Shadow Knight's Mate (36 page)

Bruno Benjamin was grinning now. He hadn't had this much fun in years. “I could lead you around the world,” he said to the screen, which showed Jack running. “In fact, I have.” He chuckled quietly to himself. Slowly, over the course of a year, Bruno had transformed the neighborhood around Jack into his own theater, with not only hidden cameras but speakers. He could make a man hear footsteps or whispered voices where there was no one. Bruno was very good with equipment.

He rose and looked around the spacious room. “Now we have to get ready,” he said, as if to a pet cat. In fact, Bruno detested animals. His only pet was his own mind, which was also his only companion for the most part. Bruno could be charming in short bursts, as he had been with the secretary at the embassy, but it wearied him.

Jack came to a metal door, through which his double had obviously disappeared. It still trembled slightly under Jack's hand. He stared at it for a long few seconds, thinking he was within sight of the end, one way or the other. For a few moments Jack just stood there, then he finished punching Arden's number into his cell phone. She didn't answer. To her voice mail he said, “I'm following a lead. It's one of my doubles, so it seems to be aimed at me. I hope you can hone in on my signal somehow. Otherwise I'm afraid you're going to be on your own. I love you, Arden.”

He wished he had time for one more call, to America, but he didn't. Using his elementary burglary skills and tools, Jack went through the door.

Inside was blackness, dark as the inside of a skull. The kind of darkness that made a man think the floor was about to drop out from under him, or bright lights come on and people scream “Surprise!”

Instead the darkness gradually lightened until he could tell he was in a narrow hallway. After thirty yards it ended in a very small room, like an elevator lobby. There were two doors there. They stood side by side, possibly leading into the same room, but Jack didn't think so. This time Jack didn't put his hands on the
doors, or lean against them to listen. Instead he looked all around the room, searching for another way.

Bruno's eyes as he watched the screen were more narrowed. He had a heavy, jowled face, but his body wasn't as uselessly plump as it first appeared. When Bruno's eyes narrowed a good observer could see a much thinner, hungrier man within. Tonight he wore black, blending into the big, black leather chair, almost into the dimness of the control room where he sat. As he stared at the screen he was almost reduced to a pair of eyes.

“Come on, Jack, the lady or the tiger. Which is it?” As nothing continued to happen, Bruno smirked. “Your legendary people skills aren't much use here, are they?”

Jack saw no obvious other way out, except the way he had come. But he didn't trust those doors. His training had taught him, whenever there are two ways to go, find a third.

The ceiling was low in this room, composed of large soundproofing tiles. By jumping as high as he could, Jack could touch the tiles, even push them up a little out of the metal grid holding them. No way he could get up into there, though.

He looked around. No tools to work with, not one. The room was absolutely barren of adornment. Jack only had two things to work with other than his brain and his body. Maybe it was game-playing that had taught him to look at objects in different ways, or maybe it had been his own inherent instinct. At any rate, it had taken him only moments to realize that sometimes a doorknob can be used as something other than a doorknob. The doors were so close together that their knobs were only a couple of feet apart. Jack put his right foot up on the knob on the right, jumped, pushed his hands right through the tiles of the ceiling, found the other doorknob with his left foot, and stood there for a second recovering his balance. Then he jumped off the doorknobs up into the ceiling.

It took him a moment to assure himself that he was stable. He put the tiles carefully back into place, and began crawling.

“Damn it!” Bruno yelled, jumping up from his chair. “I should have put the damned tiger up in the ceiling.” “The tiger” was merely an expression. He probably didn't really have one on the scene, though his unseen listener couldn't be sure.

Bruno ran around the room frantically, bringing screens to life, checking other sensors. He did not have cameras up in the ceiling, or any other way of tracking Jack's progress. There was really nothing Jack could do up there—Bruno thought, but then he hadn't thought Jack could get out of the two-door room any other way, either. It took him only seconds to consider and discard all the weapons at his disposal. Then he turned to the corner of the room. “You'll bring him,” he said coldly.

Jack was crawling through dimness, feeling pleased with himself even with no idea where he was going, when he heard a scream. It was piercing, maddening, a scream of terror and pain. And he was quite sure it was Arden's scream, though he had never heard her so much as raise her voice. The scream froze him for a moment, but not with indecision. When he unfroze he started crawling quickly, toward the source of the scream.

After some distance he slowed and halted. He was afraid he was giving away his position. Worse, he knew he was about to do something very stupid. He stopped, catching his breath, and took out his phone. The screen showed he had signal. Quickly he punched in some numbers. After a moment he got Rachel's voice mail. Could she be sleeping? More likely she was using her phone.

Jack wasn't even aware of the tenderness in his voice as he spoke. “Rachel, it's me again. Listen, there's something else you have to do. No, two things, and I hope to God you know what they are, because I can't tell you from here. There are also some people you have to watch out for, starting with Professor Trimble. You'd be surprised to hear about the other two, I think—”

But before he could finish, the tile below him splintered and gave way. Then the whole ceiling around Jack collapsed. The collapse hadn't been caused by his weight, though. Metallic arms reached up and grabbed him from his exposed position. The arms pulled him out of the ceiling then dropped him. He landed standing, then fell on his ass. His cell phone skittered away somewhere under the rubble around him. Jack coughed and blinked. The large room in which he sat seemed bright by comparison with where he'd been, though in fact it was dimly lighted. The wall in front of him was covered by a large console, with at least a dozen screens and as many keyboards, plus a vast array of buttons and switches. The room had an angled ceiling that ended high at that end, with a catwalk up on the wall above the console.

