Silver

27

Jude Lethe watched the world unravel in glorious Technicolor over and over again. The German television cameras had captured the assassination from three different angles. It didn’t look good for Koni from any of them. Lethe froze the frame as the first glint of silver caught the low sun. It was too difficult to call where the knife had originated from. He wasn’t a body language expert. He knew where it had come from-the Swiss Guard closest to the Holy Father had been concealing it within the folds of his clownish armor-but proving it was a different thing all together.

Suddenly they were two men down, and there was nothing the old man could do. His hands were tied by the very deniability that allowed them the freedom of movement their mandate granted them. He couldn’t go to the Foreign Secretary and appeal, he couldn’t contact the British ambassador in Germany. Ogmios didn’t exist on any official charter. They had no right of recall. The embassy wasn’t going to order an extradition for Konstantin, and for the same reason they weren’t going to mount an assault to recover Orla. They were deniable. They screwed up for Queen and Country, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. They screwed up. That was what it boiled down to.

Konstantin was on camera, prime suspect in the assassination of the Pope. The BKA would want a quick result, justice seen to be served. They wouldn’t want an international incident. They wouldn’t want him being extradited to the UK to stand trial. It had happened on German soil; it would be dealt with on German soil, with Germanic efficiency. In the eyes of the world Konstantin was already guilty-they’d seen it happen. Lethe needed to find proof that they hadn’t, that their brains had connected the dots and filled in the blanks but got it all horribly wrong. And the damned cameras weren’t helping.

Neither was the fact that when they started running their background checks the first thing they’d find out about Konstantin Khavin was that he was a defector from the old Soviet Republic. Two and two would make four, or an approximation of it, and they’d leap to the only logical conclusion: that you could take Konstantin Khavin out of Mother Russia, but you couldn’t take Mother Russia and her black heart out of Konstantin Khavin. He was a spy-a deep plant-still at the beck and call of Moscow. Because no matter how enlightened everyone was now that the Wall had come down, it didn’t take a lot to reignite all of the old fears and that deep-seated distrust. It was easier for people to believe that the old enemies were still enemies than it was to turn the blame around and point the finger at people like Miles Devere, capitalists driven by plain, simple, ugly greed.

When the first gunshots sounded the crane camera, the one that would otherwise have had the perfect angle to capture the entire thing, roved wildly away from the stage toward the explosion of black feathers as the birds burst out of the trees. By the time its lens was back on the stage the murder had already unfolded and the last moments of it were playing out. Konstantin knelt over the fallen Pope, blood on his hands and a sort of madness in his face. The silver dagger lay on the red carpet.

The second and third cameras were not much better. The right side of the stage stayed focused on the main players, but Konstantin’s momentum as he came into the shot and the way he twisted his body, trying to get between the white-robed Pope and the assassin, only served to obscure the actual moment of murder. The initial angle wasn’t wide enough to show the Swiss Guard drawing the Judas dagger moments before. The view from the left side was worse, focused as it was on the backs of the Pope and the guard and the light of anger-desperation-madness in Konstantin’s face as he threw himself at the pair.

No matter how many times he studied the images, he couldn’t find a single frame of the dagger before it was punched into the Pontiff’s neck.

But of course these weren’t the only cameras trained on the stage. Someone down there in that crowd had caught the truth on a cell phone or digital camera. Unfortunately there was no way of knowing who. If there were three thousand people packed into the square, perhaps three percent of them didn’t turn and follow the sound of the gunshot or the resulting flurry of movement from the trees for whatever reason. Three percent meant ninety people. Of those ninety, it was safe to assume fifty percent were too far back or had partially obscured views of the stage for one reason or another, which meant forty-five people were not looking the wrong way and had a clear view of the stage. Of those forty-five, there would be a split between left and right side of the stage. It was statistically unlikely to be a fifty percent split. It just didn’t work that way, but even if it was, then twenty-three and a half people were on the right side to see the dagger drawn.

Then it came down to wandering attention. How would people react? You hear a gunshot. Do you look immediately to the man in the center of the stage, fearing the worst? You bet your bottom dollar you do. Fifteen of those twenty-three and a half are going to look straight at the Pope as the gunshot reverberates through the square. That leaves eight and a half people who will be looking elsewhere, but in the right direction from the right side of the stage where they could conceivably see the blade going in, or at least see it in the murderer’s hand before it went in. Of those eight and a half, how many would be drawn by the sudden movement of Konstantin erupting from the crowd, looking away from the real murderer at the last second? Two? Three? Four? Five was reasonable. Five was a good number-meaning that three and a half people would be looking the right way, with the right view and undistracted.

