Dark Chant In A Crimson Key

Harper shook her head, said firmly, 'Veil's not responsible for that, Robby, so stop talking like he is. He knows you, sweetheart, just like your brother and I do. Whatever it is Veil knows or suspects, I'm convinced there wouldn't have been any payoff for you in connection with the reason you came here, and it could have been dangerous information. He didn't want you harmed; he was just trying to protect you.'

'I needed information, not protection.'

'It wouldn't have helped you. Veil assured us of that, and Garth and I believe him.' Harper paused, squeezed my hand.

'Besides, there was another reason he was reluctant to say more to you than he did. He was afraid of your brother.'

'That's lunacy,' I said, wincing inwardly as Carlo, standing off to one side as Veil painstakingly searched under and behind the seat cushions of the limousine, shot me another pained, questioning look. I again averted my gaze. 'They may not get along too well, but Veil is no more afraid of Garth than Garth is of Veil.'

'You should listen to Harper, Mongo,' Garth said gruffly, 'because she's right.' He paused, glanced quickly at Harper, then looked back at me. 'If you remember correctly, I once tried very hard to kill him. The tension between Veil and me is my fault.'

'I remember all too well, Garth,' I said quietly.

Garth said to a startled Harper, 'Forget what you're about to hear; don't mention it to Veil.'

Harper nodded. 'You can talk freely.'

I started to protest, not wanting the woman I loved to hear things that could conceivably put her at risk one day, but Garth ignored me.

'The reason I tried to kill him,' Garth said to me, 'was that I blamed him for involving you in the Archangel business and almost getting you killed. I damn well would have killed him, but-thanks to you-I wasn't able to pull it off. Veil could have killed me, and he had every right to after the way I'd gone after him, but he chose not to. And he's never forgotten my rather extreme reaction to his sucking you into that mess; he didn't want to risk creating a similar situation by telling you things that might set you off on various courses of action and get you into trouble. He tried to simply warn you off, but you wouldn't listen. He didn't think anything he could say would be of any help to you, but the information could have proved dangerous: He was afraid I'd find out he'd talked to you, and contributed to any danger you might be in, and that I might come after him again. You're right that he's not afraid of me, Mongo, but he was very much afraid that he might have no choice but to kill me if I tried to lay my 'mad big brother' number on him again, and his killing me might not set too well with you. Veil's a good friend, Mongo, and a very good man-the finest I've ever known, except for you. Like I said, you owe him an apology.'

Veil had finished searching the limousine. It was obvious that he hadn't found anything, but it was just as obvious that he wasn't going to let that fact alter his and Garth's determination to get rid of Carlo. He took out his wallet to give the old man some money, but Carlo stiffened, shook his head, and backed away. Veil threw some bills through the open window onto the passenger's seat. Carlo hobbled around to the driver's side, paused with his hand on the door handle, looked at me. Then, in a gesture I found at once faintly ridiculous and profoundly sad, he waved to me. I waved back. Then Carlo got into the limousine, turned on the engine, and pulled away from the curb.

'It may not be so easy to make amends,' I said quietly to Garth as Veil came back across the sidewalk toward us. 'I said some pretty nasty things to him.'

'Oh, I don't really think it's going to be a problem,' Harper said brightly as Veil reached us, shrugged his shoulders to indicate he had found nothing incriminating on Carlo or in the limousine. 'Now be a good boy and do what your brother says. Make nice to Veil and tell him how sorry you are.'

'Right,' I said, and proceeded to do so.

As the waiter brought our drinks to the isolated table at the back of the half-filled restaurant in downtown Zurich where we had gone to eat and talk, Garth took a notebook out of his pocket. He set the notebook down in front of him, but did not open it. 'Anybody know how we can get hold of a gun or two around here?'

I looked at Veil, who shook his head. 'Not in Switzerland.'

