The Third Magic

by Molly Cochran

  He said that he did not. Then he hung up the phone and returned to his apartment in Munich, where British intelligence—his official employer—had assigned him, and waited for Cronos to come for him.

  To his surprise, he found Darling on his living room sofa. Titus's first thought was that he had finally learned Cronos's true identity. So great was his fear that at first he could not even understand the words Darling was speaking, but slowly they began to permeate the fog of confusion and panic that had engulfed him since his conversation with the Soviet agent.

  "The Russians have too much of a hammer over you," Darling was saying in his clipped, kingly accent. "If they don't kill you just for your association with me—which they probably will—they'll want you to go over and kill Poles and Afghanis for them."

  Titus was speechless. For a full minute or more, he opened and closed his fists, which had gone stone cold with fear at the sight of his former teacher. "I thought you'd come to kill me," he said at last.

  Darling smiled. It was a strange smile, musing, rueful, resigned. "What a terrible thing," he said softly.

  "That is... I didn't..." Titus waffled.

  Darling waved him down with a gesture. "I can help you to disappear, if you'd like. Aside from that, I'm afraid you'll be on your own for a time."

  "Disappear?" Titus asked numbly.

  "We can stage your death."

  "Could you set me up with someone?"

  "Yes, of course. But you've got to be careful. We don't want to compromise the Coffeehouse Gang."

  "No," Titus said. "Certainly not. Thank you, sir. I hope I'll be able to make this up to you one day."

  In time to come, Titus Wolfe would make Lucius Darling a very rich man. But at that moment, when he realized that he would be living out the rest of his life as a man with no permanent identity, no career, not even a country to serve, he was terrified. He had been trained as a soldier in a cold war that had ended. As of now, he would be not a citizen of the world, but the world's outcast, belonging nowhere, living for no reason other than the fear of death.

  His existence ended officially in the early hours of morning, when his car careered dramatically into the Amper River. The "accident" was a fairly simple matter to arrange: All it took was for the steering mechanism of his two-year-old BMW 540i to be set so that it would veer off the bridge without a driver.

  Although there had been no traffic on the bridge itself at three a.m., when the occurrence took place, dozens of people saw the automobile's flying exit through the guardrail. Later, when the car was recovered, MI-6 was able to find enough traces of Titus Wolfe so that even without a body they could determine with some certainty that he had been in the car during the accident and had probably drowned. They also found the timed mechanism that had forced the car off the road. The secret service concluded that Wolfe's death had been the work of German terrorists who had discovered that he was a British agent.

  Titus was given a military memorial service at the Queen's expense. His youngest sister, who was working as a domestic in Manchester, was astonished when she was notified of his death to learn that he had been driving a car worth forty thousand pounds. Professor Darling's parting words to him had been, "Go to Panama. In Colon, look for a boat named Sea Legs."

  That was the last time Titus ever saw him, although he continued to work through Darling's byzantine network of contacts. Wherever Titus went, sooner or later he would receive a message through some member or other of the Coffeehouse Gang, which would lead him through a series of further calls, messages, and meetings, until the exact details of his assignment were made clear to him. Sometimes he met directly with his employer of the moment; at other times, he had no idea for whom he was working.

  The system was a work of genius.

  In Panama, Titus discovered that the captain of Sea Legs was a man named Richard Edgington. Several years Titus's senior, Edgington had been one of the brightest stars during the Gang's pub-crawling days. Supported by an indulgent and wealthy family, he hung around Cambridge for some time after his graduation, publishing tracts that condemned British foreign, economic, and domestic policy, and talking treason with the glib tongue of a natural orator.

  Too visible and outspoken to work for either MI-6 or the Soviets directly, Edgington's function had evolved into serving as a sort of general getaway driver for his compatriots who often found themselves in need of fast transportation to another country.

  It was a fairly lucrative business—a real consideration for Edgington, since his father had found out about his Communist leanings and cut him off financially. He had been given the boat, however.

