Silver (19 page)

“Grandfather must have been brave,” the boy said.

Jair nodded, lost again in memories that weren’t his. “Even his own friends turned on him because he couldn’t tell them the truth. Like everyone else they thought he had betrayed Jesus. They didn’t understand. There was so much they didn’t understand. They thought he had acted out of jealousy and greed. They thought it was all about these damned coins. It wasn’t. It never had been. You know that now. He lost everything because he was the best of them, the strongest, most faithful. And now they call him faithless.” Jair closed his eyes. The real betrayal was still fresh inside him.

He gathered up the silver and handed the pouch to his son.

“These are yours now. Think of them as the last reminders of your grandfather’s sacrifice. We cannot forget the truth. We owe that much to him, don’t we?”

“I’ll never forget,” Menahem promised.

16

Burning Down the House

Now

The first siren blared almost immediately.

The second and third came only a second later. In less than five seconds every alarm box in the street was wailing. Half of them might have only been for show, but the other half were doing the best to raise the dead. In thirty seconds they had joined into a single wall of noise.

“What the hell’s that racket?” one of the uniforms said.

“Not sure, Sarge. Sounds like burglar alarms.”

“You trying to tell me every bastard in this street just got robbed? I don’t like this. Go and check it out, Hollis.”

Ronan Frost listened to one set of booted footsteps clump down the stairs. That still left two uniforms upstairs. They were better numbers. He could take two, quickly, if he had to. Still, with a little bit of luck there would be no need.

“What the hell’s going on out there?” the uniform was talking into his radio, Frost realized. He couldn’t hear what the crackling voice said in reply. He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe had the ability to mess with their frequencies if he wanted to. If the boy could trigger every damned burglar alarm in a square mile, he could sure as hell dampen a radio signal. “Say again?” the officer repeated, shouting to be heard over the caterwauling alarms.

Just go down there and check it out
, Frost willed the man to do his job.

They had a corpse here, but the one indisputable thing everyone knew about the dead was that they didn’t get up and walk unless it was a Romero film. She wasn’t going anywhere. Outside, it could have been the first salvo of the Third World War if the racket was anything to go by. They were policemen. It was their duty to go out there and investigate.

Frost waited, counting the rhythmic
dub-dub dub-dub
of his heartbeats.

Street by street more alarms sounded until they formed their own grotesque dawn chorus across the city. It was pandemonium. Still he didn’t move. His skin prickled with anticipation. He felt the tension coiling up inside him, desperate to be released in a fury of action. Still he waited, lying on his back, listening to the cacophony. It was music to his ears. He’d asked for a distraction and Lethe had delivered. He could picture people beginning to stumble out of their houses in the pajamas, rubbing their sleepy eyes and wondering what the hell was going on.

With a bit of luck a few more minutes of this and he’d be able to slip downstairs and out of the backdoor unnoticed. He wouldn’t need to be Harry Houdini to disappear into the crowd of woken sleepers grumbling about the bloody noise.

He heard more footsteps on the stairs.

It was hard to tell if it was one man, or if both of them were going down.

Frost waited until he couldn’t hear them, then whispered, “Talk to me Lethe.”

“You can say thank you any time you like. No, no, seriously. Any time you like. I live to serve.”

“Yeah, yeah, just tell me what you see.”

“Five plod standing around, looking worse than useless. I think I confused them. That or all the noise is interfering with the neural relays and their brains are shutting down to protect themselves.”

“Meaning one’s still inside the house,” Frost mused, ignoring everything after the word five.

“No fooling you, boss.”

“Remind me again why we keep you around?”

“Because I’m brilliant, obviously, and because without my little bit of techno-magic you’d be spending a good chunk of the foreseeable at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Now, it’s good to talk and all that, but how about you get the hell out of there, Frosty.”

Frost holstered his pistol.

He reached up for one of the rafters, caught a hold of the beam with both hands, and lifted himself silently to his feet. He stood, one foot either side of the loft hatch. He couldn’t stand fully upright because of the confined space. He bent down all the way, working his fingers beneath the wooden board, then very carefully lifted it out of the way. The alarm chorus hid the occasional scrape and scuff of wood on wood as he put the loft door down. He could see the landing lit up beneath him. Frost lowered himself back down to his stomach, then leaned ever so slightly down through the opening to see exactly what he’d be lowering himself into.

The last uniform still stood in the bedroom doorway, unable to pull his gaze away from the mutilation on the bed. The odds were the poor guy had never seen a corpse before. That his first looked like one of Andrei Chikatilo’s victims spread out there on her bed didn’t help his brain process the horror of the room. But it did help Frost. He breathed deeply, once, twice, steadying himself, before he lowered himself slowly, and soundlessly, down. Frost took all of his weight on his forearms like a gymnast on the parallel bars. As his shoulders came level with his elbows every muscle in his arms began to tremble violently. He expected the police officer to cry out, but he didn’t. Frost twisted slightly, allowing his body weight to lower him further, until it felt as though the muscles in his shoulders and upper back were going to tear, then he dropped down the last few inches to the floor silently behind the uniform.

He reached around to the holster at the base of his spine and drew his gun.

