by Blake Banner
He gestured with his massive arm and said, “We’ll eat outside. Will you have a beer?”
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“No, Maria is my housekeeper. Sometimes she shares my bed, when we feel a mutual need.” He leered, then laughed. “That’s quite often, actually. But she goes home to her husband and children at lunchtime. The second setting is for you. We saw you arriving.”
“I see.”
“You disapprove?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Correct. Now, a beer?”
“Yeah, I could use a beer.”
“Sit, the bred is fresh from the oven.” He turned and bellowed in a voice that was improbably loud, “Maria, dos jarras de cerveza!”
His accent was terrible and for some reason, that made me smile. He sat at the head, in a beaten up wooden throne with a woven, straw seat. I sat on his left, looking out over the huge, blue sweep of the ocean. A hazy mist fused the horizon with the sky. Jim reached over and broke a hunk off the loaf, then tore that in two halves. He reached for a bottle of virgin olive oil and filled a dish with it. He soaked up olive oil with the bread, sprinkled salt on it and stuffed it in his mouth. “Go ahead,” he said with his mouth full, and I followed his example. The bread and the olive oil were both superb.
Maria emerged with two large tankards filled with nut brown ale and set them in front of us. She smiled, they exchanged a wink that almost embarrassed me, and she made her way back to the kitchen.
“So, what do you want from me?”
I took a long pull on the beer. It was like drinking walnuts. I set down the flagon and said, “I am not sure yet. First, I want your opinion on something. Then, maybe I’ll want your help.”
“Good,” he said, and nodded. “I’ll be glad to help you. But before you tell me what you’ve come to tell me, let me tell you something. Last time you were here, you suggested I contact your friends in Oxford, Marni Gilbert and Professor Gibbons.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“We talked a lot. Marni is good, I like her. She’s a little too cautious, but she has good instincts. Gibbons is a dangerous man, and you or I may have to kill him one day. I hope you haven’t got a problem with that.”
I frowned, recognizing my own thoughts in his words, but they were thoughts I had never acknowledged until now. I said, “He’s an asshole, but I’d rather not kill him if it can be avoided. I think basically he’s a good man.”
“I don’t doubt it, but that good man is being eaten alive by his own ambitions. Just be aware of it. He has become so obsessed with being the savior that he is becoming the enemy.” He broke more bread and ate it, watching me. Finally, he said, “Did they come after you?”
I nodded.
“You thought you’d crippled them, and they caught you by surprise.”
“I think so.” I told him about the attack at Quincy Market. When I’d finished, I asked him, “How did you know?”
“I guessed it might happen after I talked to Marni and Gibbons, when I understood the nature of Omega. You’re a smart man, Lacklan, you have an instinctive understanding of the importance of violence, but you don’t understand Omega.” He nodded a few times. “And you don’t understand how they use violence.”
“So you think it was Omega?”
“I am certain of it. Aren’t you?”
I leaned forward, broke more bread and doused it with olive oil and salt, then sat chewing it. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m certain of anymore.”
He grunted. “Well, that is one thing you can be certain of, Lacklan. Ah…!” He smiled with pleasure as Maria appeared through the sliding doors behind me, carrying a large, terracotta dish with two legs of lamb and a stash of small, sizzling chops. Among them were sweet potatoes split in half and large chunks of squash. I felt my stomach twist and realized I was starving. Maria smiled at Jim.
“You wan’ more beer?”
“Oh yes!” he said. “Bring an ice bucket. Then you can go.”
She brought a steel bucket full of ice, encrusted with pint-sized bottles of beer, they kissed, he slapped her on the ass and she left giggling. He reached over, grabbed a leg in his fist and put it on his plate. “Take,” he said. “Eat,”
I wondered for a moment if I had slipped into a parallel universe created by Robert E. Howard, but I did as I was told.
“What makes you so certain it was Omega? I’ve made a few enemies over the years.”
