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Chapter 90: The Calm one (b)
It was a chase through the bones of a building, and I remember it in pieces.The cloakroom door banging back. A guard flung into a coat rack, a shower of brass hooks and wool. The pop of a pistol and a fan of glass from a chandelier. Marcus's shout, Take the stairs! My own legs moving before I had decided to move, my heels skidding on slick marble as I tore after the shape of a black jacket vanishing around a corner.Rask knew the hall. That was the horror of it. He took the service corridor behind the great chamber without breaking stride, up a narrow stair that smelled of boiled cabbage, through a kitchen where a startled cook dropped a pot of broth, and out the far side into a long hall of closed doors. A guard stepped out of a side room to cut him off, and Rask put a bullet through the man's thigh and kept running.Elias was faster.I will say that for my brother, that he ran like a man who had spent ten years being hunted and had finally been handed something to chase. He took th
Chapter 89: The Calm One
"Start with me," said Marcus.He said it again, quieter, when nobody moved. Caius had taken the Concord's private cloakroom for the questioning, a long, paneled room with brass coat hooks and a single table, and a hundred and forty people were waiting in the hall outside with the doors bolted against them. Madam Fontaine had refused to leave Lord Wynter's side. The Chairman had demanded his lawyers, then his tea, then his lawyers again. Somewhere in the building, the Swiss police were pounding politely on a bronze door and being told, equally politely, to wait.Marcus pulled out the chair himself and sat."Name, rank, post," Caius said."Marcus Williams. Chief of Personal Security, Cross Enterprises. Disgraced." Marcus folded his hands on the table. They were perfectly still. "Ask me anything. Ask me twice."I stood by the wall with my arms wrapped around myself and watched my husband interrogate the man who had once stood outside our bedroom door. It was the strangest thing I had see
Chapter 88: The Gallery
The sound was small.That is what I remember most. Not a roar, not a crash, only a clean, flat crack from somewhere above, like a branch snapping in a cold wood. Then the world turned over.I did not see Caius move. One moment I was standing at the foot of the table with my mouth half-open on the next name. The next, a hard arm had come around my waist and I was falling sideways, and the black stone floor came up to meet me with a crash that rattled my teeth.His body covered mine."*Down!*" Caius roared.A second shot. Granite exploded off the table's edge in a spray of white dust. Someone screamed. A chair went over. I heard Madame Fontaine's glass shatter on the floor."Marcus! The gallery!""I see it, sir!"Gunfire, close, loud. Marcus and two of the Cross guards had drawn and were firing upward into the ring of dark above the lamps. Plaster rained down. A figure moved in the shadows, a quick lean silhouette against the high, curved wall. He fired once more, wildly, and then he wa
Chapter 87: The Concord
There are twelve chairs in the Concord Hall, and eleven of them were already filled when I walked in. It was a round room, built like a vault, with walls of dark Swiss granite and a floor of polished black stone. There were no windows. A single circle of golden light fell from a ring of lamps overhead, and under it stood a long oval table so old that its edges had been worn smooth by centuries of leaning elbows. Around it sat the people who owned the world's money. I recognized some from magazines. A silver-haired woman in white, Madame Odile Fontaine, whose family had financed three revolutions and two restorations. A heavy, red-faced man named Silas Brandt, of the Brandt-Meier Bank. A gaunt old lord in a velvet coat, Percival Ashdown, whose estate was said to hold more gold than the Bank of England. Others I knew only by their crests, pinned to their lapels in small, plain metals. Not one of them smiled. Caius walked at my right shoulder, upright, pale, in a black suit that hid
Chapter 86: Frozen
By dawn, we were poor.Not in any way that would have shown on a sidewalk. The castle still stood. The lamps still burned. The staff in their black uniforms still carried silver trays through the east corridor as if nothing had happened. But on the great wall of the war room, in Julian's cold white charts, the empire I had married into was coming apart line by line, like a sweater being unraveled by a patient hand."The Cross Exchange is halted," Julian said. His voice was scraped raw. "The central clearing accounts are frozen. Our credit lines in Zurich, London, and Singapore were suspended within nine minutes of the broadcast. The notice cites, sir, I have it here, Article Nine of the Sovereign Charter, unauthorized claimant under review.""Under whose authority?" Caius asked."A registry nobody's heard of. The Sovereign Trust Registry. It was incorporated in Liechtenstein at two a.m. last night, and by two-oh-five every bank in the world had acknowledged its jurisdiction." Julian s
Chapter 85: The Gentle Man
"Hello, Caius," said Aldous Crane.He smiled, and it was the worst thing I had seen all week. It was a warm smile. A fond one. The smile of a grandfather watching a grandchild open a gift."You've grown," he said. "I confess I wasn't sure you would. You were such a small, serious boy. Do you remember what I told you, at the chessboard? The king is the weakest piece. The pieces who protect him are the only reason he is a king.""You were dead." Caius's voice was a ruin. "I stood at your grave.""You stood at a very good coffin." Crane inclined his head. "It was built by a man in Milan who made violins. I took some pride in it. I would have liked to be there, but one cannot attend one's own funeral. It is considered bad form.""Why?""I had work to do.""What work?""Ah." Crane set down the pen. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at the camera, and for the first time the warmth in his face did not reach his eyes. "You mistake me, child. You are looking at the wreck of a century a
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