The rest of the room was furnished rather like an old-fashioned study, or a parody of one. Heavy, overstuffed leather furniture, a thick coffee table, floor lamps.

There were no people in sight. Then the one chair at the console turned, and the fat, bald man in the chair sat smiling at the dishevelled drop-in visitor.

“As you've realized by now, I just needed to make you hurry through the ceiling, so your noise would give away your position.” He flipped a switch close at hand and the scream rang out again, nerve-shredding even though it was only a recording. The man flicked the switch off again. “I don't actually have her here now, though I did have to make her scream the first time we met. I thought it might come in handy to record it.” He sat beaming at his visitor, with his hands folded in his lap. Jack had never felt such warm regard.

“Hello, Jack.”

“Hello, Bruno.”

“Please don't act as if you're not surprised to see me.”

“I mentioned your name to people three days ago.”

Bruno narrowed his eyes, studying the man he hadn't seen in a dozen years. Then he smiled in satisfaction. “No, you didn't. I am a complete astonishment to you.”

Jack shrugged.

“You had forgotten me completely, hadn't you?”

“No one could forget you, Bruno. I've thought about you often, believe it or not. I've always wondered when I'd be seeing you again.”

“Liar.”

Jack shrugged again. What he'd said was true, though. He had first met Bruno half their lifetimes ago, at Bruton Academy. Bruno had realized what the place was before Jack had, but in the end Jack had been inducted into the inner mystery and Bruno hadn't. As a consequence, Jack thought, Bruno must have harbored the belief all these years that the Circle was something other than what it was: that it was the conclave of the Secret Masters of the World. That naked yearning for power as much as anything was what had kept Bruno out. But Jack had always suspected, as he'd said, that Bruno wouldn't forget them.

He walked a little, which didn't seem to bother Bruno at all. He didn't even swivel to keep Jack in the center of his attention. In fact, he was looking past him, with a slight frown.

“How did you get the money out of our treasury to fund your project, Bruno? How'd you turn Professor Trimble?”

“Oh, that was easy. I've been cultivating him for years. He actually thinks I'm part of your group, Jack. Part of the ‘Inner Circle,' so deep undercover that I don't attend meetings or have contacts with anyone else. He believes he's working for the good of mankind, whatever that means.”

“And the technology? For your miracle planes and spiders and all?”

“For the Night of Terror?” Bruno smiled. The fact that Jack knew so much about him obviously didn't disturb Bruno. “Well, I've always been good with machines, Jack, I don't know if you remember that. Good enough that I could meet some of the people who are
really
good. All that technology, as you called it, is stuff that's been on drawing boards around the world for years. There are more mad scientists than you'd think. They just didn't have the funding or the motivation actually to build the things before I came along.”

Jack wandered closer to the console, until he was close enough to touch it. He pressed a couple of switches, changed camera angles on screens. Bruno didn't move to stop him. Jack didn't hear much sound beyond this room, either. No scurrying army of minions. Except for his equipment, Bruno seemed to be alone.

Jack turned his attention to his old classmate. Aside from balding, Bruno didn't look much older than he'd looked as a chubby teenager. His eyes were black and deep and hard to read. He continued to chuckle, but something smoldered far down in his eyes. Jack sighed. “Bruno, let me tell you something true. I thought they did you a favor when they didn't bring you into the Circle. I thought you could accomplish so much more in the real world. Really become something. Famous like you wanted, instead of the invisible creatures we are. Like vampires behind the—”

Bruno's fist slammed down on the console. The whole room seemed to shake. It was a large fist, Jack noted, with tremendous force driving it. The metal console was actually dented under it.

And now the hatred had appeared on Bruno's face. The flesh seemed to fall away, exposing sharp cheekbones and a thin nose, the face of someone eaten up by obsession. The smile was gone completely. “What would have been the point?” he snarled.

Jack gave him a look of non-comprehension. Bruno stood up, half a head taller than Jack. “Do you know what it's like to feel the whole world shimmery and insubstantial around you because you don't know the real truth of it?”

“Actually, yes,” Jack said quietly.

“To feel that whatever you might accomplish is overshadowed by someone whose name you'll never know? To think that even if you conquer the world, it will only be because someone else planned it to happen?”

“We're really not that good.”

Bruno leaned into his face. “Now you'll be nothing. I'll be part of the Real History. I'll be controlling it.”

Bruno recovered some of his composure, straightening up and smoothing down his black jacket. “Yes, I know everything,”
he said, trying to smile again. But he was looking past Jack again, all around the room, up into that dark space above the ceiling.

Jack knew now too, knew how high the stakes were here, not just for him personally, but for the world. He'd known that intellectually for days, but here in this room he felt the pulse of hatred so strongly it almost knocked him backwards. Enough hatred to smash everything to pieces. “You've done all this just to destroy us?”

Bruno laughed. “Not just to destroy you, Jack. To expose you and humiliate you. The Circle was designed to protect America's place in the world. Now America has no place. Once the President gets here and is assassinated, America's isolation will be complete. The world will come in to feast on the corpse.”

He sat again. Bruno obviously wanted to tell his story. “In less than fifteen years I've put together a better team than yours, Jack. Yes, some of them are washouts like me, but not as many as you'd think. The Circle has overlooked some powerful talents in the world. And I've trained them. In many ways it's better to have a solid foundation of belief than to know the ‘real' history.” Unfortunately, Jack could not only hear the quotation marks in Bruno's voice, but Bruno made them in the air.