Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  Evil.

  There. He'd said the word, if only to himself. Evil.

  It was not a fashionable word these days. In a world where children were slaughtered in the dozens, the thousands, by gun and bomb and knife, the word "atrocity" came glibly to people's lips, but somehow the recognition of evil had fallen out of fashion. The horrors of the modern world were bad luck, business as usual, "age-old racial tension," political terrorism, crime . . . but never Evil. It was as if one color in the palette of human understanding had been excised, lest . . . what?

  Lest there be hope?

  To accept the existence of Evil was to believe in its opposite—to hope, to believe that the Evil could be fought.

  As Colin must fight now, though his years were like a persistent weight, and his own destroying angel beat within his chest, always ready to betray him. People spoke of the burden of age without understanding where the cliche had come from. Colin knew age as a thing apart: a constant heaviness sapping the vitality of the man he remembered being. Now the time had come when—though, even with his heart condition, in good health "for his age"—he must plan his days like a master strategist; husbanding his resources, committing his forces with caution, lest he be left, aching and exhausted, his work undone.

  He could not afford to leave this work undone.

  Colin removed his glasses and rubbed his weary eyes. He didn't doubt any of what Rowan had written in these pages. That was the worst of it. To believe, and to know that honest men did nothing, was an agony greater than any defeat. . . .

  He set the manuscript aside and picked up the notes that Dylan had found for him. There wasn't much here, only a name—Caradoc Buckland—and jotted reminders of the questions he'd asked. Good student? Good work record? Drug use? Hospitalization? Arrests or convictions? Close friends? Family? Outstanding loans? Buckland had said he was calling from Washington D.C., but the location—like the name the man had given—might well be fictitious. It wasn't much to go on.

  Deep inside Colin, some fearful part cried out that he was old, he was tired. That he had done enough for any lifetime—won enough victories, made enough sacrifices. That he should be permitted to pass this battle on to a younger man.

  One phone call would do it. He would call Nathaniel, tell him what he knew, pass on the blasphemous crucifix, the key, and Rowan's paper. Nathaniel would act. Colin would have done what Dylan needed.

  But he would not have done what Dylan had asked of him—or what he knew he must do, even if he were to die in the attempt.

  He had been summoned to battle one last time, and though his esoteric armor was gone, he had been armed with a mighty weapon: the knowledge of a secular crime. Properly handled, Rowan's abduction could be used to expose and destroy the exoteric components of this Shadow Lodge—if through nothing more than the credence it lent to her dissertation. Though such an exposure would not be a conclusive victory for the Light, it would be a significant one. And knowing what he knew, Colin might be able to use it to win Rowan's life—if she were still alive.

  Nathaniel could not—but Colin might. His enemies knew him of old, and their memories were long.

  He sighed, and prepared himself for the battle that would be fought not with strength but with cunning, and with luck. He must check every clue that Rowan had left behind, looking for a place to start. And his soul told him that he must check, as well, to see if—beyond expectation, beyond sense—Toller Hasloch had somehow survived.

  Perhaps, in an odd way, the thought gave Colin hope. If Hasloch were somehow alive after what he had done, then Colin was spared the guilt of the deed, if not of the intention.

  But that hope, unworthy and conflicted as it was, paled beside the honest fear of what Hasloch could have become in the intervening years—of what the Thule Group certainly had become—if Colin had too easily assumed victory over its brightest fallen star.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WASHINGTON, D.C., WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1998

  0 villains, vipers, damn'd without redemption! Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man! Snakes, in my heart-blood warm'd, that sting my heart! Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!

  — William SHAKESPEARE, Richard II, III.II.129

  IT TOOK NINIAN APPROXIMATELY A DAY AND A HALF WITH A PENDULUM and maps on a gradually increasing scale to link the key with a safe-deposit box in a bank in Manhattan. The key had a relationship to its lock: by the logic that drove Ninian's gift, psychometry, the two were still connected.

