Shadow Knight's Mate (27 page)

No, that wasn't question. The question was the one Arden had asked:
Why you?
Jack suddenly sat up in the darkness. Those Jack-sightings had separated him from the Circle and brought him here, that's what they had accomplished. They had kept him on the move and on the dodge, unable to think until now.

Someone wanted him out of the picture and coping with lesser puzzles. Why? What did he know? And oddly, the Jack sightings had brought him to Europe, which seemed to be the heart of the conspiracy, if he could believe what he had heard Desquat say. Salzburg. Where the peace summit was going to take place. It could have been a lie, Desquat might have already known Jack was listening. But Rachel had had a feeling about the same thing, and he trusted Rachel's feelings.

Whoever had plotted this wasn't a gamer. This was a bad game. In a good game one clue leads to another. Conquering one level admits you to the next level. What was happening now was circular instead, each revelation leading back around. No way out.

Jack paced as far as he could pace in the small cell, reached the wall and paced back. No one knew the National Security Advisor, except that Jack had a way to get to him. The NSA seemed to have been plucked out of anonymity and installed in the White House just for this reason: to isolate further an isolationist president. And someone had created a figure of enormous influence who was completely unknown to Circle members. A near impossibility.

What had those planes accomplished? A huge fortune had been spent on that one night of terror. It had made a president decide to draw back from the world. Who could profit from that? Some terrorists, perhaps, though most would rather have the Great Satan blundering about in the world, giving them recruitment material.

Think. What else had been accomplished? And how would it be furthered by some event at a meeting of world leaders in Salzburg? It seemed that Jack was the one who could
figure this out, because he was the sole target of the invisible enemy's scheming.

But Arden had also been cut off from the group. Sent to babysit Jack. Had that been intended?

Jack lay back down on the cot, which weariness made comfortable. There was a way out of this puzzle. Stop thinking two-dimensionally. Rise above the board. He began to drift off, his thoughts growing wilder and longer, the figures in his life flitting like distorted masks. Madeline. Arden. Rachel. Stevie. The Chair. Mrs. Stein. Jack smiled in his grogginess as he pictured her at the front of the class, telling them about Robert E. Lee's young adjutant, a name lost to history, but who had set the general's glasses down in such a way that when he reached for them they focused on a town called Gettysburg. It was such a crazy concept it had made Jack laugh even then. And glancing out the classroom windows he saw someone peeking in. A boy who wasn't in the class, who had been excluded.

Bruno Benjamin had been the smartest boy not only at Bruton Academy but in the memory of his teachers. No one since Craig Mortenson had tested so high in IQ, in the Circle's own tests, the ones that mattered. But there was something they didn't trust about Bruno. He was smart, yes, but he was also lacking in that empathy for other people that was the essential weapon of the Circle. They had brought him to Bruton for observation, but had shied away from bringing him fully inside. He was not, for example, placed in Mrs. Stein's history class.

But the Circle, those self-styled masters of the American destiny, hadn't counted on Bruno's ingenuity, his deviousness. He began to learn about the special classes even though he wasn't in them. Jack's first mission for the Circle, one too big for a schoolboy but that could only be done by a classmate, had been to steer Bruno away from his suspicions– an assignment Jack had bungled so badly he had almost given them all away. That was the first time he came to the attention of the Chair, and not in a good way.

Bruno was eventually transferred to another prep school, a much better known one. Jack had asked about him years later and
been told that the Circle had seen that he got admitted to Yale, and even inducted into Skull and Bones, which should assuage his hunger for secret societies. The Circle had once again congratulated itself on its managerial genius. But Jack wondered now if anyone had kept up with Bruno's subsequent career.

Did anyone keep track of those Circle rejects who had been shuttled aside? Because there on the edge of sleep Jack realized what those planes had accomplished, what a disaster at Salzburg would seal for good. Those events had undone everything the Circle had been designed to achieve.

