Shadow Knight's Mate (4 page)

“Chun!” he yelled. “I can't take this other one!”

The woman smiled. In a strange accent, sort of British-Chinese, she said, “Unfortunately for you, he is occupied.”

Jack looked back past her, folded his arms across his chest, and smiled himself. “Unfortunately for you, he's not.”

She didn't believe him. That was clear from her continuing confident smile. But her eyes were no longer fully on Jack, and neither were her ears. When she heard the swish of movement behind her she turned quickly, moving her head to the side. She still got clipped, though, by the small three-legged stool Chun had thrown from ten feet away, where he was just wrapping up his own opponent. The stool caught the woman on one of her cheeks. She gave to lessen the blow, bending back.

Which gave Jack the opportunity to roll suddenly to the ground and through her legs. A sort of rolling tackle, not legal in any sport, but effective. The woman went down and hit the back of her head on the concrete floor. This cracking sound was even louder than the last one. She didn't move.

A moment later Chun stood beside Jack looking down at her. “Who is she?” Jack asked.

Chun gave him a strange look. “No idea. She is not Korean, though. Neither is the man.”

“Well—”

“Yes.” The North Korean government certainly worked through agents of other nationalities. So did other organizations.

Chun looked at the broken stick in Jack's hand. “You used a weapon.”

“No, I failed to use a weapon. That's a game rule, Chun, not one when somebody's trying to kill you. Anyway, you used the little stool.”

“Yes, but it was a found object. I didn't bring it with me.” Chun smiled.

They walked away without bothering to search the attackers' clothes. They wouldn't be carrying any identification, at least no accurate ones. Maybe they would still be unconscious when security came to get them.

At the curtain, Chun turned and looked back. “You know,” he said quietly, “when I slipped away, neither of them followed me. They both continued to come after you.”

“Probably thought you were still with me or close by. Wanted to take me out first the way they took out your guards.”

“Mmmm,” Chun murmured, then shook his head. “I don't think they were after me, Jack. I think they were after you.”

Jack continued to look at the bodies on the floor, avoiding his new friend's eyes. “Really?” he said.

Jack seemed to spend the next twenty-four hours on planes and in airport terminals. Only a couple of the news channels mentioned the addition of Libya to the upcoming World Summit, and those two only in crawls at the bottom of the screen. It wasn't big news, except to Jack. But he didn't take the pleasure in it he would have if he'd done it on his own, as he'd planned.

He no longer sensed pursuit, and by the time he reached LAX he felt as secure as anyone could in that place. Jack continued to exercise habitual caution, though, catching a flight to Salt Lake City and renting a car to drive to Denver.

The drive through the beautiful, nearly empty landscape helped clear his head. He gave a great deal of thought, of course, to why he had been attacked in Malaysia. Had they intended to capture him or kill him? The latter, he thought. Those two attackers hadn't appeared to be holding back. They could easily have used a tranquilizer dart or a spiked drink in that crowd if they'd just wanted to take him hostage. No, someone had hired them to kill him. Jack had no idea who would want him dead, although he was very much afraid it was one of his best friends. Maybe all his friends.

His shoulders relaxed as he drove and no one pursued, but another sort of tension began to build in him, the kind a child feels in the days before Christmas. The group meeting. Jack couldn't help grinning.

The medium-sized old hotel had been built a few miles east of downtown Denver, in what turned out to be a bad location. The hotel had changed hands several times in the last few years, and was now called The Lamplighter Inn, for no good reason at all. It
had a spacious lobby that was usually empty, and a comfortable semi-hidden shabbiness. The gift shop was always closed. A large meeting room on the second floor could be used for receptions or speeches, but usually stood empty. Most groups would not book a meeting in this out-of-the way spot.

The hotel didn't have the high-tech security of newer hostelries, which was one reason the group had chosen it. The group's own team had swept the place a day earlier, making sure there were no recording security cameras in the meeting room and no one else's bugs either.

Starting in the early afternoon people began arriving, some in cars, some in cabs from the airport, a couple on bicycles. These latter two wore hiking boots and khaki shorts and didn't bother to change for the meeting that started at five o'clock. They didn't stand out in their appearance. A handful of men wore suits, some women wore nice dresses, jeans were common, and one couple in their late fifties wore a tuxedo and evening dress. “We have an
important
function after this one,” Alicia Mortenson said, and her husband Craig laughed.

These people trickled into the spacious meeting room from about four-thirty on. There were two self-service bars at either end of the room and a few uninspired hors d'oeuvres, but no bartenders or other servers. The members were of all ages from late teens up almost to a hundred. They wore no buttons or lapel pins, and there was nothing to identify their common interest. On the hotel's register this was called a meeting of stockholders of Western Amalgamated, a name chosen to be both uninformative and too boring to provoke curiosity.

Some greeted each other with nods, others hugged enthusiastically. A man and woman who hadn't seen each other in three years but kept in near-constant e-mail communication stood side by side, their shoulders touching, and didn't say a word, just watched the others together and communicated completely by smiles and body language. Two men in their seventies, on the other hand, chattered like jays even though they had had lunch nearly every week for fifty years.

Jack sidled through the door at about five-thirty, looked over the crowd of several dozen people, and smiled gently. Janice Gentry waved at him from across the room. Janice had been his history professor at Yale and one of his early mentors in this group. She had helped teach him the Real History. She looked more like a retired fashion model than a grandmother and professor. She looked a question at him, glancing at the empty space beside him, and Jack shrugged. Thirty yards away, Professor Gentry laughed as if he'd said something witty.

