Endworlds - Nicholas Read [65]
Not yet.
It took some restraint to withdraw his nether-fingers from probing her lithe body and active mind. This woman was so alive, so vital! As she had been when they were friends, before their people had split into factions and he had led the rebels away.
How delicious that the philosophy that had caused the Dae’mon to be expelled by the Fae’er in the beginning would now be the very cause championed in secret by their own Queen!
He stroked her bare arm as one would a pet, the hairs lifting on small mounds as his phantom’s touch passed through flesh and bone. So much easier to move in by degrees than to possess this one by force. Especially when she was so complicit.
No, he would visit this one again when it pleased him; she had given her consent. They would continue their chats, most cordial and helpful. And by a slow but steady turning of the screw, he, Grand Ephir Bøsexiéède, would bring this world and all others to its knees.
His master would reward him well.
Worlds without end.
INTO THE GRID
HEIDELBERG, GERMANY
FEBRUARY 16, 2006
GENERAL ARI KRIEGMACHER had been stationed in Fairbanks at HAARP when his Adjutant handed him a satellite call from a blocked number. It was a proposition for an interview with a private organization, such as came from the private sector every few months. Usually his aides intercepted these before they reached him. But this one got through the net, and he was required to report it.
To his surprise, his superiors already knew of it, and he found the meeting had been cleared all the way through the Pentagon, suddenly more an order from the brass than a request from a post-retirement suitor. Two days later he was landing in a private airfield outside Mannheim, Germany, and was ferried around normal Customs procedures in a nondescript Mercedes sedan that drove south then up a winding forest road around the back of Heidelberg to alight at the Königstuhl—the King’s Chair—home of the Max Planck Institut für Astronomie.
Instead of finding German students or scientists in plaid jackets and white coats in the hilltop campus, he was welcomed by a frosty blonde woman who carried a tired air of indifference for both his rank and the long journey he had undertaken at short notice. Not even when he called her ‘Blondie’ did she take the bait and talk to him.
She escorted him into a large darkened room with drawn shutters over the windows, where a video projector carved a narrow beam through air laden with blue curls of smoke.
Just out of sight behind the light he could make out a row of a dozen or so men and women waiting for him to be seated on the single metal stool in the center of the room. He lifted a yellow manila folder of documents from the stool, and sat holding it in his lap. In the meeting that followed, he never once saw anyone’s face except the blonde’s.
“Welcome, General,” said one man in a crisp Oxford accent that almost covered his Saudi origin. “This meeting never happened and you were never here. You have been selected from your peers for a special detail. Certain facts will be presented. They will be outside your experience but are to be taken at face value. They are not open to debate. In the end you will be invited to accept, whereupon we will require an answer. Do you understand and agree?”
He had agreed. Blondie appeared at his side with a computer tablet, and he imprinted his thumbprint. The screen pulsed blue, and his thumb tingled sharply.
A woman’s voice next, the hawkish clip of old Boston breeding unmistakable. “Your nation provides funding to you. We provide funding to your nation. We are the government behind governments. The Elite. You have heard of us?”
Of course he had. Every good soldier understood the chain of command, but leaders like him dug deeper to understand the power behind the