For a split second the room seemed to twist and roar
about him, buckling and cracking, as if the walls of the world
were caving in. Robert raised his arms over his head, pushing
his chair violently back from the desk, knocking it
over onto the wooden floor. He stood staring at the drawer,
breathing hard.
Voices rustled at the edge of his mind: go no further, they
whispered. Stop now.
Hatred echoed around him. For an instant, he had seen
a bloodless face, stark-eyed and vengeful, floating in the
darkness that had descended on him. A familiar face.
‘You’re dead!’ Robert hissed in anger.
Outside the window was a fifty-foot drop to the street
below. There couldn’t be anyone there, and he was alone in
the apartment. No one could be whispering to him.
Robert slowly lowered his arms, peering into the darkness
outside. Wraiths of mist swirled and eddied in random
patterns. No apparition there now. He stood still, listening
intently, blood rushing in his ears.
The face was that of a man Robert had fought to the
death, two and a half years earlier, a servant and soldier
of the Enemy. The memory still haunted him, nightly, in
terrifying flashes: trapped underground, a stark sense of
loathing rumbling around him like slow thunder . . . For a
moment Robert was back there, and he tensed again, ready
to defend himself, fists clenched, feet firmly planted, hyper alert
to his surroundings.
Nothing. Silence.
He’d seen pale skin, a halo of white hair, piercing eyes
. . . it was a face he knew, yes, and yet it was different. There
was something else to it that he couldn’t name.
Robert brought his breathing under control, allowing
himself to relax slightly.
He let his eyes roam over the desk he had been working
at, the abandoned workspace of dear, crazy, loving Adam,
his friend, whom the Enemy had destroyed.
His eyes returned to the hidden drawer, now open. Was
this what Adam had wanted him to find?
Robert and Adam had been friends at Cambridge University
twenty-five years before, rivals in love through the years
since, co-conspirators in existential games, mostly of Adam’s
devising, colleagues and competitors in the international news
business. They’d been two halves, perhaps, of a single man.
Air and fire were Adam: spontaneous, daring, ungraspable;
earth and water were Robert: grounded, reliable, unstoppable.
Each in turn had sought and won the hand of Katherine,
the blue-eyed, raven-haired penitent spy who was now
Robert’s wife.
There had been darkness over the decades. Adam had
tipped over into madness in the 1990s, clawing his way
back to the light with Katherine’s and Robert’s help. And
throughout, they had been watched over by their mentor, a
man charged with guiding them even when they rejected
him: Horace Hencott, an Anglophile American and sometime
academic, a wartime colleague of Adam’s grandfather. He was an octogenarian mage, the overseer of their individual psychic gifts, which each of them had denied,
espoused, fought with, lost and regained over the years.
It was Horace who had brought them to their darkest
game nearly three years earlier, a contest with real risks and
real victims, the one that had claimed Adam’s life. The
Enemy had tried to detonate a doomsday device in Manhattan.
Millions of lives had hung by a thread, millions more
had faced unbearable suffering. Robert had succeeded by
the skin of his teeth in stopping it, at terrible cost to others,
and to himself.
But, as Horace had said, the snake was never killed, only
scotched. The Enemy had been angered, and would be back,
working through new avenues, through new souls, aiming
at new targets. It would have to be fought again.
Robert, still agitated, stepped forward again to Adam’s
desk. On either side were stacked the last ofthe files Horace
had instructed Robert to go through after the events in
Manhattan, seeking to understand just what Adam had been
focusing on in the final months before his death.
Robert was sure Adam had left a message, a series of
clues. With Adam, there had always been one more game
to play, one more riddle to dragoon his friends into solving,
one more chance to organize a party, a scavenger hunt, or
another shot at self-discovery.
Robert stood, hands on his hips, staring down at the
most recent batch of papers and photographs he had been
examining. It had been his obsessive project, as Kat had called
it, part of the recovery process Horace had devised for him
after 2004: track down and gather together all the research
papers and writings Adam had accumulated over his years
in London, Miami, Havana and elsewhere, as well as in New
York. See what he had learned about himself, and about the
Enemy. It was a way of making peace with Adam’s memory,
and with the things Robert had done.
Robert raised his eyes and peered into the hidden drawer
that he had not noticed until this evening, until a glimmer
of light, like a sunbeam reflected on water, had fallen on it
repeatedly as he’d worked. A shard of ghost light, from God
only knew where.
Snatches of words formed in his mind: Mar . . . regret . . .
Robert shook his head, dismissing them, banishing the last
echoes of the vision. Focus.
He reached inside the drawer.
It contained a sealed envelope. As he took it out, the air
grew colder around his neck and shoulders. Robert felt eyes
upon him, and he shivered.
The letter was addressed to him in Adam’s handwriting.