“All right,” I said to Penny. “Put out the call. All field agents to come home.”
“That could be dangerous for some of them,” said Penny. “Staying out of sight is all that’s keeping some of them alive.”
“Well, tell them to use their best judgement,” I said impatiently. “But unless they come back to the Hall to be vetted, they won’t be considered for one of the new silver torcs. Tell them they can use the old secret paths; I’ll authorise the extra expense.”
I moved over to the main operations table, picked up a sheaf of the latest reports, and thumbed quickly through them. People around the table looked scandalised. Such material was only for the eyes of the Matriarch. Everyone knew I’d replaced Martha as head of the family, but it clearly still hadn’t sunk in for a lot of people.
“Where’s Truman?” I said finally. “I don’t see anything about him here. Don’t we have any recent updates about Manifest Destiny? They must be regrouping by now, so why don’t I see anything on their new base, their new centre of operations? Come on, people; I’ll settle for a best guess. An organisation that big can’t hope to start up again without leaving all kinds of telltale traces. Follow the leader, follow the money, follow the threads on the message boards; but find them! They can’t just have vanished!”
“Intelligence is working on that,” Penny said calmly. “We haven’t all forgotten how to do our jobs, just because you’re not here to hold our hands. But Manifest Destiny gives every indication of having climbed into a deep hole and then pulled it in after itself. They may be weakened, after what you did to them, and well done you, but their security is still first rate. And Truman…was and is a genius. You should have killed him when you had the chance.”
“I never had the chance,” I growled.
“What do you think he’ll do now?”
“Hard to tell. He’s a genuine fanatic, dedicated to his cause; running the world the way he thinks it should be run, and everyone else eliminated. He was held back in the past by the Zero Tolerance faction…Without them to rein him in, God alone knows what atrocities he’s planning now.”
“His old base, down below the Underground train system, is completely deserted,” said Penny. “We’ve got a few people there, looking around, hoping to turn up something useful.”
“Hold it,” I said. “There were only two field agents in London: me, and Matthew. I’m here, and he’s dead, so who have you got running around under London?”
“Volunteers,” Penny said sharply. “The work has to go on, even if you’re…distracted. Not everyone wants to hide here in the Hall until you get around to handing out new torcs. Some of us still understand about duty and responsibility.”
“Don’t lecture me,” I said. “Just…don’t. Not after everything I’ve seen, and done. But you’re quite right, of course. The work does have to go on. The world won’t stand still, just because we’re having a crisis in the family. Volunteers, eh? It’s good to know we’ve got a few brave souls left. Have they turned up anything useful?”
“Ask them yourself,” said Penny. “We’ve got a direct video feed set up. Fully secured, of course.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “All right, patch me through.”
Penny nodded to the communications board, and remarkably quickly one of the great display screens cleared to show shifting views of a dark, shadowy chamber, with details picked out by jumping flashlight beams. Silhouetted figures moved jerkily among banks of silent equipment. It took me a long moment to recognise the usually bright, shining steel corridors of Manifest Destiny’s high-tech headquarters. All the electric lights were out, and all the equipment shut down. Loose papers fluttered here and there, left behind in the rush to leave. It was like looking at the excavation of some recently opened tomb in the Valley of the Kings. A shadowy figure approached the camera.
“Will you please stop bugging me?” said a harsh voice. “We’ll contact you when we’ve got anything worth reporting. Whole place is a mess. We’re having to move carefully because the bastards found time to leave a whole bunch of booby traps behind, before they scarpered. Trip wires and grenades, mostly. Wouldn’t bother us if we had our torcs, but as it is… We’re moving deeper into the heart of the bunker, but it looks like they took everything of value with them and trashed the rest. A localised EMP took out all their computers; we’ll bring back the hard drives just in case, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Oh, and we’ve found some bodies. Too far gone to identify, unless you want us to take DNA samples. Looks like they were setting one last trap when it went off in their faces.
“That’s it; end of report. Except to say it’s cold, and damp, and I’m sure I’m coming down with something. Now go away and bother someone else, we’re busy. I want us finished and out of here before some other organisation gets the bright idea to come down here and see if there’s anything worth salvaging.”