He sat up again. Think about it from a different angle. What if all this business had been aimed not at America but at the Circle itself? If so, it had been a smashing success. The Circle isolated, some of them arrested, others scattered, their mission of maintaining American supremacy in the world in tatters. It would take generations for the Circle to undo this, if they continued to exist at all.

If this was right, the person behind it would, first of all, have to know about the Circle, and hate all its members. He or she would have to have enormous resources and an amazing intellect. Jack could only think of one candidate: that boy he'd seen peeking through the classroom window fifteen years ago.

And Bruno would have known that only one person might be able to figure out who was behind this scheme: Jack. For this to work, he would have to isolate Jack from the rest of the group, set him apart and on the run, so he couldn't think straight.

Exactly what had been accomplished in the last week.

It was scary to have thoughts ranging this widely across time and space while trapped in a small cell. Jack was getting too cosmic for his own good. If Rachel had been here she would have told him he was suffering from rest-deprivation. But once his mind started clicking along these paths, he couldn't turn it off. There was nothing he could do right now with the idea that his old pal Bruno was behind the cataclysm going on in the world. But he could trace back and see if it made other things fit.

Did Bruno have other Circle members on his team? That would be almost essential. Sleeper agents in their midst. People Jack knew and loved. And good old Bruno would be sure to plant someone right next to Jack, if he could, both to guide him astray and to keep a leash on him.

Arden.

Why had she been assigned to him? Had that been an idle thought of the Chair's, or had it been planted in her mind in some subtle, sinister way? As Jack began to think, he realized how little he knew about Arden Spindler, how little any of them knew. She had been raised here in Europe. That was the most dangerous thing the Circle ever undertook, to try to bring up a member loyal to the good old U.S. of A. without being raised there. Sometimes it failed, as Paul Desquat demonstrated. Maybe it had failed with Arden as well. At the very least, being raised in Europe had put her closer to the influence of someone planning a disaster at Salzburg.

But he liked her so much.

What? Where had that come from? Jack's mind was playing him weird. As he lay there in the tiny, smelly cell, the darkness was peopled with Arden: watching him as he talked on the phone to his mother; standing silently aside at his reunion with Rachel; coming around the corner in a car to rescue him; spotting him across a crowded room; her laughing face as she turned and caught sight of him.

But just before sleep finally took him down, Jack realized something else. If the construct he'd created in the last few minutes was true, then Bruno wouldn't be content to leave Jack here in this cell while he pulled off his most spectacular scheme. He would want Jack as a witness. Which meant he had to free Jack. And that didn't seem possible.

Arden had rescued him several times already. She had been there when it was barely possible for a human to know about his peril. But now she was gone. There was no way she could learn about his imprisonment here, and nothing she could do about it if she did.

Unless Bruno Benjamin was behind his current incarceration, and Arden was on his team.

His last thought: If Arden showed up to rescue him again, she was on the other side.

Sunlight woke him. The little cell did have one small window, a little higher than a man's head, so the sun must have been high already to hit Jack's face. Now he could see his surroundings, which were more disgusting even than his nose had told him the night before. He was at the end of a row of three cells; the other two were unoccupied. Outside the door a short hallway led to a simple wooden door. Down beyond the third cell was some kind of storage area where apparently manure and straw were stored until needed. A paradise for flies and probably worse vermin.

He had to get out of here. He had to get his PlayStation. He had to contact the Circle. He had to call home. But it looked as if no one intended to let him do anything he needed to do. No one, for example, had brought him breakfast, or let him out for a bathroom break. There was a bucket in the corner. Jack stayed as far from it as he could.

Half an hour later that wooden door opened. Arden walked through.

Jack stared at her expressionlessly. He thought he was hallucinating, especially since she showed no reaction to seeing him. Her face was as blank as his. Blanker. She looked like a mannequin of herself. Jack thought, she's given up the pretense. She knows I'm on to her.

