The Darkness of God: Book Three of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy (7 page)

The warehouse was gray, anonymous, on a dingy street close to the spaceport. Henders pressed a button, and a door slid open. The lifter floated in and grounded, and the canopy lifted.

They muscled Wolfe out and took him along a bare concrete corridor, then down steps to a door. A guard stood outside with a heavy blaster.

Without a word, he opened the door, and Henders, Naismith, and the third gunman pushed Joshua inside.

The room was almost big enough to have an echo; dark-paneled wood walls hung with jarringly modern anima-art. There was a door to one side that was closed.

Naismith and the gunman stood to either side of Joshua, guns aimed.

At the far end of the room was an old-fashioned kidney-shaped desk. Leaning against it was a strangely misshapen man. From the waist down, he was tiny, almost small enough to be a jockey. Above that, he had the barrel chest and muscled arms of a stevedore. He wore his thinning hair long, tied into two queues that dangled behind his ears.

He had a strong, determined face, but with the pouty, small mouth of a decadent.

“You can call me Aurus,” he said. “That’s as good as anything else. It means gold, and gold’s what I am.”

His voice matched his shoulders: deep, full of authority. Aurus went on, without waiting for Wolfe to respond.

“Taylor, we get a lot of damned fools here on Rogan’s World, of a damned big variety. But you’re something new.”

“Always nice to widen a man’s experience,” Joshua said.

“Don’t crack wise,” Aurus advised. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if you go below with or without your teeth, and it’s hard to talk through a mouth full of blood. A fool,” he repeated. “Of a unique sort.

“You downplanet with enough pizzazz for a circus, obviously trying to catch somebody’s eye. Fine. I’m good-hearted, there’s always room for somebody else in my organization, so I send a couple of my best operators out to meet you. No problem. Everything goes well; Henders comes back and tells me here’s someone we can do business with.

“Three days later, you clip poor goddamned Igraine out of his joint. I really want to know, before you die, how you counter-rigged his wheel. I’d ask the croupier, but Igraine fed him to the eels last night.

“So you’re a fast mover, I now think. Then you go and jump the cits that front Nakamura’s place and tell them you’re the new mensch on the dock. Did you ever consider they were working for me? Did you ever think maybe you should’ve talked to me before you started pushing your muscle around?

“Not you. Throw a bomb, get the heat worked up, and think you just pulled some sort of brilliant move. Dick-head. Let me be the first to advise you, Mister Taylor. Your flashing around is going to do nothing but cost me money, and get you dead.”

Aurus’ face was getting redder. He went behind his desk, lifted the stopper from an elaborately worked decanter, and poured a drink into an equally fancy snifter. Henders walked from behind Wolfe to the side of the desk, holding his gun steady.

“Contrary to what you just said, I
did
think about talking to you,” Wolfe said, before Aurus could lift his glass. “But I didn’t think it was worth my while.”

“You didn’t …” Aurus shook his head in disbelief. “No. You didn’t think. All you did was — ”

Wolfe’s hand flashed out, palm up, fingers curled. He had Naismith’s gunhand at the wrist, twisted once, and bone shattered with a sharp crack. Wolfe, now with Naismith’s gun, spun away as the gunman on the other side pulled his trigger.

But Wolfe wasn’t there, and the blast seared into Naismith’s side, ripping through his stomach wall. Naismith screamed in utter agony and fell sideways as his guts spilled, a stinking pile of pink, gray, red.

Joshua shot the gunman in the head, and blood spattered high to the ceiling.

The man who’d called himself Aurus was scrabbling in a compartment behind the desk for a gun.

Henders fired and missed, and Joshua crouched, aimed, fired.

The blaster seared Henders’ arm away, and his gun cartwheeled across the desk.

Joshua shifted his aim and fired. His first bolt took Aurus in the shoulder, smashing him back against the wall. He flopped against it, mouth opening to shout, to scream, and Joshua blew his chest apart.

The door came open, and Joshua shot through the gap without aiming. He heard a shout of pain.

He ran, crouching, for the desk, and went prone behind it, pistol aimed at the doorway. He heard shouts, running feet. The door crashed open, but nobody came in.

He saw the barrel of a heavy blaster and took aim. A head flashed into sight, was gone before he could fire.

“Shit,” the shout came. “They got th’ boss.”

Another voice: “C’mon, Augie. We’re gone!”

