Michael could not go there. Not to that place. So he put his wolfen head down, and his wolfen body propelled itself forward, and though the old aches and agonies whispered through him and wanted to slow him down he loped onward into the woods, nearly soundlessly, his eyes seeking movement in the tangles of trees and folds of vegetation. They were here. They were close. Tonight there would be death.
Death had always been at his shoulder. It had always been leering at him, in the faces of many enemies. As he ran, searching, he thought of his trial by fire on the Caribbean island of Augustin Mireaux, the industrialist who had sold his soul and his nuclear missile plans to the Red Chinese. He thought of his battle against the drug-created assassin known as Chameleon that had begun in Paris, moved to Rio de Janeiro and ended in the Amazon jungle. He thought of his narrow escape with Aurore Bardot from Edward Wintergarden’s sinking submarine under the polar ice. He recalled Simon Tollemache’s barracuda pool, and the bloody massacre on the golf course at St. Andrews. He remembered Tragg, the killer with hypnotic eyes and two-tone shoes. He could trace in his memory every step through the deadly funhouse of Phaninath Po. All those and more remained in his head, though some he fervently wished he might forget. He wished he might forget about the Ginshi Kazoku—the Family of the Silver Thread—and the murder of the man he’d known as Mallory, but he could not.
This was why he was a hunter tonight. This was why he was ready to die, if he could kill at least one of them.
He loped onward at an easy pace, tasting the air for humans. These killers were careful. They were using an odor mask, which could be as simple as pine soap or as complex as a homeopathic drug. The Family of the Silver Thread was famous for its creation of exotic pharmaceuticals useful to the criminal underworld, as well as for its international trade in weapons and military secrets. It was said that the Silver Thread was woven through thousands of tapestries in dozens of countries, and trying to remove such a global intertwining of interests based on money and power was impossible and for the most part fatal. Last year Michael had succeeded in small part, by crippling a faction of the Silver Thread in Hong Kong. One of their weapons warehouses had gone up with an ear-splitting bang, a courier with a large suitcase full of money had found himself staring at a set of fangs just before they seized his throat, and the floating mansion of the jet-setting newspaper mogul and Silver Thread leader Anthony Tong had been sunk to the bottom of the bay with Tong’s body along as fishfood.
Something jumped in the brush as he approached. A rabbit, running for its life. It didn’t get very far before one of the other wolves emerged from the night to pounce on it, tear it to pieces and eat.
Michael went on, slinking close to the earth. There were many other wolves here. Real wolves, not questionable miracles such as himself. They came, stayed as long as they pleased, and then drifted away again. A few ran with him on a regular basis and seemed to see themselves as his ‘pack’ and he the alpha. Two days ago a new wolf had appeared in an area Michael thought of as the Four Brothers, which was a sloping meadow that held four huge granite boulders. The new wolf, coal black and smelling of maleness, had been lying up on one of the stones basking in the bright sunshine. When it saw him it sat upright, perhaps also recognizing the large black wolf with gray sides as the ruler of this domain. Michael noted that this new male had the rarity of ice-blue eyes, and the commanding way it held itself made him wonder if he wasn’t going to have to put up a fight to keep his kingdom.
Getting old was a bitch.
Michael suddenly stopped on his prowl through the woods. He had sensed something: a slow movement, a gliding from one patch of pure dark to another, a tensing of muscle before an action. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was there. An owl hooted distantly and another answered. The noise of the night’s insects was a low susurrus.
He waited, all his senses on high alert.
When Valentine Vivian had retired six years ago to his estate in Wessex and begun writing paperback spy novels that no reader on earth could take seriously, a new hale and hearty boy had taken the reins of Special Operations. This one was straight out of Oxford, he wore natty tweeds and a regimental tie of the Royal Green Jackets, and he smoked a meerschaum pipe like a whorehouse chimney burning buggy bedsheets.
This new boy, by the name of Cordwainer, greeted Michael Gallatin one day in his office with the brusque statement I understand you’re quite the hero. Only at that early point Cordwainer had understood nothing. After a summoning to Valentine Vivian’s estate where the master of suspense interrupted his latest epic to inform Cordwainer of things that Cordwainer needed to know, from that point on Cordwainer had declined to have Michael anywhere near his office and peered around corners to make sure the hero wasn’t lurking in the shadow of the potted ficus tree.
Michael began moving again through the Welsh woods. Slowly…slowly…inch by inch. His left shoulder protested this movement, and his right hind leg felt on the verge of a cramp. His eyes ticked back and forth, measuring space and darkness and distance. His nose sniffed, searching the air. His ears were up, twitching.
After the scene in Hong Kong, Mallory had come to visit Michael in Wales. It seemed to Michael that Mallory had always looked like an elderly man, but maybe part of it had been stagecraft because Mallory in his dark blue suit and with his white hair combed and parted looked not much older to him than the day they’d sat drinking Guinness at a North African airstrip sixteen years before. Mallory had to be in his late seventies by now, yet perhaps he had against all odds retained the soul and spirit of a hale and hearty boy.
Valentine Vivian had been the head of Special Operations. Cordwainer What’sHisName was currently the head of Special Operations.
But Michael knew that this man sitting in his den, smoking a black briar pipe, was Special Operations, and it was a lifelong position.
The word, Mallory confided, was that the Silver Thread had taken photographs with a long-lensed Leica. That Michael had been trailed by their professionals and the pictures snapped at an unfortunate moment.
Michael had known what he meant. The Family of the Silver Thread had photographic proof of him changing from man to wolf, or back again.
Be very, very careful, Mallory had told him. They may want your skin, or your heart, or your head. Or they may want all of you. So be very, very careful. But not more than a month later, it was Mallory who had not been careful enough. Missing for more than a week, he was found in the trunk of an abandoned taxi in an East London junkyard with his throat cut and his eyes gouged out. Valentine Vivian hired a small army of bodyguards and went on an author’s tour of America, his author’s name being Evelyn Tedford, and Cordwainer the new boy bought an attack dog to patrol his recently-acquired electric fence.
Had something moved, or not?
Michael got still. He heard the owl hooting again, and another answering. It came to him that just possibly they were not owls after all.
The night hung on the edge of violence.
There was this hero thing, Michael had often thought in less troubled times. This concept of the man of action. After all this time, he realized Rolfe Gantt had been right.
Everyone loved the hero, but the hero walked alone. It was the nature of the hero, to be solitary. To live life on his own terms, and in his own time. To be neither rushed nor to rush toward oblivion, yet oblivion would claim the hero just as it claimed every ordinary man. And love? Ah, that. Love. What woman was it who could truly love the hero? Oh, they might wish to brush against the heroic flesh, or to have some fling in the heroic bed and make for themselves some memory of a heroic night, but love? No. When the chips were down and the night was cold, it was the ordinary man who won the heart. The man of meat-and-potatoes, the man who stayed fixed in place, the man who saw his destiny and future in a family, the man to whom wife and daughter or son transformed life into a hero’s dream.