Things close to us began to disappear, driven out of reality by the overspilling energies of Strange Chloe’s stare. Objects and trophies and pieces of furniture just vanished, one after the other, air rushing in to fill the gaps left behind. Rich deep carpet faded away and was gone, leaving a slowly widening swath of bare boards between us. Strange Chloe glared at me, scowling so hard it must have hurt her face, but all I had to show her in return was my featureless gold mask. I was almost close enough to reach out and touch her when her power broke against my armour and blasted back at her. The full force of her gaze was reflected by my unyielding armour, and Strange Chloe screamed silently as she faded away and was gone.
I armoured down.
“Sorry, Chloe,” I said to the empty air where she’d been. “I hope you’re happy now, wherever you are.”
“You killed her,” said the Dancing Fool.
“Her own power turned against her,” I said. “And don’t you dare sound so outraged, Nigel. You know damn well you never liked her. Not really. Don’t you dare pretend she was ever your friend. You just let her hang around because she was useful: a big gun you could pull on people who weren’t impressed by your fighting skills. She was always more my friend than yours.”
“You were never her friend,” said the Dancing Fool.
“Sometimes . . . you just don’t have the time,” I said.
The Dancing Fool laughed briefly. There wasn’t any humour in the sound. “You’ve robbed me of one of my colleagues. Seems only fair I should rob you of one of yours. Never did like you, Walker.”
His long lean body snapped into a martial arts stance as he turned on Walker, clearly expecting to take him by surprise, but Walker was already waiting, gun in hand. He smiled briefly and kneecapped the Dancing Fool, shattering his left kneecap with a single bullet. The Dancing Fool made a shocked, surprised sound as the impact punched his leg out from under him, and he fell to the floor. Tears streamed down his face as he clutched his bloody knee with both hands as though he thought he could hold it together by sheer force. His breathing came short and hurried as the pain hit him in waves, each one worse than the one before.
“How did you do that?” he said to Walker, forcing the words out. “I’m fast. I can dodge bullets. And I always know what’s coming! How could you do that?”
“Because you never met anyone like me before,” Walker said calmly.
I moved over to join him, giving the crippled Dancing Fool plenty of room. “Was that really necessary, Walker?”
“I thought so, yes,” he said. “We don’t all have suits of armour to protect us.”
“Sorry, Nigel,” I said to the Dancing Fool.
“Shove it!” he said. Both his hands were slick with blood now, and his ruined leg trembled violently from shock and nerve damage. “I’ll get you for this. Get you both! I’ll never stop, never give up. You’ll spend what’s left of your lives looking back over your shoulder, waiting for me to be there. And I will! I’ll kill you both for this!”
“No, you won’t,” said Walker. And he put a bullet through the Dancing Fool’s other kneecap.
There was only the briefest of screams, and then the Dancing Fool passed out from pain and shock and horror. I looked at him, and then at Walker.
“It was a mercy, really,” said Walker, putting away his gun. “Revenge is such a waste of life. Besides, it’s never wise to leave an enemy in shape to come after you.”
“There is that,” I said. “At least they won’t call him the Dancing Fool anymore.”
We both looked around for Coffin Jobe. He was lying dead on the floor. I got Walker to help me pick him up and settle him in a chair, so at least he’d be comfortable when he came back to life again. I left Nigel where he was; I didn’t want to risk waking him.
“Well,” said Walker. “This was all very distracting, but it doesn’t get us any closer to Alexander and Peter. In fact, after this I think we have to assume that they’ve been observing us ever since we got here and are therefore probably heading for the nearest exit or locking themselves inside a reinforced secret bunker.”
“No,” I said. “They won’t leave. Not with so much unfinished business left between us. They know they haven’t won until they’ve beaten me. Beaten me fair and square, to keep my family from coming after them. Because the other side of Anything for the family is Anything for any member of the family. And the Kings’ best chance for winning is here on their home territory, where they have all the advantages.”
“Would you still be willing to make a deal?” said Walker. “Hands off, leave safely, in return for the Independent Agent’s secrets?”
“No,” I said. “But they’ll think they can persuade me to settle for that. Because that’s how they think.” I raised my voice. “I know you can hear me, Alexander! Talk to me! Tell me where you are so we can sort this out face-to-face. You know you want to.”
A vision of Alexander King sitting at his ease on his great wooden throne appeared on the air before us. He looked exactly as he had before: an aged rogue in flamboyant clothes. But his smile was cold and calculating now, and it added years to his shrunken face.
“Just walk straight ahead,” he said. “I’m waiting.”
The vision snapped off. I looked at Walker, and then leaned in close to murmur in his ear.
“Don’t stand on ceremony. If you get the chance, kill him.”
“Glad to,” murmured Walker.
We walked on through the Independent Agent’s monument to his own genius, through room after room full of trophies and mementos, the museum he’d made of his life. Endless photos from his extensive career, from all places and periods, showing Alexander King as a young man, growing steadily older . . . but not beyond a certain point. No photos of a more than middle-aged man, past his best, or of an old man limping into retirement. Just portraits of the legendary Independent Agent with famous faces from politics and religion, along with movie stars and celebrities, and even a few gods and monsters. (Though those last tended not to photograph well.) Alexander King really had got around in his day.