There were more shouts, running feet, and the sound of lifter drives-whining to life. It was quiet then except for Naismith’s moans and the whir of the anima-art’s motors.

Joshua went to Naismith and shot him in the head. Then he went to the door and looked out. The body of the guard was sprawled just beyond it. Wolfe went up the steps and found the warehouse deserted, its door yawning.

“Thieves
do
fall out,” he said to himself.

He went back down into Aurus’ office.

Henders was barely conscious, clutching the cauterized remains of his arm.

Wolfe kicked him sharply, and the man screamed, bit if off.

“I’m not getting soft,” Joshua said. “But maybe somebody’ll be interested in hearing the details from a survivor.”

He reached into a jacket pocket, took a card from a case.

The card read only:

He wrote the com number of his hotel, and:

Perhaps we should talk.

He dropped the card on Henders’ chest, took the magazine from the blaster, tossed the gun into a corner of the room, and left.

Henders tried to sit up, collapsed.

After a time, he started moaning.

• • •

“You’re blood-crazy,” Master Speaker Athelstan said firmly.

Joshua looked around the compartment, meeting hostile stares from Kristin, her duo, and Security Coordinator Kur.

“I do not believe this,” he said. “Not one of you understands the fine art of making a good impression, do you?”

“Perhaps,” Kur said, “we don’t have your obviously wide experience in criminal matters.”

“Obviously not,” Wolfe agreed.

“It does not matter whether we understand or approve,” Master Speaker Athelstan said. “A course of action has been determined by you. There is no other choice than to follow it. Joshua Wolfe, what comes next?”

Joshua held out his hands.

“Business as usual.”

• • •

“You had no gun hidden,” Kristin asked.

“No.”

“Yet you killed five men who
did
have guns.”

“Four. Henders should be alive, if a medico showed up in time.”

She stared at him.

“Perhaps,” she said finally, “we have not been careful enough with you.”

• • •

Eight nights later, a message was waiting when Wolfe returned from the Oasis near dawn.

The screen was blank except for six numbers.

Joshua went out of the hotel, found a public com, dialed the numbers.

A synthed voice said, “Yes?”

“This is John Taylor. I was given this number.”

There was a hum for almost thirty seconds, then:

“At 1730 hours today, leave your hotel and walk east along Fourteenth Boulevard. You will be met. Come alone and unarmed.”

The line went dead.

Joshua spotted them as he left the hotel: two men behind, a man and a woman far ahead, across the boulevard. There’d be other pairs down the side streets. It was a classic box pattern, hard to elude, more likely intended to show Wolfe the opposition’s resources than anything else.

All were pros, and none showed the slightest interest in Wolfe.

He was grateful he’d convinced Kristin not to put a shadow backup, and to play it straight, at least at first.

“If they’re trying to kill me,” he reasoned, “at least that’ll bring ‘em further into the open. I’m pretty sure I can duck another attempt by thuggery, if they’re no better than the late idiot who called himself Aurus.”

But he still felt clammy fingers at his back as he walked. He made three blocks before a long, sleek lifter pulled out of a side street. Its window hissed down.

“Mister Taylor?” The driver was young, freckled, friendly looking.

“Yes.”

“I’m your transport.”

Wolfe got into the luxuriously appointed vehicle. The driver waited for a slight hole in traffic, then sped across the boulevard. He took a left, two rights.

“I didn’t bring any backup,” Wolfe said.

“Of course,” the young man said. “I’m just careful.”

Two smaller lifters, with four men in each, came from side streets, fell in behind Joshua’s vehicle.

“Yours?”

“Mine,” the driver acknowledged.

“You are careful.”

• • •

“Sorry, sir, but I’ll have to check you before we go inside,” the driver said, trying to sound truly apologetic.

Damn them for untrusting bastards and not taking that damned bomb off.
Wolfe caught himself grinning.
How dare these Chitet think I’d ever do anything nefarious or possibly dare to haul ass without giving them the chance to blow me up. I’m shocked. Shocked, do you hear me?

He got out of the lifter, pretending to be impressed by the looming, colonnaded gray stone building they’d landed in front of, and the forested grounds around it, while he was
reaching
out,
feeling …

The driver took a sweep from the door pocket and moved it across Wolfe, who turned, raising his hands, a bored expression on his face, as the sweep moved up his spine.

The driver’s expression blanked, just as the detector’s needle pegged and a buzzer sounded. He looked perplexed, then shook his head and paid no notice to the alarm triggered by the bomb. He continued on, moving the sweep under Wolfe’s armpits, around his waist.

