard a little too low as I feinted again and he pounced. He clearly suspected that my move was a trap and didn’t come in full force, but I was thinking a move or two ahead and blocked his half-hearted attempt with something even less-than-half-hearted. Stumbling back under the apparent weight of the impact, I hit the desk and fell sideways, knocking his chair away behind me on its castors. As I fell awkwardly, he moved in, confidence rising as his carefully restrained attack brought a better than expected response. The fact that the chair and desk were my undoing rather than his own action convinced him more than if I had pretended to be more hurt by his attack than I really was. He would have seen through that straight away.
In street craft training one of the things taught is that the most critical ally an agent has is his surroundings. I was relying on Grayson having forgotten that and on his being so familiar with the surroundings of his office that he no longer saw it that way. As he leaned down over me to deliver what he hoped would be the decisive blow, I squirmed away, using the movement to mask the fact that I was really grabbing an offensive weapon. Grayson saw the drawer coming in his peripheral vision, but was too late to react to it. In fact, he turned to look at it instinctively and caught the full force of it right in his face. Grayson’s desk might have been modern in style, but the tubular chrome and glass construction still had some serious weight behind it when hefted directly into someone’s nose, especially as this lower drawer was full of something heavy. Grayson was knocked sideways off his feet and I had added two punches and a kick to his head by the time I had scrambled back to my feet and grabbed the gun out the top drawer and aimed it at his head. It was a real automatic with real bullets in the clip and was capable of making a real mess to anyone it was fired at. It felt uncomfortable and ugly in my hand.
“Now,” I told Grayson, making a big display of releasing the safety catch, “I want you to move slowly backwards towards the wall.”
He crawled backwards across the marbled floor in an undignified fashion, all the time looking like a tiger waiting for a chance to leap past the whip and bite the trainer’s head off in a spray of arterial blood.
“Miranda…”
“What the hell is going on?” Miranda asked now that the room was quiet enough to do so and actually be heard.
“No time just now for that,” I told her. “Come over to the desk, but keep away from him.”
She did as I told her, keeping a nervous eye on the Director.
“If I see so much as a muscle twitch I’ll shoot,” I warned him. When she was in front of the desk, I told her how to open up the computer, which had lapsed into morphing images of racing yachts on the screen. I would have been surprised at the Director’s mundane choice of screensaver had I not been using all my attention on other things at the time.
Miranda touched the screen and the pleasure boats vanished to a blank screen requesting an access password. I cocked an interrogative eyebrow at the Director who shook his head firmly.
“If you think I’m going to give you my password then you can just go…”
“Persephone,” I told Miranda, firmly cutting off what I knew was going to be an anatomy-referencing comment.
Grayson’s face registered shock, “How did you know?”
I indicated the cameras in the room without taking the muzzle of the gun away from its aim, “Security can be a double-edged sword if you know how to use it correctly. The Agency trained me to know how to use it correctly.”
“I’m in,” Miranda reported and then gave a surprised squeal as an email popped up on the screen without her doing anything to call it up. “It’s from the Magic Circle.”
“What does it say?” I asked, resisting the urge to read it for myself. It’s not often that you get a communication from the closest thing on Earth to God’s social club.
“ ‘We are here’,” she read out, “ ‘We will summon you when we have discussed this’.” She gave a low whistle, “Wow, not exactly full of their own self-importance are they?”
“I’m not sure I’d want to make any sort of comment on the matter when they are in the same building,” I said carefully. As far as I was concerned, having them in the same building was akin to having them sitting on my shoulder listening to my every word.
“Wuss,” she shot back and I didn’t bother trying to explain that at least I was still a human-shaped wuss.
“In the bottom right hand corner of the screen there’s an icon for cutting off all communication into the room,” I told her. I wasn’t about to take my eyes off the Director for long enough to confirm that it was there.
“A mouth with a cross through it?” she queried.
“Sounds about right,” I guessed. “Click on it.”
“Privacy mode activated,” the computer announced through hidden speakers in cultured female tones.
With that, the room was completely isolated from the outside world. There wasn’t a single monitoring device on the planet that could penetrate the electronic shield that had been activated either from the inside or from without. The glass of the windows dimmed enough to make it impossible to see anyone’s lips move even if you could get close enough to try. All the phone, computer and radio links in and out of the office had been shut down wi
th a simple ‘out of office’ message automatically brought up. The lifts would no longer access the room, though we could still leave. Most importantly of all, the security cameras were switched off so nobody could see what was happening in the office.
