Lethal Pursuit

by Will Thomas

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  I would like to dedicate this book to Forrest Elliott, my friend, my instructor in several martial arts, and an enthusiastic fan of my work.

  Kamsahamnida, Saboonim

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It takes a lot of work by a lot of people to turn out a novel like the one in your hands. Agents, editors, copy editors, publishers, and artists have turned it from a stack of seemingly random pages into this finished product.

  I’d like to thank my agent, Maria Carvainis, who has shepherded me to this, the eleventh volume of the Barker and Llewelyn novels. My editor, Keith Kahla, both an enthusiastic fan and a careful critic, lays hands upon the manuscript and the process begins. Alice Pfeifer stays in close contact with me as the edits travel back and forth. Meanwhile, my publicist, Hector DeJean, uses his craft to get the book out before you, the public.

  You expect the author’s name on the front of a book. Many thanks to the people who helped put it there.

  A special thank-you to my wife, Julia, without whom nothing would get written. She’s my encourager, my inspiration, and my helpmeet.

  It is useless to deny, and impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe, the whole of Italy and France, and a great portion of Germany—to say nothing of other countries—is covered with a network of secret societies, just as the superficies of the Earth are being covered with railroads.

  —Benjamin Disraeli

  PROLOGUE

  The express from Dover was still coming to a stop when Hillary Drummond leapt onto the platform. He staggered a moment, coming close to falling, but righted himself, balanced like a tightrope walker, with a suitcase in one hand and a satchel in the other. Once assured of his footing, he began to sprint along the platform at Charing Cross Station, heedless of the scores of men and women judging him for his lack of decorum. Drummond cared not a whit for their scandalized glances. After all, no one was trying to kill any of them.

  WAY OUT, the sign said on the wall of the Underground. Drummond felt relieved. He’d been looking for a way out since the ferry at Calais. He stumbled on the third step of the staircase leading to the street level, and looked back over his shoulder. There were no blue coats in sight, not yet, anyway, but he knew better than to think he had outrun his pursuers. Did he have time to do the one thing he had to do? Perhaps he could lose himself in the vast cavern that was Charing Cross Station.

  He passed the familiar green kiosk of a W.H. Smith’s and it made him glad he was in London again. He longed to look up at Admiral Nelson perched above Trafalgar Square. He’d lost his taste for Wiener schnitzel and goulash. If he survived, he’d stop at the Red Lion, glut himself on roast beef and pud, and drink himself senseless. It seemed a proper reward for six months’ labor.

  Drummond looked over his shoulder again. There was still no sign that anyone was following him, so he darted into the public toilet. It was a gamble, since there was only one entrance. He could not hide in such a public place, because this group had no compunction about being seen. Death provides its own anonymity.

  Ten minutes later he came out into Charing Cross Road. Nearby the bell known as Big Ben began to play its preamble. When it tolled, he counted the peals. It was just after nine in the morning. What day was it? Tuesday, he thought. Or perhaps Wednesday.

  London was in his nostrils. It was a reek, but it was a good reek, a familiar one. It was coal and soot and steam engines, horse sweat and night soil. Whitehall was just ahead. He could see it. Then he noticed a man with a blue coat at the corner. No, not a man. A youth. Drummond wasn’t certain whether he had been spotted or not, but he did not take the chance. He ducked through the nearest door for safety.

  He was in a public house, by all appearances. The wood was ancient and gray, the smell of the room hoppy. Patrons and even the publican himself looked at him without interest. He stayed just long enough to doff his coat and hang it on a hook before stepping out a second door. The youth had passed by. With nerveless fingers he pulled a cigarette from his case. Before he could pull a box from his pocket, a hand came forward with a match.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Bitte.”

  His training came instantly to hand. He caught the fellow with the heel of his pump just above the hipbone, where the ball of the femur met the socket. The young man folded like a regatta-day lawn chair. To add insult to injury, Drummond kicked him in the ribs and stepped over him. A hand clutched at his ankle but he shook it away.

  Yet another youth came pushing his way through the crowd of men and women leaving the station. It was Drummond’s first full view of the uniforms the young men wore. The boy wore a dark blue peaked cap and a matching long coat with a high collar. The coat was cut very tight around the body, but loose in the arms. Above the left side pocket was a kind of leather bag buttoned to his waist. The coat fell to his knees and the top of his boots, but in the middle it tapered to a point almost a foot lower. Every bit of trim on the blue coat, the collar, the sleeves, and the apron of his coat, was piped in an almost festive red.

  Drummond realized for the first time that it was snowing. He’d been too occupied to notice it before. Clouds of vapor wreathed the boy’s head and the pedestrians pinched their collars about their necks. A fine layer of snow lay on the pavement ahead. It had probably begun that very morning.

  All would have been fine and he’d have waited for the youth to come after him, but instead the boy’s hand reached for the leather holster at his waist. Drummond couldn’t take the chance. He leapt forward and caught his attacker’s forearm with his heel, savagely breaking the bones. The youth’s limbs shot out from under him and he fell. Nearby, a woman gave a scream of alarm, but no one stopped to help. It was too cold.

