Chapter 45

Firth of Clyde

6:16 pm GMT, 7:16 pm Local

Resistance was useless, defiance futile. Despite the power he had allowed himself to believe he possessed over global affairs, The Chairman was just one more pawn whose boldness and bravado crumbled under the unconstrained influence of Rōnin Phythian.

For the past hour he had spilled secret after secret, name after name until his ancient mind was exhausted. His adversary—who should have been dead at the bottom of the Mediterranean six years ago—was relentless in his questioning, digging for the most seemingly insignificant minutiae. Names, dates, details, everything there was to know about the G3’s most clandestine operations. The interrogation, demeaning in its scope and humbling in its process, jolted his dimming memory back to a time when good and evil were as clear as black and white, night and day. Nazis epitomized the darkness of humanity, and the Allied Forces who replaced oppression with freedom were hailed as the heroes of the time.

After the war, when he’d been approached with the promise of rooting out the Nazi vermin that continued to lurk in the forested crevasses of Europe, he’d jumped at the chance to become a custodian of liberty and deliverance. The pact that was consecrated at the Naval Observatory in Greenwich that winter of ’46 was intended to rekindle the lights of truth that had been dimmed by the devastation of fascism.

Over the years, however, the G3’s mission had shifted. What at first had seemed a righteous call to arms had evolved into a profiteering enterprise that cared not for whom the bell tolled, as long as the margins were healthy and net quarterly profits grew on a year-over-year basis. The Greenwich Global Group had been founded on the principles of rectitude and virtue, but it had morphed into a lucrative killing machine—its aspirations not all that dissimilar to those of the tyrants that its founders had been hell-bent on exterminating.

What have I become? he asked himself, at the same time realizing it was not his own conscience that was posing the question. It was Phythian, who was working his mental sorcery on him from across the room, where he continued to warm himself in front of the raging fire. And he realized there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

Eventually the pensive introspection ended and an eerie silence filled the room.

“Are you damned well finished?” The Chairman asked, feeling as if every gram of his very spirit had been drained from his body.

“Almost,” Phythian replied. “There’s just one more thing,”

“And what the fuck would that be?”

“You’re going to make a phone call.”

For an instant he wondered if that was intended to mean something else, such as dialing into death…or meeting his maker. Was this how his life was going to come to an end, in a stone fortress atop a craggy piece of rock, at the hands of one of the most dangerous killers the world had ever known?

“And after I make this call?” he asked, his mind too paralyzed to say anything else.

“One thing at a time,” Phythian told him, nodding at the mobile phone sitting on the mahogany end table that matched the ancient William IV recliner with the hand-carved tulip legs. “Tick-tock.”

Resisting every instinct in his body, The Chairman found himself reaching for the phone. “You’ll never get away with whatever you’ve got planned, you Machiavellian sonofabitch,” he fumed. “You’re crazy.”

“As she has planted, so does she harvest,” Phythian replied. “Such is the furrowed field of karma,”

“What sort of fucking gibberish is that?”

“The sort you should have considered long ago, when you still possessed a soul.”

“You’re no one to talk.” The Chairman said, unable to take his eyes off the Equinox drive in Phythian’s hand. “Whatever you intend to do with that thing, no one will believe you. It’s just too fantastical.”

“No one needs to believe a thing,” Phythian explained. “The files on this drive are far too valuable to feed to the media or an online wiki site. As our little conversation of the past few minutes has so perfectly confirmed.”

“Then what could you possibly hope to accomplish with it?”

“A slow but ceaseless reversal of fortune.”

“You’re talking gibberish again, you bloody tosser.”

Phythian offered a thin smile and listed a shoulder in a shrug. “Equinox contains the details of every lethal operation you and your cohorts have ever engaged in,” he said.

“And you’re the leading player in a good number of them,” The Chairman reminded him.

“Precisely why it’s critical that it never fall into the wrong hands again,” he agreed. “Fortunately, this little device—” he held up the black box just so there was no mistaking his reference “—is just a useless redundancy, a basic copy of everything that’s on the main server in Luxembourg. Which, as you know, is a genuine Fort Knox of information, every byte just waiting to be monetized at the proper moment, in the proper way. Intelligence has become the world’s currency, and it buys a world of goods.”

“You can’t just come in and steal a company out from under its board of directors. It just doesn’t work that way.”

“Excuse me, sir, but I’ve already done it.”

With that, he edged over to the massive fireplace, opened the screen, and tossed the Equinox box inside. Hungry tongues of flames began to lap up around the sides, and within seconds the black plastic case was entirely engulfed.

“You’ve gone completely mad—” The Chairman sputtered, his voice just a bare wheeze of its former strength. “You’ll never get into the cloud without the G3 password.”

“Cutty-Sark,” Phythian said as he watched the device shrivel into a molten lump. “You forget I had the assistance of a particularly cooperative locksmith in Andorra. Of course, it’s been changed since then, just so you wouldn’t be tempted to wipe the thing clean.”

“I am going to fucking kill you—”

“Actually, sir, you should be much more concerned about your own survival. Considering all the bluster and bombast, you’re weak and afraid.”

“And just what am I afraid of?”

“What you have become, how you lost your compass somewhere along the way. You fear the end. A man who lives a full life is prepared to die, but the coward trembles as time grows near. But enough of all this: time to make that call.”

“You are nothing but a fool and a dotard,” The Chairman said.

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser,” Phythian replied as he rubbed his hands together before the roaring flames. The Equinox drive now lay in the glowing embers like a lump of spent coal. “Quit stalling and dial the number.”

The Chairman made one last phlegmy grunt, then slowly punched out the digits on the phone he held in his hand. He glared at Phythian as the encrypted signal clicked through.

“Kent is an independent thinker,” he told Phythian. “Confident and autonomous. He may decide not to listen to me.”

“Just remind him where he was May 22, 2002.”

The Chairman thought on this for a second, then said, “Rock Creek Park—”

“That date might not be in the cloud, but it will get his attention. And that of the FBI, if he tries to fuck this up.”

“I suppose you’re right,” the old man said. Then, as if digital cell phone technology was some kind of miraculous novelty, he announced, “It’s ringing.”