I looked back at Coyote. "But this doesn't make any sense! If you knew who and what I was, why didn't you kill me and be done with it? Given what you do, given what Crowley does, I can't imagine either one of you wanting me alive."
Coyote looked down. "I had my reasons."
"Then they were flawed reasons. Flawed, just like your statement that I've never missed a target. I've met Nero Loring. I missed."
Coyote started a slow circuit around the circle of color. "I wanted you to deal with my traitor problem and with Nerys Loring. The first was a task I could have handled, but I thought it better left in your hands. In that group the only person I knew I could trust was Jytte. Beyond her, anyone was suspect, and I was not certain I could deal with the problem in the only way feasible. You could do that.
"The problem Nerys Loring presented was one that required someone with unique skills and abilities to handle. Your success in stopping her proves to me you are the individual of whom I can make the following request:
"I want you to replace me."
"Replace you? I don't understand."
Coyote stopped moving. "I have a rare disease of the brain, Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome. It causes nerve degeneration, dementia and death. I was diagnosed with it only a month before you arrived in Phoenix, and this caused me to shift my plans. My doctors did not give me very long, so I had to make arrangements. They included you."
I glanced at the shadow man. "Why don't you take him to Tityus' dimension? He could be cured."
"No." Crowley ruefully shook his head. "GSS is genetic. Once it starts it is natural. Regeneration would have exacerbated the disease, not made it better. He might have regressed physically, but his brain would have deteriorated even faster."
The shock of Coyote's request and the story of his condition stunned me. "This is, ah, a lot to handle." I held my hand out toward him. "Come with us, we can discuss it further. I need some time."
The little man shook his head. "I'm afraid I have no time to give you."
"What do you mean? You're still sharp. We can work this out."
"It's too late for that." Coyote squatted down on his haunches. "I knew that you would only leave yourself open to my people after the completion of your hit on Nero Loring. That is when you would fall into my grasp, but I could not sabotage the effort against Nerys by allowing you to kill him—and I knew I could not fool you into believing you had succeeded were I to employ some sleight of hand to whisk him away and out of danger. For that reason I took Nero Loring's place, and I filled your sights the day you saw Nero Loring die."
I stared unflinchingly into the dead man's black eyes and recalled the vision on the bluff when I met Nero Loring for the first time. I had succeeded in killing him. I had shot Nero Loring through the head, but I had no way of knowing it was someone else in disguise. The idea that a human being would allow himself to be knowingly shot to death did not exist in my world.
"You're dead?"
A thin smile graced Coyote's lips. "I could never fool you in life, so I had to do that in death. Jytte managed to create a Coyote synthesizer program that, with the proper input, was able to provide you with vague but apparently meaningful messages. I was able to guess ahead of time how much of this work would go, so we scripted up conversations, and I prerecorded them. The computer cut and spliced as necessary. As long as you believed I was alive and working to solve the mystery of your identity, you worked with me. You have seen how I work, and my files can offer you more cases to study than you could ever desire."
He shook his head and looked, for the first time, hopeless. "I apologize that this elaborate charade was necessary, but only by forcing you to see the world through the eyes of a normal person could I communicate to you how desperately I need someone with your skills to replace me. If you take up my mantle, you will have the resources to build where you previously tore down. You may create where before you have destroyed. You may not be able to leave the world a better place than it was when you found it, but you can slow its descent into the depths of hell."
I spoke around the lump in my throat. "I can pay forward."
"Precisely." Coyote pressed his hands together. "I took your life, and you took mine. Jytte has an injection for you that, if you so desire, will unblock your drug-induced amnesia. You may return to your old ways and, with this explanation, Fiddleback may even accept you back again. If not, I am certain there are other Dark Lords who would be happy to take you into their stables."
I shook my head. "I don't know, I just don't know."
"Jytte can tell you more, much more, but it's your choice, Tycho Caine." Coyote shrugged and the world began to darken around him. "My time as Coyote is up."
"Wait, answer me one question: Why Coyote?"
The fading phantom laughed. "The Dark Lords— things like Fiddleback and worse—consider us varmints and seek to exterminate most forms of life on Earth. When varmint extinction programs were tried before, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the coyote not only refused to die, it flourished. Coyotes moved into cities and bedeviled those who sought to destroy them. What other totem animal could I chose?"
The world outside the red circle collapsed into blackness. I turned to Crowley and saw lights begin to play through the dark. As the color slowly drained from our circle, the light built behind him, and I found myself back in Phoenix, on Camelback Mountain, looking southwest over Frozen Shade and the rest of the city. Looking behind me I saw we had returned to earth near one of the vast mansions built on the side of the mountain.
The occultist silently pointed toward the stairway carved into the rock. He followed me as I climbed up to the front door and opened it. Crowley closed it behind me, then led me in and down to the basement level through a steel door hidden behind an oaken wall panel in the study.
The hidden rectangular room had been simply furnished. I entered at the narrow end and saw, all the way across from me, a large screen projection television. Off to the right stood a bank of Hitachi computers and opposite it a row of 10 file cabinets lined the wall. In the center stood a long conference table with an even dozen chairs distributed about it. Nearest me, filling the walls, were workbenches with equipment that ran the gamut from chemical analysis units and scanning electron microscopes to electronics construction stations and gunsmithing tools.
A single tear rolled down Jytte's perfect face as she stood beside the table. She set a silver tray with a full syringe on the table next to a cellular phone. A single droplet of liquid glistened at its tip. I looked up at her and wondered what was going on behind that plastic mask of a face.
"Coyote said you had information for me, to help me make my decision."
Jytte nodded. "According to an agreement Coyote made with Nero Loring, you will be acknowledged as his nephew, Michael Loring. You will become the CEO of Lorica Industries, with all the rights and privileges that entails. Nero has handpicked a board to run the company for you, so the burdens of day-to-day activities are limited to those you personally choose to assume."
"Or," I noted, "the ones allowed by the rigors of becoming Coyote."
"As you wish. Lorica has facilities throughout the world. Your legitimate resources will be vast, and those assets that Coyote has prepared for his work will allow you to work in secret with unparalleled ease."
I felt a shiver run down my spine. "Who was he, Jytte? Who was Coyote? What was his real name?"
She blinked her eyes once. "That information is unknown to me. He was Coyote. I do not know if he was the first, was the only or will be the last Coyote. What you have seen is who he was."
Coyote. He was a man who set a trained killer on his own people to find out who among them was betraying him. He was a man who coerced others into working for him. He stole my identity and led me on a wild chase that not only put my life in danger, but caused me to kill a number of people—including aides he had trusted in the past. He also caused the deaths of innocent people, like Hal's wife.
I looked a
t the syringe. Were Coyote and I that different, really, at the core of it? I killed for rewards that brought me satisfaction, and he did the same. That he let himself believe he was making the world a better place meant nothing.
Or did it?
He caught a bullet in the head to take a chance that his crusade would not die.
I reached my hand out and picked up the phone. I punched up a number quickly and waited for someone to pick it up on the other end. I smiled as a sleepy voice answered.
"Hello, Mr. Sinclair MacNeal?" I smiled as he cursed at the time. "I understand you are at loose ends at the moment. I think we could work well together. Listen, it doesn't really matter who I am, but just for the sake of simplicity, you may call me Coyote."
Michael A. Stackpole, A Gathering Evil
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends