Dark Chant In A Crimson Key

Chapter Twelve

Another sturdy, straight-backed chair was brought to the library, and Carlo was quickly and unceremoniously tied into it. The business with the paralyzing drug was omitted, and Al went straight to the foul-smelling, nausea-inducing "truth brew." Carlo spat out the first mouthful, and I winced as Al put his fingers on the back of the old man's neck and squeezed, with the predictable result: Carlo screamed long and hard, and after he had finished, he drained the liquid from the cup. His response to Al's first question was apparently a lie, for he vomited all over the front of his green plaid flannel shirt. After vomiting, he slumped in the chair, breathing very rapidly, his soiled chin resting on his broad chest.

"Now let us begin again," Al said cheerfully. "What is your name?"

"Carlo Santini, you little bastard," Carlo answered in a rasping voice. "Who the hell are you, and what's that shit you gave me to drink?"

"You were discovered sitting on top of a hill overlooking this estate with the equipment of a sniper in your possession. What were you doing there?"

"I was hunting pheasant, and my eyesight isn't too-"

I certainly had to give my chauffeur-assassin credit for having guts, if no brains; but courage wasn't going to save the day for him. He proceeded to empty his guts, or what was left of them, onto his shirt front. When his stomach was empty, he continued barking in dry heaves before again slumping in his chair, exhausted and pouring sweat. Now he looked completely spent, beaten.

"That's enough!" I shouted at Al as he once again started to reach for the back of Carlo's neck. "For Christ's sake, he's got the idea!"

Al didn't seem much interested in my opinion, for he went ahead and pressed the nerve cluster at the base of Carlo's skull anyway. Carlo screamed and then passed out. Al ordered that more of the dark, greasy liquid be brought to replace what Carlo had voided. When the old man returned to consciousness, he drank it feebly, without resistance.

"What were you doing on the hill, Carlo?" Al asked, resuming his cheerful tone. "Who was your intended target?"

"John Sinclair," Carlo answered in a rasping whisper that was barely audible.

"And what led you to believe you would find John Sinclair here?"

"The dwarf and his friends are here," Carlo said with a rattling sigh and a weak, desultory nod in my direction. "The dwarf has always been the key."

"Indeed?" Al said, glancing in my direction and raising his eyebrows slightly. "From what he has said, I would not have thought so. Mr. Insolers, and you apparently, misjudged his role completely from the beginning. He knew nothing."

"It didn't make any difference. Whoever you are, you misjudged his role too-but you're here. We're all here because of the dwarf."

This turn of conversation did not please the dwarf. The nausea I was suddenly feeling had nothing to do with any brew Black Flame had concocted, and I turned my head away.

"Elaborate," Al said.

"Why? You know what I'm talking about."

Al placed his hand on the back of Carlo's neck. "Indulge me."

"The CIA has always suspected that Sinclair has friends and contacts in high places, people who are both powerful and influential. The problem is that these people would die before they betrayed him, and they're not exactly loose-lipped; that's why Sinclair gave them the gift of his trust in the first place. The thing was that if just one of these people could be identified, then that person's calls and movements could be monitored in the hope that sooner or later the friend would contact John Sinclair, or vice versa, and we might be able to get the tricky bastard in our sights. When this Cornucopia thing went down, it soon became obvious that something had changed; Sinclair was hanging around and leaving signs, almost as if he were inviting people to come after him."

"He was extending the invitation to us," Al said quietly. "It was a challenge."

"He's hunting you?"

"A decision I'm sure he now regrets."

"Who the hell are you? The CIA never told me-"

"Please continue your story," the young man in the Harvard sweatshirt said with an impatient wave of his hand.

"What story? I was hired to kill Sinclair. I figured it was a good bet that the dwarf would take me to him. I was right, for the wrong reasons, probably just the same as you. You've probably already heard everything else there is to know, so why do you want to hear it from me?"

"It's because he's so goddamn afraid of Sinclair," I said, making no effort to keep the bitterness out of my voice. "He wants to understand the thinking that led everyone to follow the village idiot here, because Sinclair is no fool. He may have anticipated what would happen, or at the least realized what was going on. It's a question of who's trapping who. Our fearless leader is beginning to have second thoughts about his own cleverness."

"That's correct, Frederickson," Al said in a flat tone.

"Chant wouldn't sacrifice us," Jan said with feeling. "Not to save his own life, not even to exterminate an unspeakable creature like you."

I watched Al's face as he studied the woman, and it occurred to me that he agreed with her. But he was still afraid. He turned back to Carlo, said, "If you don't want me to hurt you again, continue your story. You mentioned the CIA's suspicion that Sinclair has influential friends."

Carlo shrugged. "Interpol was keeping very close tabs on everyone of note who began showing up in Switzerland after the Cornucopia thing went down. Frederickson fits the profile of someone who might be connected to Sinclair, so when Interpol told the CIA that Frederickson was coming to Zurich to supposedly do something for Neuberger, the agency put me on the case. I was to follow Frederickson to Sinclair, if I could, and then kill him. I managed to latch onto Frederickson as a chauffeur."

