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  DOUBLE EDGED BLADE

  Copyright © 2017 by Blake Banner

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  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

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  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

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  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

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  One

  It was raining. Fall was thinking seriously about moving into winter. The rain was steady and a growing mist lingered among naked trunks and branches, saturating the grass and the last rusted leaves. There was a tap at the door behind me. I turned from the leaded window that framed the dank landscape and raised my voice.

  “Yes! Come!”

  Kenny, my dead father’s butler, opened the door and stepped in to my dead father’s study. “Mr. Benjamin Smith, sir, and Mr. Jonathan Brown to see you.”

  “Show them in, Kenny.”

  He closed the door and I stood looking around at the oak-paneled walls, the heavy, oak desk, the Persian rugs, burgundy chesterfields and the leaded windows: it all reeked of my father. His presence was as strong in death as it had been in life, perhaps stronger. Because now, like the creeping, gray mist outside, it was pervasive and found invisible, hairline cracks in your resolve, a million invisible ways, to get inside you. I, who had spent my life rejecting and escaping from him, now owned his house, occupied his office, was master of his estate, his legacy.

  The door opened again and Kenny admitted the two men. “Mister Smith and Mr. Brown, sir.”

  They entered in their perfect, anonymous, charcoal gray suits. The door closed behind them and they stood looking at me, without expression. Ben I had met before, when he’d come to my house in Wyoming to tell me my father was dying. He had the bearing and the impassive stare of the professional killer.

  Brown was older, maybe in his late forties. His face wasn’t ugly, but it was full of ugliness because his expression of contempt had become a habit, a way of life. I watched their eyes travel over my clothes: a khaki army shirt, jeans and boots. I was not in mourning. They attempted to read my face. I made it easy for them.

  “You’re not welcome here. Say your piece, then leave.”

  Brown spoke like an android, and for a moment I actually wondered if he was human. “It’s not that simple, Mr. Walker.”

  “I disagree.”

  “A senior member of Omega has been killed, your own father. That cannot go unpunished. Two other members, Tau and Rho, barely got away with their lives…” He came as close as he was able to an expression. It was a look that suggested he didn’t understand why I didn’t get him. “You yourself are in possession of information nobody outside Omega has ever had. You must see we can’t just walk away…”

  I moved to my desk and stared down at the ancient wood. I still thought of it as his desk. I put my ass on it and looked at Brown, at the ingrained expression of contempt that had become a part of what he was.

  “There is no ‘must’ about it, Mr. Brown. It’s your problem, not mine.”

  “I don’t think you fully understand, Mr. Walker. We are offering you your father’s position in Omega. You will step in as Gamma, a member of the Cabal of Five. Nobody has ever entered directly into the Cabal of Five.”

  “I know what you’re offering me, Mr. Brown, and I know why. You’re offering me that position in the government within the government, because the Cabal is scared of me. They are right to be scared of me, and both of you would be wise to be scared of me too, because I am running out of patience.”

  Ben looked vaguely amused.

  “Lacklan, you know that we will come after you and Marni, and we will kill you if you don’t accept this offer. This is your one chance to state your terms.” He gave a small shrug. “Shape Omega from the inside if you want. We don’t have to be enemies.”

  I knew now that my father had tried that. He had told me on his death bed. And I knew how it had played out. He had become a bitter, twisted killer. That was what Omega did to you. I could have argued with them, tried to tell them that you can never shape that kind of power from the inside. You just get consumed and shaped by it, into something infirm, ugly and contemptuous, like Mr. Brown, like my father. But arguing with them was as pointless as arguing with the pervasive mist outside. They were what they were, an expression of the dark, monstrous face of nature; humanity at its worst.

  “You’ve said your piece, you’ve done what you came here to do. Now leave. And tell the Cabal that if they think they are coming after me, they are wrong. I am coming after them.”

  Ben shook his head and actually looked sad. “Last chance, Lacklan.”

  “There are twenty-four letters in the ancient Greek alphabet, Ben, one for each member of Omega. That’s twenty-four kills I am going to make. I am guessing you two are messengers, lackeys, so that’s twenty-six including you.” I paused for my words to sink in, then added, “As of this moment, your lives are at risk. My advice is, leave. Now.”

  Brown nodded and they moved to the door. Ben paused to look back at me before he left. “It’s a shame,” he said, “I like you.”

  The small church was less than three hundred yards away as the crow flies, through the woods, but the procession followed the prescribed route up the drive to Concord Road, then down Sudbury road to St George’s. It was a half-mile walk all told, enveloped in mist and drizzle, following the hearse. There were a lot of people I didn’t know. I wondered if any of them were from Omega, but I doubted it.

