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.
Through the portico he saw that the main door stood open.
There was something in the doorway, a dark shadow on the floor. As he got closer the shadow became a shape, and the shape became a body dressed in an immaculate black suit, white shirt, white gloves and bow tie. There was a single entry wound in the center of Maxwell’s forehead, a cyclopean third eye. There wasn’t a lot of blood and there was very little damage. Powder burns rimmed the wound. The gun had been pressed up close to the butler’s head. He had that look of surprise on his face that robbed every dead man of his dignity. Even in death it didn’t look as though Max had a hair out of place. Frost knelt and closed his friend’s eyes, then he stepped over the dead man and into the house.
Nonesuch had that eerie silence that accompanies a death house. It was as though the old stones were aware of the tragedy playing out within them. Frost crept into the hall, listening to the silence. He could hear the faintest hint of voices. The old grandfather clock across from the fireside chessboard told him how late it was. The old man would be in his room by now. The house might have been a warren of mezzanines, hidden servants’ stairs and out of the way pantries, but the old man only used a fraction of the rooms. The chair kept him on the lower level; habit kept him in the same handful of rooms down here.
Frost crept across the hall.
The voices were quiet now.
He preferred it when he heard them. Dead men didn’t talk. As long as they were talking all was almost well with the world. Just keep them talking, he prayed silently to whoever was listening. He ghosted toward the control room and tapped his personal code into the lock. The beep that acknowledged the right access code and opened the lock mechanism sounded sharp and too loud in the silence. He knew realistically it wouldn’t have carried to any of the other rooms, but that didn’t stop him from biting his lip and easing the door open painfully slow.
Frost slipped inside and eased the door closed behind him.
The room was empty. The array of screens either showed Konstantin Khavin in various frozen frames as he hurled himself at the Pope, or the shadow-wreathed shape of Orla Nyren, naked and chained to the wall of a dank cell. Frost hadn’t seen the images before. They took his breath away for a moment. He wanted to do something. Anything. Every instinct screamed at him. These were his people, his team, and they were in trouble. The only one who wasn’t in trouble was Noah, which, given the usual series of events, was just plain wrong.
The staircase down to Lethe’s den was still covered. It wasn’t the only way down, but if he was going to go sneaking down there to stage a rescue, that was the way to go. He wished he’d paid more attention when Lethe gave them the briefing on the tabletop computer. He was pretty sure he could call up images from hidden cameras in all of the rooms, but he didn’t have the slightest idea where to start and was more likely to set the sprinklers off than turn the security cameras on.
He had come in to the control room for a reason. Lethe had designed the room as a digital fortress. From here Frost could lock down the most vulnerable areas of Nonesuch, protecting the team’s identity, and more importantly, their benefactor’s. He could also isolate various parts of the house. He hit the panic button. There were no sirens, no flashing lights. Lethe’s design didn’t need it. In ten seconds flat the manor house became a steel trap, literally. He heard the rumble and felt the shiver of inch-thick steel sheets slamming into place. They were interspersed in various strategic points around the manor, isolating the wings, key rooms and the exits. There was no way in or out of Nonesuch. And this time the noise would have carried to every room in the house, but as long as the intruder didn’t pry Max’s eyes from his dead head, Frost had the only key: his bright blue eyes.
The set-up had appealed to Lethe’s sense of the theatrical. The whole idea of a retina scan seemed far too Blade Runner for Frost, and the recessed steel doors like something out of the Death Star, but right now he couldn’t argue with the genius of any of it. If the lad wanted to recreate his own movie sets, so be it. The one unarguable fact was that no one was leaving Nonesuch without the right eyes.
Lockdown established, Frost had a binary decision to make: down to Lethe or back to the old man. He had only seen one bike and one set of tracks, meaning one intruder. The fact that he had heard voices in the old man’s room decided it.
He slipped out of the room.
He had been in there less than thirty seconds. The hand on the grandfather clock hadn’t moved.
The main door out to the grounds was blocked by a thick metal plate. It had sliced through Max. The cut hadn’t been clean. If it was the difference between his murderer escaping or not, he knew Max would forgive him.
Frost heard the voices, louder now. The old man and a woman. The old man was begging. Frost didn’t hesitate.
He ran toward the old man’s study.
“What the hell was that?” the woman barked at him. The echo of the steel sheets slamming into place reverberated through the floor.
Sir Charles smiled. Frost had arrived. There was a chance he might make it out of this alive, but if not, at least he had the consolation of knowing that his killer was not about to disappear into the night. It all depended upon the woman and whether her pity outweighed her killer instinct. It wasn’t exactly a sure thing, but he was playing the only hand he had-the helpless old cripple card. With any luck she’d underestimate him, or his blathering would buy Frost enough time to find them. “The Bat Cave,” the old man said.
He had wriggled the chair around so far he couldn’t see her face in the mirror anymore. The benefit of that was that she couldn’t see his, either. The old man twisted hard on the wheel with his left hand, wedged his foot beneath the edge of the bed and pulled down on the other wheel with his right, deliberately unbalancing the chair. He leaned forward and fell, sprawling across the rug. The chair came down on top of him.
He clawed his way out from under the chair, emerging on the window side of the bed. His walking stick was tantalizingly out of reach.
“You really are something,” the woman said, dragging the chair out of the way. “It’s a pity I have to kill you.”
“It’s a pity I have to die,” Sir Charles said. He dragged himself another six inches across the floor, toward the stick leaning against the wall. He willed her to keep on underestimating him. He twisted to look up at her, then deliberately, slowly, let his gaze drift back longingly toward his walking stick, knowing she would follow it, and knowing she wouldn’t think for a minute what a devious old fool he was. The walking stick was more than just an old man’s affectation, and he wasn’t about to beat her over the head with a stick of wood. It was a sword cane. One twist of the elaborately carved handle and the brass coupling would break. There was an eighteen-inch blade secreted inside the wooden shaft. If he could get to it, and get her close enough, there was a chance. A slim one, but that was infinitely preferable to none.
He dragged himself to within touching distance of the stick.
“Well, no, there’s no pity in it at all, is there?” she said, coming around the side of the bed to stand over him. “This feels like killing my own grandfather,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t enjoy that, either.”
The old man was on his stomach, one leg twisted uncomfortably because it was still trapped beneath the bed frame, the other up by his side. He looked like a chalk outline waiting to be drawn around. The sword cane was six inches from his fingers. So close yet so far away. Everything around him developed a sense of hyper-reality. He saw the threads of the rug and smd the rubber that had worn itself into them with all of those back-and-forths in the wheelchair. Even the grain in the wooden bed frame seemed so much starker, like seeing the truth of a treasure map for the first time.
He heard the study door burst open, but didn’t waste time trying to turn. He knew it was Frost. He used that fraction of a second to push himself the last six inches to the sword cane. He reached out, barely grazing it with his fingers, then stretched, finding another inch in his reach. His hand closed around the thin wooden shaft. He pulled the sword cane to his chest and broke the shaft. It took less than a second, an entire second where he expected to hear the silenced gunshot and be swallowed by the nothing of death.
As soon as the blade was clear of the sheath he lunged upward with it. He didn’t have the reach, but after
