The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [166]
"But..."
"It's the most delicious thing watching you squirm like this, like a worm on the hook. It's the gravy on my biscuits. You just put an innocent man through the most obscene, brutal torture imaginable. Not wishing to get all Oprah on you, but how does that make you feel?"
Gutted. Appalled. Shattered.
Livid.
"You - you fucking bitch!" I roared. "You could have said. Any time, you could have said."
"And why would I have done that, when stringing you along meant I could have this moment of exquisite tormenting? Psychological pain can be far harder to bear than physical pain, and far more rewarding to inflict."
I lunged at her, although the ropes made it a useless gesture.
"Now, now, none of that," Mrs Keener chided, wagging a finger. "Don't be getting mad at me. If you should be mad at anyone, it's yourself."
"Who, then?" I said thickly. "Who was it?"
"Don't you know?"
I had an inkling. There was only one person left it could have been. But I'd trusted him. I'd considered him a friend.
"He's right over there." She motioned towards the onlookers. "Looking kinda shifty, it has to be said. No need for that, honey," she called out to him. "Don't have to pretend it ain't you I'm talking to. It's all right. It doesn't matter now if folks know who you are and what you did. You're safe. You're under my protection. In fact, why not come up here and take a bow? You've done good work, far as I'm concerned. You deserve your moment of glory."
The man she was addressing broke free from the crowd, passed through the cordon of frost giants, and made his way, a little sheepishly maybe, up onto the scaffold.
He stood beside Mrs Keener, and she placed a friendly, conspiratorial arm round his broad boxer's shoulders.
"Wotcher, bruv," Cy said to me. "How's it hanging?"
Seventy
There was a twinkle in Cy's eye as he spoke.
"Yes, I was the one fucking with you, not Backdoor," he said. "It was me. Me, the black guy. Just because someone's black don't mean he's above suspicion. In't we supposed to be colour-blind these days? Positive discrimination's as bad as the negative kind. No reason to think my skin tone makes me whiter than white."
He chortled at his own wit.
"Mrs Keener hired me to be an agitator," he went on. "To be a - how'd you put it, Mrs K?"
"A destabilising influence."
"That's it, a destabilising influence. Just to make her victory that bit more likely. Sow a little uncertainty here, start a little infighting there, classic psy-ops stuff. It wasn't hard to get recruited to Odin's army. No one was exactly vetting us, were they? You turned up, you were in, that was more or less it. Odin was grateful just to have the warm bodies. My job, my real job, once I'd joined up, was to gain someone's confidence, someone influential. Get close to them, then keep them off-balance, off their game."
"If the head's unsteady, the whole body wobbles," said Mrs Keener.
"Me," I croaked. "I was the head."
"Got it in one," said Cy. "I wasn't going to try for Odin himself. Too big a target, and too remote. Hard to get his trust, harder still to manipulate him. So I started on Thor. Kept challenging his authority, antagonising him, pissing him off. Not a painless tactic on my side, but it seemed the way to go... until you came along. Soon as I met you, I knew you were the one. You had that take-charge look about you. You were a newcomer, but you were going places. Plus, we had similar backgrounds, we were on the same wavelength. We had a bond going from the start. You liked me. That made you the perfect mark."
"The perfect chump, more like."
"Same difference. Look, d'you really want me to spell out everything I did, how I made it all work? Because it feels like I'm monologuing here, and I know you've got stuff you'd much rather be getting on with."
I was about to tell him that he could happily shut up because I wasn't interested in hearing anything more that came out of his lying fucking gob.