Book 1 - The Man With the Golden Torc (3 page)

It occurred to me then that a whole lot of people were going to
be really upset that such a valuable resource as the Karma Catechist was dead
because of me. Maybe I wouldn’t mention this particular incident in my mission
report, after all.

I listened carefully at the door; the sirens were still wailing
their little electronic hearts out, but the angry footsteps seemed to have
departed. I eased the door open and slipped out into the corridor. More guns
thrust out of the walls, opening up immediately when they saw the door move. I
sprinted down the corridor, my armour giving me supernatural speed, running
laughing through the bullets like so much rain.

I reached the end of the corridor and jumped down the stairs to
the next floor, sailing through the air from top to bottom in one go. My
armoured legs bent to absorb the impact as I landed, and I couldn’t help
grinning. Sometimes my job is just so damned cool. I sprinted down the next
corridor, moving so fast now the guns in the walls didn’t have time to react. I
reached the end and then skidded to a halt at the top of the next stairway. A
whole company of heavily armed and armoured security guards were already halfway
up the stairs. I turned and ran back the way I came. I could have fought my way
through them. They wouldn’t have known what hit them till it was too late. I
could have killed them all without breaking a sweat, but that’s not what I do.
I’m an agent, not an assassin. Those guards weren’t the real bad guys here. Just
hired help. Probably didn’t even know what went on, up on the restricted top
floors. Probably thought Saint Baphomet’s was just another hospital for rich
weirdos.

I do kill, when I have to. But mostly I don’t have to. So I
don’t.

I found the elevators, forced the protesting doors open with my
armoured hands, and jumped down the empty shaft. I dropped all the way to the
bottom, one golden hand tightly gripping the steel cable to guide my descent.
Fat sparks from the cable filled the shaft’s gloom like fireworks. I hit the
bottom of the shaft with one hell of a bang and didn’t feel a thing. I forced
the elevator doors open, stepped out into the lobby…and there was Saint
Baphomet’s head of security, waiting for me. I’d been hoping I wouldn’t run into
him ever since I saw his name in the mission briefing. We had history.

I allowed myself a few mental curses. Not out loud, of course.
That might be taken as a sign of weakness, and the Droods are never weak. It’s
all about attitude, remember?

So I ostentatiously relaxed and nodded casually to the head of
security. I knew who it was, who it had to be, even though the face and body
were new to me. This was my old adversary Archie Leech, breaking in a new body,
big and muscular and loaded down with weapons. I only recognised him by the
Kandarian amulet hanging around his throat. An ugly lump of carved stone, relic
of a race wiped out millennia ago and quite rightly too, it allowed Archie to
jump his soul from one body to another at will. Rumour had it he always kept a
dozen or so in reserve in some kind of suspended animation, just in case the one
he was wearing took too much damage to continue.

Archie was a serial possessor, a spiritual rapist, and he never
gave a damn what happened to his bodies after he abandoned them. I tried to, but
it wasn’t always possible. I’d killed Archie before, when I absolutely had to,
but it had never taken. I don’t know what he looked like originally. I suppose
it’s possible even he doesn’t remember anymore, after so many faces. He scowled
at me, seeing me clearly thanks to his damned amulet. Three times in one night…I
was starting to feel just a bit conspicuous.

"This place is off-limits to everyone," Archie said flatly.
"Even to the high-and-mighty Droods."

I had to smile behind my golden mask. "Nowhere is off-limits to
us, Archie. You know that."

"Why here, Drood? Aren’t even hospitals safe from you and your
kind?"

"That’s rich, coming from you, Archie. When have you ever cared
about putting innocents at risk? Droods go where we have to, to do what we have
to do. That’s a new look for you, isn’t it, Archie? All big and brutal and
steroid abuse. You usually like them younger…and prettier."

He shrugged. "It’s a bit long in the arm, but it’s good for
heavy lifting. And they’ve been wearing out so quickly recently…"

I took a deliberate step forward. He didn’t budge. "Stand aside,
Archie," I said. "My mission’s completed. No need for this to get nasty."