"So much for your theory of the insider," I said to Insolers, who had a very peculiar expression of what looked like disbelief on his face as he stared at Carlo.

"You and Mr. Insolers seem to have shared the same notion about Dr. Frederickson," Al said to Carlo. "How interesting."

"If you say so, friend. I don't have the slightest notion about Insolers' notions, and I don't give a shit."

I again glanced at Insolers, who now appeared even more disbelieving. Color was beginning to rise in his cheeks.

Al took a step closer to Carlo. "You must have realized almost at once that Frederickson knew nothing-he had never met Sinclair and had no interest in the man beyond his immediate assignment. Yet you stayed with him. Why?"

"Because I realized something else about Frederickson almost at once, friend: after he got sucked into the whole thing, he was damn well going after Sinclair himself. People were dying, and he was going to take matters into his own hands. Perfect. What I discovered was that people who wouldn't talk to you, Insolers, or me in a million years, namely Sinclair's friends, would talk to him. They confided in Frederickson, trusted his motives, trusted him to do and say the right thing. Following a man Sinclair's friends would talk to was the next best thing to following an actual contact. Actually, even better; a friend or contact would never have led us here. It kind of looks to me like we've all been tracking Frederickson while he tracked Sinclair. So now why don't you tell me who you people are? Maybe we can make a deal. Our interests are the same. Since you seem to want to kill Sinclair as much as I do, I say that puts us on the same side."

Al merely grunted, then turned to Insolers. From the expression, or lack of it, on Al's face, I didn't think he shared Carlo's optimistic enthusiasm for teamwork, and I suspected that did not bode well for Carlo.

"Do you know this man, Mr. Insolers?"

"No," Insolers replied somewhat distantly as he continued to stare intently at Carlo.

"Well, well," Al said, sounding slightly amused. "Under the circumstances, I have no doubt that each of you is telling the truth. That leads us to an interesting question, doesn't it? We have here, not only in the same country but actually in the same room, the CIA's deputy director of operations, and a free-lance assassin hired by the CIA. How is it, Mr. Insolers, that Carlo could be sent here without your knowledge?"

It was Carlo who answered. "You're asking the wrong man, junior. Like you said, I'm a free-lancer. Insolers was never in the loop on this deal."

Insolers said, "A renegade operation."

Carlo shook his head, winked and smiled at Insolers. "Wrong, big guy. Not a renegade operation."

"Who tasked you?"

"Your boss. I report to the director."

"Bullshit."

Except for his eyes, which remained lifeless, Al seemed almost amused. "Carlo?" he said easily. "I think you've tweaked Mr. Insolers' personal pride to the point where he's calling you a liar. But I know better. After the sickness and pain you've experienced, and will experience again if you appear less than truthful, I believe you are incapable of lying at this point. How do you explain Mr. Insolers' ignorance of your mission?"

"You still don't get it, big guy, do you?" Carlo said to Insolers.

"Get what?" Al asked sharply.

"The agency knows Insolers is Sinclair's man, junior. He's been in Sinclair's pocket ever since the operation run by the character who owned this castle was shut down. You think anybody at Langley believed Insolers' story that he did it all by himself? Give me a break. He and Sinclair worked together, and a bond formed between them. They cut a deal afterward. The CIA smelled that from day one. The decision was made to keep him in place, and even promote him, on the chance that he might eventually lead them to Sinclair."

"Bullshit," Insolers murmured, but his face had gone pale.

Carlo shook his head. "It's the truth, big guy. Sorry to have to be the one to break the bad news to you, but you haven't sneezed or farted for years without the agency knowing about it. Then they finally came to the conclusion that you weren't really Sinclair's friend; he didn't trust you in the same way he trusted others he'd worked with. You'd struck a bargain, and each of you was holding up your end, but that was it. But there was still a possibility that your knowledge of him might prove useful one day, so they kept you around. I guess you're even good at what you do- but you were always sealed out of the loop on any real play that involved trying to get Sinclair. When you assigned yourself to Switzerland after the Cornucopia thing, the director thought you might finally prove useful by leading them to Sinclair. But what do you do? You go to Frederickson. So much for your influence. They wrote you off."

Insolers had proved of no value, I thought with a wave of bitterness. All he had managed to do was set me off like a bird dog on a trail that had finally led us all to this place, probably to die. "You're a fool," I said to Insolers, anger and contempt making my voice crack. "You should have been up front with me from the beginning. If you had, we wouldn't be in this situation."

Insolers frowned and slowly shook his head. His eyes were slightly out of focus, as if he were staring at something far in the past. I could understand his failing to appreciate the irony of the fact that while he was trying to turn me into an unwitting asset and run me, his own employers had been running him, without his knowledge, for years. In one sense, the CIA had been right in keeping him on the payroll, for he had finally betrayed Sinclair, inadvertently, through me.

Finally, Insolers' eyes came back into focus. He looked at Carlo, at me, and then at Al. "I don't believe it," he said in a firm voice.

