Paladin Prophecy 2: Alliance

by Mark Frost

  “Put that away. For you, Mr. West,” he said, offering a sincere two-handed handshake. “This one’s on the house.”

  “I really appreciate that,” Will said, and walked outside.

  Once Will was gone, Joe emptied the contents of the sweeper—Will’s clipped hairs—into a small plastic bag that he placed in a drawer of the cabinet in his back room.

  Will found the nearest black phone and left a two-word message for Ajay.

  “I’m in.”

  THE ISLAND

  After reporting back to his roommates, Will arrived at the Lake Waukoma boathouse just before six that evening. Stan Haxley’s boat was waiting for him at the dock. It was a classic teak and mahogany runabout with twin inboard motors about twenty feet in length. When the driver fired it up, they skimmed across the quarter mile to the island in what felt like a matter of moments. They put in at a long extended dock that was visible from the opposite shore, part of an elaborate landing complex near where Haxley’s seaplane was moored.

  Two men in black security guard uniforms escorted him from the lake toward the castle. Getting a closer look at the Crag in broad daylight than he had during their nocturnal escape from the island last fall, Will saw that the grounds were extensively gardened and meticulously maintained. At close range the overwhelming size and scale of the castle was much more apparent, by far the largest private residence Will had ever seen. Built with square roughhewn blocks of granite of a shade Will had seen in the surrounding hills. It must’ve been quarried locally. Decorative fingers of ivy scaled many of the walls. His escorts led him down a path around the side to a separate entrance, the one Will guessed they reserved for the help.

  The door led into a kitchen, or the section of it reserved for staff use, a vast working space designed to handle large numbers of guests, bustling with a dozen people hard at work preparing a meal. The escorts handed him off there to a sturdy man Will assumed was a butler, although he wore a plain black suit, shirt, and tie instead of the uniform Will had seen butlers wear in the movies. The man looked at him with a sneer, oozing contempt, and Will felt an instant dislike for him. The butler didn’t say a word as he beckoned him to follow, leading him out through a sequence of impressive rooms—dining room, living room, billiards room—and into a private study.

  Bookshelves lined walls that rose to a twenty-foot ceiling and a huge stone fireplace leaned over the room. Buttery leather couches, thick Persian rugs, dark hardwood furniture, and a mighty slab of a desk in the corner. A giant globe sat on a massive, curved wooden stand in the corner. The air smelled faintly of spicy aftershave and expensive cigars. It might’ve been the office of a member of Congress or a nineteenth-century explorer.

  The butler backed out and closed the sliding panel doors behind him, leaving Will alone. He glanced around, afraid to touch or even look too closely at anything. He couldn’t see a camera anywhere, but felt like somebody might be watching him on video.

  Another door on the opposite side of the room opened and Stan Haxley strode in, smoking a cigar and wearing dress pants, suspenders, and a white tuxedo shirt with an undone bow tie around his neck. He seemed animated with a kind of salesman’s vitality that Will hadn’t seen yesterday.

  “You’re right on time, Will, and I’m not,” said Haxley with a broad smile and a handshake. “Hope you don’t mind the cigar. It’s the one room in the house where I can indulge.”

  Will didn’t know what to say to that. No, dude, you can’t fire up a Cubano heater in your own office.

  “My dear wife, Patricia, neglected to tell me we were hosting a dinner party tonight,” said Haxley, pouring himself a drink at a bar behind his desk. “So I’m afraid we’ll have to be brief.”

  Haxley took his drink—single-malt Scotch, according to the bottle—and perched on one of the couches. He gestured with his cigar for Will to sit across from him, then studied him with a slight half-smile as if amused by some private joke.

  Will said nothing.

  RULE #12: LET THE OTHER GUY DO THE TALKING.

  “I’ve asked around about you, Will.”

  Will said nothing.

  “There is definite interest here in finding you some work this summer,” Haxley continued.

  Will nodded but kept quiet. Haxley took a leisurely pull off his cigar and blew a fat smoke ring that hung lazily in the air.

  “In fact, I believe I may have a suitable job for you right now. How quickly would you be able to jump in, Will?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Will.

  “I like this enthusiasm! Are you interested in business? That is, as a complement to your worthy altruistic concerns?”

  “Are you asking me if I’m interested in making money, sir?”

  Haxley grinned. “I suppose I am.”

  “Well, who isn’t?” asked Will, trying to match his smile.

  “There’s no law against it,” said Haxley. “At least, none that state it in so many words.”

  “So I wouldn’t be breaking the law, then?” asked Will, keeping things light.

  “That depends on who you talk to—I’m joking of course.” Haxley chuckled good-naturedly. “These are complicated times, Will, and whenever that’s the case it’s best to keep things simple. So we’ll start you with some relatively straightforward tasks, see how you do, and then determine where we go from there.”

  Haxley threw back the rest of his drink, stuck his cigar in his mouth, and stood up. Will stood up too.

  “That’s all there is to it, Will,” said Haxley, with his politician’s grin. “You aced the interview.”

  The door behind Haxley opened. A man stood in the doorway, backlit, hard to see at first. He wore a tuxedo, like Haxley, although his tie was already tied. He stood tall and straight, on the slender side, loose limbed, long arms hanging at his side. Will’s senses went on high alert.

