The Black Knight

by Dean Crawford

  The gaunt man shook his head.

  ‘Support will reach them soon, likely a nuclear submarine or perhaps even a major fleet,’ he cautioned. ‘It is imperative that this is brought to a close before such reinforcements can arrive in the area.’

  ‘It will be,’ LeMay assured them. ‘My people are under strict instructions to either escape the area with Black Knight in their possession, or if that proves impossible to destroy all trace of the site and the DIA team. We either get what we want, or nobody does.’

  The leader of the group nodded and then stood. Despite his obvious advancing years he projected an aura of menace and competence that unnerved LeMay as he glared down at him.

  ‘Your work has impressed us,’ he said, ‘and your commitment to our cause has not gone unnoticed despite the danger to your own career. You are certain, Gordon, that you have not been tracked to this location?’

  LeMay realized that he had not until now been called by his given name, that the act of doing so was likely a major concession in the silent war of wills between them.

  ‘Nobody knows that I am here with you,’ LeMay assured him. ‘I am visiting family in the city.’

  ‘Good,’ the tall man said, ‘then it is time for you to come out of the cold. We know that your position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is coming to an end as a result of the work you have done for us. We will ensure that your exit will be without any political or criminal discomfort.’

  LeMay beamed. ‘That would be much appreciated.’

  ‘Furthermore,’ the gaunt man went on, ‘we should like to hold a small ceremony, a tradition if you will, that has been a part of our history and will formally welcome you among our number. You, my friend, will become Number Four.’

  LeMay’s eyebrow raised in surprise. ‘I am to replace a member?’

  The gaunt man, evidently Number One, chuckled although LeMay could detect no true humor.

  ‘We have a great deal of power,’ he replied as the rest of the members got to their feet, ‘but we do not yet have control over our longevity. I am not the first leader of this cabal and I shall not be the last. The previous Number Four was a man named Dwight Oppenheimer, who ironically was involved in searching for the elixir, the fountain of youth, several years ago in New Mexico. He died at the hands of a man whom I believe you to be familiar, one Ethan Warner?’

  LeMay’s expression darkened. ‘I know of him.’

  ‘Then your first mission, once our Antarctic business is complete, will be to eradicate Warner and his partner, Lopez. You will be a part of our future, Gordon, and we shall celebrate that formally tomorrow. But for now, congratulations.’

  Number One extended a thin, wiry hand laced with purple veins that Gordon LeMay shook vigorously as the other men in the room clapped politely and Victor Wilms handed LeMay a champagne flute.

  ***

  XXXI

  ‘Keep it steady.’

  ‘I’m trying!’

  Lopez worked the control unit furiously as she guided the drone alongside the rear of the Pierre Hotel. The calm air at ground level near Central Park had been replaced by the faster free winds three hundred feet above the city that buffeted the drone as Lopez sent it whizzing across the rooftops toward the top of the hotel.

  The dizzying height and the drone’s instability in the wind began to take its toll on Lopez’s ability to control the device, and she realized quickly that such unsteady footage was not going to be sufficient to identify the members of Majestic Twelve. Jarvis, and indeed the President, would need clear images of the group combined with the audio obtained from LeMay’s implant in order to ensure that any convictions stuck.

  ‘I’m going to have to switch on the auto-stability that Hellerman included in the package,’ she said as she struggled to control the drone.

  ‘Won’t that use up more power?’ Vaughn asked.

  ‘Yeah, but at this rate we’ll get nothing, it’s too damned windy.’

  Lopez’s thumb moved briefly off the control column and flipped a switch on the top of the controller. Almost immediately the drone levelled off and began returning a crystal clear image of the city.

  ‘Damn, Hellerman,’ she smiled as she worked the controls and brought the drone back onto course toward the hotel’s penthouse suite.