Then the question was, of those, how many would realize that what they were seeing was the actual assassination in progress? One, maybe, two. Would they come forward? Why would they when the entire world had already convicted Konstantin? After all it was there in far too many megapixels. So what good would one uncorroborated testimony that contradicted all the perceived evidence be?

Less than useless was the answer, and Lethe knew it, unless that one person had also been filming the blessing with his cell phone or digital camera and happened to catch the truth in megapixels.

Lethe wasn’t a gambling man, but even he knew these weren’t the kind of odds you wanted to stake your life on.

That was what Konstantin was up against, and all the favors in the world wouldn’t change the evidence of two thousand eyes without something concrete.

So Lethe kept looking.

This time he blew up the image on the screen as large as it would go without pixilating too badly for him to make out the details and, instead of looking at the main players, turned his attention to the crowd, looking for that one cell phone or digital camera that might have actually recorded the truth. It was like looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack, but what else could he do?

Frost would be back soon. The ride back would probably take him two or three hours at most-closer to two given the hour and the relatively light traffic, and the way Frost flogged the Monster.

And he kept thinking about that third phone call Devere had made. The first to Geneva was obviously some routed warning to the dagger man; the second triggered the timer on the sniper rifle; but the third, back to the mother ship in London, made no sense.

height="0" width="19" align="justify"›He turned the music up because it helped him concentrate. The lead singer of the Gin Blossoms lamented that the past was gone and that he had blown his one chance with the hot chick years ago. Because of that, and because all he had been hearing for the last few hours was the screams of the crowd in Koblenz and the crack of the sniper rifle, Jude Lethe didn’t hear the muffled sound of gunshots upstairs.

Sir Charles, however, did.

Even muffled nothing else sounds like a gunshot, not that a car would be backfiring this far out in the idyllic British countryside. The main road through to Ashmoor was far enough away that the sound wouldn’t travel over the hedges and moorland, through the forested strips of field and then through the thick stone walls of Nonesuch. No, the two shots, even suppressed by whatever silencer the assassin used, were distinct and distinctly out of place in the quiet of the manor.

The old man came out of his bed, struggling to bring his legs around so they reached the floor. The wheelchair was beside the bed, but getting to it was agony. He reached out, trying to claw at the frame and drag it closer, and as it butted up against the bed frame he struggled to stand. Every muscle in his arms shivered as he labored, shifting his weight forward onto legs that wouldn’t hold him. Then he twisted and came down hard, falling rather than sitting into the chair.

Sweat trickled down the side of the old man’s face.

He looked around the room. His walking stick was on the window side of the bed.

His service revolver, a 1963 Webley Break-Top Revolver-one of the very last commissioned for the armed forces-was in the desk drawer on the far side of the room, under lock and key. It was a fragile lock, but he was an old man. And from the chair it was doubtful he could get the leverage he needed to yank the drawer out, breaking the brass tongue of the lock or the wood around it. There was a box of ammo in the drawer as well. He had hoarded them after the pistol was retired in ’63. Two cartridges per man, per year, was the old joke. By the time the gun went out of service ammo for it was in short supply. The double-action revolver could pump out twenty to thirty rounds in a minute, more than the chamber could hold and more than the old man had. The box of ammunition contained twelve cartridges.

It was one or the oer. The panic button was beside the walking stick, the phone on the desk.

He held his hands out in front of his face. They were shaking, and not just from the exertion of getting into the chair. Even if he broke the drawer open, his hands were so unsteady there was no guarantee he could load the revolver without spilling the shells all over the floor. Then again, he would only need one shot.

It wasn’t much of a choice.

He made a decision.

He steered the wheelchair toward the desk. It bumped against the side of the bed and off the carved legs of the desk itself, rattling everything on the top. He pulled at the drawer, but it refused to budge. He pulled at it again, more desperately this time. The entire desk shook with the force of the movement, but still the drawer didn’t budge. He couldn’t get any better purchase on it, or exert any more pressure on any of the stress points.

He heard footsteps in the hall outside.

The old man pulled so hard on the drawer he nearly pulled the entire desk down on him. The lock held. He slammed his hand off it, spitting a curse, then stopped trying. He gripped the chair and tried to angle it back toward the window.

The door opened behind him.

He didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He could see the intruder step into the room through the mirror above the desk. Wearing a black knitted balaclava with a ragged slash where the mouth had been cut out, and two narrow eye slits. Black curls slipped out from beneath the bottom of the balaclava. Even clothed head-to-toe in sexless black the woman’s well-defined curves gave her gender away.

Her left arm was considerably thicker than her right, misshapen. The old man realized it was sheathed in a light cast. He remembered Frost’s initial report from the house in Jesmond. This was the woman he had interrupted while she turned Sebastian Fisher’s apartment over. He had broken her arm in the struggle. And here she was breaking in again. The old man reached for the phone. He knew he couldn’t call, but knocking the handset out of the cradle would open a line, and an open line would blink on every telephone in the house. All he could do was hope that someone would see it. But who would see it? Max? Lethe? He had heard gunshots a moment before. She wouldn’t have just fired at an offending umbrella stand. Max would have gone to investigate the noise. Max. The old man couldn’t allow himself to regret or mourn. Max was dead or Max was alive; either way worrying about it now was pointless. He had his own sorry carcass to worry about/span›

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the woman said. She had an accent. It wasn’t distinct, but it was there even though she did her best to hide it. Middle Eastern, Israeli, or possibly Lebanese. Given the trail of breadcrumbs they’d been chasing back to Masada, Israel was the more likely of the two. The accent almost certainly meant it was the same woman who had got the jump on Frost in Jesmond, the old man realized.

“So Devere sent you to kill an old man in his chair?” Sir Charles asked, meeting her eyes in the backwards land through the looking glass. It made sense that Miles Devere would send one of his flunkies after him. It was all about power, showing Sir Charles that no matter how connected he was, no matter who he worked for or who he called friends, Devere could reach him. That was what the third call had been about. He had called London to arrange this little visit. “I’m flattered.”

“You should be,” the woman said, closing the door behind her.

“Perhaps we can make a deal?”

“I don’t make deals.”

“Everyone makes deals, my dear. There is a saying in my game, never send someone to kill a man with more money than you. I have a lot of money, believe me. Whatever Devere’s paying you I’ll double to send you back to his door. How does that sound?”

“Like a desperate man,” she said.

She was right. That was exactly how he sounded.

But then, that was how he wanted to sound. Any man in his situation ought to sound desperate. Desperate or resigned; he wasn’t resigned. He wasn’t that kind of man. He made things happen. That only left him with the option of sounding desperate. A desperate man with money would look to strike a deal, so that was exactly what he had done. If she was as good as she no doubt thought she was, she would have been able to see it in his eyes, the shifting gears as one gambit was rejected, thinking quickly, looking for another alternative, anything other than the bullet in the back of the head. It was in-field thinking-reassess, redeploy, react.

He stopped himself from reaching for the phone.

The chair meant he lookup at her through the mirror. It added to the illusion of helplessness. All she saw was an old man in a wheelchair. It would have helped if he had managed to open the drawer, but guns weren’t the only solution.

“Aren’t you going to increase your offer? Isn’t that what people like you do? Beg, plead, offer me riches beyond my wildest imagining?”

“No,” the old man said. “Not today. Today I am going to ask you if you are fond of life?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“No matter how good you think you are, do you really believe you can walk in here, kill me and walk out again without consequences?”

“And here we are again, the dying man’s twelve-step program. Denial, bargaining, and now we’re into the threats. For some reason, the way my client described you, I thought you might be different. This is disappointing. He made you sound like some colossus. I hate to break it to you, but step twelve is always the same. You die.”

“So it is pointless, my telling you about the security here, and what happens when my heart stops beating? My boy Lethe is a computer genius. Did Devere tell you that? Everything in this place is routed through the circuitry of my chair, dependent upon my heartbeat. My heart stops for some reason and Nonesuch goes into lockdown. There is no way out. When my team returns they will find you here. The good news is there is plenty of food, so you’ll be well fed at least.”

“You expect me to believe this is the Bat Cave and I just killed Alfred? It’s more creative than saying you’ve got the place surrounded by armed guards just waiting for your signal, I’ll give you that. But correct me if I am wrong, I don’t remember Bruce Wayne being a cripple?”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, isn’t that what they say?”

“Some do, I am sure, probably the same ones who also say they booby trapped the entire house and have a remote detonating device in the arm of their wheelchair.”

“That was the next thing I was going to try,” the old man said. He smiled, doing his utmost to appear calm on the surface, but inside his heart was racing almost as quickly as his mind. The talk was all about buying time, but once bought it all came down to how he wanted to spend it.

