Knightley and Son (9781619631540) (30 page)

Chloe trained the blade on the nape of Tilly’s neck and allowed her to shuffle the backpack from her shoulders to the ground. Tilly unzipped the front compartment and went to fish inside.

“Ah-ah,” Chloe warned, pricking her with the knife.

“Ouch. All right,” said Tilly impatiently.

“Allow me,” said Chloe, and dipped her hand into the compartment, removing the asthma inhaler and passing it to Tilly.

“Thanks.” Tilly gave the inhaler a shake, then subtly angled the mouthpiece to point backward over her shoulder, directly at her assailant.

“Hurry up,” barked Chloe.

“Okay.”

Tilly pumped the inhaler, and a spurt of foam shot out of the mouthpiece, hitting Chloe dead in the forehead, but producing no apparent effect beyond a comic one.

Chloe burst out laughing. “What a genius toy!” She giggled, not noticing the foam expanding in all directions and sliding down her forehead. “What . . . ?” She felt the pepper burn her skin, the foam expanding to cover her eyes, gluing her eyelids closed. She clawed at her face, finding the substance stuck to her fingers. It progressed down her face like a custard pie, only this one was accompanied by scalding pain, which within ten seconds had reduced Chloe to an unconscious pile of rangy limbs.

Darkus looked at Tilly incredulously.

“School project,” she explained.

“Come on.” Darkus pushed through the next door along to find a disused kitchen, complete with sinks and counters. “He must be here somewhere . . .” Darkus moved from room to room with increasing speed and desperation. Tilly followed, helpless to slow him down.

Darkus reached the last door at the end of the corridor and pushed it open to find a frail figure bound to a gray metal chair, overpowered by his own shadow.

“Dad . . . !”

Chapter 27

Father and Son

Knightley tried to peer through the mist of his own dulled consciousness. In the past twenty-four hours he’d endured hypnotic suggestions that would have turned lesser men insane. And now, through the soup of his addled mind, he actually thought he saw his son’s face. But it wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. Even if Darkus had deduced the location from the scrawled piece of paper, he couldn’t have found his way into this cave alone. Not without Uncle Bill’s assistance. And in that case, where were the officers? Where was the backup?

Knightley blinked helplessly, trying to focus, but the room was swimming. He couldn’t move.

Darkus abandoned any attempt to be covert and ran to hug his father, nearly knocking him off his chair.

“Dad . . .”

Knightley felt his son’s arms shivering around him. “Doc, it
is
you . . .”

“Of course it is,” said Darkus.

“It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“I’m sorry I let you down.”

“Of course you didn’t—you’re the best son in the world.”

Darkus smiled, hardly believing what he was hearing. “I thought I’d lost you again.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere—”

Someone snapped their fingers loudly to interrupt them, and Knightley’s head instantly lolled.

Darkus spun around to see Morton Underwood with his right hand in the air. His saucerlike eyes gazed out from a dark hat and raincoat.

“Hello, Doc.”

Darkus studied him for any trace of the person who’d allegedly been his godfather, but any connection that might once have existed had been drained from his features by time and bitter experience. Now it was simply the face of a dangerous stranger.

“What do you want?” said Darkus. “We’ll drop the case. Just let us go.”

“Speak for yourself,” Tilly interjected. “We’re all here for our own reasons.” She took Chloe’s stiletto knife from her belt and pointed it at Underwood. “You know who I’m here for.”

“Your mother’s death was a sad necessity, Matilda. She was halfway to pinpointing this l-location when we found her out,” Underwood explained. “I’m sorry she never made it to pick you up from school that day.” Tilly listened with clenched fists, her teeth digging into her lip and her eyes streaming. “It was a relatively quick death,” he added.

Tilly ran at him, but Underwood swung open the door to a switching box mounted on the wall, which stopped her progress dead, cleanly knocking her out. Tilly fell to the ground, unconscious, the knife skittering away.

Darkus got to his feet, assessing the room. It was larger than the others, and he deduced that it was at the end of the platform where the eastbound and westbound tracks converged, and a siding would have been laid to accommodate parked and disused train carriages. There were two doorways in the room. One was occupied by Underwood, who was motionless, scarecrow-like; the other was located in the center of the far wall, its door firmly closed.

“This, Darkus, is the end of the l-line,” said Underwood, as if reading his mind.

Darkus noticed that the man was now holding a pistol in his hand, and it was pointed directly at him.

“You shouldn’t have c-come here,” Underwood went on, his eyes floating in the twin whirlpools of his lenses. “This is grown-up business.”

“I came to get my dad,” insisted Darkus.

“I warned you that if you proceeded with this investigation, it would mean losing your father all over again. And yet you chose to proceed.”

Knightley looked up as if to say something, but his head lolled.

“Alan was perfectly safe until you chose to interfere,” added Underwood.

Darkus blinked. Inside his head, theories were flaring and exploding. Reason had abandoned him. He struggled to recalibrate his mind. “You took him because he got too close to cracking the case,” said Darkus. “To cracking
The Code
.”

“No,” answered Underwood. “It was
you
who cracked
The Code
.
You
who resurrected his ailing career, and remembered the Knowledge he so badly needed.
You
are responsible for his current situation—no one else.”

Underwood walked forward to allow another figure to enter through the doorway behind him. It was Presto, balancing something in his hands like a ritual sacrifice. It was a heavy, bulky manuscript, bound in some indeterminate animal skin. For a moment Darkus wondered whether it was in fact
human
skin. The stiff cover had come away from the spine, which was in tatters. The pages were barely held together, warped and worn by age. Darkus realized this was the original text that the Order of the New Dawn had talked about.