  The top floor of the hotel, so she recalled had once been up for sale for around a hundred million dollars, a sum so vast she wondered why anybody would bother paying so much money for something so comparatively small. She knew that the suite held three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an expansive lounge and terraces that overlooked Central Park in its entirety, but she knew that any folk with funds like that could buy a five bedroom mansion outside the city and be blissfully happy in retirement for the rest of her life for a tenth of that sum.

  ‘How the other half live, eh?’ Vaughn said, clearly thinking the same thing as her.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be any one of them,’ Lopez replied. ‘So much money that you no longer have any sense of its value.’

  Vaughn raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d give it my best shot.’

  The drone was now behind the penthouse suite, where two terraces looked out to the west over the cityscape. Lopez guided the drone closer to the terraces.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Vaughn cautioned, ‘we don’t want them to see it.’

  ‘I’m on zoom,’ she replied calmly as she flew the drone around the south side of the suite, seeking the lounge windows. ‘I doubt they’ll ever know the drone was there.’

  The drone drifted around to the east side, moving back over 5th Avenue and Central Park as Lopez fought to get a good line of sight into the building. The large windows reflected the bright morning sky, the sun behind the drone and the reflected light obscuring the interior of the suite.

  Lopez’s heart skipped a beat as she saw movement among the light playing on the windows, the reflections of clouds translucent enough to see suited men standing inside the building.

  ‘Here we go,’ she said as she guided the drone in closer.

  The interior of the suite was colored in shades of magnolia, the dark suits of the circle of men within contrasting sharply with their surroundings. Lopez peered at the gathering and thought she saw a single gray suit among the black.

  ‘Almost there,’ she whispered.

  The drone hovered, descending slightly, and as Lopez got her first glimpse at the men’s faces so the sun broke through the clouds and a brightly reflected flare of sunlight ripped across her field of vision.

  ‘Damn!’

  Lopez guided the drone to the right, hoping to change the angle of view of the drone and lose the reflected sunlight. The drone flew sideways and she glanced at the power bar to see that it was already two thirds depleted.

  ‘Less than ten minutes,’ Vaughn warned her. ‘Get the footage, Nicola.’

  ‘Stand by,’ Lopez replied in a whisper that she barely heard herself, manipulating the controls carefully.

  The brilliantly flaring reflection of the sunlight faded out as the drone maneuvered to one side, and then the image cleared and Lopez gasped. She saw Gordon LeMay standing in the center of a group of men, all of them clapping and smiling as one of them handed LeMay a flute of champagne.

  ‘I’ve got you now, asshole,’ she chortled in delight as she watched LeMay sip from the flute as he shook the hand of a tall, sepulchral looking man dressed all in black.

  ‘We’re getting half of them,’ Vaughn said from the front as he watched the display and the faces of the men upon the screen. ‘Damn, we’ve got Majestic Twelve on film.’

  *

  Gordon LeMay sipped the champagne in the flute and acknowledged the smiles of greeting on the faces of the men with whom he was sharing the most expensive apartment in the western world. Truth be told he was completely amazed that he had been allowed to even enter the same room as these men, all of them worth billions, perhaps trillions of dollars each, all of them wielding more power than Presidents and Prime Mini
sters the world over, all of them part of a shadowy network of businessmen shaping world events to suit their own needs. Perhaps that was how they had become so wealthy and so powerful, by joining the cabal, and suddenly he found himself thinking that he too might become as wealthy and as powerful as the men around him.

  ‘So, how does it feel to finally be here?’ Wilms asked LeMay as he approached him.

  ‘It feels good,’ he replied, ‘I’m relieved to be here, for sure, I don’t mind saying.’

  LeMay took another sip from his champagne and glanced out of the window across the stunning vista of Central Park and the city, and almost immediately his eye caught upon the black speck on the immaculately polished glass windows, sharply contrasted against the vibrant New York morning sky.

  LeMay had spent the last thirty years working for the FBI and knew just about every surveillance trick in the book. To believe for even an instant that any agency would have been foolish enough to place a bug on the outside of the window itself seemed so outlandish that he could not even begin to entertain…

  LeMay saw the speck move across the sky and then come to an abrupt halt, and in a moment of clarity he realized that he was not seeing a tiny object at the distance of the window but a larger one outside the building. He turned to Wilms, his eyes wide as he opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came forth.