"Oh, but I do," Al replied, and once again favored us with a giggle. "It's so droll, really. I couldn't be more pleased with the way this is all working out." He looked around the room, an inane grin on his face. His gaze lingered cruelly on Jan, until she finally looked away and began to sob. Then his grin abruptly vanished as he turned to the Black Flame soldier on his right. "Take him out and chop his head off, then all of you return to your posts," he said in English, probably for Carlo's benefit, then repeated the command in Japanese.

Carlo cursed and struggled against his bonds, all to no avail, as two of the Japanese lifted him up in his chair and promptly carried him out of the library.

"That's not necessary," I said to the leader. Despite his deception and attempt to use me, I still had affection for the old man. "He doesn't have the slightest clue as to what this game is really all about. What's the point of killing him?"

"One response might be to tell you that the point is that there is no point. Since he is of no consequence to Sinclair, he has no value to us. Therefore he dies. What do you care? You're all going to die anyway. He simply precedes you."

"Al, you certainly do have a way with words, you silver-tongued devil."

"What happens now?" Garth asked.

Al giggled. "What happens now? We wait, of course."

Jan had stopped crying, and when she spoke, her tone was firm, icy. "He won't come. You're a fool if you think he will. By now, he knows you're here."

"That's precisely why he will come. He knows we're here, and he knows we have you, as well as his old companion-in-arms, Mr. Insolers, as well as these other three men and a woman, who, while strangers, would have helped him if they could. He also knows that if he does not arrive soon, your screaming will begin; we will take you apart piece by piece, one by one, until he does finally choose to favor me with his presence. First, he will contact us and offer to give himself up in exchange for your freedom. Of course, we will accept the terms."

"No. He would know better than to trust you to keep your word; trust goes against everything you believe in. He would know you intend to kill us all anyway."

"Of course he knows this, dear lady. But he will turn himself in to us in any case. He will do it precisely because he knows you must die, and he will choose to die with you. Alas, dear lady, he is not only a man of ferocious honor but a hopeless romantic. He will come to us, and then we will begin John Sinclair's final ceremony. We will wait."

We waited; tied in our chairs, we had little choice. Harper and I exchanged frequent glances of love and longing; in the dim moonlight that filtered in through the windows by the staircase I could see tears glistening in her eyes. She would occasionally try to start up a conversation, but I wasn't much into idle chitchat, because I was busy with another matter that required all my concentration, and the breath control I had to employ didn't lend itself to talking.

I looked around at Veil, and from the intense look of concentration on his face, as well as the occasional ripple of muscle across his chest, in his shoulders and thighs, I could tell that he was preoccupied with the same matter. Garth, not the greatest conversationalist to begin with, had again retreated deep into himself, conserving his energy for what he hoped would be at least one shot at our captors. Finally, Harper and Jan ended up talking with each other, often with long pauses between sentences, desperately trying to use words, and the sounds of their own voices, to distance themselves from the terror they surely felt.

Suddenly, the lights in the library came on, and I quickly relaxed, stopped what I was doing, and concentrated on breathing regularly. Al, flanked by two of his men carrying pitchers of water and trays of sandwiches, strode briskly into the room. I looked at Garth, saw his eyes take on life at the possibility that at least one of his arms would be freed to allow him to eat and drink. I was happy to see that was not going to be the case. The two Black Flame soldiers fed us. We ate and drank sparingly; by now, all of us were stained with our own urine, and we didn't wish to make matters worse.

"I have a message for you, Countess," Al announced cheerfully. "John Sinclair wants you to know that he loves you very much."

"You're a liar!" Jan snapped.

"Well, it's true those weren't his exact words during our telephone conversation, but I'm sure that thought was in his mind. Why else bother to call?"

"No!"

"Yes. He promised to be here shortly after dawn to give himself up in exchange for letting you all go. I told him you would all be released after we had him in custody. He agreed. Of course, as you pointed out, he knows better; he's planning to join you in death, which I really find quite touching. But he has no idea what we have in store for him. Before you die, Countess, you will see John Sinclair as a thoroughly broken man begging us to kill him. He will be asked to kill you all with his bare hands, and he will do it. Now, why don't you all try to get some rest? Sleep well."

So we waited some more. Clouds had covered the moon, cutting down on the light coming in through the windows. That was just fine with me, because it would further hinder any secret watcher from seeing what it was Veil and I were trying to do.

Garth's low voice rumbled in the night. "Mongo, you awake?"

"Oh, yeah. Keep it down, because we don't know if anyone's listening."

There was a pause, and then Garth spoke in an even lower voice. "I still have the little item Insolers here used on you; it's wrapped around my wrist, outside my shirt cuff. I was hoping to use it to introduce Al to his head, but now I'm thinking I may never get the chance. Maybe if we can hobble our chairs back-to-back, you or Veil can get it off my wrist and we'll see if it can cut rope."

"They'd be sure to hear the chairs scraping on the floor, and I'm not sure it would work anyway. But not to worry. Veil, how are you doing over there?"

"I'm doing," Veil replied in a matching soft whisper, purposely slurring his words slightly so as to make them even harder to hear and understand. "What about you?"

"Ten minutes, maybe less. Are we coordinated?"