“Enough talk,” she said, as though she had been able to tap into his mind. “Do you want to die facing the end or with your back to it? Some people would rather not see it coming.”

“Given the fact that I can see you whichever way I face, I am not sure it makes much difference, does it? It’s like asking if I want a closed- or open-casket funeral. Back of the head, large exit wound in the face, or bullet between the eyes and the back of your head’s blown out. It really doesn’t matter because I’m going to be just as dead.”

“That you are,” she agreed.

“Let’s do this, shall we? I think I’d rather like a pretty face to be the last thing I see, call me an old fool, but I always was weak for a certain kind of girl,” Sir Charles said, reaching down for the rail on the wheel rims. He pulled back on one, and forward on the other, angling the chair around. The tight space between the bed and the desk made it impossible for him to turn properly. He knew that. That was precisely why he had twisted the chair into it.

Before he could start to back up, the phone on the desk started ringing.

“I don’t suppose I can answer that?” the old man said, ruefully.

“No,” she said. She didn’t seem all that amused by the interruption.

“Then I suppose I can’t say saved by the bell, either?”

“No,” she said again. “No last minute reprieves. We’ve talked too much already. If you can’t turn the chair around, I will.”

“I can do it,” the old man assured her, looking through the glass at the Rembrandt on the wall behind her. Judas Repentant.

The phone stopped ringing.

Ronan Frost killed the call.

It was the first time in all the years he had been with Ogmios that he had called Nonesuch and Lethe hadn’t answered in a matter of seconds. There was nothing good about the silence. He looked up at the house at the far side of the long, winding drive. As always there were only a few lights on. The cars were all lined up on the gravel drive exactly where Orla and the guys had left them a few days ago. Instead of that being comforting it made the place look like an automotive graveyard, the place where sports cars come to die.

The reason he had made the call was parked, half-hidden in the bushes: an off-road dirt bike.

The drive would take him ten seconds to drive, gunning the Monster’s engine and tearing up the gravel, or two minutes to run, silently. He chose silence over speed. If someone was inside the Manor, he didn’t want to go in there all thud and blunder, even if a few seconds could make all the difference. Noise could just as easily get everyone killed. The old man was sharp. He’d go down swinging. And Lethe had probably turned the basement into his own personal panic room.

Frost kicked down the stand and killed the Ducati’s idling engine. He stripped out of his leathers because they hampered his mobility. The time it spent getting out of them would be made up two-fold running across the lawn. He checked the dirt bike for any clue to the owner’s identity, but there was nothing. Not that he had expected to find anything. It was difficult to be sure, because the mud was fairly hard after several days without rain, but he could only make out a single set of tracks. He pulled the Browning and set off at a sprint across the lawn. He kept his head up, looking frantically left and right for signs of the intruder. Frost knew that the unanswered phone meant they were already inside, but that didn’t mean they weren’t already done when he had called and on their way out. There was plenty of darkness to hide in. Too much of it. The spotlights were on, but they only illuminated the snake of the driveway as it came out of the darkness.

Halfway across the lawn he was breathing hard. His body hurt from the abuse it had taken over the last few days.

Through the portico he saw that the main door stood open.

There was something in the doorway, a dark shadow on the floor. As he got closer the shadow became a shape, and the shape became a body dressed in an immaculate black suit, white shirt, white gloves and bow tie. There was a single entry wound in the center of Maxwell’s forehead, a cyclopean third eye. There wasn’t a lot of blood and there was very little damage. Powder burns rimmed the wound. The gun had been pressed up close to the butler’s head. He had that look of surprise on his face that robbed every dead man of his dignity. Even in death it didn’t look as though Max had a hair out of place. Frost knelt and closed his friend’s eyes, then he stepped over the dead man and into the house.

Nonesuch had that eerie silence that accompanies a death house. It was as though the old stones were aware of the tragedy playing out within them. Frost crept into the hall, listening to the silence. He could hear the faintest hint of voices. The old grandfather clock across from the fireside chessboard told him how late it was. The old man would be in his room by now. The house might have been a warren of mezzanines, hidden servants’ stairs and out of the way pantries, but the old man only used a fraction of the rooms. The chair kept him on the lower level; habit kept him in the same handful of rooms down here.

Frost crept across the hall.

The voices were quiet now.