  LeMay tried again, but his voice was a mere croak that whistled from somewhere deep inside his throat. He felt his legs start to lose rigidity beneath him, swayed as Wilms snatched the champagne flute from his grasp as two more men moved in behind LeMay.

  LeMay toppled sideways, unable to control himself as he was caught before he hit the thickly carpeted floor of the apartment. The two men lay him down on his back, and LeMay stared helplessly up at them as the members of Majestic Twelve moved into a circle around him and stared down with a strange, detached interest.

  For a brief moment LeMay wondered, hoped, that this was all some bizarre ritual, a part of his acceptance into Majestic Twelve, but somehow he knew that it was no such thing.

  Number One looked down pityingly at LeMay as he spoke.

  ‘Dear Gordon, such a shame to have been deceived in such a way, but I’m afraid that deception is what we’re all about. Surely you must have known that a man with such shamefully limited financial means could never expect to become a member of our cabal?’

  LeMay tried to answer, his mouth gaping open and closed.

  ‘He looks like a beached fish,’ Number Three said as though examining an injured insect. ‘For God’s sake, put him out of his misery.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Number One replied, ‘we can’t allow the Defense Intelligence Agency the luxury of recovering his body with that implant in place, can we? Better that we remove it soon and ensure that they don’t learn anything of our identities.’

  LeMay felt tears flood his eyes as he tried to understand what they were referring to. He tried again to speak but nothing came out, his body completely paralyzed and his heartbeat feeling slow in his chest.

  ‘Pancuronium bromide,’ Victor Wilms explained, staring down at LeMay. ‘It’s used with general anesthesia in surgery for muscle relaxation. Side-effects include moderately raised heart rate, excessive salivation, apnea and respiratory depression, rashes, flushing, and sweating. Did you know that in Belgium and the Netherlands, pancuronium is recommended in the protocol for euthanasia? After administering sodium thiopental to induce coma, pancuronium is delivered in order to stop breathing.’

  LeMay knew that he would die if he did not do something to prove his worth to the group, and he looked at Wilms and swivelled his eyes back to the suite’s main windows. Wilms frowned for a moment as LeMay repeated the motion, and then he turned his head and stood up and he noticed the speck hovering outside the suite.

  Wilms’s composed expression collapsed into panic.

  ‘We’re being watched!’

  The twelve members of Majestic Twelve whirled to look out of the window, and in an instant they all saw the drone staring back at them. For a moment it hovered there right before them and then it suddenly descended and shot out of sight toward the north.

  ‘Get the security team out there!’ Wilms shouted. ‘And get LeMay out of the building, now!’

  ***

  XXXII

  ‘They’re onto us!’

  Vaughn started the car’s engine as Lopez fought to bring the drone down to street level as fast as she could as the car jolted to the right, Vaughn cutting up a small goods vehicle as he struck out into the flow.

  Lopez had seen everything: the faces of the men in the room, LeMay among them, who had collapsed in their midst. The expression of one of the men, Wilms, as he pointed directly at the drone before Lopez had cut the throttle and let the device plummet out of sight.

  She turned the drone in mid-flight and swung it around to point the cameras at the elaborate entrance to the hotel, where she instantly saw a dozen men burst out onto the sidewalk of 5th Avenue, all of them looking up into the sky above Central Park. Dark suits, designer sunglasses and likely concealed weapons beneath their jackets.

  ‘Multiple agents,’ she reported as Vaughn drove down the avenue toward the intersection close to the hotel. She saw one of the agents point up at the drone and then the men sprinted across the street. ‘They’re onto the drone.’

  Vaughn nodded as he saw the agents cross the street a hundred yards in front of them, heard a salvo of horns honking them as they dodged the traffic and vaulted over the wall into the park. ‘How much battery do you have left?’

