"Then if it doesn't matter, you might as well tell me the truth." Paul leaned forward. "You were going to kill me, weren't you? Ava was right about that. You were going to kill me—swat me like a fly. Weren't you?"
Felix Jongleur looked at him for a long, calculating second, then looked down at the fire. "Yes."
Paul sat back with a sick little feeling of triumph. "But why?"
Jongleur shook his head. "It was a mistake—a bad idea. A failed project. It was named for the ushabti of the Egyptian tombs, the tiny statuettes that were meant to wait for the dead Pharaoh in the afterlife."
"I'm not following you. You wanted me to work for you after you were dead?"
Jongleur showed a wintry smile. "Not you. You give yourself too much importance, Mr. Jonas. A common problem with the people of your small island."
Paul swallowed a retort. So the ancient Frenchman wanted to insult the Brits—let him. He had never imagined he would actually get the chance to speak to this man face-to-face. He could not waste the opportunity. "Then who? What?"
"I began the Ushabti Project several years ago, at a time when I felt quite certain that the Grail process was going to fail. The first results on the thalamic splitter were very bad and the Grail network's operating system—the Other, as some call it—was unstable." Jongleur frowned. "I was already very, very old. If the Grail Project did not succeed, I would die. But I did not want to die."
"Who does?"
"Few have the resources I do. Few have the courage to flout humanity's cowardly surrender to death."
Paul held in his impatience. "So . . . you started this . . . Ushakti Project?"
"Ushabti. Yes. If I could not perpetuate my actual self, I would do the next best thing. Like the pharaohs, I would keep my line alive. I would save the sacred blood. I would do this by creating a version of me that would survive my death."
"But you just said that the technology wasn't working. . . ."
"It was not. So I came up with the best alternative I could. I could not escape death, it seemed, so I created a clone."
A number of terrible thoughts began fizzing in Paul's head. "But that's . . . that doesn't make sense. A clone isn't you, it's just your genetics. It would grow up into a very different person, because its experiences . . . would be different. . . ."
"I see you begin to understand. Yes, it would not be me. But if I gave it an upbringing as close to my own as I could, then it would be more like me. Enough like me to appreciate what I had done. Perhaps even enough to resurrect me someday from the Grail copies we had already made, flawed as they were." Jongleur closed his eyes, remembering. "All was prepared. When he reached his maturity and spoke his true name—Hor-sa-iset, Horus the Younger—to my system, it would have served as his access code. That is the true Horus of Egyptian mythology—the Horus born from the dead body of Osiris. All of my secrets would have been his." He frowned, distracted. "If I had already conceived of the Ushabti Project when I was founding the Grail Brotherhood, I would never have given 'Horus' as a code name to that imbecile Yacoubian. . . ."
"Hang on a bit. You . . . you were going to use a clone to recreate your own childhood?" Paul was stunned by the magnitude of the man's lunacy. "On top of a skyscraper?" A thought struck him like a stone. "Oh, my God, Ava? She was going to be. . . ."
"The mother. My mother—or at least the mother of my ushabti. A vessel for the preservation of the blood."
"Christ, you really are mad. Where did you get the poor girl? Was she some actress you hired to play your sainted Mama? She couldn't have been your real daughter, unless you raised her in a genetics lab too." It struck him then, sapping the strength from his body, chilling him to the bone. "Jesus. You did, didn't you? You . . . made her."
Jongleur seemed wearily amused by Paul's astonishment. "Yes. She was another clone of me—modified so she would be female, of course, so actually quite a bit different. You need not look so shocked—the Egyptians married brother to sister. Why should I do less for my own posterity? In fact, I would have used my real mother as the source for Avialle's genetic material, but I could not bring myself to exhume her body. She had rested in the cemetery in Limoux for almost two centuries and she still does. Her bones were left undisturbed." He waved his hand dismissively. "But it made little difference, in any case. The mother was to provide no DNA, after all. She was only to be the host—to carry and bear and then raise my true son."
"God help me, it just gets worse and worse. So Ava was right—she was pregnant!"
"Briefly. But we had a breakthrough on the Grail Project and so I abandoned Ushabti."
"And so you took the embryo back. Then you just . . . kept Ava anyway. Kept her a prisoner."
For a moment, Jongleur's mask of disdain slipped. "I . . . I had come to care for her. My own children have been dead for years. I scarcely know their descendants."
Paul put his head in his hands. "You . . . you. . . ." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "I should just stop, but I can't help asking. What about me? What did you intend to do before Ava ruined your plans by falling in love with me?"
The cold smile returned. "She ruined nothing. I expected her to do just that. My own mother was in love with her tutor. He committed suicide. In her misery she allowed her parents to marry her off to my father but the sadness never left her—it was the thing that shaped the rest of her life. If it had not happened, she would not have been the mother I knew." His smile twisted. "It was those fools Mudd and Finney who let things get out of control. They should have left the two of you alone until we were ready to dispose of you. I had just canceled the Ushabti Project, so what did it matter, anyway?"
"It mattered to me," Paul said, shaken but angry. "It mattered to me and to Ava."
"You are not to speak further of Avialle. I am tired of your familiarity."
Paul squeezed his eyes closed for a moment, fighting the rage that would end all questions and answers. "Then just tell me this—why did you pick me out of all the poor sods in the world? Was it just random? Did you simply choose the first acceptable applicant for this little . . . honor? Or was there something particular about me?"
When he looked up, the old man's eyes were glassy and dead again. "Because you went to Cranleigh."
"What?" It was the last answer he expected. "What are you talking about—my public school?"
Jongleur's sneer was almost a sign of weakness—the first such sign from him Paul had seen. "I was sent there as a child. The English boys singled me out as a foreigner and a weakling. They tortured me."
"And because of that you chose me? You were going to murder me just because I went to Cranleigh?" Paul laughed despite himself, a painful, near-hysterical flutter at the top of his lungs. "Christ, I hated that place. The older boys treated me just like they treated you." Except for Niles, he remembered, and the thought brought another with it. "So what happened to me afterward—the real me. Am I dead like Ava? Did you have me killed?"
The old man had lost his fire. "No. We arranged an automobile accident, but not with your real body. That is still quite safe in one of the project's laboratories and, as far as I know, quite alive. The remains that were sent back to England were those of a vagrant. There was no need for British authorities to doubt the identification of the body."
But even if I'm not really dead, I might as well be, he thought. Niles isn't shifting heaven and earth to find me, that's certain. He's given that "remember good old Paul Jonas?" speech a long time ago now. "How long?" he asked.