He preferred it when he heard them. Dead men didn’t talk. As long as they were talking all was almost well with the world. Just keep them talking, he prayed silently to whoever was listening. He ghosted toward the control room and tapped his personal code into the lock. The beep that acknowledged the right access code and opened the lock mechanism sounded sharp and too loud in the silence. He knew realistically it wouldn’t have carried to any of the other rooms, but that didn’t stop him from biting his lip and easing the door open painfully slow.

Frost slipped inside and eased the door closed behind him.

The room was empty. The array of screens either showed Konstantin Khavin in various frozen frames as he hurled himself at the Pope, or the shadow-wreathed shape of Orla Nyren, naked and chained to the wall of a dank cell. Frost hadn’t seen the images before. They took his breath away for a moment. He wanted to do something. Anything. Every instinct screamed at him. These were his people, his team, and they were in trouble. The only one who wasn’t in trouble was Noah, which, given the usual series of events, was just plain wrong.

The staircase down to Lethe’s den was still covered. It wasn’t the only way down, but if he was going to go sneaking down there to stage a rescue, that was the way to go. He wished he’d paid more attention when Lethe gave them the briefing on the tabletop computer. He was pretty sure he could call up images from hidden cameras in all of the rooms, but he didn’t have the slightest idea where to start and was more likely to set the sprinklers off than turn the security cameras on.

He had come in to the control room for a reason. Lethe had designed the room as a digital fortress. From here Frost could lock down the most vulnerable areas of Nonesuch, protecting the team’s identity, and more importantly, their benefactor’s. He could also isolate various parts of the house. He hit the panic button. There were no sirens, no flashing lights. Lethe’s design didn’t need it. In ten seconds flat the manor house became a steel trap, literally. He heard the rumble and felt the shiver of inch-thick steel sheets slamming into place. They were interspersed in various strategic points around the manor, isolating the wings, key rooms and the exits. There was no way in or out of Nonesuch. And this time the noise would have carried to every room in the house, but as long as the intruder didn’t pry Max’s eyes from his dead head, Frost had the only key: his bright blue eyes.

The set-up had appealed to Lethe’s sense of the theatrical. The whole idea of a retina scan seemed far too Blade Runner for Frost, and the recessed steel doors like something out of the Death Star, but right now he couldn’t argue with the genius of any of it. If the lad wanted to recreate his own movie sets, so be it. The one unarguable fact was that no one was leaving Nonesuch without the right eyes.

Lockdown established, Frost had a binary decision to make: down to Lethe or back to the old man. He had only seen one bike and one set of tracks, meaning one intruder. The fact that he had heard voices in the old man’s room decided it.

He slipped out of the room.

He had been in there less than thirty seconds. The hand on the grandfather clock hadn’t moved.

The main door out to the grounds was blocked by a thick metal plate. It had sliced through Max. The cut hadn’t been clean. If it was the difference between his murderer escaping or not, he knew Max would forgive him.

Frost heard the voices, louder now. The old man and a woman. The old man was begging. Frost didn’t hesitate.

He ran toward the old man’s study.

“What the hell was that?” the woman barked at him. The echo of the steel sheets slamming into place reverberated through the floor.

Sir Charles smiled. Frost had arrived. There was a chance he might make it out of this alive, but if not, at least he had the consolation of knowing that his killer was not about to disappear into the night. It all depended upon the woman and whether her pity outweighed her killer instinct. It wasn’t exactly a sure thing, but he was playing the only hand he had-the helpless old cripple card. With any luck she’d underestimate him, or his blathering would buy Frost enough time to find them. “The Bat Cave,” the old man said.

He had wriggled the chair around so far he couldn’t see her face in the mirror anymore. The benefit of that was that she couldn’t see his, either. The old man twisted hard on the wheel with his left hand, wedged his foot beneath the edge of the bed and pulled down on the other wheel with his right, deliberately unbalancing the chair. He leaned forward and fell, sprawling across the rug. The chair came down on top of him.

He clawed his way out from under the chair, emerging on the window side of the bed. His walking stick was tantalizingly out of reach.

“You really are something,” the woman said, dragging the chair out of the way. “It’s a pity I have to kill you.”

“It’s a pity I have to die,” Sir Charles said. He dragged himself another six inches across the floor, toward the stick leaning against the wall. He willed her to keep on underestimating him. He twisted to look up at her, then deliberately, slowly, let his gaze drift back longingly toward his walking stick, knowing she would follow it, and knowing she wouldn’t think for a minute what a devious old fool he was. The walking stick was more than just an old man’s affectation, and he wasn’t about to beat her over the head with a stick of wood. It was a sword cane. One twist of the elaborately carved handle and the brass coupling would break. There was an eighteen-inch blade secreted inside the wooden shaft. If he could get to it, and get her close enough, there was a chance. A slim one, but that was infinitely preferable to none.