"I'm about a half hour behind you. Considering the fact that I'm supposed to be your teacher, and you always hated to practice this, I find your newfound speed and skill rather embarrassing."

"Well, they paid a lot more attention to you."

"Jesus Christ," Garth said in astonishment. "Are you two-?"

"Shhh," Veil and I hissed in unison.

"Right on," Insolers said in a low voice, sounding at once excited and slightly amused. Neither Harper nor Jan spoke, but I could feel their eyes on me.

Garth obediently fell silent-for a few moments. When he spoke again, it was in an appropriate whisper, and he slurred his words as Veil had done. "Mongo, are you guys really. . uh, doing you know what? How?"

"This really doesn't seem like the appropriate time or place to discuss it, Garth. However, suffice it to say that if you hadn't always been such a pisshead when it came to the martial arts, calling just about anything you heard a ninja bullshit story, I might have told you about muzukashi jotai kara deru-the art of getting out of knotty situations. Think Houdini. Get it? Too late for you now. I'm thinking of leaving you behind."

"My hero," Harper whispered, and then giggled softly.

"We don't know how many of them there are, or where they are. We have to assume most of them are watching the perimeter of the castle and grounds waiting for John Sinclair to show up. We need to find a fast and simple way to get out of here. If we can get away from here, we may be in a position to intercept your man, or at least show some kind of signal that we've escaped. Any ideas?"

"We must get down to the lower level," Jan whispered. "There's a labyrinth to the west, and if we can get to-"

Suddenly, all of the lights came on, momentarily blinding me. I closed my eyes, fighting back the panic that welled in me. I was very close to slipping the last knot in the ropes that bound my wrists, and there had to be a considerable length of loose rope beneath my chair and behind me. If Al or one of his men saw the rope, they would know what was happening. We'd all be checked. Veil and I would be rebound, probably this time with thin wire, and there was no way we were going to get out of that ever, much less before dawn. I brought my legs together as far as I could, hoping to partially block any sight lines to the floor under my chair. Then I began frantically picking up the loose rope with my fingers, pushing the coils under my buttocks.

I slowly opened my eyes. Al and three Black Flame soldiers I hadn't seen before were standing at the opposite end of the huge library. Al was staring at us intently. I stared back, trying to look nonchalant, desperately hoping that no loose rope was visible on the floor around Veil or me, and that what I was feeling didn't show on my face. It was a very bad time for our captors to come and check on us. I glanced at Veil, who was blinking and yawning, as if he had just been aroused from sleep. There was no rope on the floor beneath Veil or behind his chair.

Apparently satisfied that we were where we were supposed to be, Al raised the walkie-talkie he was carrying to his mouth, pressed the Send button on the side, and spoke rapidly in Japanese. When he released the button, he was answered by static. He repeated the action, with the same result. If I'd had to hazard a guess as to what it all meant, I'd have ventured the opinion that our youthful leader had lost communication with one or more of his men. He was, for sure, not looking as bouncy as he had earlier in the evening. He cursed in English, then threw the walkie-talkie against one of the bookcases lining the wall to his left. He signaled to his men, who fanned out. Two of the men pointed their weapons at the entrances to the library, while the third nervously aimed his up at the balcony ringing the second level.

"Oh, my God," Jan said with a sharp intake of breath. "He's here! Chant's already here!"

That might be true, and all well and good, but the problem was that we were already, still, there too. And Al was showing disturbing signs of being more than a bit perturbed at the whole situation. If John Sinclair had indeed somehow managed to penetrate the ring of Black Flame soldiers and had entered the castle in order to rescue us, the fact of the matter was that his timing was as bad as Al's. The rope I had spent hours untying from my wrists was a painful lump under my buttocks and in the small of my back. I wondered if the Japanese had an expression concerning frying pans and fire.

As his men continued to slowly circle, sweeping the area around and above them with their automatic weapons, Al abruptly strode the rest of the way across the library, stopped in front of Harper and Jan. He reached into the back pocket of his black linen slacks, removed what appeared to be an ornately carved, rectangular box of enameled wood. He gripped both ends of the box, pulled. There was a soft, ominous clicking sound; the box separated to become the handles of two shiny, triangular-shaped knives. He raised his hands, placing the tip of one blade an inch or so from Harper's left eye, the other an equally small distance from Jan's right eye.

"Sinclair!" Al shouted, his voice echoing in the huge library. "I hope you can hear me, because if you can't, each of these women is going to lose an eye for nothing! We'll talk! Show yourself!"

The odds for the six of us surviving this business, which had seemed fairly good only a minute or two before, were now rapidly diminishing; the chances that one dwarf, however well motivated, could overwhelm one man with two knives and three men with automatic weapons were nonexistent. Any move whatsoever on my part now would be the ultimate fool's play and would undoubtedly obliterate any lingering chances we might have for survival. As horrible as it was, having an eyeball punctured by the tip of a knife was preferable to dying. And he was going to take their eyes, any moment now. Even if I hadn't felt it in my bones, Al had already provided not only ample proof that he was not a man to bluff, but clear evidence that he enjoyed such things. However, without question, the only thing to do was to sit tight, let him stick the eyes, and then hope the men would leave for a while so that Veil and I could continue going about our business of engineering our escape.