  “Will, this is Mr. Elliot. He’s a colleague of mine.”

  Mr. Elliot walked toward Will, extending his hand. When he moved into the light, Will realized he was an older man, somewhere in his sixties, at least twenty years older than Haxley. His face was crosshatched with fine lines, creating a texture almost like parchment, but he moved with vitality and his grip was powerful. He had a full head of thick white hair, wore rimless eyeglasses, and had a pencil-thin gray mustache.

  “How do you do, Will?” said Elliot, putting both of his hands on Will’s and smiling warmly. “What a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Pleased to meet you, too, sir,” said Will.

  Will thought he seemed harmless, but something about him jangled his nerves.

  Elliot’s pale blue eyes sparkled with delight, and he patted Will’s hand a couple of times before he let it go. He carried an air of heavy gravity about him, just about the most “grown-up” grown-up Will had ever encountered.

  “Stan’s told me so much about you,” said Elliot. He had a deep rumble of a voice that almost sounded like a cat’s purr, but his words were clipped with precise diction.

  Haxley subtly steered them all toward the door. Will heard live chamber music playing in one of the nearby rooms.

  “I’d invite you to join us for dinner, Will,” said Haxley, “but frankly we don’t want to bore you to death.”

  “No, we wouldn’t want that,” said Elliot with a soft little laugh.

  “That’s okay, sir, I forgot my tux anyway,” said Will.

  Haxley and Elliot chuckled politely.

  The kind of laugh you’d give when your polo pony does something adorable.

  “Nine o’clock sharp tomorrow morning, Will,” said Haxley, and walked off tying his tie.

  “We look forward to seeing much more of you around here,” said Elliot; then he gave a friendly wave and followed Haxley through an archway.

  Will waved back and smiled broadly. I’m really in. Now to start scouting the place.


  When he turned around, a young woman was standing behind him. In a black cocktail dress and heels, she stood a couple of inches taller than he did.

  “What are you doing here, West?” she asked.

  It took him a moment to place her—the girl from the counselors alumni group who’d stared him down outside their residence hall the other day. Her dark hair reached to her tanned and muscled shoulders. She had a swimmer’s build, legs for days and startling dark blue eyes that somehow looked familiar.

  “I had a meeting with Mr. Haxley,” he said. “I’m sorry, do we know each other?”

  “My family’s heard a whole lot about something called Will West in the last year,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You knew my brother.”

  Then he saw the resemblance. And his eyes landed on the name tag on her blouse:

  COURTNEY HODAK

  Todd’s sister.

  “I saw you arriving the other day,” said Will when he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Courtney walked around him, looking him over with the kind of superior disdain that reminded him of Todd. “Hard to see what all the fuss is about.”

  Will felt his anger rise. “You said I knew your brother. Past tense.”

  “You don’t know him currently, do you?”

  “I don’t know anything about him at all,” said Will.

  “Neither do we!” She almost shouted it, right in his face.

  Will worked hard to control himself before responding. “Whatever’s happened to him … I’m sorry about your brother.”

  A savage look in her eye, she leaned in almost like she planned to kiss him and whispered aggressively, “Not as sorry as you’re going to be.”

  The butler who’d escorted Will in appeared at the end of the room. He gestured for Will to follow again. As they left, he heard the click of Courtney Hodak’s heels as she walked the other way. They skirted the big rooms they’d walked through before. At one point Will caught a glimpse of the cocktail party in another room and saw some more of the counselors Courtney had arrived with, mixing with a dozen adults, including Haxley. Soon after they ended up back in the kitchen where dinner preparations had ramped up to an even more frantic pace.

  The butler opened the back door for him and Will walked outside. The two men who’d led him up from the dock earlier waited for him there. Will noted the time on the kitchen clock—after seven now but the sun was nowhere close to setting yet.

  But they didn’t lead him back to that landing—Will saw from a distance that guests in formal wear were still arriving there in launches for the party—and instead took him toward a smaller dock on the island’s north side where another boat waited to take him across. The dock from which Will and his roommates had escaped during their epic misadventure on the island last fall. Will looked off to the left from the path through the woods and spotted a wooden frame around the hatch they’d climbed out of when they fled from the tunnels. It looked as accessible as it had before.

  His plan was working to perfection: He’d found their entry point. His mind raced ahead to the next phase, tomorrow’s reconnaissance mission. If that went well, they’d be ready to get down that hatch and start looking for Nepsted’s key. And while they were at it, look for a connection between Stan Haxley and the Knights. The presence of Courtney Hodak and the other alums would be a good place to start.

  Will gathered the roommates together that night, brought them up to speed about what he’d learned, and told them that if tomorrow went as well as today, they should be ready to go as soon as tomorrow night. They checked and double-checked everything on Will’s master list and memorized their timetable, drilling Nick at least five times on his part. Will reminded Ajay to step up his research on how Haxley made his fortune—Ajay said he needed more time to finish—then they turned in early to get a solid night’s sleep.