He dragged himself to within touching distance of the stick.

“Well, no, there’s no pity in it at all, is there?” she said, coming around the side of the bed to stand over him. “This feels like killing my own grandfather,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t enjoy that, either.”

The old man was on his stomach, one leg twisted uncomfortably because it was still trapped beneath the bed frame, the other up by his side. He looked like a chalk outline waiting to be drawn around. The sword cane was six inches from his fingers. So close yet so far away. Everything around him developed a sense of hyper-reality. He saw the threads of the rug and smd the rubber that had worn itself into them with all of those back-and-forths in the wheelchair. Even the grain in the wooden bed frame seemed so much starker, like seeing the truth of a treasure map for the first time.

He heard the study door burst open, but didn’t waste time trying to turn. He knew it was Frost. He used that fraction of a second to push himself the last six inches to the sword cane. He reached out, barely grazing it with his fingers, then stretched, finding another inch in his reach. His hand closed around the thin wooden shaft. He pulled the sword cane to his chest and broke the shaft. It took less than a second, an entire second where he expected to hear the silenced gunshot and be swallowed by the nothing of death.

As soon as the blade was clear of the sheath he lunged upward with it. He didn’t have the reach, but after years in the chair what he did have was incredible upper body strength. He thrust with all of his might, feeling it hit bone and scrape off it as it sank deeper into her side. He twisted savagely, opening her up. She screamed. The sound was cut brutally short. Her body twitched on the end of the blade, then stopped moving completely. For a long second she stood, held up only by the sword in her side and the strength of the old man’s arm.

He heard a single shot but didn’t feel anything.

A fountain of blood sprayed across his face and more poured down the blade and down his arm. Then gravity caught up with her corpse and pulled the woman down the length of the sword. He couldn’t hold her dead weight. She carried on falling, landing awkwardly across his body and pinning him to the rug. He struggled, but he couldn’t shift her.

He heard the floorboard creek beneath cautious footsteps.

A moment later the old man saw Frost looking down over her shoulder.

“You took your sweet time,” he said. “Is Maxwell…?”

Frost didn’t say anything. Instead he hauled the dead assassin off the old man and dumped her on his bed. He pulled the sword from her side and dumped it on the bed beside her, then he peeled off her balaclava and grunted. It was a grunt of recognition. Next he righted the old man’s chair and helped him up into it. All of this was done in silence.

The old man sat there soaked in his erstwhile killer’s blood.

He looked at her lying there on the bed. There was no way anyone could confusher death for sleep. She really was beautiful, or had been. He wondered what could have turned her into a gun for hire, but then realized the stupidity of that kind of thinking. It was like wondering what turned Frost into the man he was, a life of conflict in Derry and Belfast or the fields of blood in Kosovo, or something else entirely, something coded on a genetic level.

“Lethe?” Sir Charles said, finally.

“As far as I can tell, she came alone, met Max at the door, then came looking for you. If Jude’s got any common sense, he turned the basement into a panic room and is sitting down there waiting for the cavalry.” He didn’t voice the alternative-that Lethe had tried to be the cavalry himself and was lying somewhere inside the big old house with a bullet in his head. The second alternative explained why the phone rang off the hook when he called, the first didn’t.

The old man wheeled his chair toward the doorway, then stopped, looking back toward the bed. “I will need fresh sheets,” and in that horrible second where reality comes rushing in, he realized that without Maxwell no one was going to be changing his bed linen and that his world had just become a little smaller without his companion in it. He shook his head, clearing it. “All right, first things first,” he said, all business. “What are we going to do with her?”

“I suggest we find a big mailing pouch and send her right back where she came from,” Frost said.

“Appealing as that notion is, I was thinking something a little less problematic. One option would be burying her in the grounds. I doubt very much anyone save Devere knows she is here, and he’s hardly likely to draw attention to his role in this. So given the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make like we never saw her. Another alternative is the incinerator.”

“That works as well,” Frost said, “but I’d still rather post her.”

“I am sure you would, sealed with a kiss, no doubt.”

“A line of C4 and a short fuse seems more fitting,” Frost said. “Okay, better get this over with. Let’s go find Lethe.”