  Sea Legs was a cumbersome, old-fashioned six-hundred-foot yacht decorated with brass and heavy teakwood trim. It had been a jewel back in the thirties, when Edgington's father had had it built, but through the years it had fallen into disrepair. By the time Titus Wolfe walked up its gangway, Sea Legs was such a wreck that it seemed incredible to him that the thing could even remain afloat.

  But its looks were deceiving. Beneath its decrepit exterior, it contained an engine more powerful than any police vessel in open water. It had been provided by Lucius Darling, through a chain of contacts, as had nearly half a ton of weaponry, all of it carefully hidden inside the wallboards and flooring.

  Most of the profit generated by Sea Legs as spy transport went to Darling, but Edgington augmented his income considerably by running cocaine and heroin between North and South America. In this way he had achieved not only financial independence from his family, but had actually become rather wealthy.

  "Never had to work a day in my life for it," he said with amusement.

  Titus told him about his own situation—about Darling's intercession and his own decidedly vague prospects for the future.

  "Well, the don did tell me what you've been doing for a living." Edgington took two tinned beers off a shelf and offered Titus one. "I say, does a field agent do anything besides kill people?"

  Titus felt his face reddening. He was unaccustomed to discussing any aspect of his work with anyone.

  "I'm trying to see what you'd be good for, you see." He held out the beer again. Titus ignored it.

  "You—you can help me?"

  Edgington laughed. "My dear boy, didn't Darling tell you? We've all stuck together. All of us from the old days. We don't work together or anything like that, of course, although I do see quite a few of the old boys in the course of my travels. I imagine I'm the only one who sees any of the others. But we do keep in touch, do one another favors, that sort of thing. Quite valuable, actually."

  "The ... the whole Gang just slipped out from under the Russians?" Titus asked.

  Edgington laughed. "Well, we didn't all take to your sort of work, old man, guns blazing and all that. We're not all in as much difficulty as you are." He took a long pull from the bottle. "Carsons, for example, works in the Department of Immigration. He can get you papers into or out of just about anywhere. And Henry—remember Henry, tall fellow—well, he's with the Exchequer. Access to all sorts of confiscated counterfeit money." He chortled. "Can you imagine, free money for the asking? No English currency, of course. That's burned straightaway. But no one cares about drachmas or pesos or yen. Comes in handy in a pinch, you can be sure of that."

  "I see," Titus said, his mind reeling. "And all of them, the, the Gang ..."

  "They were all working for the Reds in one capacity or another, although usually indirectly, through Darling. Still, there's risk, especially now that the Soviet machine is folding up like a Chinese box. We've had to stay together. Saved each other's arses more than once, I can tell you."

  "You're saving mine now," Titus said humbly.

  "Oh, you'll pay for it," the captain said with a grin. "The Coffeehouse Gang doesn't let you ride free for long."

  Edgington was able to find Titus work as a strong-arm for a Colombian cocaine exporter. His job was to kill people in the cocaine kingpin's own circle who had become untrustworthy either through
greed or power. An assassin's assassin. It was a supremely disagreeable job for Titus, but under the circumstances he could not afford to be choosy about what he did for a living.

  For several months he languished in a sleazy hotel room in Bogota, hardly daring to step outside except to perform his duties, and wondering how long it would take for his Colombian employer to get rid of him with yet another hit man, when he was approached by a rival drug lord who offered Titus the equivalent of fifty thousand British pounds to blow up a boat in Manaus, Brazil.

  He never asked what was on the boat, or who it belonged to. He simply did the job, collected his money, and left for Miami the following day.

  In time, he—or rather his work, which was extraordinary by any standard—became known among the most discreet and dangerous segments of nearly every civilized country in the world.

  Titus himself, however, remained an almost perfect mystery. For one thing, there were no photographs of him. One of the few advantages of his growing up in extreme poverty was that his childhood likeness had not been preserved anywhere. And once he got to Cambridge, Professor Darling had ensured (so subtly that even Titus had not been aware) that his protégé was not photographed for any reason. He had been thinking of the boy's future as a Soviet spy back then, but Titus's anonymity was of even greater value in his new incarnation as a mercenary.

