“I know. But, yes, with some help, they can safeguard him. Alexei will also have Special Branch detectives, should anything happen… to me, I mean.”
“Special Branch? I thought they were solely responsible for members of the Royal Family.”
“An exception was granted. I performed a special service for the Queen some time ago, and-”
“Special service? You saved her life, Alex. All their lives.”
“I had a lot of help, believe me. At any rate, when Her Majesty learned of my situation, she summoned me to Buckingham Palace. And very generously offered Alexei the protection services of Special Branch in the event of my-my passing. He will enjoy the same level of protection as the Royals for as long as he needs it. She even said she would be happy to have Alexei stay with her at Buckingham Palace if I was to be away on ‘business’ for any considerable length of time. He’d be safe enough there, I’d imagine.”
“Safe as houses, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Yes.”
“Her Royal Majesty is a wonder, isn’t she? A truly great and noble woman.”
“She is. There’ll never be another like her, unfortunately for England. She had a surprise for me while I was at Buck House. She intends to enlarge my tawdry wardrobe.”
“What do you mean?”
“She intends to add a few rather spiffy items. A dark blue velvet mantle, a black velvet bonnet with a plume of white ostrich and black heron feathers, a collar of gold, and a garter.”
“The Order of the Garter? Alex, how wonderful! The highest order of chivalry or knighthood in England, my God! I mean, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so, yes. I was deeply moved by her generosity and kindness in thinking me worthy.”
They both sat in silence for a few moments, lost in their own thoughts. Nell finally spoke.
“Alex, forgive me. But is all this discussion about Alexei’s future your extraordinarily gentle and kind way of firing me on the spot?”
Hawke laughed.
“Good God, no. Nell, listen. It’s only my very roundabout way of asking you to be my son’s godmother.”
“Oh! Alex, how very dear. Godmother, me? So unexpected, I don’t-don’t know what to say…”
“A simple yes would be the preferred response.”
“Of course, yes! Yes, of course! I would be honored beyond words to be your son’s godmother. Thank you for even considering me.”
“After all you’ve done for us, Nell, I would never consider anyone else.”
S tanding outside his bedroom door, she gave him a hug and then pulled away. It was late. Her room was one flight up.
“Good night, Alex. I thank you for the most wonderful night of my entire life. And I mean that with all my heart.”
“You actually enjoyed it?”
“I did.”
Hawke’s eyes were moist and full of questions.
“You might be the best girl there is, you know.”
“I wouldn’t mind being your best girl.”
“Then would you mind too terribly much if I gave you a good-night kiss?”
“Only if you swear not to frighten the servants.”
Hawke laughed and pulled her into his arms. The kiss, when it came, was full of real emotion and mutual animalistic need. When it was over, he took her by the hand and led her into his bedroom. Pelham had laid a fire against the chill rain outside and it was the only light.
“Can we sit by the fire?” she said, glancing nervously at the huge canopied bed lurking in the shadows.
“Of course,” Hawke said, pulling the feathery down quilt from his big four-poster. “We’ll sit by the fire and tell ghost stories.”
Hawke sat down first, looking up at her, finding her eyes in the flickering firelight.
“I want you so,” she said.
“And I you.”
She began to undress and he watched, taking in her beauty like a starving man, a man whose eyes were dying of hunger.
“Now you,” she said, dropping to her knees beside him. “I’ll help.”
When she was done, they lay down beside each other on the soft quilt and made love, their bodies coming together naturally and easily, no clumsy missteps, just wordlessly becoming each other’s favorite animal.
When Hawke awoke at dawn the next morning, she was gone.
He sat there before the hearth for a while, the quilt wrapped round him, thinking, staring into the dying embers.
One fire going out, one fire just starting, he thought, and the thought brought a warm light of happiness into his normally cold blue eyes that had been missing for a very long time.
Forty-three
Iran
Darius couldn’t sleep.
He was afraid of what he might find when he slept: more heinous visions of doom. The failure to achieve his vision, bearing witness to his own death, slipping beneath the waves of history without a trace. All of it worse than the worst nightmare. At night, his once-real dreams seemed to have fled. His lifelong goal of using the power of his own unique brain to change the world. To be a powerful force with dominion over all mankind. To be a brutish civilization’s salvation and ruler.
To clean up once and for all the fucking mess human beings had made of the planet. And the mess they made of the human species. Or, as Perseus called it, “global cleansing.” And, until now, working in secret with his most astounding creation, a quantum machine capable of superhuman intelligence he’d named Perseus, he had believed he was edging ever closer to realizing those dreams.
But, lately, he wondered.
Lately, he was afraid.
Perseus’s staggering intellectual powers were doubling every day, growing exponentially. Precisely as he and Dr. Cohen had calculated in the early days at the Stanford AI Research Institute. Soon, far sooner than his mother country’s loathsome president and the posturing mullahs in Tehran imagined, his machine would achieve the Singularity. One split second after that epic moment, there would be no more powerful “being” on the planet than Perseus.
Together, creator and creation, they would rule.
But in his dreams, unlike Perseus, he was not all-powerful, too. He was weak and alone. In these dreams he was frail, once more that frightened little cripple, about to be thrown out of his mother’s splendid palace, thrown to the wolves, left to fend for himself in a frightening world he had no knowledge of. Where people were dragged screaming from their houses in the middle of the night because they worshipped at the wrong altar. And then disappeared into prisons, into the ground.
In his night visions, he was not the boy wizard who had built his first computer when he was eight years old. And taught it to write poetry and symphonies to rival Mozart or Bach. Who made his childhood toys walk and talk, animated, as natural as any real boy. But he was not himself anymore. Not even a pale shadow. In his dreams he was negative space.
And these nightly visions and frightful apparitions had planted a seed; a dark, metastatic cancer was growing in his mind that could not be denied.
He fought the notion, his nagging doubts and suspicions, with all the considerable intellectual power at his command. He told himself it could not be possible that Perseus was insinuating these dreams into his mind. Planting these paralyzing thoughts. It just couldn’t be. Integral to the psyche he had built into the neural pathways of the
