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the night was absolute. There were no stars. The branches trailed low, whispering in the Austin’s wake. Up ahead of him rose the towering iron gates of Nonesuch Manor House. Two grotesque gargoyles perched on the gateposts watched him drive up. Their eyes had been hollowed out and replaced with surveillance cameras.
    Noah decelerated, tires spitting gravel as he followed the drive up to the house. The drive was spotlighted. All around him the powerful lights conjured shadow demons that bent and bowed with the wind. He pulled up alongside Ronan Frost’s Ducati Monster 696. It was the only bike in the courtyard. The rest were cars, and every one of them was something special. There was a Lamborghini Diablo with mud splashes up its sides, a flame-red E-Type Jaguar, a Bugatti Veyron, a canary-yellow Lotus Elan, Sir Charles’ own Daimler, a timeless classic, and pick of the bunch, a silver v12 Aston Martin Vanquish. As Frost liked to say, if you had no life, the very least you could do was drive a nice car.
    Noah lifted himself out of the bucket seat. He left the keys in the ignition.
    No one was going to steal the Austin from outside of Nonesuch.
    He walked toward the house, though calling it a house was a misnomer. In truth it looked more like a castle. The left wing was even crenellated, part of which had crumbled where the climbing plants had undermined the masonry and worked their way deep into the crevices between the bricks. The ring wing appeared to be a huge gemstone, opalescent in the night. It was the old man’s atrium with his hundreds of rare plants. The glass turned the night on itself. Lights burned in three of the windows on the ground floor, the rest covered with wooden shutters.
    The old man’s butler, Max, was waiting for him beneath the portico. “I trust you had a pleasant drive, sir?” Noah nodded. There was no love lost between the two. “Sir Charles is waiting for you with the others in the drawing room. May I take your coat, sir?” Noah shrugged out of his leather jacket and handed it over. “Thank you, sir. Will you be requiring anything else?” And then, almost as an afterthought, the butler added, “Toothpaste, perhaps? Your breath reeks of whoever had the misfortune of sitting on your face tonight.”
    Noah ignored him and went inside.
    Nonesuch was a huge, sprawling old house with narrow passages, mezzanine levels and servants’ staircases. The foyer was oak paneled. They showed signs of water damage. The old man’s family crest stood above a huge open fireplace. There was no sign that a fire had burned in the grate in the last decade.
    On a small table beside the empty fire, an exquisitely carved chess set played out the Saavedra position. It was a beautiful endgame and a wonderful example of how one move could make someone famous well outside their own lifetime. It was a salutary lesson to every man who didn’t understand the nature of war. Sometimes subtlety is more important than might.
    A granite and iron staircase rose in three tiers to the upstairs. The center of each riser was worn smooth by the scuffing of thousands of footsteps over the three hundred years since the old house had been built. There was a wheelchair stair-lift and wear marks along the wall where the old man’s chair had bumped up against it. Somehow he couldn’t imagine Sir Charles enduring the humiliation of the stair-lift. He wasn’t that kind of man. No, he was more likely to claw his way up on his hands and knees. That was the kind of man that he was.
    For all the grandeur of the entrance hall there was an almost tired air to it, like the staircase and the cracked oak shutters covering the windows. There were no priceless works of art on display, no old masters, no precious antiquities. The casual visitor would have been forgiven for thinking the old man was broke. He wasn’t; he just invested his money elsewhere.
    Noah crossed the foyer. The drawing room was the first door on the right, opposite the