On the other hand.

Al might be wrong about Sinclair being in the castle. Whether or not Sinclair was in our midst, Al wasn't going to stop with taking an eye from Harper and Jan if the man didn't show up. If there was no response after the initial mutilations, he would take the other eyes, then the ears, and then other parts of their bodies. There was no telling when or where he would stop. And even if Sinclair did show himself and give up, Al had made it clear that we were all going to die anyway. Black Flame had been one step ahead of everybody in this game, and still was.

I now felt the desperation Garth had been feeling all along, and I now had what he had been so desperately hoping for-one clear shot at Al. It was a moment that might never present itself again in our lifetimes, and it was mine. I took it.

As I untied the last knot and slipped the last loop from my wrists, and prepared to drop the rope from my hands, I quickly but carefully examined my options, my angles of attack. There weren't many of either. I had been sitting motionless for hours, with my blood circulation restricted, and my legs were bound to feel rubbery when I abruptly stood up. I might even experience a dizzy spell. Under normal circumstances, I would have had no trouble getting up the speed and momentum I would need to leap to his head, which I needed to do in order to strike a killing blow; but I didn't think I had the necessary spring in my legs now for such a move, and I would only have one chance at him.

Another consideration was the fact that my attack would have to snap his head and torso backward, or the tips of the knives he held in his hands would still puncture the women's eyeballs. That effectively narrowed my options for point of attack down to one, but that was fine with me; it was my preferred option. I must have picked up a case of bad attitude from Al, for I was no longer content to simply kill the young leader of Black Flame. I wanted him to have something-or not have something-to remember me by for the rest of his abominable life, long after I was dead.

I dropped the rope to the floor and sprang to my feet. As I'd expected, my legs were stiff, my knees weak; but the massive amounts of adrenaline pumping through my system galvanized my nerves and muscles, and I shot forward, lowering my head and aiming at Al's exposed back. The three gunmen started, but could not fire at me for fear of hitting their leader. One man shouted a warning, but it was too late. I had already centered my chi, imagining all the power in my body focused into a fine point at my forehead. I lunged the last step, hunched my shoulders, drove as hard as I could. The center of my forehead connected solidly with the small of Al's back, directly on his spine. The crunching sound of his spine breaking traveled down through my skull, the bone acting as a kind of amplifier, and I knew that all of Al's nasty doings in the future would be done from a wheelchair. He shrieked in surprise, pain, and anger as his upper body snapped backward. As he crumpled to the floor, I rolled over him and lay flat on the floor, using his body as a shield between me and the gunmen.

Then things got a bit hectic. It felt like I was adrift in a blurred universe of sound, sight, and cascading emotion, with everything seeming to happen at once. As I reached to recover the daggers Al had been holding, I heard the sound of wood cracking, breaking. That, I knew, would be Veil focusing his own chi; harnessing the enormous power in his hard, finely conditioned body, he stood up, leaving the chair into which he had been tied in shards on the floor.

But not even Veil could dodge bullets. I doubted that his breaking free was going to do either of us much good, but it did afford me an odd sense of relief, of having company out on the thin, far edge of existence in what I assumed were the final seconds of my life. At least I would die as a free man on my feet, as it were, even if I did happen to be crawling on my belly at the moment.

I took the daggers from the unconscious Al's hands, then raised my head slightly and peered over his chest to see what was going on. Everything seemed a chaotic blend of movement, with Veil diving through the air, executing a shoulder roll, then scrambling for the feet of the closest Black Flame soldier even as all three men swung their guns in his direction. Suddenly, there was more movement on the balcony overhead, off to my right. A headless corpse, naked except for a green plaid flannel shirt, came sailing down through the air. The bloody corpse hit one of the gunmen square in the chest, knocking him backward and off his feet. An instant later a deadly steel star, a shuriken, came whistling through the air and planted itself in the center of the second gunman's forehead, splitting his skull and killing him instantly. The man on the floor was dispatched in the same manner. The third soldier did manage to get off a burst of fire, but he was distracted, and his bullets passed over Veil's body as Veil rolled once more, came up in the man's face, and wrapped his hands around the man's throat.

Things were definitely looking up.

I sprang to my feet, went to my right, and began cutting through the ropes that bound Garth, Insolers, Harper, and Jan. When Harper and Jan tried to stand, they both fell. Garth and Insolers supported Jan, while I gripped Harper's hand and pulled her to her feet. She lunged for, fell on, the sofa. She rummaged around the overstuffed pillows on the sofa until she found her purse, opened it, took out the small wooden box inside, and shoved it down the front of her blouse.

"This way!" Jan cried, tugging at both Garth and Insolers as she staggered forward toward the door leading to the pantry.