  We sat through the service, which was my father’s last great act of hypocrisy, as he had been an atheist from the age of twelve. But to him, the social structures of the establishment, from the golf club to the church, were sources of power, and he had to be a part of them to use them.

  The pastor had asked me if I wanted to give a eulogy. I told him I didn’t. I had hated my father all my adult life. It was that hatred that had driven me to move to Eng
land and spend ten years training as a killer with the British SAS, and destroyed my relationship with Marni. It was true I had discovered a different man in him on the day he died, but that discovery was something between him and me, and that was how it was going to stay.

  I’d contacted my mother in England, told her her husband had died, as had Bob, her son. I didn’t tell her the details. I didn’t tell her that Marni, who had been like a surrogate daughter to her, had shot Robert, my father. I didn’t tell her that I had thrown Bob, her son, my brother, off a roof and broken his neck. I just asked her if she wanted to come to the funeral. Her reply was brief and to the point; ice cold in that way only the English know how. She told me that as far as she was concerned, they had both died a long time ago, and she invited me to visit her in England as soon as I could.

  So I sat in the ancient church and listened to the pastor commit my father’s soul to a God in whom he did not believe, in a heaven he did not deserve to occupy, and praise him for his acts of goodness and kindness towards humanity, a species he had conspired to decimate and enslave.

  His coffin was then carried out across the wet grass, through the lingering mist, among the twisted, gray fingers of the dead trees, to his grave: a gash of red earth in the green turf, among the tilted headstones of twelve generations of Walkers.

  He was lowered into the ground, watched by a chorus of black figures under shining black umbrellas that tapped out a wet, irregular rhythm of winter and death. The pastor said a last few words and somebody handed me a spade. I didn’t want a spade. I stepped over, took a handful of mud and stood looking down at the cask. Most of my life I had hated him, and the scar of that hatred had disfigured me. Now, in death, the most he could give me was a feeling of deep confusion. Maybe that was the most any of us could give each other. I threw the mud onto his coffin and bid him goodbye.

  People I didn’t know, but seemed to know me, filed past, shaking my hand and telling me how sorry they were. The crowd began to thin and the jostling umbrellas began to disperse. That was when I saw her. She was about fifty feet away, maybe a little less, standing in the shelter of a tree. Like me, she wasn’t wearing mourning. She was dressed in jeans, a long, oiled leather coat, and a leather hat. When she saw that I had seen her, she turned and started walking away through the trees, toward Concord Road.

  The remaining few mourners must have thought I was crazy, but if they knew my father, that was probably what they expected of me. I muttered an excuse and ran. I circled the grave where two men were shoveling in the dirt and sprinted through the mud toward the trees. By the time I got to the copse where she’d been standing, she had disappeared. I stumbled down the bank, through the slippery, dead leaves and saturated turf, grabbing at the tree trunks for support, and glimpsed her, thirty yards ahead of me, down by the road. There was a bleep and a flash as she unlocked her car. I scrambled, not wanting to shout her name in case somebody from Omega was there, in case Ben or Brown were still around.

  I heard the door slam and shouted, “Wait! I need to talk to you!”

  She pulled away as I exploded from the trees onto the glistening blacktop. The car was nondescript, a gray Ford Focus. I took a mental snapshot of the plate just before she disappeared from view toward Weston, and Boston.

  It was an Arizona registration.

  I made my way back to the house through the woods, avoiding the road, asking myself why the hell she had come to his funeral. To gloat? To repent? The Marni I had known would never gloat, but then the Marni I had known would not have killed a man either. Hatred can etch deep changes into a person. I didn’t know who she was anymore, and that gave me a sick pit in my belly.

  I hadn’t arranged for people to come back and drink and celebrate his life. His life was not something I thought should be celebrated. They could do that on their own time and their own dollar. Instead I had a hot shower, changed my clothes and told Kenny to bring some lunch to the study. He had a fire burning in there and as I closed the door and sat at the desk, for a moment I was surprised to realize it almost felt like home.

  I dismissed the thought and switched on my laptop. Fifteen minutes on Google told me that the gray Ford Focus belonged to Sarah Connors. I smiled. Cute. We had both loved that movie. The address, on East 26th Street, in Alvernon Heights, Tucson, was probably fake, like the name. But with fake names and addresses, like any kind of lie, it pays to stay as close to the truth as possible, and she knew that. My gut said she was in Tucson.

  Had she come in spite of me? Or had she come here because she wanted me to know it, too?

  There was a tap at the door and Kenny came in with a tray of cheese, pickles and warm bread. There was also a bottle of English bitter. You can keep your Belgian and your German and Czech. Real beer is made in the north of England. It’s man’s drink, and it is drunk at room temperature. That’s just the way it is.

