“How long have you been in Denver?” he asks.
“Four years.” Patrick’s hand shakes as he tips a paper twist of sugar into his espresso. “More or less.”
Not long after he left the Network, then. “And on their retainer?”
“About the same.” Patrick falls silent for a moment as he concentrates on stirring his coffee with the ritual focus of a heroin addict cooking up the next hit. Not spilling a drop demands infinite patience. “They’re bastards. But they look after you as long as you’re useful.”
“What do they want you to report on?”
“What you’d expect.” Patrick half-shudders, half-shrugs. “We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.”
“And sometimes?”
Patrick grimaces. “If there’s talk of miracles, wine out of water, speaking in tongues—they ask me to check out a service. It’s a bad job, I can tell you, but usually it’s boring. When it isn’t”—he pauses long enough to pick up his cup with shaking hand—“I’m not there.”
“Ever checked out an outfit called the Golden Promise Ministries? Out of Colorado Springs, run by a guy called Schiller?”
Patrick shakes his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
Johnny keeps his thoughts to himself. Instead, he pulls out his wallet and, after a quick scan, counts out bills. “Here’s five hundred. The number on this card is a burner: call me if you see anything that might interest your, uh, employers. Call me when you’ve got a repair bill for the car and I’ll pay the garage for you.”
Patrick stares at the pile of fifties. He reaches out and shakily pushes them back across the table. “Not playing that game, Johnny. I’ll thank you for fixing my car, but you don’t know what they’re like. What they do to double agents.”
It’s Johnny’s turn to stare. Then, after a few seconds, he shoves the money back towards Patrick. “Then it’s my penance for spoiling your evening, mate. Call me when you’ve got the bill for the car.”
Patrick stares at him, perplexed. “You can’t fix everything that’s broke with money, Sarge.”
“I know. But money helps.” Johnny knows exactly what’s going through Patrick’s mind: What’s happened to my old sarge, then? He stands. He doesn’t want to have to stay and explain. “At least I tried.”
He walks out the door, moderately certain that this is the last time he’ll ever see Patrick. It’s cold, and a solitary snowflake spirals down in front of his face. He goes to his truck, climbs in, and starts the engine. Maybe I should tell the Duchess, he ponders. But there’s no telling where he’ll catch her; best get it sorted himself. He drives away slowly, with a head full of darkness and questions.
It is, perhaps, inevitable that his encounter with Patrick distracts him and leaves him in a disturbed state of mind: old ghosts swirl around just beyond the corners of his vision as he drives back towards the third safe house, less attentive than usual. But as he parks opposite, a pricking in the skin of his chest brings him sharply back to a state of alertness. Something, his sixth sense is telling him, is wrong.
It’s too late to drive on, but—as usual—he hasn’t parked directly outside the front door. Johnny stares at the safe house. The warning is worryingly nonspecific: the vague itching and sense of dread tells him nothing useful.
He slides out of the cab, keeping the truck between himself and the safe house windows. He leaves the door ajar as he rapidly scans the sidewalk, then breaks into a jog. The itch fades as he leaves the shadow of the pickup, just another local out for an evening run: it’s amazing what people will miss if they’re not watching carefully, and he didn’t pick this neighborhood to site a safe house on the basis of its vibrant street life. Once out of the direct line of sight from the safe house he crosses the street, re-scans to make sure there are no bystanders, then doubles back. His nostrils flare as he ducks and glides around the side of the house.
There is a kitchen door that opens onto the backyard, and it has a well-oiled lock. The key turns silently. Johnny steals inside like a thief in the night, right hand drawn back and knife in hand. It’s of a single piece, the blade oddly flat, the handle an extruded extension: a thing of power, lethal as a cobra. A gift from the Duchess, years ago. The kitchen is dark and still and just as he left it, the tripwire—actually an empty tumbler set on the floor just inside the door—still present; but his skin is prickling again. If there was an enemy already in the house it would be far more intense. What if they aren’t here yet? Johnny stands up, then passes through the ground floor rooms silently and rapidly, ending just inside the front door. The pizza joint flyer he’d balanced against the front door when he left is still upright. No, not here yet. Which means—
There is a bright discordant jangle of shattering glass from the front window on the lounge, to the left of the vestibule he’s standing in. Johnny turns, lowering his—knife to a gunfight, he absently realizes—as a familiar rattling hiss kicks in. Gas grenade.
He smiles, lips peeling back from teeth in a frightening grimace.
Johnny’s got his fight.
PERSEPHONE USED TO HAVE NIGHTMARES, WHEN SHE WAS A girl. Dreams that would drag her shuddering awake, drenched in a clammy sweat, with her own shriek of terror echoing in her ears.
They always started the same way: with her waking in a hospital ward, moonlit through unshuttered windows, surrounded by the living dead.
They were living because they breathed in their sleep, lying cold and motionless on beds with rusting steel frames, sheets drawn up to their chins to cover the wounds and evulsions inflicted upon their bodies by the metal of war. But they were dead, too, because they would never wake. She could force herself out of bed inside these lucid dreams and poke and pry at the sleepers, scream her lungs out into their cold blue ears, to no avail.
There were always twenty beds on the ward, nineteen of them occupied by sleepers. Male and female, young and old, white-skinned and sallow in the moonlight. She could run to the end of the ward—or fly, at will—and there was a corridor, and on the other side of the corridor another ward, another twenty beds. Up and down the corridor the wards stretched towards a morbid vanishing point in the gloom. She’d ventured into the corridor, once or twice, but the first few wards she checked were all the same. And besides, she wasn’t alone. She never actually saw the Watcher but she knew it was there; a lurking immanence observing her increasingly frantic explorations, avoiding contact for the time being as, suffused with a growing sense of panicky terror, she cast about for relief from the infinite loneliness of the graveyard.
Curiously, it never occurred to her to gaze out through the windows at the night world her dream had crash-landed in the midst of.
Years later, in her early teens, she’d shyly confessed these dreams to her adoptive father. It was a tentative gesture of intimacy, as she began to deconstruct the emotional barriers that she had erected during her childhood in the camps and on the long road out of Srebrenica. Alberto had taken it seriously, not pooh-poohing it as teenage angst; rather, he sat her down and delivered the first of a series of lectures on the interpretation of dreams, with the aid of a copy of the Liber di Mortuus Somnium. “Precognitive dreams are not representations of a fixed future,” he explained. “Rather, they’re echoes of events which hold particular resonance, sufficient to overcome the barrier between now and then. They might not come true, and they are in any event symbolic, not literal predictions. But you should always take them seriously.” Then he spent an afternoon with her, showing her how to make a dream catcher from cobwebs and feathers, and then how to program it as a screensaver on her Amiga; and she’d taught herself to sleep soundly without waking the rest of the household.