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I kissed Landen, checked that both my pistols were fully loaded and took spare clips from the gun safe, slipped a dagger into my sock and then popped my head around the door of Tuesday’s lab. To my silent question, she simply shook her head, and once back in the kitchen I asked Friday if I could borrow the Sportina.
“Why?”
“It’s the closest thing we have to a tank, and I could really do with one of those right now.”
“Game on, Mum,” he said, tossing me the keys.
“Thanks—and don’t do any murdering until I get back. Promise?”
“Promise.”
37.
Friday: The Righteous Man
The size of the righteous-person sector within the population is difficult to estimate, but calculations extrapolated from charity work, donations and the Samaritan Index might indicate an occurrence of about 11 per 100,000 population. Of these, perhaps only 2 percent might be considered truly righteous, wholly selfless and without a shred of sin—a total of about 100 people living in England today. Who they might be, it is difficult to say. They don’t advertise the fact.
James Hidden, The Good Amongst Us
As I headed toward Chiseldon, I could see that the hillsides surrounding Swindon were filled with spectators, eager to see the smiting firsthand, as no broadcast images could ever do justice to the terrifying beauty of a pillar of fire descending from on high. Many people had tried to describe it adequately, but usually without success. My favorite description was this: “The sort of spectacle that married the bold elegance of a solar eclipse with the visceral thrills of bare-knuckle croquet.”
Chiseldon is a small
village on the Swindon-Marlborough Road comprising a few houses, a gas station, a shop, and a railway station. There had been a basic-training camp for Crimean conscripts nearby, to which I had myself been assigned before moving to the plain for vehicle training. The camp reverted to farmland once the conflict had ended, but the iron gates were still present, along with a large bronze statue of Colonel “Trigger” Dellalio, now covered with ivy and graffiti.
I stopped at the deserted gas station and climbed out of the car to have a look around. I walked to the road and glanced up and down the dead-straight highway. There was traffic, but it was all heading into town, presumably latecomers wanting to indulge in what had been sniffily dubbed “Smite tourism.” Even though there was an hour to go, the clouds had begun to heap high above the Swindon Financial Center. The Smite Solutions “honeypot” of hardened criminals would theoretically attract the pillar of fire as it descended in a sinuous curve, similar to the twisting nature of a waterspout.
I checked my watch again and nodded to Phoebe, who was parked in the entranceway to the abandoned Chiseldon camp three hundred yards off. The clock ticked by until it was eleven, then eleven-fifteen. The traffic died down, as presumably everyone was in place to watch the spectacle, and even the staff in the gas station closed up the shop to go watch. Within a few minutes, I was completely alone.
As I stood there, I noticed a large Pontiac driving along the road in a slower-than-normal fashion. It pulled in to the gas station’s forecourt and stopped, just the other side of the pumps. I walked cautiously toward it and soon noticed that the engine was still running and that the windows were tinted.
I knocked on the window. After a pause the window wound down. There was a tanned man with a military-style haircut sitting in the driving seat, and through the window there came the faint waft of gun oil, coffee and body odor. There were four of them. They were armed, and they were bored.
“Yes?” said the driver.
“You know who I am and why I’m here,” I said softly, “and I want you to turn the car around and leave.”
He looked at me curiously and gave a slight smile. “And why would I do something like that?”
“Because I don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to be dead.”
The smile dropped from his face.
“I don’t respond well to threats,” he said. “There are four of us, Miss Next. How many of us do you think you can take down before you’re dead?”
I stared at him, then at his front-seat passenger, who had his hand beneath a newspaper on his lap, presumably hiding a weapon of some sort.
“I can take two of you down for certain, three possibly. But it needn’t come to that. You’re not Goliath. You’re mercenaries. So aside from the cash, you’ve got no real reason to show any loyalty.”
“We think a lot of you, Miss Next,” replied the driver, “and we don’t actually want to hurt anyone. It’s messy, the paperwork is a headache and the lawsuits frequent, and the clients don’t like it. Our instructions are clear: Hold the righteous man in custody until after midday. But if anyone stands in our way, we are required to take whatever action is deemed appropriate. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly. Now just go home and we’ll forget this ever happened.”
He shook his head, and I heard two faint clicks from the backseat as safeties were released.
“We can’t do that. We have reputations to consider. Do you know how oversubscribed the menacing business is these days? Gigs are hard to come by, and one failure can lose you clients as easy as blinking and, what’s worse, slash the daily rate in half.”
And that was when I heard a mild squeak on the adjacent railway line. It was a faint noise but one that unmistakably heralded an approaching train from the south at a distance of five hundred yards. I could sense the speed it was going, too, and given that it was slowing at a progressive rate, my Day Player mind calculated I had a little over thirty-one seconds to get rid of these idiots before the 11:36 from Marlborough pulled into Chiseldon station. The righteous man was arriving by train. “Reputation, huh?” I said. “Ever heard of the Special Library Services?”
