The Last Paladin

by Ward Wagher

  RWB grinned at her. “I am glad you are on top of things, Lesa. Now you will be able to enjoy the party.”

  She glanced over at Jones, who raised an eyebrow. If the Paladin felt happy enough to tease Lesa, then he must be feeling better.

  Cliff Barr sat outside the party venue and stood as RWB walked up. They shook hands.

  “Great to see you again,” Barr said. “You have been a stranger for too long.”

  “I am not strange anymore,” RWB said with a smile.

  “Er, yes,” Barr replied, slightly nonplussed. “Anyway, we just opened the bar, so there is no need for you to wait out here.”

  “Fine,” RWB nodded.

  He stepped around Barr and pulled open the door that led him into the party. Once again, the noise of the music and the throng assaulted him. He shook his head in shock. He once enjoyed the ambiance, but now it seemed like it was just noise and it was unpleasant.

  People called out to him as he walked across the room to the bar. He waved with his trademark smile but continued on his path. He saw no one that he really wanted to talk to.

  “Beer,” he said to the bartender and absently picked up the bottle when it was handed to him.

  He moved over to a corner where he could observe. The noise began to give him a headache and he was faintly nauseous. He looked up with a smile as a tall, broad brunette approached. He had known Jennsy Parker for years and considered her a good friend.

  “How is it going Jennsy?” he asked as she stepped in for the obligatory kiss.

  “Have not seen you around, RWB,” she said. “We have missed you.”

  “I am here,” he countered. “It is where I wanted to be tonight.”

  “Do you suppose we might have a private conversation?” she asked. The sultry tone was drowned out by the music, but the look in her eyes was enough.

  “Why not?” RWB said, setting down his bottle.

  He took Jennsy’s hand and they walked out of the room. Jones and Carper looked at each other and then followed.

  Out in the hallway, they saw RWB and Jennsy heading for the elevator. Jones and Carper hurried to follow them, and just managed to step into the elevator with the couple.

  “What is my room number, Jones?” RWB asked.

  “Twelve-thirty-five,” Jones replied.

  “Who are these people?” Jennsy asked.

  “These are my guards. In view of recent events, I have them with me everywhere.”

  “Even in your room?”

  He glanced over at her and smiled. “No, they will guard the room from the outside.”

  When they entered the Paladin’s suite, she looked around to make sure no one followed. Just inside the doorway was a table of hors d’oeuvres and a bottle of Champaign chilling in an ice bucket. She walked over and pulled the bottle up to look at the label.

  “Oh, this is very nice. Will you be a dear and pour me some?”

  “Of course.”

  After he poured two flutes of Champaign and they sipped, she came into his arms.

  “I have missed you, RWB,” she said in a voice softer and higher pitched than one would think from her size. “I know I will never have all of you, but I have enjoyed these evenings we have spent together.”

  He said nothing and she leaned in for a kiss. He gazed at her for a few moments and then broke away.

  “I am sorry, Jennsy, but I cannot do this.”

  “Was it something I said? I am sorry if I was too forward. You know I would not be that way on purpose.”

  “It is not you, Jennsy. I think I just need to call it a night.”

  “Are you sure, RWB?” she asked. “I think you may need a friend right now more than entertainment in your bed. I am really sorry about Scout. We all are. Maybe if you would like to just sit down and talk.”

  “No. But, thank you for understanding,” he said softly.

  The tall brunette left the room and Jones stuck his head in. “Is everything all right, Boss?”

  “Just peachy,” the Paladin replied. “I guess I want to be alone.”

  “Very well. Call if you need me.”

  “Thanks, Jones.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “How much sleep are you running on?” Jones asked.

  “About four hours, Chief,” Carper replied.

  They stood together in the hall and watched as the statuesque brunette entered the elevator.

  “I wonder what happened,” Carper commented.

  “I suspect his stiff upper lip is not as strong as he thought,” Jones murmured. “Did you see the look on his face?”

