McCullough, Crown Island
St. Lawrence River, Ontario, Canada
Four Months Ago
As promised, the limousine was waiting at the curb. A driver in traditional livery stood by the open door. A second man, identically dressed, stepped forward to take their bags. Both were slim, fit, and Korean.
Toys caught Gault’s eye, flicked a glance at the driver, and then affected to scratch his ribs. Gault did not need the cue. He’d already seen the bulge of the driver’s shoulder-rigged pistol. The other man, too. Nice cuts to their jackets, though. Most people would never have guessed either of the Koreans was armed.
Gault did not have a weapon. Toys, he knew, carried a knife in his left sleeve. Gault had seen his friend use that knife several times. Few surgeons were as precise or dispassionate.
Once upon a time Toys had been Gault’s employee, a combination executive secretary, valet, and bodyguard, but that time had passed. Events had occurred that forever changed the dynamic of their relationship. Now they were more like brothers. Or fellow refugees. Gault was at least nominally the alpha of their two-man pack, but that position was held now by mutual consent rather than financial or personal power. In the same disaster that had scarred them both, Gault had discovered an emotional blind spot that had nearly proven fatal while Toys had demonstrated terrifying personal power.
They got into the car and settled back. The driver and the other man sat in the front with the Plexiglas screen closed. The limo was next year’s model. Very expensive and nicely outfitted. Toys poked around and found
unopened bottles of Cerén vodka—a superb El Salvadoran brand—and vermouth. Toys set about making martinis.
“Stirred, not shaken,” he said as he handed one to Gault. It was a private joke. Although Toys loved watching the Bond movies—for eye candy of both genders—it irked him that Ian Fleming had his hero order his martinis to be made the wrong way. By shaking the mixture, the bartender created air bubbles that turned the martini cloudy. More crucially, shaking also caused the ice to release too much water, thereby bruising the flavor of the vodka. A perfect martini should be stirred gently for thirty seconds, then chilled properly and served stingingly dry and cold. Toys always made perfect martinis.
They sipped.
“What are the odds that this lovely car is bugged?” asked Toys. He said it in a normal tone of voice.
Gault smiled thinly. “I would be disappointed if it wasn’t.”
They settled back and sipped their drinks and said nothing else during the drive.
THE TWO KOREANS took them to a small airport and ushered them onto a private Gulfstream G550. Gault was impressed. He had planned to buy one of those for himself before his plans had gone to hell in Afghanistan. The sleek jet came with a $59.9 million price tag. It had a range of sixty-seven hundred miles and all sorts of lovely bells and whistles, and though it was designed to accommodate up to nineteen passengers in great comfort, Gault and Toys found themselves alone in the cabin.
The second Korean came in to attend to drinks and to take their orders for dinner, and when the food came it was superb. The first course was a crème brûlée of foie gras that they washed down with 1990 Cristal champagne, and that was followed by several small but delicious dishes, including tartar of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oysters, and mousseline of
pattes rouges
crayfish with morel mushroom infusion. The accompanying wines—a 1985 Romanée-Conti, a ’59 Château Mouton Rothschild, a ’67 Château d’Yquem, and a ’61 Château Palmer—inspired great respect from both of them.
“Well,” said Toys as he sipped Hennessy Beauté du Siècle cognac, “I think we can submit a new definition for ‘ostentatious.’”
“Mm. Are you complaining or commenting?”
Toys sloshed the deep-amber-colored liquid in his glass. “This is two hundred thousand pounds a bottle. I’m not a cheap date, Sebastian, but they had me at the crème brûlée.”
“You think they’re trying to prove something to us?”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course. And notice that we’re both saying ‘they.’ Not ‘he,’” Gault said. He sipped the cognac. It was delicious and it soothed the aches in his damaged flesh, but he would never have spent two hundred thousand on it. His devotion to brand names did not extend into mania.
“Well, to be fair,” Toys said, “our American friend was always grandiose, but cultured … ? Not so much.”
“And he has no excuse for it. He’s new money, but he went to the very best schools.”
“You’re new money.”
“Yes, but if you didn’t know it you couldn’t tell. You can tell with him. At a hundred paces, too. Table manners of a baboon, and he keeps his mouth open while chewing. And he has that thing where he speaks like a college professor one minute and a dockworker the next.”
“You do know that he can hear everything we’re saying.”
Gault merely smiled.
“So,” said Toys, rolling the cognac back and forth between his palms, “the question is ‘why?’”
Gault shrugged. “A demonstration of conspicuous ostentation makes its own statement, don’t you think? After all, no one
needs
to own a jet like this. There are plenty of less expensive aircraft that are more than opulent enough for the few hours their owners and their guests spend aboard them. To put it crudely, the price tag is a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who can’t afford it, and much more so to those who can almost afford it.”
“Mmm,” mused Toys. “Then tell me this, O mighty sage, why are we being treated to such luxury? He doesn’t owe us a thing, not even sanctuary.”
Gault merely shrugged. He was pretty sure he knew. He closed his eyes and remembered a sultry night a dozen years ago. He and Eris in a Belle Etoile suite at the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris. The two of them naked, covered with bites and scratches, the bed and nightstand wrecked,
sheets torn and tangled, and the air heavy with the smell of wine, perfume, and sex.
“One day,” she’d murmured to him as they lay together on the floor, their feet propped on the edge of the bed they’d fallen out of during their last deliciously ferocious bout of sex. And it was
sex.
No one could call what they did lovemaking. It was too violent and immediate and selfish for that, and it had served them each and satisfied them both. “One day you’ll be a king, lovely boy.”
