Shadow Knight's Mate (26 page)

He began moving that way, around the perimeter of the cameras. The driveway was probably covered too, but that couldn't be helped. The little silver sports car was down at the end of the driveway, maybe out of camera range.

Moments later he was standing there. Peering in, he could see that surely enough the keys were in the ignition. He reached for the door handle and heard two clicks. One was of the door locking itself. The other, he saw when he turned, was Yvette cocking the semi-automatic pistol she held trained on him. She still wore the loose grin, and it was no more attractive when turned on him.

“I've always been the lucky one,” she said softly, her eyelids moving languidly. “I picked the right direction. And Paul had an extra set of keys to my car.”

She gestured with the pistol, indicating the direction of the house. For the moment they were alone. Jack could lunge and overpower her. But he saw her, even with the sleepy, seductive look, keeping a careful distance. She wasn't prepared for another kind of attack.

“You know he's in love with Alexis, don't you? You're just a diversion, something to make their lives interesting. You do know that, don't you?”

In an instant her lip was trembling. Her eyes darted back and forth, obviously wondering if it was true. Then she stepped toward Jack, lowering the gun.

“Could you—?” she asked hesitantly.

“Yes.”

“—be more stupid?” she finished, and hit him in the stomach with the gun. The heavy metal cracked off a rib. Jack doubled over instantly. Yvette moved around, kicked him from behind, started him moving toward the house. “The great manipulator,” she laughed.

A few minutes later Jack was sitting in that living room he had heard but not seen until Yvette had pushed him into it at gunpoint. It was a beautiful room, though too stark and modern for Jack's taste, with a parquet floor, half-empty white bookcases and high-tech furniture. He sat in a very modern chrome and black leather chair. The back was high enough that he couldn't turn and see anyone behind him. Jack pivoted the chair slightly so that he could see the wide windows of this room, with a view of the gardens but also a reflection of the room now at night. In that reflection he watched Alexis and Desquat enter the room from different directions, from their separate searches for the intruder. Jack looked at Yvette, saw her look first at Paul Desquat. Some women would look at their rival, comparing looks, but Yvette looked at her lover. She saw that his eyes went first to Alexis when he entered the room, involuntarily, the way a compass needle points north. Yvette's pouty little mouth hardened.

Back in America, life went on, tensely. The morning after the attacks and the President's announcement, the Dow Jones average fell five hundred points before the board suspended trading. But days passed and nothing else happened. Habit has the force of tides; people stayed in their natural courses as rivers do. They went to work, bought groceries, took kids to school. Except in the communities most immediately affected, it was hard to tell that anything had happened.

Except in conversations. People talked of little else. At first the national response was to want to strike back, but as no immediate target of revenge became apparent, a large majority of Americans began to support the President's view. Enough of this. Let the rest of the world destroy itself. Let's stay out of it. Leave us alone.

Corporate leaders had larger views. Microsoft couldn't withdraw from the world stage, nor would Wal-Mart, nor Disney. And they didn't want to be alone out there. Executives of such companies talked of patriotism and commitment, and paid millions to public relations firms for ads extolling those virtues. But Americans, already tired of wars that lasted too long and had too little point, of screaming foreigners hating us, of being criticized even where we tried to help, switched channels.

The American Century was coming to a decisive end.

Within a very few minutes it became clear that Paul Desquat didn't know what to do with Jack, even though his partner Alexis had lured him here. Desquat was a handsome, dissipated-looking man, growing a little belly on a thin torso, the beginnings of pouches under his dark eyes. But still with a strong chin and sharp features, though now they looked puzzled.

“Why here?” he said. “Why to me? Have you been paying calls on everyone you met while you were with—?”

Alexis cleared her throat sharply, cutting him off. She was standing close to Desquat, who sat on a low black sofa matching the chair that held Jack. Alexis was fully dressed now, in black slacks and a black filmy blouse, giving dramatic effect to her pale skin and black hair.

“He knows,” Desquat said to her dismissively. “Everything he's been doing is about Madeline. As if she left him directions.”

“It certainly took him a long time to decipher those directions,” Alexis said, still staring at Jack. In Jack's peripheral vision he saw, off to the side, Yvette glaring at the two of them, neither of whom seemed to notice.

“He doesn't know all that—” Yvette said, and Desquat interrupted her, which was perfect.

“Maybe he didn't need to do anything about it until now.”

Yvette scowled. Jack pretended to ignore her, as the other two were doing. “Maybe I didn't want in until now.” He leaned forward, noticing how that move heightened Yvette's interest in him, and her gun's interest. The chair in which he sat was too low to spring out of suddenly. Jack said, “I believe I've learned everything I can from my—early tutors. Madeline was going to introduce me to others.”

Alexis and Desquat studied him. Alexis had her arms folded. “I don't think so,” she finally said.

Jack studied her in turn, with frank curiosity. “I don't know you. Haven't even heard your name. Are you—” He turned to direct the unfinished question at Desquat. To Jack's hidden delight, the architect looked guilty. “So you've been recruiting outside the—” Jack deliberately cut himself off, as if he'd said too much.

Alexis strode forward. “I know all about your precious Circle,” she sneered.

“Do you? What's the password? Show me the secret handshake.” Jack held out his hand at an odd angle. Alexis kicked at it. Jack's hand twisted, caught her ankle, pulled, and dumped her on her ass on the hard parquet floor.