As it was, they didn’t need to go far. Jude Lethe stood beside half of the butler’s corpse looking down at it. He heard them approach and looked up. “The cameras,” he said, as though that explained everything. It did in a way. The old man took it to mean he had seen the assassin shoot Maxwell on one of his many screens down there in the basement and he’d locked down the nerve center of Nonesuch. No second thoughts, no heroice’d followed the protocols to the letter, even if it meant leaving the old man in harm’s reach. Sir Charles nodded.

He looked down at his friend.

“Mister Lethe, would you be so kind as to reset the shield doors. Frost, Maxwell was one of ours. I would count it a personal favor if you would take care of things.”

Frost nodded. He seemed about to say something. It was rare that Ronan Frost didn’t simply speak his mind.

“What is it?” the old man asked.

“I saw the screens in the control room,” he licked his lips. “Konstantin, Orla. They’re ours too. And has Noah checked in? This is a mess.” The understatement of the year.

“There’s nothing to be done,” the old man said. It sounded harsh in his own ears even as he said it. Frost didn’t so much as flinch. He accepted the judgment like the professional soldier he was.

“I’m not finished looking,” Lethe said. “I found someone in the crowd who was filming the Pope’s blessing on his cell phone. The angle’s right, with a bit of luck he caught everything on film. The only problem is I’ve got no idea who he is and have only actually seen the back of his head.”

“That’s a bit of a problem,” Frost said, but the possibility that someone had caught the truth of the assassination on their cell phone seemed to energize him. “But it’s not insurmountable. Koblenz is a small enough city. Get the plod to go door to door with a photograph of the back of the guy’s head. You know the deal: Is this you? Is this you? Is this you? It has to be someone.”

There was nothing to say that that particular someone even came from Koblenz, but it was a straw worth clutching at. He could see that in Frost’s face. No man left behind.

“The police won’t go door to door. They took thousands of statements at the scene. If he had seen anything, the BKA will already know, and most likely, if they know he was filming, they will have confiscated his cell phone as potential evidence.”

“They might not have looked at the film yet,” Frost said.

“Or they might have seen it and deleted it already,” Sir Charles said. He knew all too well how some of these profile investigations went. They had evidence, witnesses, and a prime suspect that the British Government would already have disowned. A Russian defector with paramilitary experience? They couldn’t have asked for a better assassin. They wouldn’t be looking for the knife in the hands of the supposedly most loyal guardsmen in the world. It didn’t sit with their investigative mindset, and why would it? They all saw Konstantin do it. Or at least thought they did.

“It’s worth a try. It has to be,” Frost pushed. “What about the guardsmen themselves?” He looked at Lethe. “Any of them see what happened?”

“If they did, I’d expect another corpse to turn up any minute now, wouldn’t you?” Lethe asked.

Frost nodded. “But will another dead body be enough to barter Koni’s freedom?” Frost and the old man locked gazes. Sir Charles was the first to look away. “I want to go out there,” Frost said. “I’m no use sitting on my hands here. Hell, if it comes right down to it, Noah and I can go in there and bust him out of that damned German prison cell. It’d only need the two of us to bring him home. Then the three of us can go get Orla.”

He made it sound so simple.

It wasn’t.

It was a geopolitical minefield.

The suits at Vauxhall Cross might deny Konstantin, but that didn’t mean the Germans would necessarily believe their denials. It came down to whether they believed he was British or Russian, which side he was currently working for and which government they wanted to hang out to dry. Deals could be made, perhaps. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that the public needed to see someone suffer.

“That won’t be necessary,” Sir Charles told him. “You take care of Maxwell, I will make the call. If there is anything that can be done, it will be done. But I am making no promises. Understood?”

“This is becoming rather a bad habit, Charles,” Control’s reedy voice said over the telephone. “I don’t suppose I need to remind you about the hour, or point out that civilized people are abed?”

“I’m not going to apologize,” the old man said. “You know what is happening. Those are my people out there.”

“And that’s a damned shame, but there’s nothing I can do about it. And even if there was, these midnight calls are hardly endearing, old boy.”

“How long have we worked together?”

“Longer, I am sure, than either of us would like to admit.”

“And how many times have I asked you for help, Quentin?”

“Oh, is that the card your playing? The ‘I’ve been a good and faithful servant all these years and you owe me’? I thought better of you.”

“You’re the second person to say that to me tonight. The first one is dead. Regrettably, she killed Maxwell.”

“Are you telling me Nonesuch was breeched?”

“That’s exactly what I am telling you.”

“Have you been compromised, Charles? Tell me the truth. There’s nothing to be gained by protecting your pride.” Quentin Carruther’s tone shifted, his affected tones suddenly more urgent, all hint of playfulness stripped from his words.

