Aubrey sensed the light in the alleyway change before he saw anything, and still putting himself back into his trousers, he glanced to one end and saw that in the mouth of the alleyway stood a figure. Then back at the other end, another figure.
Aubrey felt a shiver. Any other day and this would be a pair of mutchers, the street ruffians who preyed on the poor souls who were too drunk to offer much resistance—and of course Aubrey could deal with them all right, drunk or sober.
But this wasn’t any other day. And besides, he fancied he recognized the two men who blocked both exits, and that made it worse than a pair of mutchers.
They were moving up the alley toward him. A third figure had appeared at the mouth of the alley. Aubrey desperately wished he had his truncheon but knew it would be no good. He cast his eyes at the streaming wall right in front of him in the hope that a ladder might magically be present, then back at the men, who were upon him now.
He recognized the grinning faces in the second before the light went out. Just as he’d known he would.
* * *
Striding through the streets of Amritsar in their robes, Kulpreet and Ajay had been preoccupied with their own thoughts. Perhaps because years of Assassin dominance in the city had made them complacent, or perhaps because even Assassins are not immune to mistakes, but whatever the reason, before they knew it the crowd seemed to dematerialize, and standing in the street before them was a line of seven men in matching brown suits. Something they had always been told to train for and expect was actually happening. They were under attack.
Kulpreet and Ajay wheeled around. The street was emptying. Behind them was another phalanx of men in brown suits, nervous crowds moving away from them like ripples from a dropped stone. A tempo of fear increased as the brown suits began to produce kukris from within their coats. Over a dozen blades versus two.
Ajay and Kulpreet looked at each other. With a reassuring smile she pulled her cowl over her head and he did the same, then he reached to give her three quick taps and a squeeze on her upper arm, and she responded to the code with a nod. They knew what to do.
Mentally they both counted—one, two, three—and then, in one coordinated movement, went back-to-back, deploying their blades at the same time, and it was a measure of how quiet everything had become that the noise was even audible, and a measure of how confident the brown suits felt that they didn’t even flinch, didn’t even look nervous.
The one in the middle was the leader. He gave a whistle and rotated a finger. As one, the brown suits began to advance, the end of each line edging forward, closing the circle in the hope of trapping Ajay and Kulpreet at its center.
“Now,” said Kulpreet, and they made their move. She dashed to a canopy on her left and he went in the opposite direction, and both reached their respective targets before the brown suits could get to them.
Ajay’s blade was back in its housing as he hit the wall running, his bare feet clinging to the stone as he reached for a sill and heaved himself up. Two more grunting efforts and he was on the roof traversing the building, jumping down to the street on the other side and sprinting into a passageway. At the end was one of Amritsar’s street walls separating one thoroughfare from the next, and Ajay went for it now, knowing he’d be home free if he could scale the wall and get over.
He never made it. The brown suits had anticipated his move, and as Ajay reached the end of the alleyway they appeared, taking him by surprise. He stumbled and saw a kukri flashing toward him, and acting on instinct brought his hidden blade arm into defense, engaging the steel . . .
Only, the blade didn’t engage.
It jammed.
FORTY-THREE
Aubrey had no idea where he was but sensed that was the least of his concerns.
What mattered was that he was bound to a chair in a room that was dark apart from a flickering orange glow given off by lamps bolted to the walls, while in front of him stood the three punishers, gazing at him with smiling dispassion, preparing to do their work.
Hardy stepped forward. He pulled on black leather gloves then from his jacket pocket took a pair of brass knuckles that he slipped over his fingers. The two other men shared a look and stepped back into the shadows as Hardy came to Aubrey and put his gloved hand to the peeler’s face, like a sculptor testing the consistency of his unmolded clay.
Then he stepped back and placed his feet with the expertise of a boxer, and Aubrey thought that closing his eyes might be a good idea right now, so he did. It was funny because he’d always found it difficult to picture his family when he was away from them; it was something he always wished he could do—just to have them with him.
But they came to him now. A perfect image of them that he clung to as the blows began raining in. There was that to be said for being beaten up, at least.
Thank God for small mercies.
* * *
Kulpreet awoke with a sore head and found herself squinting in the gray dark of a warehouse: an empty, cavernous space, with just the slapping sound of rain pouring through the roof and birds nesting in the rafters. Rusting stairways led to ancient, dilapidated gantries overhead.
She was restrained in an unusual manner. Seated at one end of a long slatted table, it was to all intents and purposes as though she were an honored guest for dinner—apart from the fact that you tended not to tie up honored guests. Her chair was pushed neatly beneath the table. She couldn’t see her feet but they were bound to chair legs. Meanwhile, her hands were laid out in front of her, tied tightly around a slat with a leather thong, palms flat to the tabletop. They were placed almost as though she were about to receive a manicure.
In a sense, she was. A few inches from her fingers, laid very deliberately so that she could see them, was a pair of pliers, the sort of rusting pliers one might use to extract a fingernail.