  No one outside the Coffeehouse Gang knew his name, either. The Colombian and his closest henchmen, who all happened to be on the boat in Manaus when it exploded, had called him "the English." The Brazilians had not known even that much about him.

  Before long, Titus's skill became so finely honed that no one even identified his jobs as the work of one man. Only in the late nineties, following a spate of bombings on behalf of a number of Middle Eastern concerns, did an American journalist speculate that the terrorist activities filling the newspapers over the past two years might be the handiwork of a single brilliant mind.

  The journalist, through painstaking but stunningly erroneous research, even found a name for the hitherto unknown terrorist: Hassam Bayat.

  Titus had been drinking coffee in an Algerian cafe when he read about his new identity. He had laughed aloud: It had taken the press the better part of five years to pick up on the clues Titus had left leading to his false identity, but some bumble-headed writer had finally taken his subtle bait. Soon every counterterrorist organization in the world would be looking for "Hassam Bayat"—an Arab. Once the ball got rolling, no one would look twice at a blond, blue-eyed Englishman with the right papers. By the time he passed Rapid City, South Dakota, Titus Wolfe was getting excited. The initial phase of the Cheyenne assignment had occurred without incident. He was in the United States, his passport stamped, his presence unsuspicious. He had an appointment with the head of the purchasing department at the Air Force base to show some metal dies from a company in Minnesota. The real sales representative, with whom Titus had conversed in a bar two weeks before, was now decomposing in a Minneapolis parking garage.

  It would be a good long drive to Wyoming in the stolen Cadillac—long enough to assemble and perfect the device he had picked up in the airport locker, and to practice with the new handgun that had also been waiting for him.

  Titus didn't work quickly unless he had to. He always had backup plans, and backups for backups. For his current assignment, he had planned for so many contingencies that the possibility of actually accomplishing the mission on this try was fairly remote. Only a zealot concerned with getting publicity would sacrifice himself in something like a bombing. A professional of Titus's caliber would never move forward with a plan if even one element went awry, and his employers knew this.

  After the mission—or, what was more likely, when the mission was aborted because a part of the plan was found to be faulty—Titus had made arrangements to be picked up in Alberta, Canada, within two days of the assignment. If this route of escape was not possible, he was to travel eastward to Atlantic City, New Jersey, within two weeks.

  Whether the mission was successful or not, it would be up to him to stay alive for those two weeks.

  They would prove to be two of the most difficult weeks of his life, and would begin with a chance encounter with a biker named Pinto.

  Chapter Fourteen

  HOGS IN BATTLE

  Sturgis, South Dakota

  "You a cop?" asked the man who smelled of blood. He was leaning against a rail outside a bar, where a constant stream of people flowed around the two of them.

  Launcelot helped Hal to his feet.

  "Look like one," Pinto added. He took a toothpick out of his pocket and examined it before placing it in his mouth. His fingers were stained with blood.

  None of my business, Hal thought. Some criminal types could spot cops from a mile away. They were usually drug dealers, creatures accustomed to being tailed. It was hard to deceive them. But other sorts had the nose, too. Some killers. During his FBI days, Hal had encountered a few who'd made him as soon as he stepped into the room.

  He had the same talent. Not with every crook, certainly— he'd go crazy if he got the vibe with every petty thief who crossed his path—but sometimes. When there was something off. With murderers, when the killer was the kind of sicko who needed to kill. Hal could sniff them out at a hundred yards.

  Pinto was one of those.

  "I don't like cops."

  "Get lost," Hal said.

  Pinto took a step toward him.

  In the next moment, the door to the Full Throttle Saloon opened and the ten other knights walked out. They moved swiftly to surround Hal. Dry Lips sauntered implacably between the two men.

  Pinto spat out the toothpick. Then, with a soundless motion of his wrist, a switchblade leaped into his hand, the blade pressed against Dry Lips's big neck.