  “I missed that. I was trying to maintain situational awareness.”

  “Was that a criticism of your chief, Lesa?” Jones tilted his head and pulled one side of his mouth into a slight grin.

  “What?” she looked surprised. “No! No, Sir. That is not what I meant at all.”

  He grinned broadly at her. “You worried me, there.”

  She looked suspiciously at him. “Sir, are you pulling my leg?”

  “Moi?”

  She sighed and dropped her arms to her side. “You do that to me every time, Chief.”

  “I think the Paladin is done for the night,” Jones said after a moment. “Muddy has been snoozing since we got here. Go wake him up to take the first watch. Then I want you to put your head down. I think the early morning hours are when the risks are the greatest.”

  “What about you, Chief?”

  “I got seven hours last night. I am good for a while. I think I want the entire team up after midnight.”

  “Have you heard something, Chief?” Carper asked suspiciously.

  “Not specifically, Lesa. But the clowns that have gone against us seem to prefer the early morning hours. And we are about as exposed here as we can be. If I was running one of those teams, it is when I would try something.”

  “I had Audrey put vid pickups in the elevators and stairwells. She is good at sneaking the things in. I got Muddy to sneak up on the roof and put pickups around the outer walls.”

  “Then we have the place dialed in.”

  “I was rather pleased, myself,” she said.

  “Do not get too proud of yourself. We had nearly as good visibility when we were in Miami and we still almost had our heads handed to us.”

  “I threw a couple of drones up there. They are orbiting the building. The AI is controlling them.”

  He gazed at her until she grew disconcerted. “What?”

  “You are getting cocky, Lesa. We have stopped them every time so far, but they only have to get lucky once.”

  She put her hands on her hips as she glared at Jones. “Chief, I am paying attention. I have eyeballs backstopping my technology.”

  “Good. I know that I am nagging at you, but we honestly have no opportunity to get slack. We cannot afford to lose the boss.”

  “I hear you, Chief.”

  Jones nodded. “Fine. Go roll Muddy out and catch some shuteye.”

  He watched as the young woman stalked away. He thought she resembled nothing so much as a hunting cougar. She did not realize just how good she was. Jones was really not as worried as he had led Lesa to believe. However, in this business, overconfidence was deadly.

  At midnight, everyone was up and Jones had most of them in the next suite to the Paladin’s, which was being used as the command center.

  “Okay, people, we are heading into the witching hour. I want four of the team up on the roof. Four should be in the lobby. The rest will cover this floor. Lesa will be on the sensor suite. If anyone gets a twitch, sing out.”

  “What are we expecting, Chief?” Audrey Schloss asked.

  “Hopefully nothing,” Jones replied. “But the bad guys may think they have a beautiful opportunity this morning. I want them to break their teeth on us.”

  “Why the sleepy darts, Chief?” one of the guards asked.

  Each member of the team had a tiny air-powered pistol in their gear. Each device carried two dozen slee
py darts – small needle-like projectiles coated with a drug that would put a man down for about eight hours.

  “If we get a team coming in, and can isolate them individually, I want to put them down with the darts. If nobody hears gunfire and an entire team disappears, it is all for the better as far as I am concerned.”

  “What would we do with those we captured, then?” Carper asked.

  Jones shrugged. “That would be up to the Paladin and Arlen.”

  The door to the improvised command center slid open and Muddy Rivers looked in.

  “What…” Jones started to say, and the Paladin brushed past him.

  “Everybody is up?” RWB asked. “Good. Is there any reason why we cannot go home right now? I have not been to sleep yet, anyway.”

  Jones regarded him for a minute and turned back to the group. “Very well, People. Break it down. Lesa, send the order out. This is a good time to practice a combat withdrawal. But we will take everything with us. No sense wasting the gear.”

  “Right,” she called back before turning to the equipment on the table in front of her. “All units, combat withdrawal on my mark. Mark!”