  Will was up packing gear he needed in his knapsack when Brooke knocked softly at the door. He let her in, making sure that Elise’s door was closed so she wouldn’t see them before closing his door after her. She looked worried.

  “I didn’t want to bring this up in front of everyone,” said Brooke, leaning against his desk, arms folded against her body. “Are you sure it’s safe for you to go into that place?”

  “I don’t have any way to know yet,” said Will. “It depends on how much Haxley has to do with the Knights.”

  “He has to know about the tunnels,” she said. “I mean, he owns the place, Will.”

  “I’m sure he knows about them,” said Will. “They were there for over a hundred years before he showed up.”

  “But doesn’t it seem like he agreed to hire you a little too easily? What if it’s a trap?”

  “Come on, give me some credit,” said Will. “I stalked him and sold him on the idea. He couldn’t resist my big sad orphan eyes routine.”

  Will clasped his hands in front of him and looked up at her with a pathetic, pleading wide-eyed look. Brooke laughed in spite of herself, but immediately checked herself.

  “Come on, Will, this isn’t funny,” said Brooke. “The Knights tried to kill you.”

  “More than once,” he said, taking her hand reassuringly. “I’ll be careful, I promise. And if it goes south, I can always just … run back across the lake.”

  She gave him one of her withering stares and took her hand back.

  “You think I’m kidding,” he said, deadpan.

  “I think you’re crazy,” she said. “What if Haxley’s right in the middle of this? What if he wants you working there so they can keep an eye on you, or something even worse?”

  “I honestly think he feels sorry for me,” said Will.

  “That’s not a reason to trust him. How do you know what he’s got going on over there?”

  “That’s part of what we need to find out,” said Will. “Ajay’s running background—by the way, did your father know anything about Haxley?”

  “They know each other,” said Brooke, twirling a strand of her hair. “Father says he’s a good man, very trustworthy. They served on the school’s board of directors together.”

  “Your dad was on the board?” Will asked.

  “Yes. I thought I told you that.”

  “Maybe you did. I forgot.”

  “It was ages ago, before his last posting overseas. Years before I started here anyway. Speaking of which, my parents are going to make me move to another hall when the school year starts.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Will, covering the fact that the news made his heart sink.

  “That was the compromise I had to make for them to let me come back this summer,” she said, moving to his window and opening it. She leaned out and pointed to Berkeley Hall, the second residence down from Greenwood where alumni family kids boarded and where Courtney Hodak and her team were staying now.

  “We can signal each other with flashlights,” he said. “Morse code.”

  “It won’t be so bad,” she said. “Plus if we find out any of those legacy kids are still mixed up with the Knights, I can work undercover. Keep an eye on them.”

  “Do you know anything about the alumni counselors who work with the summer camp?”

  “What about them?” she asked without turning to look at him.

  “Ajay and I saw them arrive. They’re graduates from a year ago, the class before Lyle’s. One of them is Todd Hodak’s older sister.”

  Brooke turned, alarmed. “Courtney is here?”

  “Yeah. I figured you must know her.”

  “Of course I know her. I grew up with her. She’s only a year older than Todd.”

  Will saw her tense up, her expression suddenly hard to read. “What’s her story?”

  “She’s like every other monster in that family,” said Brooke. “Bullheaded. Entitled and egotistical. And th
ey never stop until they get what they want.”

  “I didn’t know any of the others but they all have a kind of Knights vibe about them. They were all at the Crag tonight at Haxley’s dinner party.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “If our theory is right, and the Knights have been graduating twelve people per class for decades, they could be part of last year’s class—”

  Brooke suddenly turned from the window and embraced him, almost fiercely, a wave of pent-up emotion coursing through her. Will hugged her back, confusion keeping pace with his enthusiasm.

  “No matter what happens, I know you’re going to be all right,” she whispered in his ear.

  She kissed him once, quickly, and then she practically flew out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  Will sat down on the bed for a second to clear his head. He had a fleeting feeling that someone was in the room with him, watching him. He turned to his notebook, open on his desk. His syn-app was sitting at his virtual desk, twirling a pencil around and whistling.

  “What are you looking at, Junior?” asked Will.

  “Don’t mind me, boss,” said Junior.

  “What do you make of this? Two girls interested at once?”

  “I would make of it,” said Junior with a little smile, “whatever I could.”

  When Will arrived at the lake the next morning, the same launch waited for him at the shore. As they skimmed across to the island, he noticed the seaplane was gone from its mooring near the dock.

  Stan Haxley had left the building.

  No guards waited to greet him on the landing this time. Apparently he was expected to make his way to the back door by himself, so Will hoisted his backpack, walked around, and let himself in.

  The kitchen was quiet, except for the background hum of multiple dishwashers. The same squat butler sat at a plain table, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. He sighed when he saw Will come in, his moment of leisure punctured, but he seemed more relaxed in general when he stood up and headed into the house.

  “Follow,” he said.

  As they passed through a different set of rooms, Will heard a platoon of vacuum cleaners at work nearby and saw a flock of maids still cleaning up after the party. The butler took him under a flight of stairs and through a door that led down more stairs to a long, straight, subterranean passage of rough concrete lit by bare bulbs. Their footsteps echoed in the cool air.