Jack edged around the group, seeing people he'd known for years, but he wasn't yet ready to dive in. He couldn't stop smiling, though.

A rotund young man in an expensive suit stopped on his way to the bar, looked Jack up and down and said, “How's the kiddie porn business?”

“Awesome. Wicked good.”

The young man looked at the goatee Jack had started growing in Asia, made his mouth small, and said, “It's so sad to see a chronological adult captured by a teenage fad. Or more pathetic yet for a grown man to want to appear to have the intellectual capacity of a baseball player.”

Jack took out his baseball cap, the one with the company logo on it, and put it on backwards.

They both burst out laughing.

“Hi, Jack.” “Hey, Ronald.” Ronald hugged him one-armed, holding his drink glass out to the side. “I'm headed to a convention in Vegas after this,” Jack explained his appearance. “Got to appear. There was a rumor I was going to be named Gamer of the Year this year, but at the last minute a bloc of east coast votes swept it away from me.”

Ronald knew exactly what this meant. Jack had engineered his own defeat. The primary rule of this group was not to become high-profile enough to get noticed. “I'm sorry, man.”

Jack shrugged. “I'll have to give up this role pretty soon anyway. Been at it long enough.”

“That will be a relief, I'm sure,” Ronald said. He had a smooth,
preppy-sounding east coast accent which no one was quite sure was phony. But he could do other voices as well, in any of four languages. Jack had heard many of them, starting when they were at school together years earlier.

“No, I'll miss it,” Jack said of being a gamer. “It's fun. I could just quit for a while and come back. In three years it'll be a whole new generation. No one will have heard of me.”

“Yeah, man, but then you'll be, like, thirty.” Ronald was doing a Valley Boy voice now.

“What about you? You rich again yet?”

A few years earlier Ronald, or rather a few of his companies, had made an enormous fortune in some dot-com startups. He had funneled most of the money into this group's secret coffers, then, when he was in danger of making
Fortune's
list of billionaires, had “gone broke” in a quiet way. In answer to Jack's question, he looked sideways around the room, as if fearing eavesdroppers, and said in a completely fake voice, “Me? Nah. Nah. Just a working man. Up at dawn, milking the computers, collecting the eggs.”

They both laughed again. God, it was a relief to be here.

Jack circulated, hugged old friends, genuflected to respected elders. One asked, “Did you suggest a caterer for the affair to your friend the ambassador?”

Without asking how the man knew, Jack shook his head. “No, sir. Can you recommend someone?”

The man was ready with advice. “I think you should go through Italy rather than Paris. Everyone should be more comfortable than that. And of course now you can't have a Swiss presence.” Jack knew what he meant. The semi-rational dictator the American ambassador had invited to the peace conference had declared a jihad against Switzerland a few years earlier; no point in provoking him needlessly.

The man scribbled a name, and Jack took it gratefully before moving on.

A few minutes later Jack was back standing with Ronald, chatting quietly along with three other old friends, when the door opened and Arden Spindler entered. Arden wasn't particularly
well-known here, having been recruited into the group only a year or so ago. But Ronald knew her, as did two other people in their small conversational group, and they all stopped talking, staring at the young woman with fascination, the way a prairie dog stares at a snake.

“What? Who?” said the fifth person. “Her? The one who just came in?”

“Don't say anything,” Jack whispered.

“Don't look at her. Erase her from your thoughts,” Ronald added. “Keep talking. What about this new National Security Advisor? Oh, shit, she's coming this way.”

The group suddenly scattered, leaving Jack and the woman who didn't know Arden to face her alone, as the friendly young woman made her slow way across the room toward them.

Exit Interview

Three months later, after everything was smashed to pieces, the Circle destroyed and all Jack's friends gone, he began to talk to his fifth interrogator. To the first four he had said nothing, not even his name, though they knew a great deal about him already. But Jack didn't tell them anything, even after they dropped any pretense of civilized rules and began torturing him.

The interviews took place in a small windowless room that felt as if it were deep inside a much larger space. The prisoner had been interrogated many times over the last week by several different interrogators who had run the full range: best friend, bully, torturer, wheedling promiser. He hadn't given any of them anything. It was morning, but he was already tired, when he looked up to see a woman walking into the room holding a large black notebook. It matched her large black-rimmed glasses. The glasses either hid or emphasized her slightly crooked nose, and obscured rather than enlarging her mud-colored eyes. In spite of her thinness above the waist she had rather lumpy hips, looking
as if she spent most of her life sitting. She also had the no-nonsense air of a woman who had spent most of her life in the company of men who resented her, so she had managed to turn off her personality as well as any sexual subtleties.

Jack thought at least she'd be a nice change of pace from the wrestler who had punched him on every third question, no matter what his answer, but after a few minutes he wasn't so sure.

We know all about your Circle. You may fill in a few gaps, but you probably have no primary information we don't already know. We know this “secret society” has operated for many years, coming to have some influence on some administrations. Currently out of favor, we believe. You were recruited by your—sixth grade teacher?

Jack didn't speak for a long minute, while the interviewer waited. Then he looked up at her and said,
Fifth.
His voice was hoarse from lack of use.

She nodded and made a note in her notebook.
An exceptionally early recruit, I understand. Congratulations. And I'm sure this organization gave you a sense of importance, the thought that—