He was using his hands and a knife to remove large chunks of meat from the bone. “I am sure you have. Tell me something, when did you make your plans to go to the market?”
“That morning. It was spur of the moment.”
“So that tells you they had somebody watching your house. You got to the market—how long were you there, half an hour?”
“About that.”
“So they called in a team, right? They had one man watching you, tailing you. When you got to the market, he called in the team. They assembled, you headed down toward the restaurant and they came at you from both sides.”
“That seems about right.”
“So, sure, you’ve upset a lot of people in your time, and made a lot of enemies, but who has the motivation—and the resources—to have a man sitting on your house waiting for you to step outside so they can call in a team to take you down? If the cartels or jihadists devoted those kinds of resources to every SAS soldier who ever gave them a hard time…” He shook his head. “No, this is much more personal. Who is that personally involved?”
I thought about it. “Only Omega,” I agreed. “But everyone, from Marni and Gibbons to Senator McFarlane—and even you—agreed that after the Malibu massacre, they were pretty much finished.”
He nodded, concentrating on the meat on his plate. He loaded up his mouth, then sat back, chewing and looking at his tankard. Eventually he wiped his mouth with his hand and drained his mug. Then he belched.
“You understand violence,” he said. “Omega understands power.”
I made a face that told him I didn’t want another philosophy lesson.
He shook his head. “You need to understand this, Lacklan. Power is stability. Violence is chaos. What every empire seeks—has sought since before Alexander—is to use violence to impose stability.”
“You’re contradicting yourself.”
“No. You fight fire with fire. You fight violence with greater violence. You attack me with a gun, I destroy you with bombs. I bring such chaos and mayhem to you that you are cowed into submission. Because, when you have stability, it means you have obedience. The people you have subjected are obeying your rules, right? And those rules are there to ensure that you get what you want. You apply violence to achieve stability in the supply of your needs.”
He laughed. “The operative word in the sixth commandment, Lacklan, is ‘thou’. Thou shalt not kill! We can kill all we like, but thou shalt not kill. And that’s only the sixth commandment. The first is, ‘I am the law’. The second is also, ‘I am the law’. The third is, ‘Fear me, I am the law’, the fourth is ‘Respect the law’ and the fifth is also, ‘Respect the law’. So out of the Decalogue, which is at the heart of our Western jurisprudence, the first five tell us, ‘Obey!’ Of the next five, four tell us: ‘You shall not kill, commit adultery, steal or lie about your neighbors—those are rights reserved to us, the State’. And the last, the tenth, is the best of all. ‘You—you—shall not desire!’”
“Jim…”
“I know, you don’t want philosophy, but bear with me, you need to understand this. Eat, drink, relax—listen. So the Decalogue can be broken down into three basic principles: respect and obey me, I have the right to violence and theft, do not desire. Every empire in history has been built of this trinity, and Omega understood it better than anybody.”
I chewed, nodded and shrugged all at the same time. “OK, it’s interesting and enlightening, but how does this help me?”
He grunted. “You kno
w, one day you’ll hit sixty and you won’t be able to beat people up anymore. Then you’ll need to be wise instead. Destructive power doesn’t only come from being able to hit hard, it comes from knowing where to hit.”
“Agreed. Again, how does this help me?”
“Keep listening. So if that trinity is the foundation of empire: I am the law, obey me, do not desire, then the empire that is built on that foundation, is the projection of power. And this is the bit that is important to you. If you are building an empire, and Omega is an empire, it is not enough to have power. You need to be able to project that power—that means fighting offensively, not defensively—and the farther you project it, the greater your empire and the more stability there is in that empire.” He spread his hands. “The famous pax Romana, followed by the Pax Britanica and then the Pax Americana, currently in steep decline. Offensive capability leads to order and stability. But when everybody has defensive capability, that leads to chaos, because nobody has the power to control and stabilize: Vietnam, the Middle East….”