“This is Eddie Drood,” I said.
“Well, whoop de doo. Colour me impressed. You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“No,” I said.
“Let’s keep it that way. We’ll be home soon; put the kettle on.”
And he shut down the video feed from his end. Everyone was looking at me, so I was careful to smile. “I don’t know who he is, but I like his style. He reminds me of me. See to it I get a full report from him, the moment he turns up here. In the meantime, keep working on tracking down Truman’s new base of operations. He’s got to be planning something nasty, to reestablish himself, and I want to know all about it well in advance.”
“You see?” said Penny. “You can act like you’re in charge, when you put your mind to it.”
All meetings of my Inner Circle took place in the Sanctity, the huge open chamber that once held the damned Heart, before I destroyed it. The Circle met in the Sanctity because it was the only place in the Hall I could be sure of absolute privacy. The Sanctity had been designed to contain the dangerous other-dimensional emissions of the Heart, and nothing could penetrate the Sanctity’s powerful shields. The other-dimensional strange matter that I had brought to the Hall occupied the Sanctity now. It manifested as a warm, happy crimson glow, radiating from a single silver pearl of strange matter. Just standing in the glow made you feel good. Calm and relaxed and secure, in body and thought and soul. In fact, it felt so good that access to the Sanctity had to be strictly limited, for fear of people becoming addicted. The strange matter swore that couldn’t happen, but I’ve learned not to believe everything I’m told.
The point is that thanks to the Sanctity’s shielding, and the strange matter’s unusual emissions, no one can listen in on the Inner Circle’s meetings. And there’s always someone trying to listen in, in the Hall. It’s the only way you ever learn anything that matters.
Penny came to a halt just inside the Sanctity’s door as she took in the full effect of the scarlet glow. Her face softened, and she smiled a real smile, quite unlike her usual cool effort. She looked calm, and happy, and at peace with herself. It didn’t suit her. She made a deliberate effort to push the effect away and regained some of her usual composure.
“Remarkable,” she said. “Reminds me of standing in front of one of Klein’s famous Blue paintings, in the Louvre.” She noted my surprise and raised a supercilious eyebrow. “I do have some culture, you know.”
“Then you should put yoghurt on it,” said Molly.
Penny and I looked around, and there were the rest of my Inner Circle, staring at us suspiciously. The good feeling from the crimson glow vanished from me immediately. I hadn’t expected this to be easy, but the grim faces on the assembled Circle made it clear this was going to be an uphill battle all the way. I took Penny by the arm and led her forward, glaring right back at the Circle.
“Penny is one of us now,” I said firmly. “A full member of the Inner Circle. And I don’t want to hear any more insults. I trust her, and so should you.”
“Just like that?” said Molly dangerously.
“Yes,” I said.
Molly looked at the rest of the Circle. “I’ll knock him down, you get the straightjacket on him.”
“I need advisors from all parts of the family,” I said patiently. “Including the traditionalists.”
“You mean the ones who wanted you and me dead?” said Molly. “The ones who declared you rogue, and secretly ran Manifest Destiny behind the cover of the Zero Tolerance faction?”
“That’s the ones,” I said. “Except that Penny was never Zero Tolerance. She told me so.”
“And you believed her?” said Molly.
“Of course,” I said. “She’s family.”
“So,” said Penny. “This is the infamous Inner Circle? This is what has replaced the Matriarch’s Council, sanctified by centuries of tradition?”
“Yes,” I said. “Eventually the Inner Circle will give way to a new Council, to be elected by the family. About time we had some democracy around here.”
“Democracy?” said Molly.
“Shut up, dear, I’m talking,” I said. “The old Council had to go, Penny. They were all corrupt. They knew the truth about the torcs, and they never did anything about it. They knew the truth about the family’s true role in the world, and they just went along with it.”
“Elected…” Penny said thoughtfully. “By the whole family, or just the ones you end up giving new torcs?”
I grinned at the Inner Circle. “You see? That’s why she’s here; to ask the necessary awkward questions.”
