How quickly things changed. He had believed Caine a likely candidate to win Uplink International and forge a media/technology monopoly that would extend around the globe as no single entity of its type had done before… and as a plum for being instrumental in bringing that about, Armitage was to have been handed Uplink's biosciences division on a silver platter. Who could say what new treatments for his condition might have emerged with the company's resources at his disposal? Who could truly say?
But Marcus had disappointed him. Failed him, and none of that was to be.
He pulled air through his throat and released it in a watery sigh. Perhaps the ALS would get him in the end. Almost certainly it would. But he would live long enough to see Marcus go down first.
And no doubt write many interesting and widely read columns about his fall.
'There it is. You can check everything out if you'd like.'
Marcus Caine sat on the leather-cushioned sofa in his study, a square of mahogany wall paneling pulled back on his right to reveal an open wall safe.
The man he'd spoken to stepped across the room and peered into the safe. He reached a hand inside, extracted a banded pack of bills, rifled their edges, then put them back and looked into the safe another minute.
'It contains over a million dollars in cash. And some trinkets… diamonds, my dear wife has always loved her diamonds… worth a great deal more.'
The man shifted his gaze toward Caine. He was smallish with a pencil mustache and gray eyes that matched the color of his sport jacket.
'You sure you want me to do this?' he said.
Caine spread his arms over the top of the backrest, tilted his chin up, and laughed — a sound that reminded the man a little of crows.
'What's the problem? Are you afraid you'll screw up, the way your friends did at the airport? Or how about Sacramento — shall we discuss that merry fucking romp?'
'There's no reason to talk to me that way,' the man said. 'Those were tough assignments.'
Caine laughed his harsh, cawing laugh again.
'Then let's see you tackle an easy one,' he said. 'Earn your money this time. And spare me the humiliation of becoming the poster boy for Court TV for a year or so, to be followed by a lifetime of prison interviews.'
Silence.
The man walked across the room, stopped in front of Caine, and reached under his jacket. The weapon he brought out from underneath it was a Heckler & Koch.45 P9S.
A moment passed. Still standing there, he took a sound suppressor from his inside pocket and screwed it onto the barrel.
'You worried about how your wife finds you?' he asked.
Caine straightened, and brought his arms down off the backrest. The pained humor was gone from his face and his eyes were watery.
His mouth suddenly tightened.
'Earn your money,' he snapped. 'Make a fucking mess for her.'
The man nodded, cocked the gun, and angled its bore up at Caine's head. There was the sound of Caine sucking in air, and then the muted thud of bullets leaving the gun as he pulled the trigger ten times, emptying the magazine.
When his job was finished, the man holstered the gun, walked back around the couch to the safe, and quickly emptied it, transferring everything that had been inside to his briefcase.
He paused briefly at the door on his way out. Looked at the body and the blood on the sofa and walls. And nodded to himself with satisfaction.
Got what you paid for, he thought.
The inscription on the gravestone was elegant, a quote from Wordsworth:
O joy! That in our embers Is something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers, What was so fugitive.
Reading it, Kirsten wiped a hand across her eyes.
'I remember, too, Max,' she said. 'I remember.'
Behind her, Pete Nimec waited quietly, standing in the shade of the Japanese maples that grew where Blackburn had been laid to rest, his body flown back from Malaysia soon after his identity was confirmed.
Kirsten knelt over the soil that filled the grave, still loose under her fingers.
'Atman and Brahman,' she said. 'Sometimes, Max, we need illusion to show us the truth in ways we can manage… and though I can't be sure, I sometimes think you didn't understand that, and sold yourself short because you didn't. That you felt guilty about asking me to make difficult choices, and let that guilt get in the way of your opening up to me.' She felt moisture on her cheeks. 'The thing is, Max, I believe Roger Gordian is right. That you were really showing me the way to my own conscience. To my own heart.'
She tasted salt, touched her fingers to her lips, touched the place where Max's name was carved on the gravestone.
'You… what we had… it was Brahman, my sweet love,' she whispered. 'It was truth.'
Kirsten lingered there a moment, her eyes closed as if in prayer or repose.
Then she rose, turned from the grave, and strode slowly to where Pete Nimec was waiting.
'You okay?' he asked softly.
She looked at him, smiled a little.
'I will be,' she said.