I was becoming interested. I couldn’t exactly see where he was going, but I could sense it. I said, “Traditionally, the model for that would be a monarch with some kind of government, supported by a powerful army.”
“Supported by a free trade market generating wealth and taxes to pay for that army.”
“But Omega didn’t follow that model.”
“Doesn’t. They are not a government using an army. They are a government within a government—or within governments, in the plural—like a secret cancer spreading within an organism, slowly taking control, first of one organ of power, then another, aiming ultimately to take control of the organs of violence.”
He gave a small shrug. “But then your father came along and decided he wanted to rebel. There was nothing he could do on his own, but he recruited you, and you became an infection within the infection.” He threw his head back and laughed out loud. “They had achieved a lot of stability, they were taking possession, making use of law enforcement and the military. They weren’t there yet. They still had to do it secretly, from the shadows, but they were doing it and approaching the time when they could come out in the open and seize control absolutely.”
“And that’s when I started killing them.”
“And that’s when you started killing them. You hurt them bad, real bad. You almost destroyed the U.S. section. But they understand power better than you do; better than almost anybody. And they knew that what they had to do, if they were to survive…”
“Was project, destroy what was destabilizing them.”
“That has to be their top priority. My bet is, they regrouped in Europe, and as soon as they were ready, they attacked. They can’t absorb you, accommodate you, live alongside you, hide from you, deal or negotiate with you. There is only one thing they can do. They must destroy you.”
“But who, Jim? They are all…” I hesitated, reached for my beer and saw it was empty. As I cracked two more bottles, he was frowning at me.
“What? You were going to say they are all dead, but you stopped.”
I thought about it for a moment, looking out at the ocean. “You remember the murder of Secretary of State O’Brien a few of months back?”[4]
“Yeah, and Fokker and Troyes, in New York.”
“Fokker and Troyes arranged O’Brien’s murder. I killed Fokker and Troyes, and Dr. Salcedo…”
“But?”
I reached in my pocket and pulled out my cell. I found the message I had received just after O’Brien’s assassination and slid it across the table to him. He read it briefly: I guess I win this round, Lacklan. You can’t win them all, can you, Bro?
He glanced at me. “Bro?”
I nodded. “It seems Alpha may have been my half brother. A young man who was my father’s assistant for a few years before he died. Ben Smith, his real name was Benjamin Walker. I killed him at Fenninger’s house.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I shot him twice in the chest. He died.”
“He wouldn’t have been the first man to survive a shot to the chest.”
“He died.”
“So then it is somebody stepping into his shoes.”
“Troyes said Alpha was immortal.”
He picked at the bone on his plate for a moment, feeding himself small bits of lamb. “That makes sense. They have a quasi-mystical side to them, haven’t they? The Organization is Omega, the head is Alpha, it’s like the worm Ouroborus, eating its own tail as a symbol of eternity. The man might die, but the office of Alpha will go on. The king is dead, long live the king.” He stuck out his bottom lip. “Troyes was French. Fokker was German. It looks to me as though the European branch of Omega was attempting to project its power back into the U.S.A. If you’re sure you killed Alpha, then the message was just an attempt to fuck with your head.”
“So the guys who came after me in the market might have been European.”
He nodded. “You should have asked them.”
I sighed. “I should.”
A sudden weariness washed over me. We talked some more, but it was general discussion and didn’t lead anywhere. We had coffee and whiskey and at three o’clock he said, “My friend, you are falling asleep. I have spare rooms upstairs. Have a shower, sleep, and this evening at dinner, you can ask me for the help you need.”
Somehow, a pretty young girl in a white jacket appeared. She looked Filipina. I narrowed my eyes at him and shook my head in a question, to which he smiled and answered, “Hundreds. Is that immoral?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you ask her?” He turned to the girl. “Roan, take Mr. Walker to the warrior’s room. Make sure he is comfortable.”
“Warrior’s room? Seriously?”
His smile was almost malevolent. “Interesting, isn’t it, Lacklan, how even the most anarchic of you feels the need to conform on some level.” He shook his head. “My world, my game, my rules.”