“You’re clear,” he said. “So let me take you inside to Advisor Walsh.”

“Won’t be necessary,” a jocular voice came from the mansion’s steps. “The mountain has come to Yahweh, or however it goes.”

The man appeared as cheery as his voice and his driver. He was small, balding, with twin ruffs of white hair above his ears, and a smile accenting the lines of happy aging on his face. But his eyes were obsidian, and the two men flanking him looked equally dangerous.

“Mister Taylor, you’ve wreaked some havoc on my organization,” he went on. “I’m Edmund Walsh, and I think we should have a talk.”

• • •

“I suppose you expect me to begin with some sort of moral lecture on how I’m so outraged by this new generation of villains like yourself, who lack all respect for tradition, the amenities, and so forth,” Walsh said. “I had Sathanas’ own time finding Hubert Dayton,” he said. “Finally had to buy a bottle from your hotel. I believe this is how you like it, however.”

He handed Wolfe a half-full snifter and a glass of ice water.

“It is, sir,” Wolfe said. “And no, I wasn’t necessarily expecting a lecture about the good old days. Wasn’t expecting or not expecting anything, to be precise.”

“Good,” the old man approved. “What they call no-mind, eh?”

He noted Wolfe’s flicker.

“Oh yes, Taylor. I’m hardly an oaf. When I heard the report of the damage you did to Aurus and his goons, I suspected there was a bit more to you than just being quick with a gun. Some say a man properly trained could even control objects. Such as roulette balls?”

Wolfe smiled politely, sipped Armagnac, and made no response.

“Anyway, back to where I started. You’ll have to bear with me, Taylor. I’m getting old and have a tendency to ramble. You’ll likely find that weakness in yourself, as you age.” The black eyes glittered. “That’s assuming you plan on getting older.”

“It’s on my agenda.”

“Good. At any rate, one reason I won’t talk to you about how gunnies like me were such noblemen in our youth, when the world was young and every day promised a new fool to hijack, is I got the same lecture from some other old bastard back then. I read me a little history, and found what he’d said to be complete codswallop. Goons is goons, as they say. And I suppose we all end up romanticizing the past.”

Walsh dropped ice cubes into a glass, poured from a pitcher. “I’d dearly love to be saltin’ it back with you,” he said, letting a bit of false sentiment into his voice, “but the stomach won’t stand for it. Most of it’s synth lining, but still I’ve got to live the clean life. At least they don’t have me on pablum yet.”

Walsh walked out of the bar-cubby down a long, high-ceilinged hall, into a drawing room with bookcases and tables holding ship and machine models. On the walls were testimonials to Walsh’s virtues. He motioned Wolfe into a large leather chair, sank into one across from him. “Admire my digs?” he asked.

“Imposing,” Wolfe allowed.

“Glad you didn’t say you liked this pile of rubble,” Walsh said. “Damned cold and hard to heat. You know why I choose to live here instead of somewhere comfortable?”

“Because you want to impress the gunsels?”

“That,” Walsh admitted. “But there’s something else. When I was a boy, my mother used to come here. At the time the place was the home of a shipbuilder. A hard, hard man named Torcelli, who’d cut his way to the top and wasn’t about to let anybody get up beside him. My mother was one of his mistresses. She brought me here twice. Torcelli saw me, and got uncomfortable about something. I’ve wondered if I’m his bastard, but I doubt it. Mother wasn’t exactly the choosiest with her attentions, and his seed would’ve been weak by then.

“But the place took my mind, and I never let it leave me. I guess that gave me some sort of visible goal, eh? Get on top my own way, then buy this relic and restore it to prove I’m at least as good as Torcelli was. Better, since I’ve been here longer.”

Walsh drank water. “Not that this matters,” he said. “But when you retire, or anyway step back from the day-to-day battles, you find yourself thinking back. Wondering what made you do this, do that, and what you gained or lost from it.” Walsh looked out a window. “See, over there, by the lake? My elk. There’s six of them. Had them brought in from Earth. Ungainly bastards they are, and they’re hell on my roses. I guess I’ll have a roast one of these years, eh?” He put his glass down, leveled his eyes on Wolfe. “Even though he didn’t bother to clear it with me, I can’t say I disagreed with Aurus’ wanting to kill you. You
did
put a dent in his immediate plans.”