The Six Messiahs

'Nonsense, I would have been happy to know you were alive....'

Jack shook his head once, with emphatic vehemence.

'I'm not.'

Doyle's heart tripped. Sparks wouldn't meet his eyes.

'Not in the way you suppose when you say it. Not in the way you assume.'

'Of course I had no way of knowing that, did I?' said Doyle.

'That woman. On the ship.'

'The medium? Sophie Hills?'

'You asked her about me.'

'She said that you weren't dead.'

'She was wrong. I did die. I stayed in this body and I died.'

'But Jack; you are alive, the fact remains you're standing here....'

' 'Life ... does not mean ... the same thing ... it does to you. There is no way ... this can be described.. . that would make you understand. Not any way ... that would have made you .. . happy.'

Jack spoke like an automaton, face drained of expression; unreachable. Spitting out the last word like a bitter seed. He was right about this much: He didn't seem human. And using the skills Jack had taught him to now analyze the man himself made Doyle feel vaguely treacherous.

A long silence. Jack turned away, looked out the window. Doyle's skin crawled, palms moist. But he waited for Jack to elaborate. You'll find I'm not the same man either now, old boy; I don't intimidate so easily.

'Didn't want you to see me like this,' Jack said finally.

Was there a trace of shame in his voice? For the first time, Doyle noticed Jack's hands folded behind his back; they were scored with angry red and white scars, fingers crooked, mangled. The fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand were missing. What had happened to him?

'Larry told me about it,' said Doyle. 'Found me in London. Nearly ten years ago now. How the two of you followed your brother's trail to Austria. Finding Alexander at the waterfall. Your fight. How you fell.'

'Yes. I read your story,' said Jack dryly, staring down at the city.

'And I'll make no apologies for writing about a man I thought long dead,' said Doyle, his back bristling; then, softening his tone: 'I went there, years afterward. With my wife: I'm married now. To Reichenbach Falls. I didn't see how anyone could have survived but someone said it had happened before. It was possible. But I never heard from you. ...'

Doyle trailed off; no response.

'The Queen sent for me,' Doyle went on. 'Months after our business with the Seven. An audience with Victoria herself: There I was, twenty-five years old, chatting with the Queen. She confirmed what you'd told me was true, that you'd been working for her all along. She never mentioned anything to suggest you might have survived....'

Why was he telling him what he must already know? Doyle realized he felt a compelling need to fill this gulf of silence between them with words and somehow bridge it, to find a way back to knowing him.

'She calls on me from time to time. Asks my opinion on one thing or another—I've never told anyone of our arrangement, at her request. But I continue to make myself available. Least I could do.'

Sparks kept his back to Doyle, offering no reaction.

'And Larry works for me; five years now. Soon as I made my way in the world, I sent for him. He's a splendid secretary. Indispensable to me; you'd be proud of him, Jack. He owes it all to you, leaving that criminal life behind. I know how much he'd love to see you.'

Jack shook his head, dismissing the possibility. Doyle had to rein back his anger again.

'But you're obviously still working for the Crown,' asked Doyle.

Finally he spoke, slowly, almost disembodied: 'Three years ago ... found myself outside the British embassy in Washington. Been in America for ... a while. Had them send a cable; coded message only I could have sent. Made its way through channels to ... the highest level. Response came back: Give this man whatever he needs. Stared at me like some new species pulled from the bottom of the sea.'

Why was he so frigid and ungiving? With all his observational acuity brought to bear, Doyle could not penetrate the man's veil of silence. Perhaps a more emotionally straightforward approach.

'You've never been far from my mind, Jack. After what Larry told me, I thought you were lost to us. You never knew how much you meant to me, how my life changed for the better from knowing you. If there was some small chance you'd survived, I thought surely you would have found a way to let me know. ...'

'You would never have known,' said Sparks sharply. 'Not from me.'

'Why?'

'This was circumstance. Unfortunate but unavoidable. Better you'd never seen me again.'

'Why, Jack?'

Sparks turned to him, angry, the glassy scars on his face stark against his pale skin.

'I am not the man you knew. Put him out of your mind. Don't speak of him to me again.'

'I must know what's happened to you....'

'Put a headstone over that memory. Move on. If you can't, there is no way for us to proceed: I'll leave and you will never see me again.'

Doyle struggled to contain his frustration. 'If there's no other way.'

Sparks nodded again, satisfied for the moment. 'Saw you on the ship, hoped you wouldn't get involved; still a chance you could avoid it....'

'Why should I now when I didn't before?'

'You are a man of position and reputation now. You have a place in this world. A family. More for you to lose.'

'Involved in what exactly? And how would anyone find out about what part I've played in this?'

'The fourth man escaped the ship when we reached port....'

'That seems unlikely....'

'No one found him.'

'Perhaps he threw himself overboard like the other one.'

'He was the last one left alive; his primary responsibility would have been to survive—'

'And report back to whoever hired them.'

Jack nodded. 'This fourth man will tell them of your involvement.'

Doyle's anger flared again. 'So you suggest I'm now in danger.'

'Greater than you imagine ...'

'Then for God's sake, stop talking in riddles and answer me plainly: I've had as much of this as I can swallow—I nearly lost my life a dozen times following your lead ten years ago, I'm under no obligation to prove myself to you again. You turn up out of nowhere like Marley's ghost with your secrets and mysterious connections and never a word in the last ten years, and you're right, Jack, I have gotten somewhere in the world, and I've a lot less patience for half-truths and pointed evasions, particularly where my personal safety is at stake. You can be blunt about what you're on about here or be damned as far as I'm concerned.'

The silence hung heavy between them. Neither man gave an inch.

'So when you say 'they,' ' said Doyle, 'who exactly do you mean?'

Sparks stared at him, unblinking, seemingly unmoved, but after making a decision behind his impassive gaze, he took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Doyle.

A lithograph of a woven coat of arms, an interrupted black circle on a field of white, three jagged red lines darting through the circle like lightning bolts.

'I've seen this design before,' said Doyle, as he took out the sketch he'd been carrying in his pocket and gave it to Sparks. 'Scrawled on the baseboard of Selig's cabin wall. I believe he saw it on the arm of one of his assassins—a scar or tattoo—and wrote it himself just before he died.'

'Do you know what it signifies?'

'Haven't the faintest. Do you?'

'For centuries something similar to this served as the official seal of the Hanseatic League.'

Doyle rummaged through his schoolboy memories: 'The Hanseatic League was an alliance of German