Beneath the crown was a ruddy-faced, balding man with a receding chin, a bulbous nose, and a wattled neck running to jowls; but his gray eyes looked out from under low, even brows, his teeth were straight, and his skin nicely tanned from many idle days on his boat. Turning sideways he sucked in his stomach and slapped his belly three times with a satisfied grunt. All in all, not bad for fifty-eight years, he decided.
He took another gulp of champagne and sauntered back into the bedroom, pausing at his desk to tap a button on the answering machine. There was a beep; a woman’s voice drifted airily into the room. “Teddy, where are you?” she spoke rapidly, her English lightly spiced with a Portuguese lilt. “I haven’t seen you for days, darling. I meant to come up, but Amanda is in town and I promised to have a drink with her. But do come down, my sweet. We’ll have a late supper, just us two. I’ve got a bottle of your favorite brandy. Okay?” There came the sound of a doorbell on the tape. “That’s Amanda. Gotta run. Kisses. Bye.”
“You mean Armando, don’t you, love?” He tapped the button again, and another voice came on — a man’s voice this time. It greeted him coolly and identified itself as representing the Foreign Office, whereupon Teddy jabbed a second button to cut it off. “Bastards,” he muttered; he had heard it all before.
As the machine rearmed its digital memory, Teddy dropped his hand to the center drawer of his desk, pulled it open, and took out a brown wooden box. He wandered back onto the balcony, set the box on the table, and drained his glass. He stood for a time, clutching the empty glass and staring out into the gathering darkness.
Coming to himself once more, he retrieved the bottle from the bucket and ceremoniously emptied the remains of the bottle into his glass, spilling most of it over the tablecloth. He then turned and heaved the empty bottle over the balcony. From the satisfying crash that followed, he guessed he had hit his new Alpha Romeo Spider in the driveway below.
“C’est la vie,” he murmured, and sucked at the rim of his overflowing glass.
He sat down heavily, sloshing champagne onto his bare thighs. Setting his glass carefully on the table, he brushed at the liquid and then took up the wooden box and placed it on his knees. He stared at the box for a moment, then opened it and withdrew the small, silver-plated British service revolver.
He hefted the gun in his hand, turned it, and peered at the cylinder to make sure that each chamber contained a bullet. He transferred the revolver to his left hand and took up his glass with the right.
“To England!” he growled, knocking back the champagne in a single gulp. “Bloody England.”
He gazed unhappily at the empty glass, then hurled that, too, over the balcony. Reaching up, he straightened his crown. Then, pressing the muzzle of the revolver tightly against his left temple, he gently squeezed the trigger and blew away the right side of his head.
Part I
One
Even as a child, James could remember feeling that some mysterious power held his fate in strong, infallible hands. Perhaps a youth spent in the Highlands — where ghosts and Fair Folk still haunt the hidden glens, and the quaint predictions of country sages and seers find enthusiastic reception among the locals — had shaped him more than he imagined. Superstition clings to the ancient hills like the gorse and heather, and it would be unusual indeed if an impressionable youngster did not imbibe something of his surroundings.
He did not ask for second sight; he never sought it, but simply accepted it as a feature of his unique being. In time, he learned that not everyone possessed the power of the fiosachd — Gaelic for “the knowing.” It covers a range of subtle manifestations — some physical, some mental — which most people view as extraordinary. As a child, however, James did not think himself unusual; he merely considered his gift a sign intended to confirm his special existence. Children are self-absorbed creatures, true enough, yet many was the time he had dreamed of greatness. Many was the time he had awakened in the night to the knowledge that his soul was destined for a higher purpose.
Of course, every child entertains similar thoughts of grandeur. Growing up, however, dulls the secret insistence; life’s harsher lessons teach us we are not so special after all. Sooner or later, we arrive at the cold realization that we will never be the first astronaut to set foot on Mars; we will not be the doctor whose miracle cure rids the world of cancer; we will not win fame and fortune and the eternal adoration of the masses through the wondrous artistry of our writing, singing, or acting.
Despite this — despite all evidence to the contrary — James never outgrew his belief that something amazing would happen to him one day. Although he did come to understand the natural limitations of circumstance, and the extreme randomness of opportunity, deep in his inmost being the belief in his own particular destiny doggedly persisted. Like the fiosachd, he was born with it, and it never deserted him. He had always known his life would end in one of two ways: triumph or tragedy. One or the other, but nothing less.
This produced a curious bravado. Once, when as a freshly commissioned officer with the UN peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, Captain Stuart was leading his small company of men down one of the many shattered streets of Kabul, the fiosachd began jangling like crazy. He recognized this as its usual manifestation — a sharp tingling or squirming sensation on the back of his neck or down between his shoulder blades — and by it he knew, as the company approached a deserted intersection, that they would be ambushed by snipers. The flesh between his shoulder blades began twitching, and in his mind’s eye he saw, as if in the very room with them, six black-turbaned rebels crouching at the windows of a bombed-out apartment block across the street.
He halted the company, chose two men to help him reconnoiter, and the three of them circled around and came into the building from the back. They climbed three floors up a mangled fire escape and crept down a blackened hallway to the room where James knew he would find the rebels. Without the slightest hesitation, he put his hand to the doorknob, pushed open the door, and strode into the room, demanding their surrender.
The six snipers were so surprised, they threw down their rifles and gave themselves up without protest. James’ men were likewise amazed; afterwards they made out that he was the fearless hero — a latter-day John Wayne beating back a war party of bloodthirsty Apaches with bare hands and a rifle butt. He won a commendation for saving the lives of a dozen men that day and capturing a valuable rebel cell without firing a shot.
He was also given a citation for valor — a fine gesture but one James felt superfluous. Although, as a career officer, he recognized the tremendous risk — of all the possible outcomes of such an action, the one actually resulting was the least likely — he knew in his bones it was not courage that had sustained him but simple conviction: he knew what lay behind the door and, just as surely, he knew his life would not end in that room.
Even James — who understood better than anyone else the peculiarities of his special gift — accepted the extreme improbability of his childhood intimations of greatness ever coming to fruition. After all, it is one thing to pretend oneself a prince or a pirate; but who, in all sanity, could imagine — much less orchestrate — the extraordinary interplay of incident and accident, chance and serendipity, as well as the immense complexity of enterprise needed to make such a pretense possible in reality?