Then Arden came farther along the hallway and Jack saw the man behind her, the man in uniform holding a gun on her. He marched her forward, pushed her aside, opened the door of the cell next to Jack's, and shoved her inside. Arden turned and gave the guard a look that Jack took for complicity. Arden and the guard were in something together. But the uniformed man just stared back at her, then locked the cell and marched out without a word.

“Jack!” Arden flung herself against the bars, reaching through
them, so he had no choice but to go and give her an extremely awkward hug. Jack kept his emotions tightly contained. He knew now she was waiting to betray him. He could give nothing away.

Nevertheless, her arms felt surprisingly good.

He asked her how she'd found him, but barely listened to her explanation: decided he would need her, followed him to Nice, heard about an American arrested for invading a home, blah blah blah. Jack waited out the story, then asked, “How are we getting out of here?”

Arden looked longingly at that wooden door. “Hell if I know.”

“You don't have a plan?”

“I don't even know exactly where we are.”

Which put a tiny hole in his suspicions. If she didn't have a way out, maybe she
wasn't
on the other side. But just give her time, Jack thought. She'd come up with something ingenious. “You sort of made friends with that guard, didn't you?”

“I thought we made a little connection,” Arden answered, worry putting lines in her forehead. “But I sure couldn't tell it by the way he shoved me in here.” Her nose wrinkled. She looked around the accommodations, and her expression was horrified. “My God, Jack, I only left you alone for like a day. What did you do to get put in this hellhole?”

Jack was still watching her. She seemed genuinely to be as trapped as he was. “We have to get out of here,” she said, sounding a little desperate.

“Yes, and very soon.”

“Why?” She looked at him with real curiosity. “What's happening?”

“I'm starting to think real seriously about that bucket in the corner.”

Two hours convinced him that Arden had no idea how to get out of here. Lunchtime passed as had breakfast time, with no intrusion from the outside world. By climbing the bars between their cells, then leaning far back and to the side, Jack could grab the bars of the only window and hold himself up long enough to
see out. There was little to see. The window seemed to be facing an alley. He couldn't see all the way to the ground from his angle, but he could see another wall a short distance away, and could hear no human voices nearby, although there were the sounds of cars and foot traffic from off to his left. No one close by, though. No one whose sympathies he could enlist.

When he dropped down he said angrily to Arden, “You know what to do in this situation, don't you? Find an ally before you get captured. Or create one. Didn't you?” Because Jack was getting very anxious and more than a little paranoid. He wanted this to be over. She should go ahead and reveal herself and drop the pretense.

“I didn't have time. I was worried about you.”

She spoke very quietly. Jack turned to look at her and found Arden looking down at the floor. He waited, but she didn't look up. She'd sounded sincere. Which meant they were truly trapped here. Jack wondered if he'd be taken before a magistrate. Certainly no one had offered him a phone call.

An hour later they were slumped against the bars of their cells, back to back. The slight human contact was nevertheless warming. Jack thought he could hear her thinking. But everything they did was about manipulating others. In this solitude, they had nothing to work with. Instead they found themselves reminiscing, as if this might be the last time. Arden spoke of her parents again. Jack told her about school. “Really?” she'd say, as if everything ordinary sounded like an adventure. “One time Rachel and I sneaked into the library late one night, looking for a book that was kept locked away. We didn't know what was in it, we just knew it must be great if they wouldn't let us see it. And four teachers were having a meeting in the library, all huddled around one little lamp.” He could hear Arden picturing it, not the same scene he'd seen, but
a
scene, one transposed into her own school library, probably. He could feel her back against his as he told the story. It
had
been an adventure. He and Rachel had graduated thinking they'd prepared themselves for the grandest adventures of all, world-guiding. They hadn't had a clue. World-saving was smelly, uncomfortable work, not grand at all.

When he finished talking Arden said one word: “Wow.” And he found she was holding his hand.