Yvette smiled, and didn't raise the gun in his direction. Jack jumped to his feet, but Paul Desquat didn't move. “Where will you go?” he said quietly. “You came here to learn, didn't you?”

That stopped Jack. Alexis regained her feet, with as much dignity as she could muster. Her face was even whiter, all the blood having drained southward. She looked like a vampire with her blazing blue eyes. Without any other warning she slapped Jack hard across the cheek.

He could have grabbed her then, used her as a shield and a hostage, maybe escaped. Instead Jack just pursed his lips at her in a simper. “Bitch.”

Yvette had to stifle a laugh.

Jack sat down slowly, looked up at Alexis, waited for her to walk away. Then he returned his attention to Desquat. “Tell me why I should want in,” Jack said slowly.

“No one's invited you.” When Jack didn't respond, Desquat shrugged. He repeated Jack's question, with an eloquent French gesture that took in the beautiful room, the house, Nice, his life.

Jack acknowledged what he wasn't saying. “You have a villa in Nice. How nice. All the money you could spend in more than a lifetime. Comfortable furniture. Lovely friends. Why would you want more than this? You do have Internet, right?”

Desquat smiled. “I have a wine cellar. A lovely beach, where the most beautiful women in the world come to play nearly naked. More comforts than the most powerful Caesar could have had. Why isn't this enough, Jack?”

“I don't know.”

“Yes you do.” Desquat waited, but when Jack didn't take the bait he answered, “Because nothing is ever enough. We are the monkeys who climbed to the top of the highest tree, Jack. But from there we can see the mountains.”

Jack nodded slowly, as if convinced. “All right. You've got me.”

Desquat smiled sadly. “I'm sorry, Jack.”

“Madeline trusted me.”

“Really? What did she tell you?”

“Your name. She was ready to bring me in.”

“If she gave you my name, why has it taken you all these years to come to me?”

“Not to find you. Just to decide I wanted in.”

“I'm sorry, Jack. You need a sponsor to come in. You don't have a sponsor.”

Jack noticed that Alexis had disappeared. He had shamed her out of the room. Desquat probably wasn't going to buy his turncoat act, and Alexis clearly wouldn't. So he turned serious. His voice turning hard, he said, “Did you kill her?”

Desquat merely sighed. “I'm sorry. I really am. Maybe Madeline would have brought you in. But not now. You're too wild a card, my friend. I think you don't want this. You want to stop us.”

Jack lifted his arms from the uncomfortable chair arms. “I don't have a gun. And I'm sure my knowledge of martial arts is less than yours. I'm not a threat to you.”

“You have your mind. It is one of the twistiest we have ever known. No one can trust you.” Desquat gazed off into the distance, considering. “But… I don't think—” He almost said a name. Jack listened tensely. But Desquat stopped himself. “What are we to do with—?” He looked around and saw for the first time that Alexis was gone. As he realized it, she came striding back into the room. “That's simple,” she said. “He's a burglar, isn't he?” A doorbell chimed. “That will be the police.”

The others went more tense than Jack did. At least Alexis and Desquat looked tense. Yvette seemed to enjoy their sudden and quick quarrel. She glanced at Jack with a conspiratorial smile. He didn't try to send her any message.

Desquat's and Alexis's argument was quick and only half-spoken. “We can't turn him over—” “What's he going to say? That he's discovered some worldwide—” Alexis turned and laughed at Jack. “Go ahead. They'll bury you in the crazy ward.”

Jack smiled back at her ever so politely, like a guest at a cocktail party who knows no one.

Then came the sound of the front door crashing inward.

One would expect that an elegant resort city in the south of France might occasionally need to incarcerate celebrities, or at least rich people. One could hope that their jails, therefore, would be several cuts above the American equivalent. But if that was the case, these gendarmes obviously didn't think Jack worthy of the presidential suite. The small cell into which they threw him unceremoniously had a rough cement floor—he could attest to the roughness—a small cot, and a constant stench. Its only luxury was solitude. Maybe they thought he would infect the other prisoners with his craziness. Or maybe this was solitary confinement.

It could have been, in fact, that those were no police who had taken him from Paul Desquat's house and that this was no jail. At least no official one. It could be that that barred door would never open again, and there would be no official record of this discarded American.

Jack curled up on the cot, which immediately sank so that his side was touching the floor. He was wearier than he had ever been. The only useful thing he could do in here was sleep, but he didn't. He thought.

For the first time since this crisis began, Jack had time to think. He was alone, he had no one else to worry about. And he didn't have to think about evading pursuit, because he had already been caught. Lying on that cot, his mind roved back over the days, and he realized that since the night the planes had crossed America, obstacles and puzzles had been thrown in his way that had kept him from concentrating on the big picture. He had been separated from his group; he couldn't contribute to their discussions nor get their insights. Was it accidental that Jack alone had been cut off from the Circle?

What had brought him here? Those sightings of him in Europe. Some genuine, several false. He had seen the fake Jacks himself. They weren't close enough to fool anyone who really knew him. Someone could have used plastic surgery to create near-perfect Jack clones if they had wanted, but what could they do with such replicas? Even if they looked exactly like Jack, they couldn't fool anyone who mattered for long. Not the Chair, not his
friends. His face mattered to so few people. Even if his name was fairly well-known in the gaming world, his face wasn't. What had those fake Jacks accomplished?