Vicious Circle

There was an abrupt click, and then the high-pitched, single tone that means “message ends.” I dialed Nicky’s number with shaking hands. Nothing, for ten or twenty seconds: just silence. With a muttered curse I terminated the call and started to dial again, but before I even finished the area code I heard the sound of footsteps walking down the short path from the road.

I turned in that direction. A figure came into view a second later, stepping out of the shadows and through the narrow opening between the raised earth beds onto the driveway.

“Over here, Dr. Forster,” I called, and the figure turned, came forward into the light.

When I got a look at his face, I experienced a momentary lurch of dissociation: then my heart jumped in my chest like a test pilot in crash webbing. I’d never met Dylan Forster, but I knew that face well enough. When I’d first met the guy, only three days before in my office, he’d introduced himself as Stephen Torrington. And now, in a sudden flash of elementary logic, it occurred to me that both of those names were as good as each other because his real name had to be something different again. I also knew now why he’d had to send someone else to look after me when I collapsed at Pen’s house; at that point, he couldn’t afford for me to see his face.

I thought of Peace’s Glock, which was still inside lying on the floor of the Oriflamme. But it wouldn’t have mattered even if I could have got to it. The bastard had set this up exactly the way he wanted. He already had a gun in his hand and it was pointing at my chest.

“You want to watch that thing, or it could go off,” I said, because I had to say something, had to get some kind of interaction going that might buy me some time while I thought of a way to distract, disarm, and decapitate him.

He shook his head. “It won’t be going off just yet,” he said, in an almost languid tone. Funny that Pen had never mentioned his soft, half-elided mid-Atlantic accent. The smirk playing across his lips confirmed what I already knew.

“You’re Anton Fanke.”

He made a mock bow, saluting my way-past-the-eleventh-hour leap of intuitive logic. “If you’d figured that out three days ago,” he said, his tone the gentlest of sneers, “I might have been impressed. Check him for weapons.”

The last words weren’t addressed to me, but past me into the shadows at the side of the building. Three men who must have been standing absolutely still until then stepped out of the darkness, surrounded me, and frisked me with extreme thoroughness. They didn’t look like my mental image of satanists: they looked a lot more like my mental image of FBI agents. One of them was carrying a snub-nosed handgun, which he pressed to the base of my neck.

The other two, searching my left- and right-hand sides in rough synchrony, came up with my dagger and whistle respectively. They held them up for Fanke’s inspection.

“Now we’ll go inside,” Fanke said.

I took a step toward him, but the men on either side of me moved in to block me and the gun at my neck pressed a little harder. I knew I’d never get there.

“Why Pen?” I demanded, between my teeth. “What did you need her for?”

“Rafael Ditko was the vessel,” said Fanke, throwing out his arm toward the door of the Oriflamme in formal invitation. “I had to get close to him. We had our plan already in place, but if it failed—it might have been necessary to take Ditko from the Stanger clinic and kill him to release Asmodeus’s spirit from him. Pamela would have been very useful in that eventuality. As things have turned out though, I think we’ll be just fine as we are. Wilkes, you can lead the way. You’re just marginally more expendable than Mr. Castor is at this point.”

Things were coming apart fast. In desperation, I tensed to jump for Fanke as he walked toward me. He favored me with a glance of amused contempt.

“That would be a mistake,” he said in a clipped tone. “I’d like you alive at this point, because you’re looking like a pretty good scapegoat, but don’t push me.”

Caught in his sights and those of the guy behind me, I briefly considered tackling him low and seeing if they both let fly and took each other out. But that wouldn’t even work in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.