She knew of this torture, of course. The cumulative pain. Apparently there was an Assassin who had managed five before he broke.
As far as she could tell, there were three brown suits in the warehouse with her. With clenched jaw she watched as one of them inspected her hidden blade, and if there was one thing that made her angry—beyond being captured, beyond having it taken from her and beyond being told by sniggering brown suits that Ajay had been cut down like a dog in the street, it was that. They had Ajay’s blade as well. Another Templar thug stood at the end of the table, turning it over in his hands.
“This one jammed,” he told his friends, and they laughed.
But that’s not why you can’t deploy it, you idiot, thought Kulpreet. Not unless you can slip it over your wrist and arrange your muscles and tendons in such a way as to precisely emulate Ajay, or can activate the failure-avoidance switch, and to be honest, you could spend the rest of your life looking for the switch and still not find it.
The lead brown suit turned his attention from his colleagues to Kulpreet. “It’s calibrated to each individual Assassin,” he called back over his shoulder as he came forward to Kulpreet. Behind him the two thugs had grown bored of inspecting the blades and dropped them to the table, and she wanted to look over at them, to check their position, but didn’t dare.
She was thinking about that switch.
“Well, well, she’s awake,” said the grinning inquisitor. “Looks like it’s time to begin.”
He picked up the pliers but then made a show of pretending to reconsider and dropped them back to the table with a clunk. “Maybe I won’t be needing those,” he said, almost to himself. “I mean, it’s not as if it’s a difficult question, the one I have to ask. Did you put Jayadeep Mir to death three years ago, or was he banished to London instead? It’s quite straightforward really.”
He looked at her, but if he was hoping for a response, she didn’t give him the satisfaction. He continued, “You see, pretty one, we have a colleague in London who was a British army officer who spent some time in India, and he heard
all about the extraordinary Jayadeep Mir, and now he’s met a rather extraordinary Indian boy in London and what with one thing and another, he wonders if the two might be one and the same. What do you have to say about that?”
She said nothing but when he stepped to one side and retrieved the pliers she was able to see past him and check the position of the hidden blades. Now she needed to check the stability of the table, and she feigned a helpless fury, shaking herself as though trying to wrench free. The men shared an amused glance but she’d learned what she needed to know: the table was not secured to the floor, but it was heavy, too heavy for her to tip by herself. She’d need help to do that.
But if she could tip it, then maybe she could reach one of the hidden blades.
“Water,” she said, softly.
“I beg your pardon,” said the inquisitor. He’d been turning the pliers over in his hand, staring at them fondly. “What was that?”
She made as though she were too parched to form words. “Water . . .”
He leaned a little closer. “What did you say?”
Was he close enough to grab with her teeth? She had two chances to do this, and this was one of them. But if she messed it up . . .
No. Best to wait. Best to try and lull him into a false sense of security.
And so, as though making a Herculean effort, she managed to say the word “water” audibly enough for her inquisitor to hear, and he stepped away, beaming.
“Ah, I thought that’s what you said.” He indicated to one of the men, who disappeared then reappeared a few moments later with an earthenware mug that he placed on the table in front of her.
She made an attempt to reach for it with her teeth before fixing him with a look of appeal, and with a smile he picked up the mug and lifted it to her lips, excited and titillated at having this beautiful woman so much in his control that she needed help even having a sip of water. Oh, how he was going to enjoy what came next. The inquisitor was a man who enjoyed his work. He was good at it; he was an expert when it came to inflicting . . .
Pain.
It shot up his arm. With her teeth she had clamped onto his hand and she wasn’t just biting him, she was eating him. Oh my God, she was eating him alive.
He yelled in agony. The mug dropped but didn’t smash. Kulpreet kept her teeth clenched on the inquisitor’s hand, tasting sweat and dirt and wrenching her neck at the same time, maximizing his pain and using every ounce of her strength to bring him closer. At the same time she tipped the legs of the chair out to one side, resting all her weight on her forearms as she used them to slam into the inquisitor’s shins, sending him off balance and increasing the speed of his downward journey so that at last he sprawled to the table, face breaking the earthenware mug as he made contact, and if that added to his pain, then great, thought Kulpreet, but that wasn’t her main objective, because what she needed to do now was . . .
With all her might and using the weight of them both, she bore down on the table, which tilted so the hidden blades came skidding down the surface toward her waiting fingertips. The inquisitor was in the way so she couldn’t even see them come but she felt one reach her fingertips just as he managed to yank his hand free of her mouth, and she gasped with her own pain as one of her teeth went with it. Blood and torn flesh were around her mouth but she didn’t care about that now, all she cared about was the blade she was turning over in her hands, feeling for the switch. Over the body of the inquisitor she could see the other two men exchanging an amused glance before reaching for their kukris and of course they were in no hurry, because after all, what could she do? The odds were not in her favor. Even with a blade she was still tied to a chair, and there were three of them and a locked door. Skilled and clever and lucky as she was, there wasn’t enough luck in the world to save her now. They knew it, she knew it. They all knew how this would end: she would tell them what they wanted to know then she would die.