I paused before one photo, nicely framed, but just one more set among so many . . . A young and handsome Alexander stood with his arm around the waist of a very young Martha Drood. A simple snapshot of a warm moment in the Cold War. Martha, when she was just a field agent, like me. She wasn’t even as old as I was. She was beautiful, just like everyone said.
Another photograph showed a middle-aged but still stylish Alexander standing next to a young Walker dressed in what looked like his very first good suit. I looked at Walker, and he shrugged easily.
“When you have work that needs doing, you go to the best man for the job. And for many years, that man was Alexander King.”
“Have you noticed?” I said, indicating a whole wall of photos with one wave of my hand, “all these photos of the man himself and his world, and all the people he knew . . . but not one of his family. Not one of Alexander with his wife, whoever she was, or his daughter. Or Peter. What kind of a man has no family photos?”
“A man who lives for his work,” said Walker. “You don’t get to be the greatest agent of all time by allowing yourself to be . . . distracted.”
Soon after, we passed through a room full of evidence of Alexander King’s more ruthless side. Stuffed and mounted exhibits of men and women from his past. Enemies he’d overcome, and then kept as trophies. At first I thought they were waxworks, but up close I could see the treated skin and smell the preservatives. I tapped a fingertip against one eye, and it was glass. The exhibits were dressed in the very height of fashion from their times, from the 1920s onwards. Their faces were taut, emotionless, damned forever to stand around the room in casual poses, as though at some awful cocktail party that would never end.
A museum to murder.
“Old enemies,” said Walker, striding casually through the carefully posed figures and occasionally peering closely at certain faces. “And maybe just a few friends and allies who
got above themselves. What better way to celebrate your victory, when you can’t tell the world . . . than to be able to walk among your defeated foes and gloat as you please? I wonder if he talks to them. Probably . . . Probably the only people he can talk to, these days . . .”
“Anyone here you recognise?” The place was creeping me out big-time, but I was damned if I’d show it in front of Walker.
“No one I know personally,” he said. “I’ve only ever operated on the fringes of the intelligence field. How about you?”
“Jesus!” I said suddenly, striding forward. “This one’s a Drood! He’s still wearing his torc!”
I reached out to take the torc, and Walker grabbed my arm at the last moment and pulled me back.
“No, Eddie. Really bad idea. Booby traps, remember?”
I stopped, breathing hard, and then nodded curtly to Walker to show him I was back in control again. He let go of my arm.
“Later,” I said. “I’ll see to this later.”
“Yes,” said Walker. “There will be time for many things, later.”
Finally, we ran out of rooms. I pushed open one last oversized door, and there before us was the room I’d seen in the background of Alexander’s floating vision. A bare room, with bare walls, nothing in it but a great wooden throne with its back turned to me. I stopped just inside the door and took a good look around, but there was no one else in the room. Walker mouthed the word Peter? at me, and I shrugged. We strode forward into the room, and the door closed slowly but firmly behind us. The throne began to turn spinning silently on some unseen mechanism, and there, sitting on the Independent Agent’s throne, was Peter King. He smiled easily at me and nodded to Walker.
“Welcome to my home, both of you. Well, have you nothing to say to the legendary Independent Agent at the moment of his greatest triumph? I’ve been running rings around people like you for the best part of a century, but you have to admit, this is one of my best! Oh, come on; surely you guessed before now? Surely two agents of such vaunted skill and experience had just the merest suspicion at some point that I wasn’t who I appeared to be; that it was in fact me?”
“You’ve been masquerading as your own grandson,” I said, feeling numb and stupid. “It was you all along, Alexander.”
“Of course, of course!” he said cheerfully. “It was my game, my rules, and you never stood a chance.”
“Was there ever a real grandson?” said Walker. “A real Peter King?”
“Oh, yes,” the Independent Agent said easily. “Pitiful little fellow. No use to anyone, not even himself. No drive, no ambition, and not a single achievement of worth to his name. A dreary little man in a dreary little job. Industrial espionage; is there anything lower for such as us? I didn’t really kill him, not as such. Just relieved him of a life he wasn’t using anyway. I took his life energy and used it to make myself young again. Gave myself a few nips and tucks here and there and a new face. It’s not difficult, if you know what you’re doing. An expensive process, certainly, but worth every penny. As a great man once said, What good is wealth, if you don’t have your health? I feel so young! So alive! I feel . . . like myself again!”
He swung one leg elegantly over the other and smiled condescendingly. I could feel my hands knotting into fists at my sides. I wanted to haul him down off his stupid throne and beat him to death with my bare hands. But I didn’t. I made myself wait. He had more to say, more secrets to spill, and I needed to hear them.
“You didn’t really think the legendary Independent Agent would give up his role and his secrets just because he was getting old, did you?” said Alexander through Peter King’s face. I decided to think of him as Alexander. It made it easier to hate him. “The world needs me, needs the Independent Agent, needs my knowledge and experience and skills now more than ever. Too many damned amateurs running around out there, screwing things up for everyone. When you’ve got a real problem, you need a professional. Someone who knows what he’s doing.
