Silver

20

Jude Lethe stared at the screen. The video clip had gone viral. In a matter of hours from its first being posted on the net to when he’d found it just now, some three million people had seen it.

The picture wasn’t good. It was the usual kind of fuzzy, grainy image with poor-quality lighting and terrible audio distortion. It didn’t matter. The content was hypnotic. Hypnotic in the same way as a car wreck where the paramedics are loading up the body-board as you drive slowly past. You can’t help but look, even though you know what you are seeing is someone else’s tragedy.

He watched again, trying to be sure, but it was so difficult because of the poor resolution and bad light. He knew in his gut though. Just knew. On the small screen a man in black walked backward and forward, ranting every so often at the camera. Behind him slumped a woman in chains, her head down, hands trussed up over her head. Her body was sliced with red welts where she had been whipped and beaten. She didn’t look up once. The masked man pulled a blade and held it up to the camera. Lethe couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it had that fanatic’s rising pitch that sent a shiver, bone by bone, down his back. Normally Orla would have interpreted the madman’s rant for them. Nothing about this was normal.

The dagger man paced back and forth.

Lethe studied the blade in his hand. It was old, that much was obvious. It wasn’t Damascene, but it was quite similar.

The dagger man walked up to the chained woman and drove a fist into her stomach. She barely reacted. Off screen someone laughed. It was the single most chilling sound Jude Lethe had ever heard. The man took a sheet of paper from his pocket and walked toward the camera. He read what Lethe assumed was a list of demands, then walked back across to where the woman hung. Someone off camera moved the light source, casting an eerily bright glare across the woman’s tortured body. She looked wretched. Her body was covered in bruises, and her bones stood out like an anorexic’s against her wax skin.

He ran the blade from her temple, down her cheek and neck all the way down to her hip, drawing the thinnest line of blood that welled in the cut. He tangled his hand in her hair and yanked her head back, forcing her to stare at the camera. He spat another outburst of bile at the screen. Lethe didn’t understand a word of it. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what was going to happen next.

The man took the blade, leaned in close and cut her throat.

He couldn’t watch.

Equally, he couldn’t look away.

The man didn’t stop cutting until he was through the windpipe and the blood was streaming down his hands. Then, holding her head up, he finished the job with a thicker machete-like blade, cleaving through the bone. Her body still hung there, suspended by the chains. The masked man picked the woman’s head up from the floor and showed her face to the camera.

He paraded his trophy back and forth, with more ranting in whatever language it was. This wasn’t the part that had stunned Lethe. It was the last ten seconds before the camera died, as the picture roved wildly around the makeshift dungeon.

He froze the stream.

In the shadows, barely recognizable for the beating she had taken, he saw another woman chained to the wall. He pushed the image on, frame by frame, until she looked up. For a single frame she stared straight at the camera.

Orla.

He called up to the old man and told him. For a moment there was only silence. Then the old man said, “Are you sure it was her?”

“As sure as I can be, sir.”

“Bring Frost in. We need to deal with this as cleanly and simply as possible. She is not ending up on some bastard’s propaganda movie, Mister Lethe. Believe me, hell will freeze over before I allow that to happen.”

“Yes, sir. Do I recall Koni and Noah?”

“The world doesn’t stop because Orla’s in trouble, Mister Lethe.” The old man sounded cold. Detached. Fire and ice. Just a second before passion had been driving his tongue. All it took was a second for the tactician to take control. Jude was immediately reminded of the half-played-out game of chess on the board beside the great fireplace. The Saavedra position. It was the old man’s favorite endgame for a reason. “And Mister Lethe, whatever happens, under no circumstances are you to inform Larkin about any of this. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal, sir.”

“The fact of the matter is that Larkin is too unpredictable as far as she is concerned. I can’t be worrying about him going off message,” which was the old man’s way of saying Noah was in fact far too predictable in this case. He’d wage a one-man war to bring Orla home. He wouldn’t care about casualties or collateral damage-he would bring Orla home, and God help anyone who tried to stop him. It was precisely the kind of thing that made Noah so vital to the team; but sometimes one’s greatest strength can become their greatest weakness. The old man wouldn’t be able to control him.

In one breath Lethe had heard the best of the old man, and the worst.

“Understood.”

“Good man. After you’ve contacted Frost I want you to run a few queries for me. Specifically, I’m after information concerning Humanity Capital. I want a list of territories where they have insured fighters, and if there is a paper trail, I want to know all of the places where they have supplied mercenary fighters.”

“There’s always a paper trail,” Lethe said. “If they sent a private army out there, you’ll know before lunchtime.”

“Good. When you’ve done that, I want you to cross-reference these against any contracts won by companies Miles Devere has a stake in. I want to know exactly how much Little Man Devere has made out of the suffering of others.”

The old man hung up on him.