Veil and I started to go to retrieve the dead men's automatic weapons, abruptly halted, turned, and sprinted after the others as two more gunmen came running through the door at the far end of the library. We darted through the pantry door where the others had gone a split second before twin bursts of gunfire sent a hail of bullets chewing into the wood of the door frame. We found ourselves in a long, narrow pantry with a high ceiling. Garth was standing at the other end, holding a door open and frantically urging us on. We ducked through the doorway, with Garth following, slamming the door shut and bolting it behind us. We clambered down a circular staircase to a narrow stone corridor. Insolers and an anxious-looking Harper and Jan were waiting for us. The corridor was like an echo chamber, and the sound of running footsteps was all around us-but the men seemed to be running in a number of different directions, and there was no sound of splintering wood at the head of the stairs down which we had come.

Twenty yards down the corridor there were three more doors, one on the left and two on the right. We followed Jan through the door on the left, skipped and hopped down yet another steel stairwell into a large wine cellar. A door at the opposite end of the cellar opened into yet another stone corridor, and our footsteps echoed eerily as we ran down it after Jan. I presumed we were heading for what Jan had described as a labyrinth, but to me the complex system of stairwells and stone corridors was a hopeless maze and I wondered how many years it had taken the woman to find her way around this massive complex she modestly called home.

A man suddenly lunged out from the dark shadows of a deeply recessed doorway to my left, grabbed Harper with one hand, and started to raise the machine pistol he carried in the other. Jan was in the line of fire between Veil and Garth, and they couldn't get around her before he fired. I tensed, ready to leap at the man, but Harper reacted first. She jerked free from his grasp, reached down the front of her blouse, and took out the wooden box. As Insolers knocked the gun away, Harper opened the lid of the box, then slapped it against the man's face, just below his left eye. The man screamed, clawed for a few moments at the spot on his face where he had been bitten, then stiffened and crumpled to the stone floor. Veil stepped around Jan and picked up the machine pistol, and I grabbed Harper's arm, helping her to step over the corpse of the Black Flame soldier.

"We're almost there," Jan gasped, pausing just before a sharp bend in the corridor. "The door at the end opens into the labyrinth. I know the way through. It will take us to an apple orchard on a hill overlooking the castle. Chant will know where to find us. Come on."

Jan turned and went around the bend, disappearing from sight for a moment, and then we heard a startled cry. The rest of us hurried around the bend, then came to an abrupt halt, with Veil, Garth, and Insolers quickly moving to screen the women, when we saw what Jan had seen.

The door at the end of the corridor was open, and moonlight silhouetted the black shape of the tall man who filled the door frame. The man's hands were empty, hanging at his sides.

"Shoot the fucker," Garth murmured.

Veil shook his head, then handed the machine pistol to my brother. 'The sound of gunfire through that open door could give away our position. It doesn't look like he has a gun, which means I can take him out without making much noise. You people stay here."

"I'm coming with you," I said, and fell into step beside Veil as he started forward.

The man's features began to emerge from the moon shadows as we grew nearer, and I felt a little shudder as I recognized him. Carlo was bare-chested, which was understandable since he had wrapped his shirt around the corpse of one of the two Black Flame soldiers unlucky enough to have been ordered by Al to carry him out of the library and chop his head off. It seemed Carlo was anything but a run-of-the-mill assassin, with hidden resources neither Black Flame nor we had imagined; like Veil, he knew more than a little about focusing strength. In the second or two before they died, the men who had carried Carlo from the library must have been quite surprised when the chair they were holding abruptly disintegrated, and powerful hands gripped their throats.

The man who had been my chauffeur obviously knew a few other tricks as well. The features were still those of the man who had introduced himself to me as Carlo, but the bad leg was now straight, as was the spine. I stopped, grabbed Veil's arm just as he was about to leap at the man-a move I suspected might not be such a great idea, even for Veil. Suddenly, I knew who this man really was, even before he turned slightly to reveal the large mark, a combination of scar tissue and black tattoo ink, that ran up the left side of his back.

"John Sinclair, I presume," I said to the still figure.

"I want to thank you for what you did back there in the library, Mongo," the man replied in a deep, resonant voice that might have been Carlo's, except that it had lost all trace of any Italian accent. "You too, Kendry. Things were getting a bit out of hand."

"Chant!" Jan shouted with joy when she heard the man's voice, and rushed past Veil and me into his outstretched arms. "Oh, Chant!"

The man and woman held each other tightly, swaying back and forth slightly. They kissed, and then Sinclair gently pushed her away and turned to the rest of us. "We'll talk later. There's no time now. I just wanted to make sure you were all safe. Jan will lead you through the labyrinth to a safe place, and I'll join you there when I'm finished with the rest of that overgrown delinquent's men. I have to move quickly now, before it gets light."

Judging from his tone of voice and casual manner, he might have been talking about going to the corner grocery store for a quart of milk.

"I'm sorry, Sinclair," Insolers said in a low voice. "I came to help, but I … I didn't mean for things to happen the way they did. It's my fault those men found your home."

"Don't worry about it, Insolers," John Sinclair replied easily. "I'd have chosen a different battleground, but this was inevitable. They've been getting closer every year. It's why I chose to make my stand now, to try to draw them to Switzerland. It will work out. They're spread all over the castle and the grounds hunting for me." He paused, then added in a tone that chilled me, "I won't be long."

