on Earth.
It heats in my gut as I turn to my sisters. We’re in my office. It’s the first chance the four of us have had to talk face to face in days, and I take the three of them in at a glance.
Blonde and cool Teagan is removing the scarf, hat and sunglasses she wore while driving the taxi earlier in the day. Marta, ebony-haired and calculating, sets her motorcycle helmet on the floor beside her pistol and unzips her leathers. Pretty Petra is the youngest, the most attractive, the best actor and therefore the most impulsive. She looks in the mirror on the closet door, checking the fit of a chic grey cocktail dress and the dramatic styling of her short ginger hair.
Seeing the sisters like this, they’re each so familiar to me that it’s hard to imagine a time when we weren’t all together, establishing and projecting our own busy lives, while staying completely unaligned in public.
And why wouldn’t they still be with me after seventeen years?
I know. I keep track of such things. My dreams depend on it.
In any case, the sisters have lived under the threat of discovery for so long that it pervades their DNA, but that constant cellular-level menace has made them all the more fanatically devoted to me, mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Indeed, ever so gradually over the years, my dreams of vengeance have become theirs, along with a desire to see those dreams realised that burns almost as incandescently as my own.
Over the years, in addition to protecting them, I’ve educated them, paid for minor plastic surgery, and trained them to be expert marksmen, hand-to-hand fighters, con artists and thieves. These last two skills have paid me back tenfold on my investment, but that is another story altogether. Suffice it to say that, to the best of my knowledge, they are the best at shadow games, superior to anyone save me.
Now the jaded might be wondering whether I am similar to Charles Manson back in the 1970s, an insane prophet who rescued traumatised women and convinced them that they were apostles sent to Earth for homicidal missions designed to trigger Armageddon. But comparing me to Manson and the Furies to the Helter-Skelter girls is deeply misguided, like trying to compare a true story to a myth of heaven. We are more powerful, transcendent and deadly than Manson could ever have imagined in his wildest drug-induced nightmares.
Teagan pours a glass of vodka, gulps it down, and says, ‘I could not have anticipated that man jumping in front of my cab.’
‘Peter Knight – he works for Private London,’ I say, and then push across the coffee table a photograph that I found on the Internet. In it Knight stands, drink in hand, beside his mother at the launch of her most recent fashion line.
Teagan considers the photograph and then nods. ‘That’s him. I got a good look when his face smashed against my windscreen.’
Marta frowns, picks up the photograph, studies it, and then trains her dark agate eyes on me. ‘He was with Guilder too, just now, in the bar, before I shot. I’m sure of it. He shot at me after I killed the one guarding Guilder too.’
I raise an eyebrow. Private? Knight? They’ve almost foiled my plans twice today. Is that fate, coincidence, or a warning?
‘He’s dangerous,’ says Marta, always the most perceptive of the three, the one whose strategic thoughts are most likely to mirror my own.
‘I agree,’ I say, before glancing at the clock on the wall and looking at her ginger-haired sister, still primping in front of the mirror. ‘It’s time to leave for the reception, Petra. I’ll see you there later. Remember the plan.’
‘I’m not stupid, Cronus,’ Petra says, glaring at me with eyes turned emerald green by contact lenses bought just for this occasion.
‘Hardly,’ I reply evenly. ‘But you have a tendency to be impetuous, to ad lib, and your task tonight demands disciplined adherence to details.’
‘I know what I have to do,’ she says coldly, and leaves.
Marta’s gaze has not left me. ‘What about Knight?’ she asks, proving once again that relentlessness is another of her more endearing qualities.
I reply, ‘Your next tasks are not until tomorrow evening. In the meantime, I’d like you both to look into Mr Knight.’
‘What are we looking for?’ Teagan asks, setting her empty glass on the table.
‘His weaknesses, sister. His vulnerabilities. Anything we can exploit.’
Chapter 28
IT WAS ALMOST eight by the time Knight reached home, a restored red-brick town house that his mother had bought for him several years before. He was as exhausted and sore as he’d ever been after a day at work: run over, shot at, forced to destroy his mother’s dreams, not to mention being grilled three times by the formidable Inspector Elaine Pottersfield.
The Metropolitan Police inspector had not been happy when she arrived at One Aldwych. Not only were there two corpses as a result of the shoot-out, she’d heard through the grapevine that the
‘I should be arresting you for obstruction!’ she’d shouted.
Knight held up his hands. ‘That decision was made by our client, Karen Pope of the
‘Who is where?’
Knight looked around. Pope had gone. ‘She was on deadline. I know they plan on turning over all evidence after they go to press.’
‘You allowed a material witness to leave the scene of a crime?’
‘I work for Private, not the court any more. And I can’t control Pope. She has her own mind.’
The Scotland Yard inspector responded by fixing Knight with a glare. ‘Seems as if I’ve heard that excuse before from you, Peter – with deadly consequences.’
Knight flushed and his throat felt heated. ‘We’re not having this conversation again. You should be asking about Guilder and Mascolo.’
Pottersfield fumed, and then said, ‘Spill it. All of it.’
Knight spilled all of it: their meetings with Daring and Farrell as well as a blow-by-blow account of what had happened in the Lobby Bar.
When he finished, the inspector said, ‘You believe Guilder’s confession?’
‘Do dying men lie?’ Knight had replied.
As he climbed the steps to his front door, Knight considered Guilder’s confession again. Then he thought of Daring and Farrell. Were they part of these killings?
Who was to say that Daring wasn’t some kind of nut behind the scenes, bent on destroying the modern games? And who was to say that Selena Farrell wasn’t the gunman in black leather and a motorcycle helmet? She’d been holding an automatic weapon in that picture in her office.
Maybe Pope’s instincts were spot on. Could the professor be Cronus? Or at least involved with him? What about Daring? Didn’t he say he’d known Farrell from somewhere in his past? The Balkans back in the 1990s?
Then another voice inside Knight demanded that he think less about villains and more about victims. How was his mother? He’d not heard from her all day.
He’d go inside. He’d call her. But before he could get his key into his front lock he heard his daughter Isabel
