Silver Read Free Page B

library.
    He didn’t knock.
    He pushed the door open and walked inside.
     
     
    The drawing room was anything but the classic Englishman’s retreat. The old man called it the crucible. Noah thought of it in military terms: it was the debriefing room. The vast room was essentially the gloss of glass and the sharp lines of steel juxtaposed against Old World England’s conservative charm. Everything in the room was laid out with Sir Charles’ disability in mind.
    One entire wall comprised twelve huge high-definition plasma displays capable of showing either a single image as a visual mosaic orspliced into a dozen individual ones. On the second wall there were two bookcases: one filled with priceless first editions—Bunyon, Marlowe, Fielding and Goethe on the first shelf, folio editions of Lavater and Glanvil, Maturin and Collins, each annotated with corrections in the author’s own hand—and the other with worthless antiqued faux leather books. If Noah didn’t already know which was which, he never would have been able to guess.
    Behind the fake books was a service elevator down to an area they called the nest. It was the nerve center of Nonesuch. It housed the servers and their zettabytes of stored information, harvested newswires, ran surveillance equipment, monitored satellite signals and maintained emergency power for the manor. It was the beating heart beneath the floorboards. The ruse wouldn’t fool a halfway decent intruder—wheelchair tracks in the deep pile of the carpet disappeared beneath the second bookcase—but a halfway decent intruder would never make it as far as the crucible. The fake books were there simply because Sir Charles enjoyed the game.
    Recessed spotlights were set into the ceiling. They were dimmed low. The screens showed a powerful single image: a burning woman with her arms spread wide. It was time-stamped 1500 hours Zulu Time. Almost ten hours earlier.
    Marble statuettes stood on plinths, each offering an aspect of war personified. There was Babd, the Celtic crow, and her sisters, Macha and Morrigan, the ghosts of the battlefield; Bast, the Egyptian lioness, standing proud and tall, fiercely defiant, while the Greek Ares and the Roman Mars both wore the guise of hunters; one-eyed Odin, with the ravens Hugin and Munin on either shoulder, encapsulated fury and wisdom, wrath and beauty, the Norse god the dichotomy of war itself; and of course, in the center of them all, Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.
    The statuettes lent the room a curious air of the occult that the old man liked to foster. They were a reflection of his eclectic tastes and another part of the game. He could have chosen anything to decorate the crucible, for wealth was not an issue. Neither was taste. The old man possessed both in abundance. No, the statuettes were a very deliberate nod to the past, to death, and rather ironically, to glory.
    Other than the bookcases, the main concession to traditional taste was what at first glance appeared to be a Georgian mahogany dining table in the center of the room, only instead of the leather inlay the entire table top had been cut away and embedded with a powerful touchscreen computer.
    The table was surrounded by five high-backed, green leather chairs.
    In four of the five chairs sat a member of Sir Charles Wyndham’s brainchild, codename Ogmios. They were bound by Mandate 7266 issued by the Secret Service, their job, to do anything and everything necessary to preserve the sovereignty of the British Isles. What that meant was more difficult to pin down. They weren’t spies. Officially they weren’t anything but outside of the law, removed from the security of the State. They were deniable. If something went wrong they were on their own. If something went right no one ever said thank you. When things went south, they were there.
    The old man might call them the Forge, Noah called them the Lost Cause. It was a slightly different interpretation. Noah didn’t know who they