'Just thought I'd ask,' Garth said with a shrug. He tapped the cardboard cover of the notebook, continued matter-of-factly, 'John Sinclair was born in Osaka, Japan, in nineteen forty-six to Henry and Anne Sinclair. The father was a midlevel career diplomat who'd gained a virtually permanent posting in Japan and had a reputation as having gone native, in a manner of speaking. He was a Japanophile. He'd been part of Mac Arthur's occupying army after the war, and he spent most of the remainder of his life there. According to one of the obituaries I read, the man became deeply steeped in Japanese culture and spoke the language fluently. Both the mother and father died under what were described as mysterious circumstances, when the son was nineteen years old, and there was some speculation that the couple had been murdered as retribution for the father having delved too deeply into the secrets and practices of certain mystical Japanese secret societies.

'John Sinclair's upbringing in Japan is shrouded in speculation and seeming contradictions; accounts differ, and there's a lot of obvious tabloid stuff that's fiction. However, I think we can safely assume that he was educated in the best American private schools there. He learned the language as a child, and so can be assumed to be fluent. Also, we can assume that the father arranged for him to begin learning the martial arts at a very young age. That's where he picked up his fighting skills. He attended graduate schools in both London and Paris and picked up the equivalent of a doctorate from the Sorbonne. His dissertation was on secret Japanese societies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He enlisted in the United States Army after he received his degree and was subsequently commissioned.

'Whatever he did in Vietnam is still highly classified, and I didn't want to take the time to try to dig it out, but I think it's also safe to assume that he was involved in intelligence and covert military operations in Laos and Cambodia, like Veil. He was a super-soldier.' Garth paused, sipped at his drink. He set the glass down, glanced at the man sitting on his left and my right, continued, 'There were two men in that war who received a disproportionately high number of medals for exceptional bravery above and beyond the call of duty. John Sinclair was one of those soldiers. The other was Veil Kendry.'

Harper reached across the table and squeezed Veil's hand. She waited until the waiter, who had arrived with our salads, went away, then said quietly, 'That's very impressive, Veil. Robby is always talking about your incredible martial arts skills, but he never mentioned that you were a war hero.'

There were several good reasons why dear Robby had never mentioned Veil's war record, which no longer officially existed; not the least of those reasons were the circumstances surrounding his dishonorable discharge engineered by the man who had been determined to celebrate an enormous political victory by killing his old enemy, Archangel-Veil Kendry. It hadn't worked out well for him. Although Orville Madison had very nearly killed not only Veil but also Garth and me, in the end it was Madison who died in a hail of bullets in a dusty congressional hearing room in the Old Senate Office Building. Kevin Shannon, President of the United States, had, for his own very good reasons, conspired to cover up the whole affair, and it was not a subject we wanted to talk about ever again, especially not to people we loved. Garth and I exchanged glances, and I was pondering ways to change the subject when Veil managed to at least steer it off into safer channels.

'I wasn't a war hero by any good definition, Harper,' Veil said casually. 'I was a war lover. Without boring you with too much of my personal history, suffice it to say that I was more than a bit mad back then. I loved the war, because that outlet for sanctioned violence helped me with a certain medical problem I suffer from, which is associated with brain damage I sustained when I was born. I dream vividly. Now my painting resolves the conflicts and enables me to function. But before I learned that I could paint in order to ease the pain, I picked up a lot of decorations in Southeast Asia simply because I usually managed to be where the fighting was; that's where I wanted and needed to be. That's a description of psychosis, not courage. Sinclair was brave, not psychotic-at least not back during the war years. Now. . well, I suppose there's no way of knowing.'

I watched as Veil leaned back in his chair and sipped at his drink. What he had said wasn't true; as far as I was concerned, he was a war hero, by any definition. Psychotic or not, he had risked everything to save a village marked for destruction by his controller for political reasons, and it had been that act which had led to his dishonorable discharge and sentence of death. But those facts were hidden away in the larger labyrinth of secrets about Archangel that were best kept that way.

Garth turned to Veil. 'How do you know this?'

Veil shrugged. 'About Sinclair's head back during the war? I don't know for sure. What I do know is that he