  By that time Claire and Justin had arrived in Glastonbury—Colin could not, in good conscience, leave either unwarned.

  Justin took the news of Rowan's disappearance very badly. If Claire had not been there to calm him down, he would certainly have gone to the police. "How could you have let her do it? Why doesn't someone do something?" The outcry of any anguished parent whose child had gone astray.

  Dylan's attempts to reassure him—to explain—were useless.

  "Let them do their work!" Claire rapped out sharply.

  Justin, who had been pacing the floor of Dylan's living room, rounded on her in surprise. "Give me one good reason that I should! Palmer here didn't even have the common decency to tell me she'd disappeared; I should—"

  "If you interfere, she will die," Claire said flatly.

  Justin Moorcock stared at her. Claire took a deep breath and continued.

  "Justin, you've known me for years. I've known Rowan since she was a little girl, and I love her as much as you do. I know these people, Justin—they tried to kill me when I was about Rowan's age, and Colin saved me then. Let him save Rowan now."

  "Why doesn't someone do something?" Justin demanded. But the fury was gone from his voice now. He sat down on the couch. Claire put an arm around his shoulders and looked at Colin pleadingly.

  "We are doing all we can," Colin told him gently. There was no need to tax Justin with the fuller explanation of the powerful political protection the Thulists could summon, of their expertise in hiding the proof of the cult's existence.

  "What can I do?" Justin asked. "If money will help—"

  "I won't hesitate to ask for it," Colin told him firmly. "But right now we need to get into Rowan's safe-deposit box in New York and find out what she's left there for us—"

  Claire was watching him with an odd expression on her face.

  "I think I can help you out there, Colin."

  All five of them went down to New York to open the box, though only Colin and Claire went to the bank itself. Claire was cosignatory on the box; Rowan had rented it two years ago, something Claire had long since forgotten about.

  "She fooled me completely," Claire said, a little bitterly. "I had no idea she wanted it for something like this."

  "Probably she didn't know either, then," Colin said. "Two years ago would have been before she started investigating the Thulists."

  Or would it? he wondered, gazing down at the open box on the table between them. Its contents were heartbreakingly pragmatic: another copy of her dissertation, letters for Justin and Claire, a copy of her will. Rowan's notes and correspondence were there as well, but, as Colin had expected, they did not constitute anything that might interest the police, or comprise proof of a kidnapping. The documents were only ominous if one understood what they represented.

  Caradoc Buckland's signature was on a number of otherwise-innocuous letters bearing the name of the Cincinnatus Group and an address in Washington, D.C.

  "Now what?" Claire said, when Colin had read everything over twice and taken a few notes.

  "Now comes the hard part. You stay here and keep Justin and Dylan out of trouble—Ninian may be of help there, he seems like a sensible young man— and I go pay a call on some old friends."

  "God be with you," Claire said solemnly, her face grave.

  Colin took the shuttle from JFK on Wednesday morning. National Airport had been renamed for Ronald Reagan last February, but the name change stuck about as well as changing Sixth Avenue in Manhattan to Aven
ue of the Americas. People used the old familiar names in defiance of signage.

  Washington was just as he remembered it: a city that seemed at times to be no more than a stage set, a backdrop for implausible events. It was raining when he arrived, and that, too, matched his memories. Washington, like Berlin, was a city best understood in the rain. He took a taxi directly to his Georgetown destination, giving, out of old habit, an intersection and not an address. The past seemed present once more, and habits abandoned for decades had gained new currency. Once again, Colin became the man he had abandoned, the one for whom he'd thought he had no further use, once upon a time.

  But once upon a time could not last forever, and even the loveliest fairy tale had to end.

  With the legendary city traffic, the ride took over an hour, even though Colin had used the closer airport. The neighborhood slowly changed, becoming more moneyed, until the street where the driver stopped at last was filled with brass-plaqued brownstones whose tenants were wealthy and reclusive organizations: law firms, consultants, other groups with less specific purposes. Though long absent from the political chessboard, Colin recognized this shadowland well: this was the intersection of wealth and power, a realm where corruption flourished.