  ‘Less than ten per cent,’ she replied. ‘We need a way to get that drone back into the car.’

  Vaughn offered her a tight grin in the rear view mirror. ‘Nice to hear you’ve planned ahead. Is the downlink working?’

  Lopez blinked as she looked at the screen. ‘Yeah but it’s slow, I need another couple of minutes.’

  Vaughn drove past the hotel, the lightly tinted windows of their vehicle effectively concealing them from observation as Vaughn turned right onto the Plaza and then followed East Drive, the trees surrounding them concealing the vast city that enveloped the park.

  ‘You got a bead on the agents?’ Vaughn asked.

  Lopez turned the drone and looked down to see the four agents sprinting through the forest, following trails between the trees as they pursued the tiny drone.

  ‘They’re not going to make it,’ she said. ‘Head to the far side and we’ll pick up the drone and get the hell out of here.’

  Vaugh nodded as he accelerated toward the center of the park, where Terrace Drive would pick up 5th Avenue again and let them head north out of Manhattan. Lopez descended the drone, skimming the treetops as she flew it toward the park exit. Vaughn was almost there when she spotted the two glossy black SUVs pull into the park and block the entrance as armed agents got out and began waving vehicles down and peering inside.

  ‘Damn, that was fast’ she uttered. ‘They’ve got support and they’re checking vehicles, stay off Terrace.’

  Vaughn did not reply, simply slowing down and easing the vehicle past Terrace and further into the park.

  ‘How the hell did they figure this out so quickly?’ he asked. ‘We could have been anywhere in the city.’

  ‘Majestic Twelve,’ Lopez murmured. ‘They’ve likely got tech just as advanced as some of our own. Maybe they scanned for the drone’s controller signal and picked it up coming from out of the park.’

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ Vaughn snapped. ‘If they identify us in this vehicle we’re done.’

  Lopez focused on the drone as she sought a way out of the park.

  ‘They’re following the drone right now, not us,’ she insisted. ‘I can give them the run around while you drive out of here.’

  ‘If you get too far out of range with a low battery we could lose the drone,’ Vaughn warned her. ‘If we lost that downlink and the drone gets picked up…’

  ‘It won’t,’ Lopez insisted. ‘I
’ve got an idea. Drop me off.’

  ‘They’ll see you.’

  ‘Just do it.’

  ‘The drone is the priority,’ Vaughn insisted. ‘We can’t lose you or it!’

  ‘Then pull over now!’ Lopez shouted. ‘Get the car out of the park on Terrace and I’ll meet you on Central Park West!’

  Vaughn yanked the car into the sidewalk and braked as Lopez got out and slammed her door behind her and dashed across the street into the trees. She heard Vaughn pull away as she ducked into some bushes and hurriedly unfolded her laptop to see the view from the drone as it flew overhead.

  To her surprise she could hear its engines buzzing somewhere above her, and gently she began turning the drone to the north, continuing on over the park toward the Reservoir. She ducked down as she heard running feet pounding the path nearby, and peered through the trees to see four agents run past her, one of them speaking into a microphone as he stared up at the speck in the sky.

  ‘Run Forrest,’ Lopez smiled to herself as she watched them sprint desperately after the little drone.

  She toyed with the idea of turning the drone in a big circle to tire the agents out further, but quickly scratched that from her list as she realized that it would give the game away and force the agents to search for controller’s signal instead. The battery was low, five per cent now and falling fast and the downlink had not yet completed.

  ‘Come on, damn it!’ she whispered, urging the downlink to hurry.

  Moments later, a warning signal appeared on the screen.

  DOWNLINK FAILED – SIGNAL LOST

  Lopez hissed an expletive as she slammed her fist into the soft earth beside her, and then she saw through the drone’s lens Vaughn’s vehicle stop at the exit of Terrace Drive, four agents surrounding the vehicle.

  *

  Vaughn dropped the window of the car as two armed agents with stern expressions peered down at him.