He took two steps across the deep pile carpet, quickly bringing himself up to no more than a few inches behind the policeman. He saw himself over the uniform’s shoulder, in the mirror on the wall behind the bed. The uniform’s eyes widened and he started to turn. Frost didn’t hesitate. He pistol whipped the uniform across the side of the head, dropping him like a stone. It was that or putting a bullet in his temple. He caught the man as his legs buckled and lowered him gently to the floor.

Frost took the stairs two and three at a time, then froze at the bottom, caught by a moment’s indecision. “This is such a bollocks job. That guy saw my face, and my prints are all over this place,” he said, looking at where his left hand still rested on the ornamental acorn-carved knob at the bottom of the balustrade.

“Three choices,” Lethe said in his ear, without missing a beat. “Get the feather duster out, play chemist and burn the place down—it’s easy enough, trust me. There’s a gas main, and there’s enough explosive stuff in the average kitchen to take out a tank. That kills two birds with one stone: no eye witness, no prints to worry about. It’s surprisingly easy. All you need is some lard, the crystallized oven cleaner and the gas hose. Couple of minutes and the blaze will be out of control. Or I can make it look like you never existed. No fingerprints, no military records, nothing. You’ll become a non-person in about twenty seconds flat. Your call.”

“Obi Wan taught me well, but you are my Lord and Master, Frosty. And as your faithful servant I feel obliged to remind you it’s time to make like a shepherd and get the flock out of there.”

Ronan Frost knew the kid was right. He turned and started to run. He heard the front door opening behind him. He didn’t risk a backward glance, knowing it could be the difference between making it out of the house and not. He hit the backdoor running. Outside was chaos. Alarms blared, people were shouting, confused, worried. Frost didn’t break his stride as he ran straight across the tiny backyard and launched himself at the painted fence. He hit the Grim Reaper’s grinning wooden teeth right foot first, caught the top with his hands, and boosted himself up over the fence in one fluid motion. He dropped down onto the other side and stood there for a second, back pressed up against the fence, looking left and right.

The Monster was parked streets away.

“All available cars have just been sent your way, boss. In a few minutes the entire area is going to be teaming with the law.”

It didn’t have to be a problem. They had no idea they were even meant to be looking for him. As far as they knew there was a dead body and a lot of alarms ringing. He didn’t have any blood on him, and other than being in the wrong place at the absolutely wrong time, he’d done nothing wrong. Still, there was nothing to be gained from sticking around.

He started to walk toward the far end of the alleyway that ran between the narrow terraces. People had begun to congregate around the alley’s mouth and on the street corners. No one had a clue what was going on. There was a chill to the night that had them permanently moving as they tried to keep themselves warm. Some of them had dressed hastily, pulling coats on over their pajamas. Others were in jeans and jackets and whatever else made up their normal daywear. In less than twenty feet he passed all body types, from the anorexic to the bloated belly hanging out over the waistband of straining pajama bottoms. Lurch tall to Cousin It short. There were more than their fair share of Uncle Festers out there as well. And of course, there was the one staggeringly beautiful Morticia with her died-black hair, piercings and Gothed-up eyeliner, who had no right to be living among this freak show of inner-city life. Frost smiled at her, risking the wrath of her very own Gomez. Charles Addams would have been proud of how his old cartoons captured this slice of dystopian, happy families so well even all these years later. They were all out there on the streets, and none of them loked very happy with their life right then.

“One last trick,” Lethe said in his ear.

Frost had no idea what he meant until the first streetlight exploded in a shower of glass. Each bulb detonated in quick succession, sounding like a series of shotgun blasts. Shards of glass fell like jagged rain. Frost walked down the center of the street, feeling like some dark avenger who had stepped out of a B-movie. Lethe laughed in his ear. Darkness chased down the street, passed him and raced on. In thirty seconds the stars in the sky were suddenly so much brighter because there wasn’t a single streetlight burning in the entire city.

“I don’t want to know how you just did that,” Frost said.

“Liar,” Lethe said. “But don’t worry, I’ll let you in on the secret. All I did was redirect some electricity. It’s amazing what you can do with a computer. I overloaded the transformers and something had to give. The bulbs are built to blow. It’s cheaper than replacing the entire wiring. Looked good though, didn’t it? Give me that much, at least.”

“It looked good,” Ronan Frost agreed.

He saw two policemen getting out of a squad car. He walked across to them, pretending to be a curious resident. “Hey fellas,” Frost called out, “what’s going on?”

“Nothing to concern yourself about, sir,” the shortest of the two uniforms said, slamming the car door. He locked it. Trust in their fellow man, it seemed, had yet to reach the local police force.

“It’s a bit hard, sounds like all hell is breaking loose,” Frost spread his arms wide, taking in the whole cacophony.

“Yeah, some sort of outage in the power grid shorted all the alarm circuits. I don’t pretend to understand, mate. I just do what the gaffer tells me,” the taller uniform said, smiling almost conspiratorially.

“Ahh,” Frost said, as though that made perfect sense. “Well you have a good night, guys.”

“You too.”

“You know the deal, no rest for the wicked.”