  The taxi stopped. Colin paid it off and watched it drive away before turning to locate his destination. Some part of his mind insisted that it would have been better to give an address several blocks away, to make the determination of his destination even more difficult for the hunters, but he knew that was pointless. No one was hunting him—yet. That would come only after he stepped into the arena.

  He walked up the street and located his destination: a brownstone indistinguishable from the others. The Cincinnatus Group was the only tenant.

  Colin had done his homework. The Cincinnatus Group was an advisory think-tank of the sort frequently retained by the Administration to do in-depth research on various unspecified issues. It was named for the legendary Roman general who had been admired by George Washington—the one who had saved the city, then returned to his plow. The civilian soldier had been an American ideal, once upon a time.

  When there had still been American ideals.

  Colin mounted the steps. There was an engraved brass nameplate beside the door. The door was locked; he pressed the bell beside it. To his mild surprise, the door opened.

  There was one last moment when he could have turned and run. It was surprising how strong the impulse was; as if he shared his body with a pragmatic animal interested only in its own survival, a creature who knew that only danger lay ahead.

  But he was not an animal. He was a man. Colin shrugged off the sensation of dread and stepped over the threshold. The reception area was directly to his right.

  Colin walked through the archway under the politely inquiring gaze of a receptionist who looked faintly disconcerted to see an unfamiliar face. The desk was bare of anything that might suggest that she worked for a living; there was a telephone, a Tiffany lamp, and a Georgian silver card receiver, nothing more. The woman behind the desk was blond, fine-boned, and patrician, and looked as if she'd be more at home on the runways of Milan than she was here. Her pageboy bob almost—but not quite—concealed the button in her ear and the wire that ran from it to a transceiver somewhere beneath her jacket; a crack in the amiable facade, and proof that someone, somewhere, was watching.

  "May I help you?" she asked. One hand was out of sight beneath the desktop—hovering, Colin had no doubt, over a security alarm.

  "I'm here to see Mr. Buckland," Colin said.

  "Yes, of course, sir," she said, relieved. Both hands appeared on top of the desk. "Who may I say is calling?"

  "Colin MacLaren."

  She spoke quietly into the telephone for a few seconds; Colin heard his own name spoken. The receptionist hung up the phone and brightly invited Colin to take off his coat and have a seat.

  Colin thought he preferred to stand, and to keep his coat. The blasphemous crucifix was a cold weight in his jacket pocket bringing it here had been a risk, but leaving it elsewhere would have been as much of one.

  He heard the rumble of an elevator through the walls of the old house, and a few moments later, a young man—presumably Caradoc Buckland—appeared.

  He was not precisely what Colin had expected. Buckland was somewhere in his early thirties, sleek and model-handsome, with dark brown hair cut fashionably short and hazel eyes. He was dressed in the Washington uniform: a dark blue blazer, maroon rep tie, and grey flannel slacks. Despite such scrupulous conservativism, he wore a heavy gold hoop in his left ear and a massive gold signet ring on his right hand.

  "Dr. MacLaren? I'm Caradoc Buckland." He held out his hand and Colin shook it.

  The next thing—the reasonable thing—would have been for Buckland to ask Colin's business here, but he did not. He gestured for Colin to accompany him, and led Colin toward the back of the house, where the elevator Colin had heard before was waiting.

  "Did you have any trouble finding us?" Buckland asked politely, sliding the bronze gates of the elevator shut.

  They know. The intuition brought with it an almost overwhelming urge for flight. But Colin had known they would know who he was—if not at the moment he entered the building, then very soon thereafter. The Thule Group never closed its books on an opponent until it had buried him itself.

  "Oh, no particular trouble," Colin answered easily, the first rush of dread fading into the prickle of anticipation along his nerves. The urge to play the Great Game never died, even after half a century.