“
The Code
was my offering to the Combination,” Underwood went on. “My way in. You see, there was a boy under my care—”

“I know all about it,” said Darkus.

“You don’t know everything,” Underwood corrected him. “The boy came to me with behavioral problems, lack of f-focus, that sort of thing. During the course of our sessions he told me about a book he’d discovered. His family was wealthy and powerful. They were collectors. They had come into possession of a certain manuscript . . .” Underwood nodded to the burden in Presto’s hands. “I asked him to bring it to me. The manuscript had no effect on me, but it had the most unusual effect on the boy: he tried to k-kill me. I defended myself, and he fell to his death. I did some research, and realized what I’d stumbled upon. And so it set me on my path, and afforded me entry into a very exclusive organization.”

“A criminal organization,” said Darkus.

“The judicial system found me guilty, so I used the manuscript to gain access to an alternative system. One that doesn’t rely purely on reason.”

“Without reason there’s only madness,” argued Darkus.

“We’re
beyond
reason. The Combination doesn’t exclude anyone, or anything, however extraordinary, or supernatural. You might say, we use a
combination
of everything to succeed.”

“That still makes you a criminal,” insisted Darkus.

Underwood didn’t blink. “Crime is only another form of justice. And
The Code
is the perfect recruiting tool.”

“You’re endangering innocent people.”

“I’m inspiring the weak-minded, giving them something to believe in.”

“That doesn’t explain what you want with my dad.”

Underwood nodded, continuing his story. “Alan
f-found
me . . . several months after I was presumed dead. But by that time it was too late. We were on opposite sides of the law. The truth is, I never wanted to harm him. It was Alan who told me about the existence of the Combination in the first place—or his suspicions of it. One day he might have been an asset,” Underwood explained. “So when he found me I didn’t want to kill him, but I couldn’t risk him talking. And that’s when I came up with a solution.”

Aboveground, Bogna’s phone was ringing off the hook, and she was starting to regret her choice of ringtone—a Polish folk dance was hardly appropriate for the grave circumstances she now found herself in.

Uncle Bill had called as soon as he woke up, and was now, against doctor’s orders, making the trip to Down Street with every available officer.

Bogna watched as several white vans pulled up outside the abandoned Tube station. She crossed herself as officers entered the general store and the alley and started testing the strength of the gray security door.

Inside one of the vans, Bill’s wheelchair was positioned at a control desk, his right arm in a cast, his left leg, also in a cast, extended out in front of him. He peered at a large monitor as a technician worked the keyboard.

Bill picked up a walkie-talkie with his good hand. “Let me know when we have contact.”

Chapter 28

The Open Book

Darkus was hanging on his godfather’s every word, and Underwood knew it.

“I used hypnosis to make Alan believe he had never found me. Alan returned to his former life none the wiser, but deep down he knew he had the answer . . . he just couldn’t find it. It made him even more obsessive, even more determined to crack the Combination. It drove him away from Jackie, and away from you. And one day his mind locked up, and he couldn’t handle it any longer. And that’s when he had his episode.”

Darkus felt a throbbing in his temples as the catastrophizer struggled to process what he was hearing. “It was your fault.”

“A coma was the safest place for him. While he was asleep, nothing bad could happen to him. Then something woke him up. We may never know what that was,” said Underwood. “He was perfectly safe until you helped him remember.”

Darkus turned to his father, who was now completely still.

“He’s in a deep, posthypnotic trance,” Underwood went on. “When he wakes up, he won’t remember a thing: not this case, not your budding partnership. You, on the other hand . . . You’re the only one left with the Knowledge. Which means you’ll have to be consigned to history along with it. You were last seen entering a disused Tube station. No one will be surprised when an accident befalls you on the tracks.” Underwood nodded to the manuscript in Presto’s hands. “You know, there is something to that book. In the last few minutes, I haven’t stuttered once.”

Darkus lifted his father’s chin, looking into his eyes, but they remained defiantly, terminally closed.

“Dad,” he said, his own eyes welling up. “Talk to me.” He shook him, but Knightley wouldn’t wake up. Darkus sank to his knees, resting his head on his father’s arm, detecting the familiar smell of his shirt cuff, feeling the familiar rhythm of his chest heaving and falling—but his father was as lost to him as he’d ever been. “Please . . .”

All of a sudden, Knightley’s body seemed to sense the proximity of his son, as if Darkus had an even stronger gravitational pull than the hypnosis. Knightley’s nostrils flared, his brows knitted, and his ears lifted—all unbeknownst to Darkus, whose face was buried in his father’s argyle sweater. Yet these subtle facial movements were as significant as a drowning man fighting his way back to the surface.

Darkus heard the whistle from his father’s nose get quicker and looked up, daring to deduce what it might mean. “Dad?” he whispered.

“Yes-yes,” Knightley answered, as if something deep inside him couldn’t refuse his son’s wish.

At that moment, an announcement crackled over the station’s public address system: “This is SO 42. We have ye surrounded. Release the Knightleys and exit the station with yer hands in the air,” Bill’s voice went on. “I repeat: we have ye surrounded . . .”

Underwood turned in the direction of the announcement. Presto frowned and exchanged a glance with him.

But neither of them noticed the manuscript in Presto’s hands. The pages began to riffle from top to bottom, like a wave breaking. The leathery cover creaked and flew open. Presto looked down, his eyes widening, as the book appeared to tremble.

Darkus stood up, feeling a vibration moving through the ground, affecting the whole station, pushing him off balance.

“It’s just a train,” said Presto, trying to convince himself.