I stepped closer to Sinclair, looked up at him, said, "I want to go with you. I owe them too."

He shook his head. "Thank you, but no. It's better that I work alone."

"I assume you killed the two who carried you out, but you don't know how many are left."

"Eleven, not counting the pain-in-the-ass kid you put down. It's almost a tenth of their entire membership."

"Let me come with you."

"This isn't your kind of play, Mongo. They will never give up, and so they must be killed, one by one. There can be no hesitation. I think it's safe to say you've never killed a man in cold blood, but that is precisely what is required now. There is no middle way."

"Your blood may be cold right now, Sinclair, but mine definitely isn't. I know how they've tortured people to death, and they've shot down men, women, and children in front of my eyes." I paused, held up the twin daggers I had taken from Al. "I won't hesitate. At least let me come along to hold your coat."

"And me," Veil said, stepping up beside me. "My blood's as cold as yours. I may not be as good as you, but I'd like to think I'm damn close-better than any member of Black Flame. I have no doubt that you can kill every one of the fuckers, but I'm not so sure you, alone, can find them all in the hour or so you have before the sun comes up. When it gets light, things are going to get tougher. You can use the help. I've done this kind of thing before-in Laos and Cambodia."

"I know that, Kendry," Sinclair said with a curt nod. "I'd heard of you in Southeast Asia, and I've heard of you since. As a matter of fact, I own three of your paintings. Your point about time is well taken, and yes, I would appreciate your help." He paused, glanced at me, then looked away. He seemed embarrassed, and I knew what he was thinking. Suddenly, I felt vulnerable, hurt. I felt. . well, small. "Mongo, I just don't think-"

"He's earned the right, Sinclair," my brother said sharply as he stepped up beside me. "Think about it."

"Well, thank you, mother," I murmured, at once grateful for his support, and thoroughly embarrassed.

Veil said: "I agree."

Sinclair nodded. "All right."

"And I'll come along," Garth said in a firm tone. "As backup."

"If you fire that," Sinclair said, pointing to the machine pistol Veil had handed my brother, "you'll give away our position."

"I understand. I don't pretend to have the killing skills the three of you have. I'll stay back. But it can't hurt to have someone with a gun in case something goes wrong."

Again, Sinclair nodded his assent, then turned to Insolers. "Duane, you know this isn't your brand of fighting."

"No argument," the CIA operative replied. "I'll go out with Jan and Harper, wait for you."

"There's one other thing. If I'm going to totally destroy Black Flame, I need to capture at least one of their members. That won't be easy. No member of Black Flame has ever been taken alive; choosing death before capture is deeply engrained in them. All of them have poison-tipped darts in spring loaders strapped to their forearms, and they can shoot the darts into their own wrists if they choose to do so. Some also have a fake tooth filled with cyanide that can be released if they bite down in a certain way. Killing these men could prove relatively easy compared to capturing one and keeping him alive. That will take planning, coordination, and skill." He paused, reached into his pocket, removed a wooden dowel. The dowel was perhaps three inches long, about an inch and a half in diameter. "This must be placed in the captive's mouth, at the same time as the hands and wrists are immobilized, if we are to be successful."

Veil grunted softly. "That will be the last one we take."

"Al's already on ice," I said. "He's the obvious choice, because he's certain to have all the information you need on the entire outfit. He's paralyzed, and may even still be unconscious. We certainly know where to find him."

Sinclair frowned, looked uncertain. "The problem is that he's on the floor, out in the open, impossible to approach without him knowing it-assuming he's conscious. The moment he sees me, he'll know we've killed his men, and he'll kill himself."

"There may be a way."

"We'll see," Sinclair replied, glancing at his watch. "We must go now. Follow me, and please do exactly as I say."

Garth, Veil, and I followed John Sinclair as he ducked out through the doorway, then moved quickly and silently through the chiaroscuro moon shadows at the base of the castle walls.

We moved in the night, through and around the castle, like a four-piece, grotesquely shaped killing machine. Actually, it was Veil and Sinclair who did the killing, with Garth and me bringing up the rear and afforded an opportunity to do little more than offer silent encouragement. John Sinclair, in the guise of Carlo the chauffeur and free-lance assassin, had obviously done a very good job of reconnaissance before sitting himself down on a hillside and waiting to be captured. He knew, if not precisely where each Black Flame soldier was at the moment, at least where they had been, and what zones they were likely to be searching. And, of course, he was intimately familiar with the castle and its grounds; intricate, secret passageways allowed us to move freely and quickly from one site to another, often to see without risk of being seen.

Despite his size, John Sinclair moved with incredible stealth, like some great panther, cloaking himself in night, then rising like a deadly shadow behind some unsuspecting Black Flame soldier; a moment later there would be the faint clicking sound of the man's neck snapping. He and his companion in killing alternated targets. Veil moved with the same stealth, used an identical killing technique, and got the same results. I had been in such awe of the ninja mystique in general, and Black Flame's in particular, that I was initially amazed at the relative ease with which Veil and Sinclair went about their business of dispatching the Black Flame soldiers. Then I recalled Veil's comment about Black Flame's emphasis on the psychological and medical, not the physical, aspects of the martial arts. Veil and Sinclair were among the best stone-silent killers, and a ninja who hears nothing before a garrote slices through his jugular, or a knife blade slips into his heart, is just as dead as the rest of us mere mortals.