"You worry about the bodies I wear," he said, smiling with his
stolen mouth. "That’s always been your weakness."

"Step aside," I said. "Or I’ll damage you."

"Not a chance in hell. I’ve always wanted to kill a Drood."

He opened fire with a machine pistol, spraying me with bullets.
They ricocheted away from my armoured chest and face, and I walked right into
the hail of bullets and slapped the gun out of his hand. He cut at me with a
glowing dagger, but the spells enchancing its edge still weren’t enough to do
more than raise a shower of sparks as the blade skidded across my throat. I
grabbed for the amulet around Archie’s neck, but at the last moment my hand
slipped aside. The amulet had serious protections.

Archie punched me in the head with all his body’s strength
behind it. I heard the knuckles break. I didn’t even flinch. I grabbed his
shoulders and threw him against the nearest wall. He hit hard enough to crack
the plaster and slam all the breath out of him. I started past him, hoping it
was over, but he surged to his feet again, drawing dangerously on his body’s
reserves, one hand full of plastique explosive. He slapped it against my
armoured chest, and it stuck fast. He laughed hoarsely as I tried to pull the
sticky stuff off, but it wouldn’t budge. Archie held up the detonator before me,
brandishing it mockingly.

There was enough plastique on my chest to blow out most of this
floor. My armour would withstand it…but the blast radius would almost certainly
take out half of Saint Baphomet’s underpinnings and bring all the upper floors
crashing down. Hundreds dead, maybe more, most of them probably innocents.
Archie didn’t care; he’d just jump to another body. Hundreds could die, if it
meant he could boast of killing a Drood. He didn’t care. But I did.

I grabbed Archie by the shoulders again and pulled him to me,
slamming his chest against mine with the plastique crushed between us. He
struggled fiercely, but I held him easily with one golden arm. He cried out in a
pettish fury as he realised what I intended, and then my free hand closed over
his and activated the detonator.

My mask darkened briefly to protect my eyes from the glare of
the explosion and my ears from the blast, and when I could see and hear again, I
was surrounded by smoke and rubble and small bloody gobbets of what had been
Archie Leech’s stolen body. My armour and his body had absorbed most of the
explosion, and the walls around me looked scarred but still solid. The hospice
would stand. Archie was gone, of course, his soul wafted away to his next
bolthole, along with the amulet. I had no doubt I’d see them both again, some
day.

Once again, there was the sound of a hell of a lot of running
feet, approaching fast from above. The security guards here were nothing if not
persistent. I took the portable door out of my pocket and slapped it against the
floor, where it immediately became a nice new trapdoor. I opened it, dropped
through into the basement, and then pulled the portable door away from what was
now my ceiling. Let them search the rubble for my body while I calmly and
quietly made my way up the back stairs and walked right past them to the nearest
exit.

This proved to be the back door, and I slipped silently out into
the back square, where Dr. Dee’s dog from Hell was lying in wait for me. Next
door’s alarms and excursions had clearly attracted its attention. It was
growling steadily, like a long rumble of thunder, up close and threatening, and
its huge jaws opened, revealing more teeth than seemed physically possible. It
glared at the door that had just opened before it, but still it couldn’t see or
hear or smell me…So I just held the door open and let the demon dog charge
straight past me and on into the hospice. Where no doubt the security guards
would think of something to do to keep it occupied. I do my best, but I’m really
not a very nice person sometimes. I closed the door quietly behind the demon dog
and strolled away.

I powered down my armour, and in a moment it was just a golden
collar around my throat. And I was just a man again, with a man’s limitations.
Sometimes, that’s a relief. I left the side alley and walked unhurriedly out
into Harley Street. The same people were walking up and down, with no idea that
the whole history of the world had just been changed behind their backs. None of
them paid me any attention. I was my old anonymous self again. No one ever sees
a Drood’s face, just occasionally the golden armour. It’s enough that the world
is protected; they don’t need to know by whom.

They might not approve of some of our methods.

