“I’m going to find out who did this,” I said. “I am going to find them and I can guarantee you, Dr. Grey, I will show them what ‘terror’ really means.”
He closed his eyes. “I wish I could believe you.”
I said nothing to that. He was starting to drift. Bloody sweat was leaking from his pores.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?” I said softly.
He nodded weakly. “I wrote an account of it. Of everything. It’s on my laptop, in the documents section. My password is grásta.’ With an accent over the first a. It’s hidden in a folder called ‘Christmas List.’”
“What’s grásta mean?”
“My family’s Irish. That’s Gaelic,” he said. “For ‘mercy.’”
I stood and stretched out my left hand. “Give me the beaker.”
He smiled and looked at the swirling brown mixture with the red veins. “It’s not what I said it was,” he said. “It’s just coffee and Tabasco sauce.”
He handed it to me. I still took it carefully and set it on the desk.
“Mercy,” I said.
“Grásta. But I don’t deserve it.” He buried his face in his hands. I could hear him saying the names of his wife and son over and over again.
Mercy.
I’m no saint. Furthest thing from it. But I can at least grant a little mercy.
I raised my gun and put the laser sight on him.
Interlude Twenty-three
Aboard the Delta of Venus
The St. Lawrence River
Four Months Ago
Sebastian Gault lay with his head on Eris’s naked breast as the stars wheeled overhead. The boat rocked gently under them, dark water slapping against the hull. Far away on Crown Island, cicadas and crickets made the darkness pulse with life. Fireflies were pinpricks of light as they flitted among the tall grasses on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.
“I’m glad you accepted our offer, lovely boy,” Eris murmured.
“You knew I would,” said Gault. “It feels a little surreal, though. Kings and thrones.”
She laughed, deep and throaty. “It is surreal. We’re remaking the world into what we want it to be.”
“I hadn’t expected you to be the driving force for this thing.”
“Oh … you know, ‘behind every great man is a—”
“totally psycho power-hungry bitch?”
“Exactly.”
“And sonny boy is fine with that?”
“He’s less devoted to the Goddess than his fellow Kings, but he’ll do his part.”
“What about the others? Are they all still in your corner?”
“They are,” she said as she ran her fingernails down his chest and over his hard stomach. “I have a special relationship with each of the Kings.”
“God, please don’t tell me that you and your son are—”
“No.” She laughed. “Just the other Kings. I’m corrupt, lovely boy, but not tacky.”
“Thank god for small mercies.”
“Thank ‘Goddess,’” she corrected.
“Ah, yes.”
They lay together and watched as several meteors burned their way through the blackness. Minutes drifted past them on the current of the night.
“Sebastian … ?”
“Mm?”
“You loved her, didn’t you?”
“Who?”
“Amirah. Your pretty little Iraqi mad scientist. You really loved her, didn’t you?”
He closed his eyes, shutting out even the simple beauty of the star field above. “Love is a quicksand pit.”
“You’re being evasive.”
“Did I love her? Yes. Deeply, and despite the fact that she was married to another man, and despite the fact that I had several times planned to kill her, and despite the fact that she betrayed me and tried to kill me, I loved her to the end.” He made a low, feral sound and a shudder passed through his whole body. “I still do, and I wish I could take a scalpel and carve that emotion out of my body. I’m not joking, Eris … . If I could actually cut it out, I would.”
“Is that what your plan is? The course of action you proposed to the Kings—is that the scalpel you want to use?”
He sat up and looked down at her. It was so dark that she was merely a paleness woven into the fabric of shadows.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Eris propped herself on one elbow. “Oh, don’t take offense, Sebastian. You can’t possibly be dense enough to believe that you’re not damaged goods. We all are or we wouldn’t be the people we’ve become. You are one of the greatest pharmaceutical researchers on the planet, a self-made rags-to-riches billionaire, and yet you’ve spent most of your adult life covertly funding terrorist organizations and creating exotic diseases just so you could be the first to bring treatments to market. You’re a thoroughly corrupt mass murderer. You paid to have a certifiably insane molecular biologist design a pathogen that could easily—easily—have caused a global pandemic of apocalyptic proportions. If it wasn’t for Joe Ledger and the DMS, this whole world would look like a sequel to Night of the Living Dead. And now you have been brought into a secret society, a group that has asked you to help them destabilize the economies of the global superpowers by any means necessary. You are all those things, lovely boy, and yet when you spoke tonight about what you would be willing to do as part of the Seven Kings there wasn’t a flicker of greed in your voice. There wasn’t ego or megalomania. What I heard was a person in pain who wanted to stop hurting.”
“How do you know what I said or how I said it, damn it? You weren’t even there.”
She laughed. “I’m always there, Sebastian.”
Gault said nothing.
“And you, lovely boy, are still being evasive. Surely you have the balls to admit the nature of your motivations. Or should I go looking for them?” Her fingers brushed his upper thigh and he batted them irritably away.
“What do you want from me?” he snapped.
“Only the truth,” she said. “That’s the only thing that matters between us. Between the Seven Kings, their Consciences, and their Goddess. No lies, no secrets.”
The wheel of night turned and turned above them before Gault could bring himself to speak, and when he did there were ghosts in his voice.
“I … died,” he said. “When Amirah betrayed me, when it all crashed down … I died. I could feel it inside. It was like a poison had taken hold of me. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes? It does. I saw everything that I had done; I saw all the versions of myself. The child, the lad, the young entrepreneur, the man. I saw myself expand into a captain of industry. I saw the specific moments of my own corruption. My first dirty deal. I saw the faces of the people who were dead because I wanted them dead. I saw the friends betrayed and cast aside. And I saw Amirah’s face—beautiful before her betrayal and beautiful and monstrous after. I saw the monster that lived within me. I felt the humanity in me die, Eris. I felt it go and …”
His fingers closed around hers and she squeezed back.
“ … and I was glad. God, I was so glad to be rid of it. It was a tumor, a canker.” His voice was a reptilian hiss.
“Sebastian … my lovely boy …” Eris bent toward him, finding his face in the dark. She kissed his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, and as he spoke his cold words were breathed into her hot mouth.
“All that remains is the monster,” he said.
Eris took him in her arms and held him. Tears flowed like hot mercury from her eyes and splashed on his shoulder.