“Yeah,” I agreed, “maybe. But you’ll be deader’n shit.”
“True.” He contrived not to look impressed. I wondered why. “So where’s that leave us?”
“Having a chat.”
“What would you like to chat about?”
“It starts with an ‘e.’”
He chuckled. It made his eyes crinkle, and I realized that he looked exactly like Mr. Rogers. Swap the lab coat for a cardigan and it’s him. It gave this whole thing an extra layer of surreal weirdness.
“Can we pause to appreciate the wonderfulness of my trap?” he asked.
“Yes, hooray, I’m sure you’ll get your Mad Scientist merit badge.”
He pursed his lips. “Sadly you won’t get the Be Prepared badge. You came in here alone?”
“He’s not alone,” said Violin. “He brought a date.”
We all laughed about that. The laser sights never budged, though. Not theirs, not ours.
“You want to cut to it, friend?” I said. “You set a trap and we walked into it. Now we have a standoff. What’s the punch line here?”
“Oh, it’s pretty simple,” he said. “I’m in charge of quality control here. Our clients had some questions about our security. Despite all of our assurances that we have excellent security as well as redundant, fail-safe and alternative systems, they were still jittery. So I arranged a practical demonstration. We, um, leaked some information to several law enforcement agencies, domestic and foreign, over the last fourteen months. Different information to each agency, and leaked in ways that would encourage them to keep that information in-house. You know how you fellows in the alphabet agencies hate to share. Since then we’ve had the FBI, the CIA, Homeland, the DEA, and a few other groups come poking around. Not here, of course, and never the same company twice.”
“You’re not Marquis Pharmaceuticals?”
“Oh, hell no. And, by the way, Marquis doesn’t actually know we’re down here. At least, no one in authority does. We own key members of maintenance and security, as we do with fifty or so other companies, including the construction company that built this place, the zoning board, and the various federal offices that watchdog facilities of this kind. That’s the real way to get things done, you know. Forget about corrupting the high-profile executives. They’re always being watched and audited. No, the secret is to own the blue-collar grunts and the watchdogs because nobody of consequence is looking at them. It’s the same way with some of the financial games we have running — we have our people in the IRS, the SEC, as well as Wall Street. We own the people who are paid to look for the bad guys.”
“That has a familiar ring to it,” I said.
His smile turned into a grin.
“I’ll bet it does.”
“You’re the Seven Kings,” I said.
His grin kept getting bigger.
Oh fuck.
The Seven Kings were the world’s most powerful and elusive organization. They pretended to be an ancient secret society and reinforced that by hijacking the history and urban legends of other secret societies, from the Illuminati to the Neo-Templars. They also pretended to be terrorists, but in truth they used terrorist groups as pawns, funding and supporting them and ultimately aiming them at specific targets. Terror, however, was only a byproduct of their game, and they weren’t in it for God or to further a political agenda. They were in it for the money. If you knew exactly when a major terrorist attack was going to happen, you could make an incredible fortune during the flight-to-safety stock market panic that always follows. The Kings were behind 9/11 and the 2009 economic crash. Three of the Kings — Osama Bin Laden, Sebastian Gault, and Hugo Vox — were dead. That left four of them, and any replacements they might have recruited.
“I am a very small cog in the machine that is the Seven Kings,” he admitted. “The organization, however, is always growing. And in case you’re wondering, we’ve filled all outstanding vacancies. Killing me won’t stop this project, and it won’t prevent our clients from receiving the fruits of our research.”
“Let’s see if that’s true after I blow your nutsack off.”
He just grinned.
“Okay, Sparky,” I said, “so you duped me here with an anonymous phone call. You also put out the stuff about Ryerson?”
“Sure,” he agreed. “Mr. Ryerson is one of ours. Very low level, but like I said, that’s where the action is.” He turned his smile toward Violin. “We were hoping for Interpol or a Recces operative from South Africa. But I don’t think that’s who you are.”
“She’s a Jehovah’s Witness,” I said. “She wants to know if you heard the word of God today.”
“Cute.”
Violin thought so, too. She laughed. There was a bit of a threat in the laugh, too. And a bit of fear.
“I wasn’t clear on something,” said the guy, “so let me correct that. When I said that I didn’t know who you were, miss, I meant personally. I know which organization you belong to. Arklight has become quite a troublesome little sewing circle. That’s why I invited representatives of our newest client to join us.”
“Joe…,” murmured Violin, and even as she said it I heard a soft scuff behind us. I turned. Door number two stood open, and two Red Knights stood there.
They were also smiling.
Their mouths were filled with jagged teeth. You see teeth like that in monster movies, but in the movies they’re fake. They’re special effects. That’s not the case with the Knights. Those teeth are way too real. Both of the Knights carried weapons that looked like ice axes. Dagger-tipped on one end, hatchet blade on the other.
The Knights looked at me with their rat-red eyes and dismissed me with sneers. The looks they gave Violin were different. Women in general were less than nothing to the Red Knights, which was a viciously patriarchal society. Women were slaves and breeding stock. But Arklight was different. Those women had killed many of the Knights and hunted them around the world with the same ferocity as Nazi hunters after World War II. It was kill on sight on both sides, and I knew that they would go after Violin with every intention of killing her while making the torment last.
The fact that they didn’t attack her immediately suggested that they didn’t know who she was. If they knew that she was Violin, daughter of Lilith, there would already be blood on the floor.
I jerked my head toward the Knights. “And them? The Seven Kings are recruiting monsters now?”
“Oh, hell,” said the scientist, “we’ve always recruited monsters. I believe you’ve encountered some in the past.”
“So, what’s the play?” I asked. “We all know how this ends, so tell me why we’re still chatting.”
He nodded. “You’re right, we do know how it ends. Ideally I live, you die, my clients are satisfied that we know who’s looking at us and, more importantly, how they’re looking and how they typically respond. So far there have been no surprises. The administrator in me appreciates that, because it allows the Kings to continue working the way we’ve always been working, knowing that the blunt predictability of the United States government’s various law enforcement agencies actually contributes to our success. However, the sociopath in me — and, yes, I admit it; in the Kings that’s both a job requirement and pathway to promotion — that part of me is disappointed in how clumsily you’ve walked into this trap. I thought that the DMS would send someone of greater skill.”
I shrugged. “Life sucks sometimes.”
He gave a sad nod of agreement. “So true. Anyway, to answer your question, the ‘play’ is that you get a choice. We want to know exactly how the information we leaked was disseminated internally by your organizations. Who received it, who processed it, who had eyes on it, how and to whom was it shared. That sort of thing. A complete rundown.”