Kulpreet realized this, of course. But the object of getting the hidden blade was not to use it on her captors.
It was to use it on herself.
But still, thank God for small mercies, because she had the opportunity to take one with her, and so as her thumb went to the switch, she did what looked like an odd thing: she brought her face close to the throat of the inquisitor, and because of the position of her arms it looked as if she were taking him in a lover’s embrace, pressing her flesh to his.
One of her captors realized her true intention but it was too late. She had already rammed the blade housing against the inquisitor’s neck and then with her eye still at his throat, released the blade, which shot through him and into her.
As Kulpreet died she thought of all she had done. She thought of her husband and little boy at home, who would be wondering where she was. She even thought of poor old Ajay—“well, I’ll be joining you soon, old friend”—and she thought of the Brotherhood and wished it well, and it was with a heavy heart that she knew the struggle for a better and fairer world would have to continue without her.
As the point of the blade drove through her attacker’s neck and into her own eye and into her brain, Kulpreet knew this was a better death than the one they had planned for her, but she wondered if it was a noble death. She had told them nothing, and she hoped that would count for something. She hoped the Council would decree that she died with honor.
FORTY-FOUR
Two days later on the harbor at Amritsar, three men in brown suits intercepted an Assassin messenger.
The three men killed the Assassin, made sure to retrieve the message he’d been due to deliver to London then bundled his body into a wagon for pig feed.
As instructed the message was handed to Templar code breakers, who set about decoding it, a process that took them a week or so.
“Urgent,” it said, when translated. “Mission possibly compromised. Ajay and Kulpreet dead, maybe tortured for information. Suggest abort mission at once.”
And then, at the bottom: “Ethan, look after my son.”
FORTY-FIVE
Abberline was in The Green Man. But not drinking today. Not brooding nor drowning his sorrows. He was there on altogether more pressing business.
“Hey, Sam, you seen Aubrey today?”
“Not seen him for a while, Freddie,” replied the barman. “No, tell a lie, he popped his head round the door earlier, on his way to School’s Day at Lord’s.”
Freddie shot the barman a confused look and Sam was disgusted in return. “What the bloody hell are you doing in here if you don’t even know about the Eton-Harrow match?”
“All right, keep your hair on, what’s left of it. Aubrey was on his way there, was he?”
Sam suddenly pulled a face, as though he’d said too much. “Well, um . . . no. He was on duty, wasn’t he?”
Now it was Abberline’s turn to be exasperated. “Look, you can’t tell me anything about Aubrey I don’t already know. He was playing truant right?”
Sam slapped a bar towel over his shoulder and gave Abberline the kind of reluctant nod that wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.
“Right,” said Abberline. “Now we’re getting somewhere. He came in here to . . . Oh, I know. He came in here to change his clothes, did he?”
Another reluctant nod.
“All right,” said Abberline, sliding off his stool about to make for the door. “When he comes back for his uniform, tell him I’m looking for him, would you?”
“Bloody hell, everyone wants old Aubs at the moment, don’t they?”
Abberline stopped and turned. “Come again?”
“Like I say, seems like everyone wants to talk to Aubrey.” Again Sam was wearing a queasy look, as though he might have said too much.
“Put a bit more meat on those bones for me, mate. Who exactly is looking for Aubrey, apart from me?”
“Three geezers who came in not long after he’d lef
t for the match.”
“And what did they look like?” asked Abberline and felt his heart sink as Sam gave him a description of the three punishers.
Not knowing what else to do, he headed for Lord’s cricket ground but immediately regretted it when he found himself swimming against a tide of humanity leaving the ground. Cabs were stopping and turning tail. Nearby, a horse snorted and stamped its feet. The weight of people became too much for an aunt-sally owner and he began packing quickly away. Same for the stallholder who called for the shoving, ebbing crowds to pay attention—Mind the bloody barrow—as little hands reached to grab produce from his stall. Another was pushing a cart away from the crowds through a shoving sea of bonnets and caps and children carried on shoulders. Abberline felt something drag his clothes and looked to see a dog weaving through a forest of legs.
Despite the crowds the mood was genial. A good time was being had by all. The masses certainly enjoyed cheering on the sons of the nobility as they played their annual game, that was for sure, thought Abberline. One day the highborn progeny would be doing what all the upper classes did: lining their pockets at the expense of the lower orders, taking their fun where they found it and who cares if we ruin a few lives in the process.
And no, he didn’t find Aubrey. He found lots of drunks passed out in the road. Found lots of women trying to sell him matches and posies. Found lots of swells and ladies in posh frocks looking down their noses at the drunks and match-sellers. But no Aubrey.
He went back to The Green Man.
No, Sam shook his head, there had been no further sign of Aubrey, and no, not the three men either.
The punishers, that’s who it was, them at the line. He’d be paying those rail works a visit unless Aubrey turned up pretty soon. One more place to try, though, and he took himself to Aubrey’s rooms in Stepney, where he lived with his wife and two children.
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