“Right,” I said to Grayson, feeling a lot more comfortable with the prospect of a fully-armed riot squad descending through every available access point to pummel me to a bloody mess removed. They might still already be on their way, but each passing second made it that much less likely. “Now if you would be so kind as to take your chair again. I will not hesitate to shoot you if you try anything foolish.” I waved the gun slightly to punctuate the threat. Not enough to affect the aim. Just enough that the bullet would have punctured his left ventricle rather than his right.
Slowly, and all the time looking for an advantage, the Director stood up and dusted off his suit. Considering how clean the office was, even being smeared across the floor as he had been would probably have not left a mark, but the gesture was there to give him time to think, to look for a way to best, or at the very least distract, me. It did neither, so he walked casually back across to his desk, pulled the chair into its normal position and sat down.
“Would you care to explain to me what’s going on?” Miranda asked again.
“Not yet. Not till he’s secured. Here,” I said, handing her my gun, “Keep him covered with this whilst I find something to tie him up with.”
Most people aren’t expecting to need to keep people tied up securely in their normal places of work and, as a result, don’t keep a lot of the items necessary for such activities to hand. Since there were no curtain cords to make use of, I considered the phone line that ran between the handset and the socket in the floor, but then thought of a better idea. Scrabbling around under the desk, I located the ‘panic’ button and traced the wire around the frame of the desk, down one leg and into the floor. Yanking the cable out at both ends, I used that to bind the Director to his chair and took great pleasure in doing so. I know all the tricks about flexing muscles whilst the ropes are being put on to ensure a little wriggle room once they’re unflexed, so I made sure that the cord bit deep into his arms, denying him that. Once the hands were securely tied behind his back, I tied them onto the chair itself. I didn’t have anything to take care of his legs, but with the chair in tow he wasn’t going to get anywhere very fast and couldn’t pose a threat.
“Now?” Miranda reminded me. “Explanation?”
“I’m surprised that you actually need one,” I said, taking a perch on the edge of the desk on the far side from the bound Director. It was too heavy a piece of furniture for him to try and kick over without some serious leverage. “I meant it when I said that the Children of Osiris had someone working on the inside. Him.”
Miranda’s jaw fell open in shock. It wasn’t a great expression on most people, but was far less unflattering on her.
“You’re insane,” Grayson said, licking some of the blood from his split lip. A lesser man might have just spit it onto the floor, but he was too fastidious to risk messing up either the floor or his suit. “Or at least seriously misguided.”
“Oh really?” I demanded. I realised that he was trying to keep me talking, looking for an opportunity, keeping me occupied and hoping that I would somehow mess up. It was a technique that I had used before myself and an effective one since even though I knew what he was doing I felt compelled to justify myself. “Quite apart from the incomplete case file and Professor Houseman’s demise,” I started counting off the evidence again, “there is the small matter of the fact that the recently deceased curator of the Abu Simbel Centre for Antiquities knew that we were coming and who we represented as soon as he saw us. Now how was that possible? You were party to both of these trips and the reasons behind them. All along the line people seem to have known where I was going and what I was looking for when I got there even before I did and all because I was reporting directly to you at each step. But do you want to know what was the clear giveaway, the one thing that set off all the alarms in my head?”
“Enlighten me,” Grayson allowed, feigning disinterest, at least as much as it is possible for anyone who is tied to a chair and being accused of treason to feign disinterest.
“You should have sounded the alert for the Siren,” I told him with a flourish that I was thoroughly ashamed of. Whilst it might appear cool in the last act of an Agatha Christie play such grandstanding appeared pretty tawdry in the cold light of day and in front of a, literally, captive audience. “There was no excuse for not doing so.”
“That’s it?” Grayson asked scornfully. “That’s all you’ve got? That tells you that I am a traitor? You imagine that I have worked for years to reach the very pinnacle of not only this building, but the responsibility that it represents and that I would then throw it all away in some mad effort to bring back the mythical gods of Ancient Egypt? I don’t think I’m the one here who needs to be restrained.” His look of contempt was somewhat hampered when he was forced to blink the slow flow of blood from the wound caused by the impact of the desk drawer on his forehead out of one eye.
