Simon Green - The Man with the Golden Torc

Which wasn’t supposed to be possible. All right, Mr. President saw me, but that was only because he had a demon in him. Twice in one night was unprecedented. I moved quickly over to the bed, raising one golden fist in warning, and the patient took his hand away from the call button. I stopped abruptly as I finally recognised the patient. Behind my golden mask, I was gaping. No wonder he was able to see me. The man in the bed was the Karma Catechist.

A living legend, the Karma Catechist knew all there was to know about magic systems, rituals, and forms of power. He was the living embodiment of every mystic source, every forbidden book, every obscure and secret treatise on how to do terrible things to other people in seven easy steps. He’d been designed that way while still in the womb, shaped by terrible wills, his form and function and fate decided in advance by powerful sorceries and arcane mathematics. He knew it all, from the Kaballah to the Necronomicon, from the Book of Judas to the Herod Canticles. Every spell, every working, every concept.

My family had been trying to get their hands on him for years, but no one had set eyes on him for decades. He’d been passed back and forth by every group that ever dreamed of power, stolen and abducted and traded, because no one group could hold on to him for long. The problem was, he knew too much; and you had to know the right questions to get the answers you needed. A living encyclopedia of appalling knowledge, but no index. And now he was in my grasp. If I could just get him out of here with me…No. Too much trouble. His very nature would interfere with my armour’s stealth mode. He’d get me noticed, slow me down…No; I’d just pass on word that he was here and let the family decide what to do next.

If it was up to me, I’d hit Harley Street with a tactical nuke, just to be sure of getting him. There is such a thing as too much knowledge. The Karma Catechist knew a hundred ways to end the world or disrupt reality itself. But the family would never sanction a hit on such a valuable asset as this. They wanted the information he held within him, just like everyone else did.

I would have killed him myself, and to hell with the consequences, but…he didn’t look so terrible, close up. He was just a small, middle-aged man who’d already lost most of his hair. He had a soft, kind face, vague eyes, and a diffident smile. He was wearing old-fashioned striped pajamas, with the jacket drooping open to reveal a tuft of white chest hair. He looked tired and sad and very vulnerable. It was easy to feel sorry for him; he hadn’t had much of a life, and hardly any of it his own choice. It wasn’t his fault he was a living doomsday device.

"Don’t hurt me," he said, looking at me with almost childlike detachment.

"Hush," I said. "You just keep quiet, and I’ll be on my way in a minute. What are you in here for, anyway?"

"Because I can’t keep quiet," he said sadly. "I’ve been conditioned, reprogrammed, my working parameters altered; and it all went horribly wrong. Now if anyone asks me a question, I have to answer them, whether they know the right passwords or not. I’ve become a security risk." His eyes widened suddenly, alarm filling his face. "They’ll know I talked to you! They’ll think you asked me about what’s coming! I won’t tell you! I won’t!"

He gritted his teeth, and I heard a distinct crunch. He convulsed, his back arching up from the bed, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and then he was limp and still, his last breath a small sad sigh. I checked for a pulse in his neck, but he was definitely gone. A poison tooth, for God’s sake. I thought they went out in the sixties. A man had just killed himself in front of me, and I had no idea why. I don’t know what he thought I might ask him. The guilty flee where no man pursueth, and all that.

It occurred to me then that a whole lot of people were going to be really upset that such a valuable resource as the Karma Catechist was dead because of me. Maybe I wouldn’t mention this particular incident in my mission report, after all.

I listened carefully at the door; the sirens were still wailing their little electronic hearts out, but the angry footsteps seemed to have departed. I eased the door open and slipped out into the corridor. More guns thrust out of the walls, opening up immediately when they saw the door move. I sprinted down the corridor, my armour giving me supernatural speed, running laughing through the bullets like so much rain.

I reached the end of the corridor and jumped down the stairs to the next floor, sailing through the air from top to bottom in one go. My armoured legs bent to absorb the impact as I landed, and I couldn’t help grinning. Sometimes my job is just so damned cool. I sprinted down the next corridor, moving so fast now the guns in the walls didn’t have time to react. I reached the end and then skidded to a halt at the top of the next stairway. A whole company of heavily armed and armoured security guards were already halfway up the stairs. I turned and ran back the way I came. I could have fought my way through them. They wouldn’t have known what hit them till it was too late. I could have killed them all without breaking a sweat, but that’s not what I do. I’m an agent, not an assassin. Those guards weren’t the real bad guys here. Just hired help. Probably didn’t even know what went on, up on the restricted top floors. Probably thought Saint Baphomet’s was just another hospital for rich weirdos.

I do kill, when I have to. But mostly I don’t have to. So I don’t.

I found the elevators, forced the protesting doors open with my armoured hands, and jumped down the empty shaft. I dropped all the way to the bottom, one golden hand tightly gripping the steel cable to guide my descent. Fat sparks from the cable filled the shaft’s gloom like fireworks. I hit the bottom of the shaft with one hell of a bang and didn’t feel a thing. I forced the elevator doors open, stepped out into the lobby…and there was Saint Baphomet’s head of security, waiting for me. I’d been hoping I wouldn’t run into him ever since I saw his name in the mission briefing. We had history.

I allowed myself a few mental curses. Not out loud, of course. That might be taken as a sign of weakness, and the Droods are never weak. It’s all about attitude, remember?

So I ostentatiously relaxed and nodded casually to the head of security. I knew who it was, who it had to be, even though the face and body were new to me. This was my old adversary Archie Leech, breaking in a new body, big and muscular and loaded down with weapons. I only recognised him by the Kandarian amulet hanging around his throat. An ugly lump of carved stone, relic of a race wiped out millennia ago and quite rightly too, it allowed Archie to jump his soul from one body to another at will. Rumour had it he always kept a dozen or so in reserve in some kind of suspended animation, just in case the one he was wearing took too much damage to continue.

Archie was a serial possessor, a spiritual rapist, and he never gave a damn what happened to his bodies after he abandoned them. I tried to, but it wasn’t always possible. I’d killed Archie before, when I absolutely had to, but it had never taken. I don’t know what he looked like originally. I suppose it’s possible even he doesn’t remember anymore, after so many faces. He scowled at me, seeing me clearly thanks to his damned amulet. Three times in one night…I was starting to feel just a bit conspicuous.

"This place is off-limits to everyone," Archie said flatly. "Even to the high-and-mighty Droods."

I had to smile behind my golden mask. "Nowhere is off-limits to us, Archie. You know that."

"Why here, Drood? Aren’t even hospitals safe from you and your kind?"

"That’s rich, coming from you, Archie. When have you ever cared about putting innocents at risk? Droods go where we have to, to do what we have to do. That’s a new look for you, isn’t it, Archie? All big and brutal and steroid abuse. You usually like them younger…and prettier."