“The situation was contained, this time.”

“Are you sure?”

“I killed the intruder myself, Quentin. Her blood is still all over my clothes, and her corpse is in my bed. I couldn’t be much surer.”

“Well that’s something, at least.”

“I want him out of there, Quentin,” the old man said, shifting the subject back to Konstantin Khavin.

“There’s nothing I can do, Charles. I don’t run you boys anymore, not that I ever did, really. You’ve had far too long a leash for too long a time. This is the new world order, my friend, and there’s a new sheriff in town. Talk to him, talk to the Chief. If anyone can pull diplomatic strings it’s him. My hands are decidedly stringless. But don’t hold your breath. Your boy knew the risks when he signed up. Her Majesty is hardly about to claim responsibility for the papal assassin, now is she?”

“He didn’t do it and you know full well that he didn’t.”

“Neither here nor there, though, is it? The camera never lies. If he was innocent, the picture proving it would have been all over the tabloids by now. As it is they’re calling for his head as though he were John the Baptist.”

“I want him out of there, Quentin.”

“And I want Pretty Boy Floyd to come massage my aching feet. I suspect both of us are going to be disappointed, don’t you?”

“Someone in the crowd filmed it,” the old man said, trying a different tack.

“I am sure they did, but again, it doesn’t help us. Your boy wasn’t supposed to be there. He was operating without German consent. He assaulted the Israeli ambassador’s men in Berlin. There is photographic evidence of him breaking and entering into a dead man’s apartment, and enough to suggest he might be linked to the whole sorry affair. They want him, old boy, and there is sweet Fanny Anne that I can say or do that will change their minds. He was careless. He got caught.”

“So you’re saying he should have let the Pope die?”

“I don’t know whether you noticed, but His Holiness died. So yes, as far as Her Majesty is concerned, Khavin’s involvement in this debacle is nothing short of embarrassing. She could come out publicly and say, ‘Yes, we sent an agent to try to protect the Holy Father, but that agent failed.’ It doesn’t look good for a monarch to admit fallibility. Then there are the questions of why we didn’t turn everything over to the German authorities the moment he suspected something was going to happen on their soil. Things are fractious enough even sixty years on. To say that there is still bad blood between our countries is something of an understatement.

“We can’t make him disappear; that will just make the Germans look foolish. We can’t trade him one for one because it’s been years since we’ve held a German citizen as a gheight=f Her Majesty’s Displeasure. We can’t bully them into giving him back; how would that make us look? Give us back the man who just killed the Pope! Can you imagine? Just be grateful they don’t have the death penalty anymore. They’d have him hanging from a gibbet in the same town square, ironic given one of the purposes of the blessing, if you think about it.” Control had the decency not to chuckle at his own joke. “No one is going to come out of this very well, Charles. Now it is all about damage limitation. The eyes of the world are on Koblenz. Give them Khavin. They have it all on film, they get to look good, a fast efficient clean up, justice served and everyone is happy. That’s the long and the short of it.”

“Not everyone,” the old man said. “You don’t want me to turn this into a war, Quentin. He’s my boy. I lost one of mine today, and I refuse to lose another.”

“Is that a threat, Charles?”

“You know it is, old boy,” the old man said. “I suggest you make the call and don’t try and fob me off with deniability. You’ve got a duty to Konstantin.”

“I suppose you want me to mount an invasion? We could take Tel Aviv while we are at it, bring your girl home, a two-for-one special. Don’t be so naive, Charles. Khavin is nothing more than an unfortunate incident. He doesn’t even register as collateral damage. You need to understand, if you continue to push this, we’ll cut you off. It’s as simple as that. Ogmios will cease to be useful. You’ll be closed down.”

The old man breathed into the phone, letting his silence speak for him.

“In case the nuance was lost on you, that was a threat, dear boy,” Quentin Carruthers said.

“Or I could just send Frost around to your house tonight. It’s always tragic when an old man dies, but there’s something natural about dying in your sleep, don’t you think?”

“And to think I used to call you my friend.”

“There is no such beast in this game, Quentin. There are those that can help us and those that stand against us. I want my boy back, and I will do anything to make it happen. So, I say again, make the call, bring him home.”

“If I do this, and that’s by no means a given, Charles, if I do this, you’re through. I want everything you’ve got on this operation turned over to my people in the morning. I’ll close you down. You understand just what is you are asking?”

The old man didn’t answer him.

He hung up.