With the glow of approaching dawn and four men left to find, we split up. Garth went with Veil, while I tagged along-the only way to put it-behind Sinclair, carefully moving in accordance with his hand signals.

I was ending up more voyeur than participant, and I was feeling increasingly embarrassed. It had been, I realized, the height of presumption for me to suggest that a dwarf, no matter how considerable his physical skills, could be of any assistance whatsoever in a matter like this to a consummate master of the martial arts like John Sinclair. He had permitted me to come along only to spare my feelings, and that made me angry-at myself. Indeed, I was becoming increasingly disgusted with myself for asking in the first place and for allowing Garth-also sparing my feelings- to be so insistent. My only job was a negative one, to be certain I remained quiet and unseen as Sinclair snuffed the lives out of the strange zombie-men who had invaded his home, and who would have killed the woman he loved along with the rest of us. Every once in a while I managed to make myself useful by ghoulishly picking over the corpses Sinclair left in his wake. I took one of the men's machine pistols and recovered a fine throwing knife similar to the one Veil had had taken from him. Once, inside the castle, I managed to catch a dead man's automatic rifle before it fell and clattered on the stone floor, but that was, to that point, my one and only contribution to the entire mission.

As the time approached when we would have to make the crucial decision as to which man to attempt to capture and keep alive, an idea occurred to me, a plan in which I might actually be able to play a useful role. Garth and Veil had rejoined us, and as we approached our last target I pulled Sinclair aside and hurriedly outlined my notion to him, emphasizing the specialized skills I possessed that were the basis for the plan. He listened and, somewhat to my surprise, immediately nodded his assent.

My plan required that we make a bit of a mess, and to that end Sinclair used the knife he carried to slit the jugular of the last

Black Flame soldier in our path.

The four of us stood in the shadow of an alcove between two bookcases on the library's balcony as the rising sun sent rays of light through the huge bank of undraped cathedral windows at the eastern end, near the sitting area. The light slowly moved across the floor, finally illuminating the man lying near the open end of the horseshoe-shaped sofa. Al's paralyzed legs were twisted at odd angles, but he had used his arms to push himself over on his back. He was awake. His strange, matte-black eyes were opened wide, his gaze rapidly shifting around as he watched, waiting for something to happen, some sound to emerge from the silence that enveloped him.

Garth pressed the trigger on the machine pistol he carried. The gun chattered, spewing out bullets that tore out a section of the balcony railing on our side, and ripped into the books and bookcases across the way. A moment later, Sinclair staggered out from the shadows and collapsed, his blood-soaked body falling at the edge of the balcony, both arms dangling over the edge. Good show. Now it was my turn. Garth let loose with another burst of fire. I screamed and sent my blood-covered body over a section of railing down closer to the eastern end. I executed what I thought was a rather neat little somersault, managed to land square on my back in the center of the curved section of the sofa, just like it was a safety net. I bounded straight up, did a half roll in the air, came back down on my stomach with my torso hanging over the edge of the left arm of the sofa, my blood-streaked face only inches from the startled Al's. I put on my best glazed-eye, "dead" look for a few moments to let him savor the full range of my acting talents, then smiled at him.

"Top of the morning, my dear fellow," I said, and immediately jammed the wooden dowel I had been palming hard into his open mouth. Then I rolled off the couch behind his head, grabbed both of his wrists, placed my feet on his shoulders, and pulled as hard as I could, extending his arms in order to prevent him from flexing his wrists and sending a poison-tipped dart into him, or me.

Sinclair rolled the rest of the way off the balcony, dropped easily to the floor, then quickly strode over to where I was bracing the hapless Al. As Garth and Veil hurried down the staircase, Sinclair pulled up Al's sleeves and extracted the darts from the spring-loaded scabbards strapped to his wrists. He then hit Al hard, with the heel of his hand, on the right side of Al's jaw, knocking the Black Flame leader unconscious. He removed the dowel from between Al's jaws, probed with his right index finger inside the man's mouth until he found what he was looking for. He yanked loose the cyanide-filled plastic tooth, casually tossed it away. Veil picked up a length of rope from the floor, and he and Sinclair bound Al's wrists tightly behind his back. From the looks of the knots they used, it was going to take Al a considerably longer time to get free than it had taken me, assuming he knew a little muzukashi jotai kara deru, and it was time he didn't have. He wasn't going anywhere, crawling or otherwise.

"It's done," Sinclair said quietly. "Good job, Mongo."

"It should be interesting to hear what he has to say. He knows where all the others can be found, doesn't he?"

Sinclair nodded. "He knows everything that's needed to erase the Black Flame Society from the face of the earth." He paused, looked up at us, and smiled. "But he'll wait, and I have certain preparations to make before I begin questioning him. Let's go get the others and clean up. I think we all deserve a good meal. I'll buy."