I looked round the Circle, but it didn’t seem that impressed. My Inner Circle consisted of Molly Metcalf, my uncle Jack the family Armourer, the ghost Jacob Drood, the Sarjeant-at-Arms, and now Penny. I could have ruled the family on my own—declared myself Patriarch, or something—but I’d seen where that led. Power tends to corrupt, and the Droods are the most powerful family in the world. So I chose people to advise me who I could trust to tell me the truth, whether I wanted to hear it or not; and who together might just be a match for me, if I looked like getting out of control. Penny nodded formally to the other family members of the Circle, though she couldn’t bring herself to look Jacob in his ghostly eyes; but she had only a cold, distant stare for Molly.
“I might have known you’d stick your girlfriend in a position of power,” she said sweetly. “You always were a soppy romantic, Eddie. You must know she can’t be allowed authority over the family. She just can’t. I mean, she’s an outsider.”
“She’s with me,” I said flatly. “Accept it, and move on. Or there’ll be tears before bedtime.”
The Armourer made his usual impatient harrumphing sound, meaning he had something important to say, and he was going to say it whatever anybody else felt. He was wearing his usual chemical-stained and lightly charred lab coat; a stick-thin middle-aged man with far too much nervous energy, and not nearly enough self-preservation instincts. He designed and built weapons and gadgets for agents in the field, aided by a fiercely questing intellect and a complete lack of scruples. He wore a grubby T-shirt under his coat bearing the legend
Weapons of Mass Destruction; Ask Here
. He once created a nuclear grenade, but couldn’t find anyone who could throw it far enough. Two great tufts of white hair jutted out over his ears, the only hair on his head apart from bushy white eyebrows. He had calm gray eyes, a brief but engaging smile, and a somewhat jumpy manner. Plus a pronounced stoop, from far too many years spent hunching over the designing board, working on really dangerous things.
He was my uncle Jack, and I would have died rather than disappoint him.
“I can’t stay long,” he said abruptly, scowling fiercely about him in his usual manner. “I’ve had to leave my interns alone and unsupervised in the Armoury, and that’s always dangerous. To them, as well as their surroundings. And of course they’re so much more vulnerable these days, without torcs to protect them. Though it doesn’t seem to have slowed them down any. I had to take a superstring away from one of them the other day. How did the Overdrive work on the Bentley, Eddie? I’m rather proud of that…I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the bugs out now.”
“Only pretty sure?” said Molly. “Now he tells us…”
“It worked fine,” I said. “I’ve put the Bentley into the Armoury for some minor repairs.”
“What? What?” said the Armourer, bristling. “What do you mean, minor repairs? What have you done, Eddie? What have you done to my lovely old Bentley? You crashed it, didn’t you? You crashed the Bentley after I told you I was only loaning it to you!”
“No, I didn’t crash it,” I said calmly. You learn to keep your calm in conversations with the Armourer, on the grounds that he’ll be emotional enough for both of you, and one of you has to be calm and it certainly isn’t going to be him. “I just picked up a few very
minor
dents and scratches, during a trip through the side dimensions.”
“I’m going back to the Armoury.”
“No, you’re not!” I said quickly. “We have important matters to discuss.”
“Important matters, eh?” the ghost of Jacob said brightly. “That sounds important.”
Jacob tried hard, but he just wasn’t as focused as he used to be. When he lived, or rather existed, in exile in the old chapel around the back of the Hall, he used to sit around quite happily in his ghostly underwear, watching the memories of old television programmes on a set with no insides to it. Most of the family wouldn’t talk to him, but he and I had been good friends since I first sought him out as a child. (Because I knew I wasn’t supposed to.)
Now that he was officially a part of the family again, and had moved back into the Hall, Jacob had made something of an effort to smarten himself up. He still looked older than death, his face full of wrinkles and his bald pate graced with only a few flyaway silver hairs. But he had refined his ectoplasm into a smart tuxedo, even if the material tended more to navy blue than black, and he kept forgetting about the collar. But as a ghost of long standing, or at least a stubborn refusal to lie down, only his concentration held him together. And of late his thoughts had shown a distinct tendency to wander. Which was why every now and again he’d suddenly be wearing a Hawaiian T-shirt over baggy shorts, and a heavy red sash bearing the legend
Mortally Challenged
. He also left long trails of pale blue ectoplasm trailing on the air behind him when he made sudden movements.