The Path of the Four

In the maze, Hargrove kept one hand on her shoulder, steering her by pressing his hand into her, tilting his hand left, or right, as he swore, muttered, and fell into a series of silences.

The killer kept her, and himself, moving.

Some Side Clan, some with torches, must have stayed on the hill. Ariana didn’t see where else the light, what there was of it, could be coming from, the flickering, broken, confused light of two, three, four dozen torches, however many there were, coming down from the night sky and into the rocky walls and floors of the labyrinth.

However, there were others in here, with her and Hargrove, in the maze. Close, beyond this wall, around that corner, she heard occasional footsteps and voices.

“What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

Maybe Hargrove didn’t want an answer from her, but he asked the question in her presence, so he was going to get one, an answer, from her.

“You’re going to give yourself up, tell us who hired you and why, and what’s the reason for this double-assassination mission.”

“Why am I going to do that?”

“To increase the chances of my friends decreasing your punishment. That’s what criminals do, don’t they?”

“I’m not a criminal! I’m someone who is, is not a criminal, anyway!”

“OK. I’m sure there’s another word for someone who kills a harmless old native, and tries to kill me, and now has me as a hostage. ‘Criminal’ is the only word I know that works.” Or Paladin of the Promise, thought Ariana. Is that what you are, Peter Hargrove, a Paladin of the Promise? She wouldn’t speak the question aloud. The last time this assassin had heard the phrase he had shot up the Two Worlds Club.

“You know, lady. The secret. What nobody, except the people who need to, is supposed to know. Or you know, and don’t know you know. Same thing with your native friend.”

What secret?

She listened to the tide, and considered the situation.

It took, she imagined, a certain level of intelligence to be a criminal, any type, especially someone who was some type of working assassin. There was a cheap theatricality about how Hargrove had planned to kill her, but the plan did display a kind of low, animal cunning, a sort of intelligence of the pragmatic.

But as for here and now, escape was impossible.

They rounded a corner and there were Roselle and his freckle-faced and scar-faced officers, pointing their weapons at them.

No. She was wrong.

They were pointing their weapons at her.

Hargrove smiled, nodded, let her go and stepped to one side.

Roselle held up his free hand. The freckles and the scar glanced at that hand as Roselle brought the thumb of his free hand in, then his index finger, and so on.

Counting down.

So the three of them would fire as one, at her.

“Ariana, down!”

That was Joe’s shout, behind her.

She surrendered to gravity, and let her body tumble to the ground in an awkward heap.

Offensive, ultra-high intensity laser beams, hissing, and old-fashioned, hot lead bullets, whistling, flew over her.

There were flesh and clothing burning smells, and the sound of three bodies hitting the ground.

Somebody close to her, Hargrove, grabbed her, yanked her to her feet, and pulled her away, past the dead security men, sending blasts back down the twisting hallways.

No return gunfire from Joe, now.

Of course there wasn’t. Joe wouldn’t take a chance on hitting her.

Hargrove steered, pushed, and pulled, zipping fast, and then faster, away from Joe, the one nearest to making contact, and a rescue.

At some point, Joe, in his pursuit, must have lost them, because Hargrove slowed her and himself down.

“All of Human Security?”

“What?”

“All of Human Security, on your side?”

“Use some sense, lady. You don’t trust a whole damn police department with a secret. Not one this important, this big.”

What sort of secret do people kill to protect?

Ariana remembered that, in mythology, somebody uses a labyrinth to keep a monster trapped.

Behind her, steering again with his heavy hand on her shoulder, his panic and desperation vivid with the feel and sound and smell of his sweat and breathing, Peter Hargrove seemed far from a monster. He was only a man after all. He had dragged her into a nightmare, but had none of the Gothic grandeur of a nightmare.

But monster he was, in moment and in function, and he had placed himself into a trap.

He had placed himself, and her.

An element within Human Security had already been under suspicion, of course, so those HS men lining her up for a shooting gallery was not a total surprise. With them now dead, and with Hargrove determined not to surrender, his options dwindled.

And her options dwindled as well.

Somebody sang.

It was one of those late twentieth century, “rock” tunes that Joe liked so much.

All she could remember about it was that it was the last “track” on one of the “albums” that the Beatles released.

The singing couldn’t be coming from Joe, because the singing was right above.

And it was loud.

Hargrove stopped her, yanking her to a halt.

Ariana looked at her captor’s face.

He was looking up.

She did the same.

In the alien night sky, above the labyrinth, in the light of the torches from the hill, huge and singing, floating the masked, hooded face of Brother Chaos.

Brother Chaos stopped singing.

What did he say last time? Did he say that there would be two more appearances? Ariana tried to remember.

“Looks like I have to step in again, and nudge events in the needed direction,” boomed Brother Chaos. “So let me give you a little history lesson. Let me tell you about the origins of the Paladins of the Promise.”

“No!”

Hargrove roared, his face twisted, and he fired blast after blast at the giant face.

“Don’t tell them! Damn it, don’t tell them! I can’t kill them all! You’ll ruin everything!”

The beams went right through the giant, floating face.

It had to be a hologram, of course. But where was the projector? And the level of technology to pull this stunt is more advanced than Ariana thought was currently possible, on any planet.

Ariana couldn’t finish her thoughts about the giant head because Hargrove was going berserk.

However, the voice of Brother Chaos just got louder and louder.

At last, Hargrove ceased his useless, impotent demonstration, and fixed Ariana with a stare, and leveled his weapon at her head.

Ariana made it a point not to look at the gun, looking up at the giant face of Brother Chaos.

“As I’ve been trying to say,” Brother Chaos said. “Let’s go back, into history. Many people still believe beings from outer space landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1948, although that’s not true. Many people believe that Mayor Richard Daley stole the electoral votes of Illinois in the 1960 U.S. Presidential election, and therefore stole the Presidency for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. True and not true. Daley did some hanky-panky, but even if had Nixon won the Illinois electoral votes in 1960, he still would have lost the election. And almost everybody believes that, toward the end of the Pan-Asian War, then U.S. President Curry negotiated a cease-fire and the disbanding of the Universal Resistance League.”

Brother Chaos paused.

“And almost everybody is wrong,” Brother Chaos said. “Here’s what really happened. More than twenty years ago, Roger Brantley was much as he was now, only younger. I’m interested in his understanding of history, and what a country, and a world is like, after something like the Pan-Asian War, and something like the actions of the Universal Resistance League. Brantley convinced President Curry that he, Brantley, and a few of his friends, should go to Irving, Texas to negotiate with the League, and not the President. Remember that the League organized itself around the classic ‘cell’ system, not a hierarchy; League members were far from knowing just who belonged, and how many of them there were. Brantley took advantage of this. He gave the League members at the meeting the exact surrender terms they wanted. Then Brantley, and the associates he had brought with him, foreign businessmen, gave the people across the table a proposal. Brantley and his associates would form the ‘Better World Foundation.’ That was the only public part of the plan. The secret parts were more interesting. Brantley and his associates would be signatories to ‘the Alpha Covenant.’”