Steven Savile - Silver

“So Devere sent you to kill an old man in his chair?” Sir Charles asked, meeting her eyes in the backwards land through the looking glass. It made sense that Miles Devere would send one of his flunkies after him. It was all about power, showing Sir Charles that no matter how connected he was, no matter who he worked for or who he called friends, Devere could reach him. That was what the third call had been about. He had called London to arrange this little visit. “I’m flattered.”

“You should be,” the woman said, closing the door behind her.

“Perhaps we can make a deal?”

“I don’t make deals.”

“Everyone makes deals, my dear. There is a saying in my game, never send someone to kill a man with more money than you. I have a lot of money, believe me. Whatever Devere’s paying you I’ll double to send you back to his door. How does that sound?”

“Like a desperate man,” she said.

She was right. That was exactly how he sounded.

But then, that was how he wanted to sound. Any man in his situation ought to sound desperate. Desperate or resigned; he wasn’t resigned. He wasn’t that kind of man. He made things happen. That only left him with the option of sounding desperate. A desperate man with money would look to strike a deal, so that was exactly what he had done. If she was as good as she no doubt thought she was, she would have been able to see it in his eyes, the shifting gears as one gambit was rejected, thinking quickly, looking for another alternative, anything other than the bullet in the back of the head. It was in-field thinking-reassess, redeploy, react.

He stopped himself from reaching for the phone.

The chair meant he lookup at her through the mirror. It added to the illusion of helplessness. All she saw was an old man in a wheelchair. It would have helped if he had managed to open the drawer, but guns weren’t the only solution.

“Aren’t you going to increase your offer? Isn’t that what people like you do? Beg, plead, offer me riches beyond my wildest imagining?”

“No,” the old man said. “Not today. Today I am going to ask you if you are fond of life?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“No matter how good you think you are, do you really believe you can walk in here, kill me and walk out again without consequences?”

“And here we are again, the dying man’s twelve-step program. Denial, bargaining, and now we’re into the threats. For some reason, the way my client described you, I thought you might be different. This is disappointing. He made you sound like some colossus. I hate to break it to you, but step twelve is always the same. You die.”

“So it is pointless, my telling you about the security here, and what happens when my heart stops beating? My boy Lethe is a computer genius. Did Devere tell you that? Everything in this place is routed through the circuitry of my chair, dependent upon my heartbeat. My heart stops for some reason and Nonesuch goes into lockdown. There is no way out. When my team returns they will find you here. The good news is there is plenty of food, so you’ll be well fed at least.”

“You expect me to believe this is the Bat Cave and I just killed Alfred? It’s more creative than saying you’ve got the place surrounded by armed guards just waiting for your signal, I’ll give you that. But correct me if I am wrong, I don’t remember Bruce Wayne being a cripple?”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, isn’t that what they say?”

“Some do, I am sure, probably the same ones who also say they booby trapped the entire house and have a remote detonating device in the arm of their wheelchair.”

“That was the next thing I was going to try,” the old man said. He smiled, doing his utmost to appear calm on the surface, but inside his heart was racing almost as quickly as his mind. The talk was all about buying time, but once bought it all came down to how he wanted to spend it.

“Enough talk,” she said, as though she had been able to tap into his mind. “Do you want to die facing the end or with your back to it? Some people would rather not see it coming.”

“Given the fact that I can see you whichever way I face, I am not sure it makes much difference, does it? It’s like asking if I want a closed- or open-casket funeral. Back of the head, large exit wound in the face, or bullet between the eyes and the back of your head’s blown out. It really doesn’t matter because I’m going to be just as dead.”

“That you are,” she agreed.

“Let’s do this, shall we? I think I’d rather like a pretty face to be the last thing I see, call me an old fool, but I always was weak for a certain kind of girl,” Sir Charles said, reaching down for the rail on the wheel rims. He pulled back on one, and forward on the other, angling the chair around. The tight space between the bed and the desk made it impossible for him to turn properly. He knew that. That was precisely why he had twisted the chair into it.

Before he could start to back up, the phone on the desk started ringing.

“I don’t suppose I can answer that?” the old man said, ruefully.

“No,” she said. She didn’t seem all that amused by the interruption.

“Then I suppose I can’t say saved by the bell, either?”

“No,” she said again. “No last minute reprieves. We’ve talked too much already. If you can’t turn the chair around, I will.”

“I can do it,” the old man assured her, looking through the glass at the Rembrandt on the wall behind her. Judas Repentant.

The phone stopped ringing.

Ronan Frost killed the call.

It was the first time in all the years he had been with Ogmios that he had called Nonesuch and Lethe hadn’t answered in a matter of seconds. There was nothing good about the silence. He looked up at the house at the far side of the long, winding drive. As always there were only a few lights on. The cars were all lined up on the gravel drive exactly where Orla and the guys had left them a few days ago. Instead of that being comforting it made the place look like an automotive graveyard, the place where sports cars come to die.

The reason he had made the call was parked, half-hidden in the bushes: an off-road dirt bike.

The drive would take him ten seconds to drive, gunning the Monster’s engine and tearing up the gravel, or two minutes to run, silently. He chose silence over speed. If someone was inside the Manor, he didn’t want to go in there all thud and blunder, even if a few seconds could make all the difference. Noise could just as easily get everyone killed. The old man was sharp. He’d go down swinging. And Lethe had probably turned the basement into his own personal panic room.

Frost kicked down the stand and killed the Ducati’s idling engine. He stripped out of his leathers because they hampered his mobility. The time it spent getting out of them would be made up two-fold running across the lawn. He checked the dirt bike for any clue to the owner’s identity, but there was nothing. Not that he had expected to find anything. It was difficult to be sure, because the mud was fairly hard after several days without rain, but he could only make out a single set of tracks. He pulled the Browning and set off at a sprint across the lawn. He kept his head up, looking frantically left and right for signs of the intruder. Frost knew that the unanswered phone meant they were already inside, but that didn’t mean they weren’t already done when he had called and on their way out. There was plenty of darkness to hide in. Too much of it. The spotlights were on, but they only illuminated the snake of the driveway as it came out of the darkness.

Halfway across the lawn he was breathing hard. His body hurt from the abuse it had taken over the last few days.