  “You heard the lady,” Jones barked. “Let us go. Come on, Boss, we need to get you packed.”

  “Oh, I am already packed,” RWB said.

  “So much the better.”

  Once the order was sent, the four guards in the lobby turned and each went to a stairwell and began running the stairs. At each level, they reached up and pulled down one of the unobtrusive video pickups. The pickups were no bigger than a small coin.

  Jones and Rivers walked back to RWB’s suite with him and picked up the handles on the four suitcases. With the small counter-grav units built into the luggage, they were no problem to move. They marched down the hall to the elevator and then ascended to the rooftop lounge. It was deserted at that hour, and they walked out to the waiting shuttle.

  Cathay and the copilot had arrived first and were working down the checklist before the takeoff. Rivers took the luggage to the back of the shuttle to stow it. Jones remained outside to cover them. RWB flopped into his seat, looking disgusted or depressed.

  At the twelfth level, the guards who came up the stairs pulled the doors open and nodded to the other guards stationed on the Paladin’s floor. The two men guarding the elevators trotted down the hallway to the stairwell, and proceeded up the stairs towards the roof, following the lobby guards. Those who had been guarding the doors to the stairwells on that floor followed last.

  The group coming up the stairs exited the stairwells on the top floor and then moved quickly along the hallway to the stairwell going to the roof. They quickly mounted the flight of stairs to the roof and came out in corner of the lounge. They trotted across the landing pad to the shuttle. Once they had boarded, Jones nodded to the guards on the perimeter of the roof. Each reached over the parapet to collect the vid devices and then trotted to the shuttle.

  As the last of the guards boarded Jones hit the button to close the hatch. He leaned into the cockpit.

  “Time to go, Richard.”

  “Right, Chief.”

  Jones buckled into his seat across from RWB as the turbines began spooling up. Cathay applied the counter-grav in a heavy burst so that it seemed like the shuttle bounced off the rooftop pad. Because they had chosen to make a quiet exit from the hotel, Cathay kept the counter-grav steady to allow the shuttle to keep rising. He used just a whisper of the turbines to begin moving the craft forward. Jones thought it likely their departure had disturbed no one in the hotel.

  At three thousand feet, the shuttle came to 80% power and started climbing strongly. Jones pulled his hand comm from his pocket and called the Chicago command center at Wilton House to let them know the Paladin was coming home.

  Jones slipped the comm back in his pocket and looked across the cabin at the Paladin. The young man was sprawled across his glove-soft leather seat, sound asleep. Jones shook his head sadly and wondered what would become of Ryan Ward Baughman, the accidental Paladin who styled himself as RWB.

  § § §

  RWB was working his way through the morning tasks. He hated detail work and pushed as much off to the department heads as possible. Much of what he saw were things that the heads should have taken care of, anyway. He shook his head as he briefly thought about the party the previous evening in Memphis. Suddenly, a lot of those things were not fun anymore. When he brought Jennsy to the hotel room and looked at her, all he could see was Scout’s face.

  He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He scrubbed his eyes with his hands and sighed. When he looked up again, he jumped. Singman Jones had slipped into the office and was sitting across from him.

  “I did not hear you come in,” he exclaimed.

  “Sorry, Boss,” Jones did not seem contrite. “We had something come up that you needed to know about.”

  “And Ellen let you get past her?” RWB grinned.

  “Ellen did not see me,” Jones smiled back.

  RWB sighed. “You are worse than Chaim. With all the spooks around here, people will say Wilton House is haunted. Very well, Sing. What was it I needed to know?”

  “Just that our timing was very fortuitous last night.”

  “No!” the Paladin exclaimed.

  “Yes. Perhaps fifteen minutes after we left, our friends attacked the hotel.”

  RWB shook his head and sighed. “How many people were killed?”

  “None. They used sleepy gas on the staff. They did blow the door to your suite. You were gone, of course.”