  The elevator stopped on the third floor. "If you'll come this way, Dr. MacLaren," Buckland said. His voice gave no hint that anything out of the ordinary was occurring.

  The hallway was carpeted in vivid scarlet, with padding so deep that Colin was conscious of his feet sinking into the surface. The rug seemed to swallow sound, giving the hall the same dense hush as a cathedral. With a small part of his consciousness, Colin wondered how the confrontation was to be staged, and who the players were to be.

  The door at the end of the hall was a single slab of carved rosewood, the grain brought out through generations of hand-polishing. Buckland swung it open and gestured for Colin to precede him. The office walls were paneled in oak, and in its way this room was as much of a stage-set as the reception area downstairs had been.

  The desk stood isolated in the middle of the room, an immense ornate car-ven antique.

  "Hello, Colin," the man behind the desk said.

  It was Toller Hasloch.

  His bright hair had softened with time to the color of old ivory, and his body had thickened with age, but he was unquestionably the same man Colin had last seen a quarter of a century ago. Colin felt the shock of that surprise like a hammer blow to the chest, making him want to gasp for breath.

  "Do sit down, Colin," Hasloch said, rising to his feet like any good host. "Doc, please get our visitor a drink."

  Colin sank into the offered chair, unable to take his eyes from Hasloch's face. He barely noticed when Buckland set a glass on the table at his elbow. Age was an anchor, slowing his reflexes, sapping his resiliency, and Colin set himself against it as if were a living enemy. Hasloch had meant to stagger him with the revelation that he was alive, and Colin could not afford to let him have his way. After a moment the first paralyzing surprise faded, and he could think again.

  "What are you doing here?" Colin asked bluntly, although it was the question Hasloch himself should have asked.

  How had Hasloch survived? Though in the final analysis the question was irrelevant to the problem at hand, it still deviled Colin's thoughts. If only he'd stayed in New York—if Simon hadn't been injured almost at that same moment, drawing Colin's attention away to the West Coast. By the time he'd returned to the East to helm the Bidney Institute, checking to see that Hasloch was actually dead had been the furthest thing from his mind.

  They always say that it's the details that will get you in the end. . . .

  "I'm livi
ng my life," Hasloch said, with too much innocence. Buckland had taken up a sentry position by the door, and Colin felt a momentary pang of smugness—all this fuss over one old man!

  "While it's true that I prefer to keep a lower profile these days," Hasloch said, still smirking, "I'm hardly a hermit. I have wealth, power, influence, material possessions, pleasant company. . . ."

  Hasloch had always been high-strung, and even now, his nerves betrayed him. He could not keep his hands still; they roved across the littered surface of his desk like independent entities, plucking up first one item then another to toy with. Colin watched his hands moving over the objects. Most of them were perfectly mundane, but in the middle of them, gaudy and out of place, were five small clear candy-colored pieces of plastic. A cube, a triangle, a diamond, and two that had so many facets they might as well be round. Gaming dice, such as Colin had seen in Rowan's living room.

  Only the fact that he had steeled himself not to betray anything kept Colin from showing his surprise now. This could be coincidence, but Colin thought it was proof, instead.

  And the approach he'd planned to take with a stranger named Caradoc Buckland would not work, Colin realized, now that he knew Toller Hasloch was—against all expectation—involved.

  "Forgive me," Colin said politely. "I'm just wondering why you're telling me all this?" He'd learn more by being irritating than through conciliation—Hasloch had always had a tendency to make speeches.

  "Because," Hasloch growled, placing his hands flat on the desk and leaning up out of his chair across it, "/ want you to know how thoroughly you failed, you son-of-a-bitch."

  He'd hoped to irritate Hasloch, and it seemed he had. Behind him, Colin felt Buckland straighten to even greater attention.

  "So I did," Colin agreed, still calmly. "I suppose I should say I'm happy to see you're looking well?"