  There was the slightest of rustles as the others adjusted themselves for combat. Launcelot, Kay, Bedwyr, MacDaire, and Tristan drew their swords in unison, the shafts whistling softly as they exited their scabbards. Gawain and Fair Hands, both experts with the light spear, held their weapons in the air as if they had suddenly materialized there. Geraint Lightfoot drew a dagger, prepared to throw. Agravaine ran his tongue along the cold silver of the hook that had replaced his left hand. Lugh slowly dragged into view the ball-end of his favorite weapon, the unwieldy but thoroughly effective, at least at close range, mace.

  "I think you'd better put down the blade," Hal said.

  "How about I take his fat head off?" Pinto taunted, rubbing Dry Lips's bald head with his knuckles. The big man's eyes widened.

  "Shouldn't have done that," Hal said a split second before Dry Lips lifted the biker into the air behind him by the crotch. Pinto flew into the street, landing headfirst in the wheel of an airbrushed Bourget 230 chopper, causing it to fall over.

  The milling crowd stopped cold. The fallen motorcycle had made it personal for all of them. In an instant the knights had surrounded the perpetrator. Agravaine's hook was already inside Pinto's nostril and drawing blood.

  "Leave it," Hal said. Reluctantly, the men withdrew their hardware. Lugh looked hurt. It was the sort of thing Hal was always doing. It made no sense not to kill the blackguard on the spot. It made them all look bad.

  Then, slowly, the crowd parted and a three-hundred-pound Greaser with a Pancho Villa mustache and a tattoo on his arm bearing the legend "Pure Poison" over a skull and crossbones strode forward. "Which one of you knocked over my bike?" he demanded, the skull seeming to come to life as he flexed his muscles.

  The knights stepped back to reveal Pinto on the ground, blood and mucus from his nose spraying over the flawless chrome of the Bourget.

  "Be my guest," Hal said, offering the man a little salute. "Come on, let's get out of here."

  Pinto raised his head. "I'll kill you, cop," he wheezed.

  "This cannot be countenanced," Dry Lips complained as they neared the motorcycles. "I was deprived of my proper right to defend myself."

  "Aye, he should have been allo
wed to kill the knave," MacDaire agreed. "'Tis only seemly." The others nodded.

  "You can't kill anybody, okay?" Hal said.

  "But surely if the fiend's got a knife—"

  "I'm saying it would make things complicated, that's all." Hal mounted and put on his helmet. "Look, guys, I know it's hard to walk away from a jerk like that, but I'm thinking about Arthur. He can't have any attention drawn to him, not yet."

  "And why not?" Kay rumbled. "The boy's lived eighteen years as a child. It's time he showed himself."

  "True enough," Tristan said. "He was at this age when he pulled the sword from the stone."

  Hal blinked. "He was?"

  "Aye. Eighteen, and by just a day or two," Kay confirmed. "He was my squire."

  Dry Lips waved his hands in the air. "Arthur's nothing to do with this. That one over there was a smelly mole, and mine by right to tread on till his blood ran red."

  "No," Hal insisted. "I don't want anybody to get killed, even him, understand? It'll just cause problems. Now let's go for a ride or something. By the time we get back to the rally, snot-nose'll be long gone. Okay?" He fastened the helmet and revved the engine. "Okay?"

  Truculently the others followed suit.

  God, but I'm getting tired of this, Hal thought for the fiftieth time that day. What happened to the days when he didn't have anyone to worry about except himself? He wasn't cut out to be a Boy Scout leader, especially with this gang of delinquents. "Move it out," he said, waving lackadaisically.

  In his rearview he saw Pinto staggering away from the Bourget and its owner. The crowd was shouting encouragement: Clearly the man with the tattoo was a popular personage at the rally. Poor bastard, Hal thought. The guy who had called him a cop was a born loser if he ever saw one. He was half the size of the Bourget owner. And if he tried the stunt with the switchblade on that one, the crowd would knock him down and see that he never got up.