I disappeared down into the Underground, mixing in with the
crowds, and took the next train to Tottenham Court Road station. I joined the
army of people bustling up and down Oxford Street, just another face among many,
and browsed shop windows until I was sure I hadn’t been followed. Because when
you work for the Drood family, the rest of the world usually is out to get you.
I headed down into Soho. The city’s gentrified the hell out of what used to be
the last truly wild part of London, but there’s still plenty of sin, sleaze, and
secrets to be found there, if you know where to look.

Just a little off the beaten track, down a side street that
never gets any sunlight, lies my very favourite Internet café. It’s a part of
the Electronic Village chain, but I like it because it’s open twenty-four hours
a day, serving twilight people like me. The single window in the shopfront is
whitewashed over, and the neon sign above the door hasn’t worked in years. The
people who come here like their privacy while they do strange, illegal, and
possibly unnatural things with their computers. I entered the café and stopped
just inside the doorway to let my eyes adjust to the gloom. There were chairs
and tables and computers and absolutely nothing else. The surprisingly large
area had an air of quiet reverence not unlike that of a church. The customers
sat huddled over their glowing screens, deaf and dumb to those around them. The
only sounds in the room were the swift tapping of keys and the quiet chirping of
working machines.

The café’s manager came forward to greet me. Willy Fleagal was a
tall gangling sort, with bifocals, a high forehead, and a ponytail, wearing a
T-shirt saying Information Wants to Be Free ™. He gave me a big smile and a limp
handshake. He knew me as a regular customer, with special privileges guaranteed
by the chain’s owners, but that was all he knew. I’ve dropped him the occasional
hint that I might be an investigative journalist, chasing the corporate bad
guys, and he loved that.

"Wow, hello again, Mr. Bond," he said, trying hard for
cheerfulness but not quite making it. Willy was a conspiracy theory freak of
long standing, and therefore tended towards depression, misery, and gloom as
natural default positions. "Always a pleasure to see you in here, man. Are you
sure you weren’t followed? Of course you are, course you are." He produced a
handheld scanner and checked my clothing for any planted bugs. All part of the
service, for Willy.

"You seem busy enough, Willy," I said. "Turned up anything juicy
recently?"

He nodded quickly and lowered his voice as he filled me in on
the latest conspiracy gossip. Most of which I already knew, but I didn’t have
the heart to tell him. His watery eyes glowed behind the bifocals as he solemnly
assured me that the British royal family is actually descended from ancient
lizard gods who had their awful genesis in the German Black Forest; that the
U.S. Pentagon actually has a secret sixth side invisible to all but the chosen
few, where all the really important decisions are made; and that a certain
Hollywood actress is actually a shape-changing alien, which is why she can put
on and take off weight so easily while never seeming to age. That last one was
new to me, and I made a mental note to check it out later. The family knows of
four shape-changing alien species currently busy on our world, and part of the
agreement is that they’re supposed to stay out of the public eye.

Willy finally ran down and led me past his oblivious customers
to the back room reserved for my use. He unlocked the door, ushered me in with a
last dismal sniff, and then left me alone. I waited till I heard him lock the
door again, and then sat down before the waiting computer. I didn’t need to
check whether Willy or anyone else had tampered with it; if anyone but me even
approached it, the whole thing would self-destruct in a quite impressively nasty
manner. Willy didn’t know that, of course. He didn’t need to know. He also
didn’t need to know that inside the standard computer shell was nothing more
than a properly prepared crystal ball. Far more powerful than any computer and a
damned sight harder to hack.

I said my real name out loud, and the monitor screen turned
itself on, showing me an image of my usual contact, Penny Drood. A cool blonde
in a tight white sweater, sweet and smart and sexy enough, in a distant sort of
way. I like Penny. She doesn’t take any shit from me.

"You’re late," she said. "Agents in the field are required to
report in exactly on the hour."

"Yes, I did manage to avoid being killed or severely injured,
thank you for asking, Penny. May I inquire why the mission briefing didn’t
inform me about the bloody big demon dog standing guard outside Dr. Dee’s?"

Penny sniffed. "Demon dogs come as standard these days, Eddie.
As you’d know if you actually bothered to read all the updates I send you."