“I doubt that the loss of personal position would bother you too much when you consider that others have been willing to give up their lives for this mad idea,” I pointed out, “besides which I expect that you were looking forward to glory everlasting and perhaps a desirable pyramid of your own in the new order. Have you picked out an appropriate animal head yet? Slug springs to mind. That would suit you.”
“You really are quite mad aren’t you?” he asked me simply.
“Well now that the Magic Circle is here, they’ll take care of your little plot soon enough, all of you.”
“And I was the one that brought them here,” he pointed out, equally simply. “Why would I do that, do you think, if I was running this plot?”
Now that was a good question.
“It’s obvious to me that you are the one working on the inside,” he countered, “the one responsible for Houseman’s death, and the Curator’s and that stripper’s…”
“Cynthia Traske.”
“But I don’t understand why you’re continuing to play this game. What is it that you actually want from me?” he demanded. “From the Agency?”
I didn’t answer his question. I didn’t have an answer for it. My mind was racing with possibilities and one of those was that I had been mistaken in thinking that Grayson was the inside man. I was still sure that there was an inside man and all the evidence still pointed squarely at the man tied up in his own chair with his own panic button wire. Still, the fact that he had personally summoned the Magic Circle, the only group capable of stopping his plot, undermined everything else. It was possible that the email he had sent to them via the Bobo The Clown website was a complete red herring and the responses were as fake as he was, but somehow I didn’t believe that. It didn’t quite fit. He wasn’t acting right either. I couldn’t have explained what he was doing that wasn’t in the expected pattern of behaviour because there couldn’t be an expected pattern of behaviour in a situation as unexpected as this, but something felt off. Something wasn’t right. Call it agent’s intuition if you like.
“I’ll do you a deal,” I told him. “I’ll bring in security and they can keep us both safe until the Circle has decided what it is going to do. Once the threat’s been removed then we can decide what we do about who is and isn’t the inside man.”
“I can live with that,” he agreed immediately, no doubt thinking of the various punishments that he was going to visit upon me once he was out of the chair and back in ultimate authority.
I needed to re-establish communications with the rest of the building to bring Mettles and his team in, so I reached for the computer.
“Please don't do that,” Miranda said from behind me and I flinched because it was clear from the tone of her voice that I had made a terrible mistake in handing her Grayson’s gun. Suddenly, everything made clear and painful sense. I had the kind of blin
ding epiphany that usually only happens on the road to Damascus and leaves you, well, blind. In this case, it opened my eyes to so many things that were now so obvious. So many little details and small incidents slotted together to make up one much larger picture. In this case it was a much larger picture of my own abject failure. It was as though, in saying those few words, she had handed me a flowchart to the whole case and our roles within it, which in a sense she had.
“So you were playing me from the very start,” I said, turning around very slowly and making no sudden movements. As I had expected, she was holding the gun pointed squarely at my chest. She also handled it like an expert, using a double-handed grip and with a firm stance. The barrel never wavered from its target. This is what happens when you swap from non-lethal to lethal firearms.
“Yes, right from the very start,” she confirmed everything with a tight smile, “and please don't ask if it was all an act because it was. I mean, come on. You thought you could have me after one day in your company? One day! How arrogant is that? Trust me when I say that you are neither that attractive, nor that charming. Plus, you’'re not my type. Couldn’t possibly be.”
“Of course not,” I agreed. “I’m sane.”
Grayson watched in silence from the seat to which I had secured him. He probably would have enjoyed my humiliation more if he hadn't been a couple of paces behind in understanding what was going on, didn’t have panic button cords cutting into his wrists and couldn’t feel the circulation being slowly cut off. He, though, wasn’t in possession of all the information that I was now party to.
“Awww, no need to feel bad about it loverboy,” Miranda sneered, enjoying her moment of superiority over me. A professional would have just got on with it, but the fanatics always feel the need to exorcise all those years they spent feeling like despised outcasts by explaining to any and all available normal people how they had proven themselves to be so much better than those who had despised them, yet whom they secretly envied. It was so textbook that it was pathetic, but it might be something I could exploit using the exact same technique that Grayson had tried on me. I certainly didn't have a lot of advantages going for me at that precise moment. “People a lot smarter and more important than you had to be fooled for a lot longer to pull this thing off.”
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 22