  “Are we sure it was the same people, Sing? They haven’t used sleepy gas before.”

  “The city police managed to capture one of the attackers. He had the misfortune of falling down the stairs. He could not move very fast with a broken leg.”

  RWB stood up and walked to the windows. The ceramaplast filtered out the direct glare and heat of the morning sun and he could see the waters of Lake Michigan sparkling in the light. Chicago had a fair amount of air traffic, although the heavy freight came in via ground vehicles, and the streets carrying the heavy traffic was below ground level.

  “What are you thinking, Boss?” Jones asked.

  “I am thinking we are not making any progress at getting ahead of these monsters.”

  “Unfortunately, that is true,” Jones admitted. “Arlen has people out all over the Palatinate trying localize them.”

  “Does Arlen really know what he is doing, Sing?”

  Jones opened his mouth and then closed it again.

  “Forget I asked,” RWB jumped back in. “I should not have said something like that.”

  “Arlen Senter is actually an effective policeman,” Jones stated. “It is just that the Arabians have become so much better so quickly. It is unsettling.”

  “That means we need to up our game.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  RWB shrugged. “Something Pop used to say. I think he got it from his dad. Anyway, we really need to get better at this. I assume Arlen is paying attention to you.”

  “Oh, yes. There is some competition between the Paladin’s Security Team and the regular forces, but everyone keeps the mission front and center.”

  “Well, we are going to have to do something about the Caliph before this is over and done with. I trust you are giving that some thought.”

  “Would that not fall under Director Lewis’s purview?” Jones asked.

  “Yes, but everyone seems to be coming up empty-handed on possible solutions. If you have any ideas, I want to hear them.”

  “If I have any ideas, Boss, I will certainly let you know.”

  The Paladin gazed out the window for a while longer, and then returned to his desk.

  “Would we have repelled the attack last night, Sing?” he asked.

  “Oh, I think so. It might have been messy, but we had the force dialed in and alert. This is actually a good lesson for us.”

  “How did you know that there was going
to be an attack?” RWB asked.

  “I did not. But I have been trying to get into the head of whoever sets these things up. It seemed to me like last night would have been a good opportunity to do something. For whatever reason, the Caliph is really out to get you.”

  “One thing that I really hate doing,” the Paladin commented, “is to attack my enemies openly. Pop taught me that it is much more effective to move in the shadows. Something happens and they do not know where it came from or who did it.”

  “Your father was a master of subterfuge,” Jones replied. “He had the O’Blecks stumbling over their own feet because they were looking over their shoulders all the time.”

  RWB snorted. “Honestly, Sing, I think Pop did that for pure entertainment. I mean, the O’Blecks are so easy. The caliph is another kettle of fish.”

  “Where do you get these phrases, Chief?”

  RWB grinned at his head of security. “I got them from Pop. He told me they run in the family. But, then, everyone knows I have a strange family.”

  “A very successful one, though,” Jones commented.

  “So, you agree that my family is strange?”

  Jones gave him an old-fashioned look. “I would never say anything like that.”

  “Right.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  “Are we just going to march in to RWB’s office, Trace?” Antonia Riggs asked. “Most people don’t show up for a visit unannounced.”

  Tracy Riggs grinned at his wife. “Oh, but this is not announced. We were invited.”

  “We were invited by a strange comm call, Trace. In fact, this whole thing is rather strange.”

  “We received tickets for the trip, didn’t we? And, we are here. Worst case we just go home again.”

  “And it interrupted our packing for the move to Hepplewhite. I don’t know if we will be ready on time for the liner.”

  The young couple walked through the main lobby of Wilton house and stopped in front of the Information Desk.

  “May I help you, Sir and Madame,” the teenaged boy behind the desk asked.

  Riggs turned from his wife and faced the attendant. “Yes. We have an appointment with the Paladin. I am Tracy Riggs and this is my wife Antonia.”