  “Acne,” Drummond muttered to himself. The youth had acne. Were there no men in their country willing to make the journey? Surely someone older must be leading this band of well-dressed youths. The prize he brought with him was worth a fortune, after all. It could also start a war. For all he knew, it already had.

  Drummond burst into Whitehall Street and his head naturally turned right, where Admiral Nelson watched sagely over London from his one-hundred-sixty-foot pedestal. The admiral still stood, one-armed and wily as ever. England still reigned. Drummond himself finally had something to show for it, this work he’d been doing for so many months. Now all he had to do was survive another eighth of a mile.

  His head turned left. At the far end of the street, across from the Houses of Parliament and hiding Westminster Abbey from view, were the Home and Foreign Offices. He’d come hundreds of miles by rail to get here, used many a stratagem to survive, took such resources as he could in order to make it this far. His last meal had been a bun pinched from the kitchen of the Orient Express. He dared not be so open as to have a meal in the dining car. By then he knew every inch of the train, from roof to undercarriage, and every place he could squeeze his six-foot frame into.

  Ther
e was no one about in Whitehall Street, no one dangerous. No dreaded blue coats. How many had followed him? It was impossible to tell.

  Drummond knew this area like the back of his hand. When he joined the Foreign Office as a clerk, he’d delivered messages to almost every building in the street: the Admiralty, the Horse Guards, Scotland Yard, Downing Street. Now he skirted an alley hurrying to Great Scotland Yard Street. Surely no one could attack him in front of the gates of Scotland Yard.

  He trotted south. There were too many pedestrians on the pavement and a crush of vehicles in the street. Hay had been strewn on the dirty cobblestones to give the horses traction in the snow. It was frigid cold. Not too much farther, he told himself. The Foreign Office was growing bigger and bigger ahead of him.

  He bumped shoulders with another man.

  “Beg pardon,” he murmured.

  A pain went through him, a flash of heat like a poker. Then he felt something being drawn out of him. Immediately, he had trouble breathing. Air simply would not be drawn into his paralyzed lungs. He looked over his shoulder. A man stood there regarding him, the man whom he had bumped into. There was a sword in his hand. As he watched, a drop of blood fell in the snow, as bright red as the piping on the youths’ coats.

  He must get away. The man was behind him and two more blue coats were running toward him from the other side of the street. There was only one choice. Drummond leaped into traffic.

  Horses snorted in his face, affronted by his sudden appearance. He scrambled past them, hugging his suitcase to his chest. He wheezed. No air. No air.

  There was a median between the lines of traffic, a thin strip of grass covered in dirty snow and a few bare trees like hands grasping vainly for the heavens. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two of the youths reach the same median, one on either side. What must it be like to have such youth, to have fleet limbs that do what one tells them to? Drummond was only thirty-four, but now he felt twice that. He jumped into traffic again, but this time he encountered a layer of hard ice. His feet slipped out from under him and he hunched forward, suitcase extended, trying to keep his balance. A horse bellowed in his face and he fell under an oncoming growler.

  An iron-shod hoof came down on his chest, crushing his ribs like matchsticks. Another stumbled on his knee, shattering it, causing the horse to slip and tumble down on top of him, half a ton of warm horseflesh. Lastly, as if an afterthought, the front wheel of the cab rolled over his ankle before skidding to a stop, straddling him.

  Everything hurt at once, an excruciating pain as he had never experienced before. There was a ringing in his ear that would not go away. He understood he was dying. One didn’t recover from such injuries. He gasped for breath, but he had to stay alive for one more minute to savor one final sight.

  The man and the two youths stood over his body, looking down on him without pity. One of the boys held his suitcase and was undoing the clasp. The lad reached in and drew out a shirt and undergarments. And socks, lots of socks. The man’s face clouded and he began yelling at the boys.

  Drummond tried to chuckle, but it was beyond him. He’d stowed the satchel in a locker in the station. He’d never reach the Foreign Office, but others would come, his brothers in the service. He was only a pawn, really; but even a pawn can threaten a king.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Mac!” Cyrus Barker bawled from his bedchamber at the top of the house that morning, the tenth of January 1892.

  My wife was already down in the kitchen helping Etienne Dummolard, our chef, but I was shaving, so I turned to hear what the disturbance was all about. One rarely heard a word of criticism about Jacob Maccabee, and certainly not from our employer. I heard our factotum’s soft footfalls on the stair overhead.

  “Sir?” he said, a trifle coldly.

  “Mac, what are these?” Barker rumbled.

  “I believe they are hose, sir.”

  “To be more precise, they are silk hose,” Barker replied. “What are silk hose doing in my drawer? Where did they come from?”

  “From Paris, sir. I ordered them for you. They are very fine and in fashion. All the butlers in London are suggesting them to their gentlemen this year.”

  “Mac, I am a humble man and I prefer humble hose. Plain woolen socks are good enough for me. I am no fashion plate, and have no need of silk hosiery.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Mac said. “I was only trying to keep you looking modern and professional, like contemporary enquiry agents.”