  When I’d finished the cheese, I sat drinking the beer, smoking a Pueblo cigarette and gazing into the hot coals. However much I wanted to, I couldn’t second-guess her. The name she’d chosen to register the car, like the photograph she’d pinned to the board in the kitchen when she’d first disappeared and my father had asked me to find her, suggested she wanted me to know where she’d gone. But I kept coming up against the same anxiety, over and again. This was a different Marni. I didn’t know this Marni anymore. I had watched her kill my father, a man whom she had loved. I didn’t know what her motivation was, or what she was capable of.

  She was pursuing her father’s research, research that could bring Omega down, research that had driven Omega to order my father to kill him. I had exposed that truth to her, and now that she knew it, it was impossible to know how deep her desire for vengeance went, or what lengths she was prepared to go to. Yet, my father’s dying wish had been that I should protect her.

  I made my way up to my bedroom, pulled my old army rucksack from the wardrobe, and threw it on the bed. I opened my gun cupboard and thought about the weapons I might need. I wasn’t going into the wilds, I wasn’t going to be blowing anything up, all I needed was my Sig Sauer p226 and two extended magazines. I threw in the silencer, the telescopic sight with night vision, and my night vision goggles. I stared at the Smith & Wesson 500, decided against it and chucked it in anyway, because you never know when you’re going to have to stop a bus. I threw in a couple of tablets of C4 and a few detonators too, remote and universal for good measure.

  Let’s face it, in life you never know what you are going to need.

  Then I opened my tech cupboard and took out half a dozen tracking devices and a couple of listening bugs, plus my pack of lock picks. Those I had a hunch I would need.

  I wrapped it all in a pair of jeans, a couple of shirts and a handful of socks, and slung it over my shoulder. Then I went down to the kitchen to talk to Kenny and Rosalia.

  It was warm in there and smelled of baking.

  “Should we expect you back at any particular time, sir?”

  “I don’t know, Kenny. Maybe a week, maybe a little longer. I’ll keep you posted. Anyone calls, I’ve gone to Canada for the week.”

  Rosalia grabbed my face and gave me two huge kisses. “You gonna be careful! You take care don’ do nothin’ crazy! OK?”

  I smiled. “I’ll do my best, Rosalia.”

  I gave her a kiss, shook hands with Kenny, and stepped out into the mist and the drizzle. The taxi cab was waiting in the drive. I climbed in the back and slammed the door. The driver looked at me in the mirror.

  “Where to?”

  I knew that if she drove non-stop it would take her almost two days to get to Tucson. I could do it in a lot less than that in my customized Zombie 222. But the Zombie was a car that got noticed, and for the moment, whether Marni wanted me to follow her or not, I didn’t want her to know I was there. The Greyhound would get me to Tucson in just over two and a half days. That suited me fine.

  “The Greyhound Bus Station on Atlantic Avenue, in Boston.”

  “You got i
t.”

  Two

  Two and a half days on the bus gave me plenty of time to find a guest house. I wound up at Cissy’s on Avenida Fria, in the Presidio district. In early October in Arizona, it’s still warm during daylight hours. As I climbed out of my rental car and stood on the broad front porch that afternoon, with the desert hills behind me, I figured we were hitting eighty-five degrees under a perfect blue sky. It made a change from Massachusetts.

  The door opened and a pretty blond with freckles and mischievous eyes smiled and raised an eyebrow at me. I smiled right back.

  “Are you Cissy?”

  “Are you?”

  “Not last time I checked, but sixty-four hours on a Greyhound bus can do things to a man. You think we ought to check?”

  Her laugh was as cute as her face. She moved aside and let me in.

  “I think I’d better not. I could get into trouble!”

  I stepped inside. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  She led me upstairs to my room. It was plain, simple and comfortable, with a bed, a desk, and a chair. She leaned on the door jamb as I dumped my rucksack and looked around.

  “The rent covers bed and breakfast. You’re my only guest right now, so I can make lunch and dinner too, but that’s extra and you eat what I eat. There ain’t no menu a la carte. And Saturdays Red sometimes comes over for dinner, that’s my boyfriend, and if he does, then we eat alone.”

  “Lucky Red.” I took out my wallet and gave her a thousand dollars. Her eyes went wide as she took them and counted them. “Tell me when that runs out. I’ll try not to be around when Red visits. I’ll join you for dinner tonight. Steak and French fries will do fine. And a cold beer.”

  She gave me a once over that had more amusement than annoyance in it. “I told you, you eat what I eat.”

  “Then I guess tonight you’re eating steak and fries. About seven will be great.” I smiled nicely. “Now I need to do some work.”

  She giggled her pretty giggle. “You are going to be fun to have around, mister.”