I sighed. “OK, Roan, show me to the warrior’s room.”
She gave a little curtsey and led the way.
FOUR
When I awoke, it was dark, maybe half an hour after sundown. My first impression was silence, stillness. Then I felt the sea air on my skin. Then I became aware of the dim light filtering through the open window. It might have been moonlight, or lamps down in the garden. It cast warped oblongs across the wall and the old, wooden wardrobe: blue-gray oblongs intersected by dark bars of shadow. I lay still, allowing my eyes to travel across the walls, adorned with swords, battle axes and shields. I wondered absently if Jim was insane, and decided he wasn’t.
I gradually became aware of the rhythmic sigh of the ocean, like waves lapping at the edges of the silence. I sat up, sighed, and rubbed my face. Now I could hear voices: quiet, male, murmuring. I went to the window and looked out. I had a clear view of the vast Pacific. Suspended over it was a waning, gibbous moon casting a sheet of golden light over a flat, inky sea. It seemed to be just inches above the surface, as though it drop in at any moment.
I looked down at the table where I had been sitting with Jim that afternoon. There was nobody there, but I could see now a winding, descending path of stone slabs leading down from the terrace to a glade surrounded by trees. I couldn’t make out what trees they were because they were cast into darkness by a fire that was burning in the center. Two men sat around the fire on large wooden chairs, talking quietly. Occasionally, the breeze brought their voices to me, but I could not make out any words. One of the men I recognized as Jim, the other I thought I recognized as Njal.
I went to the shower and stood under the stream of hot water for five minutes, then dressed and went down to join them. I was not surprised, as I approached down the winding, stone path, to see that each one of them held a pewter goblet of wine, and on the dirt, beside Jim’s chair, there was a large, terracotta jug.
He looked up as I came closer, with the flames dancing on his face and in his strange eyes. “Goo
d evening, Lacklan. You remember Njal. We were just discussing your situation.”
Njal held out a hand to me without getting up. We shook and he muttered, “Hello, my friend.”
Jim poured me a goblet of wine, handed it to me and pointed to a large, high-backed wooden armchair drawn up within the glow of the flames. I sat and looked at my host across the firelight. Njal was watching me, smiling. I sipped the wine, it was good.
“Jim,” I said. “All this…” I gestured at the fire, the goblets, the house. “What are you trying to do? Forgive me, but it feels like you’re playing a game, or trying to live out a fantasy. It’s not real, Jim…”
He smiled his strange, diabolical smile. “Not real…”
I sighed. “I don’t mean to be patronizing, but the problems I have are real. Four men tried to kill my wife and my kids. They were using automatic weapons, not swords or axes. They weren’t warriors, they were trained, professional assassins…”
He turned to Njal. “Remind me, when Captain Walker, late of the SAS, was battling his way out of Mr. Fenninger’s ranch, how did you bring down the chopper? Am I right in thinking you threw your battle axe at the rotors?”
“No.” He shook his head and took his time pulling a cigarette from a soft pack and lighting it. “It was Browning M2, fifty caliber. I think with an axe, I cannot bring down three helicopters.”
He was totally deadpan, but when he turned and threw his pack of unfiltered Camels at me, there was humor in his eyes.
Jim spoke while I lit up and threw the pack back. “Don’t be misled by your own prejudices, Lacklan. It is important to have the latest technology, and dream beyond it. That is where real military power has always been, from the bow, to the machine gun to the stealth bomber, to experimental laser technology. But never lose sight of the fact that it is all artificial. When the belly of the globe becomes uninhabitable, when the icecaps melt, when the whole house of cards collapse, your highly trained assassins with their 9 mm Glocks will be mythology. This, that you call a fantasy and a game, this will be reality. We like to keep our feet on the ground.” He grinned. “Do you know how to defeat the most sophisticated cyber warriors in the world, Lacklan?”