  “Who, pray tell, wears such frippery?”

  “Mr. Llewelyn does, sir. His wife chose them for him specially, I understand.”

  “Well, that is more than enough silk for one household, then. The silkworms may toil for Mr. Llewelyn, but they need not do so on my account. Take this box and post it back to Paris, before it taints the rest of London with French decadence.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I heard Mac sigh as he came down the stair a defeated man. I donned my jacket and followed him to the ground floor. Going into the kitchen, I kissed Rebecca on the cheek and she handed me a hot cup of coffee. Etienne was teaching my wife the proper way to bake a French tart, which I found ironic. I wondered if our chef had heard the Guv’s remark about French decadence. His voice does tend to carry.

  Etienne waved me to a chair and slid a warm pastry my way so that I wouldn’t interrupt his lesson. I looked out at the cold, austere garden, enjoying the peace while Barker still grumbled in his bedchamber. Things were topsy-turvy. Everything had been subtly derailed, like a train engine that had jumped the track but was still rolling forward parallel to the rails. One knew something bad was coming, but did not know when or how.

  I heard Barker’s heavy tread on the stairs, pecked my wife on the cheek, and took a large bite from the tart before sprinting to the front hall. Mac opened the door to his butler’s pantry and gave me a forlorn look, holding a flat white box in his hand. Poor Mac. The man was very nearly perfect and unused to being scolded by the headmaster. Unlike me, for instance. I opened the door and Barker sailed through it into another day. In black woolen socks, of course.

  I went in search of a cab. Perhaps my employer’s fit of pique was due to his injury, I thought, as I directed the vehicle to our home to pick him up.

  Barker had been badly injured six months earlier, a compound fracture of the tibia, which left him with a leather brace and a cane. It meant that he was confined to his desk more often than either of us preferred. It must have ached, but the man was a stoic of the first order. In true Scottish form, he would not complain. It was up to me to note when his limp became more pronounced and suggest we take a hansom. The cold of a London January, which seeps into one’s bones, did nothing to aid in his recovery.

  This meant, of course, that most errands, from delivering messages to bringing lunch from a local public house, fell to me. It also meant should either of us be attacked, it was my duty to defend us both. It hadn’t happened yet, and I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t, not for my sake, but for his. The Guv’s pride would be damaged, being defended by his subordinate, and the man does tend to brood.

  “Lad, what are you ruminating over?” he asked as our hansom reached Westminster Bridge.

  “Nothing important, sir. This and that.”

  Recently, Barker had remarked that I was less talkative than I had been as a bachelor, which was for the better. Things were more complicated now that I was married. I had two completely different people to please, sometimes with contradictory expectations. There was less time to read, or to soak in the bathhouse in our garden. These were prices I gladly paid, since I’d never been so happy in my life. Rebecca was perfect for me, and as I learned more about her every day, I appreciated her all the more.

  “Here we are,” he rumbled.

  I would not help him out of the cab, but I hovered nearby in case I was needed.

  “Morning, Mr. B., Mr. L.,” our clerk, Jeremy Jenkins, said as we entered.

  “Good morning, Jeremy,” I replied.
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  Cyrus Barker grunted in greeting, crossed our chamber to his desk and sat in his green leather swivel chair. Jenkins and I had a sort of signal as to how the Guv was faring on any particular day. I shook my head. Storm clouds approaching.

  Lifting our ledger book, I began going over our accounts, or pretended to. I’d gone over them the day before. In reality, I fell back to thinking about my wife.

  During our honeymoon, Barker had renovated the first floor for our private use. The guest bedroom had become ours, a lumber room beside it had become a sitting room, and my old bachelor quarters were now a study-cum-library. We could not fault his generosity, but I was aware that he did so partially to have me on hand should he need me. If Rebecca had her wishes, we would have moved into her house in the City, which she still kept. We had reached a temporary compromise: each morning after breakfast, she would go to Camomile Street in order to receive callers and friends, and then the two of us would return, separately, to Barker’s house to have dinner together and retire for the evening. It was not a perfect arrangement, and as much as I enjoyed the routine, I knew it was only a matter of time before we moved permanently. A woman needs a house, to choose cushions and drapes and add countless small details. A husband is there on sufferance, to pay for everything and to keep his opinions to himself.

  Cyrus Barker and I were installed in our offices in Craig’s Court. Unfortunately, there was no current case under our scrutiny. Between his aching limb and the lack of mental stimulation, I feared he would take to growling at me much in the way he had growled at Mac that morning.

  There was much more in me with which to find fault and I was an easy target to hand.

  “Please, Lord,” I prayed to myself. “Something to keep him occupied. Anything. He needs it. I need it. We all need it.”

  I assumed, in my sins, that God hears a lowly Methodist who had married a Jewess and was now attending a Christian-Jewish church. I was still working out if we were satisfied in Reverend Mordecai’s church-synagogue, but whatever we were, we were more satisfied than the Guv.