“And don’t get me started on the state of the official organisations! Bloody accountants have taken over, more concerned with balancing their budgets than actually achieving anything. And as for the Droods . . . I am lost for words, Eddie. You never should have meddled. All right, your family were corrupt; so what? They got the job done, didn’t they? Did you know I offered to help you out during the Hungry Gods War, and some damned fool turned me down?” He leaned forward on his throne to glare at me. “Did you really think I’d give it all up and go quietly into the long night? Just lie down and die, because I got old? I didn’t spend my whole life saving the world and putting it to rights just to grow old and feeble and die! People like me aren’t supposed to die! The world needs me! I still have important things to do! Dying is for small people, for the little people who don’t matter!”
“You’re shouting, Alex,” said Walker.
“Ah. Yes. Sorry about that,” said the young Independent Agent, sitting back on his wooden throne. “This new body is packed full of hormones. I’m still getting used to it.”
“The game never was what we thought it was,” I said. “You set the contest up specifically so you could be in it and win it. So you could beat us all, in front of the whole world. You needed to prove to yourself, and everyone else, that you were still the best. By taking on the greatest agents the world had to offer and beating them all.”
“Oh, please; you were hardly the best,” said Alexander. “You were just the five best up-and-comers. The ones most likely to be my competition as I started life again. The ones most likely to get in my way as I built my new career as Peter King. I brought you into this game to show everyone I could beat you, yes; but mostly so I could kill you all off before you became a nuisance.”
“Excuse me,” said Walker. “But . . . why me? I’m hardly an up-and-comer. I’m barely an agent. Why not choose the current champion of the Nightside, John Taylor?”
“You . . . were my one indulgence,” said Alexander, beaming down on Walker. “I wanted someone who could put up a good fight. Someone worth beating. And I wanted someone there who knew the old me, to see if they could identify me inside this new identity. And you didn’t! I fooled you completely!”
“All that young blood is going to your head,” said Walker.
“I know,” said Alexander. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“If all you wanted was to become young again,” I said slowly, “there are any number of ways you could have become a young Alexander King. Not very nice ways, most of them, but that wouldn’t have stopped you. The Independent Agent, rejuvenated! Such things have been known to happen in our field. Rarely, and usually frowned upon, but not unknown. However, you didn’t do that. You couldn’t afford to do that. You’ve made too many enemies down the years, Alexander. Really powerful, really nasty enemies. You couldn’t kill all of them and put them on display. No, they’re out there, sensing weakness in your old age: jackals and vultures circling the dying lion.
“The only way you could hope to shake them off was by spreading rumours of your impending death, and then reappearing as your own grandson. Winning the game you set up would establish Peter King as a major player in his own right, and then you’d use the secrets gained from the contest as currency to get you back in the great game. You would become the new Independent Agent, with none of your old enemies any the wiser.”
“But why this desperate need for new secrets?” said Walker. “Why play the game at all? Unless . . .”
“Exactly,” said Alexander. “Knew you’d get there, in the end. There is no great hoard of hidden secrets. Hasn’t been for some time. There was once, along with whole vaults full of objects of power and forbidden weapons and the like. But I sold them all off, down the years, to fund my wonderfully extravagant lifestyle. One at a time and very discreetly, of course, but they all went. Sometimes I even sold things back to the very people I’d taken them from in the first place! Through a whole series of trusted intermediaries, of course; I couldn’t risk any rumours
getting out. Oh, I get almost giddy, thinking of how clever I’ve been . . . The last few items went in payment for my new youthfulness. Can’t say I miss them. They were the past, and I must concentrate only on the future now.
“As befits a young man, with his whole life ahead of him.
“I shall be the new sensation of the age and astonish everyone! After I’ve blown up Place Gloria to establish Alexander’s death. And yours too, naturally. A pity to have to blow up the old place; it’s been good to me . . . But the world must believe the Independent Agent is dead, if the new one is to rise from his ashes. And you have to die so you can’t tell anyone what you know. Nothing personal; just business.”
“Wrong,” I said. “This is personal.”
“You don’t really think it’s going to be that easy, do you?” said Walker.
“Oh, yes . . . I think so,” said Alexander. “If you hadn’t found your way here so quickly, I was planning to lay out a trail of bread crumbs. I needed you to come find me on your own, without calling in reinforcements. How did you find me so quickly . . . ? No. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t got where I am today by worrying over unimportant details. You’re here, as I meant you to be. You know, you’re very easy to manipulate, Eddie. I just knew killing Honey right in front of you would make you so angry you’d come charging after me without bothering to bring in any more of your annoying family.”
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s why you killed Honey? Because of me?”
“Because of you, yes,” said Alexander. “No, Eddie! Not everything is about you! She had to die, just as all of you had to die. It’s necessary. My game, my outcome, and no one left to contradict me. I killed her because of me, Eddie. This has all been about me. Get used to it.”
“You really think you can take me in my armour?” I said. “I’ve fought evil organisations, Hungry Gods, and my own damned family and still come out on top, you stupid little turd. All of this, for your ego. You may be young again, Alexander, but you’re still just a man, and I’m a Drood.