Gault was propped on one elbow, his head resting in an open palm while he used his other hand to trace slow, meaningless symbols in the sweat between her heavy breasts.
“A king?” he mused, his voice still carrying some of the East End London of his youth. “No way that’s possible, but I’d like a knighthood. That would be brilliant.”
She shook her head. Her hair was snow-white, with subtle threads of lustrous brown sewn through it. Candlelight reflected in her eyes so that it looked like she was on fire inside.
“No, lovely boy. I have my eye on you. One of these days you’ll be a king.”
Sebastian laughed. “A king of what?”
“What would you like to be king of?”
“Not of bloody England. Too much nonsense and fluff.”
“You could be the king of your own world,” she said. “A king of the microscopic world of viruses and bacteria.”
“Oh, very nice. Behold the leper king—”
“Shhhh!” Eris pressed a finger to his lips. “No. Not a king of the common cold or the king of cancer. One day I think you will be the King of Plagues.”
He almost laughed again, but there was something about her tone when she said those words that stopped him. “The King of Plagues.” Saying it as if it was a real title for an actual king. No mockery. This was not a joke to her.
Sebastian Gault had looked deep into her burning eyes. “Tell me,” he had whispered.
And she told him. Not much, but enough. She broke off a delicious fragment of the truth and whispered it in his ear, and it was that seed, planted there in the shadows that smelled of their passion, that grew into Gault’s
dreams of empire. The many paths that led away from that moment in his life trailed away into infinite possibilities, but one—
that
one—was paved with gold.
The King of Plagues
.
“And if I am a king,” he whispered as he pulled her on top of him, “will you be my queen?”
“No,” she breathed, her voice husky and dark, her hand reaching down to guide him inside. “No … I will be your goddess.”
Afterward, he had made love to her so hard that they both wept and ached all the next day. And each time an unwise step or movement speared pain through either of them, they remembered and laughed. It was not the sex that they remembered but the idea that had fueled it.
The King of Plagues
.
And the Goddess
.
THE FLIGHT WAS long and the crew did not inform them of their destination. From the duration and the angle of the sun, Gault judged that they were in southeastern Canada. Looking out of the porthole suggested east, and Gault was sure that they were still in America.
When the plane landed they were both relaxed and composed and accompanied the two Asians without comment or protest. The plane had set down at a large private airstrip by the water, and the boat ride across the river was quick and comfortable.
As the boat coasted to a gentle stop at the dock, Gault nudged Toys with his knee. Toys looked up to see a woman step out of the shade of the boathouse and into the bright sunlight. Even Toys, whose taste tended toward fashion models of both gender of the type once known as “heroin chic,” lifted his eyebrows in appreciation. The woman was tall, slender, with snow-white hair that lifted and snapped in the breeze off the water. She wore skintight white sporting slacks and a bikini top that was little more than triangles of brightly colored cloth. Her feet were bare and she wore silver jewelry at throat, ears, fingers, toes, and navel. Sunlight flickered around her as if the daylight kept reaching out with quick and naughty touches. Her body was lithe and fit and the only concession to makeup was a fierce red lipstick that was an immediate challenge.
“Well, well,” murmured Toys. “Not exactly Snow White, is she?”
“Good God,” breathed Gault. “That’s Eris.”
“I thought you said Eris was his mother.”
Gault laughed. “That
is
his mother.”
Toys turned to Gault with a half smile, but he wasn’t joking. Then Toys took a second and longer look at the woman as she walked toward them.
“If that’s cosmetic surgery, I’ll marry her doctor.”
“No. Just bloody good genes and a refusal to age like ordinary mortals. I don’t know how old she is, but she has to be in her sixties.”
“You’re killing my youth-centric sensibilities.”
Gault laughed. As soon as the boat was tied to the cleats, he leaped onto the dock and walked toward Eris with his arms wide. She beamed at him like a happy panther and hugged him fiercely, showering kisses on him, even on the bandages. As Toys approached, Gault gave him a look that said,
Well, she’s not
my
mother.
Eris turned, graceful as a dancer, and gave Toys a quick and frank appraisal. “Who is this delicious beast, Sebastian?” she said in a husky voice that was English with a soupçon of Boston. “Is this the clever one who’s been keeping you out of trouble all these years?”
“Sweetheart,” Gault said, “meet Toys. Toys … this is Evangeline Regina Isadora Sanderson. Lady Eris to the commoners and Goddess to those who really know her.”
“Toys … mmm, now that’s a name with real potential.”
Toys took her hand and kissed it in a way that was at once elegant and filled with self-referential mockery. Eris gave him a wicked grin. At close quarters he could see that she was indeed older than she at first appeared, but no one would ever guess fifty, let alone mid-sixties. The bikini top was challenged to restrain abundance; her eyes were as green as a tropical sea and flecked with sparks of gold fire.
“Welcome to Crown Island,” she purred.
“Thank you for having us,” said Toys.
Eris eyed him up and down. “I haven’t had you yet.”
Then Eris hooked their arms so that they bookended her and led them toward the huge fortress of a building that was McCullough Castle.
Above them the sun was a furnace, and Gault wondered what was being forged in its heat.
GAULT AND TOYS were escorted to separate rooms.
“Divide and conquer?” Gault asked with a smile.
“Divide, yes, conquer—no, lovely boy. We want you to be comfortable. Travel is such a bore. Take a hot shower. Fresh clothes will be laid out. Someone will come to fetch you in an hour.”
One of the two silent Koreans stepped up to Toys and led him down a side hall.
When they were alone, Gault took Eris’s hand and led her a few steps away from the second servant.
“What’s going on, love? This is weird even for you.”
She laughed. “Mystery and intrigue is all the thing, lovely boy.”