The Magpye: Circus (4 page)

Thinking about it now, he
realised that he was licking his lips underneath the mask. The
hunger was always there. It wasn't the hunger for flesh or for
blood, as necessary as those things now were for him to live. No,
it was more than that. All the souls that he'd dug up, the unquiet
spirits that now found themselves inside his head, it was their
hunger that he felt. Their hunger for revenge on those that had
wronged them, their hunger for retribution. Their own hunger for
blood.

Magpye checked the seams on his
outfit one last time, pulled the zipper on his mask tight.
Quietening his mind, he waited for the ghosts to do their work. "We
need to get across to that roof."

Unbidden, his hand reached down
and took the loop of wire from his belt. He tied it around a metal
hook dug from one of the pockets of his coat and tossed it across
to the warehouse roof. Skittering across the metal for a moment, it
found purchase and the wire tightened in his grasp. His hands moved
again, pulling a second metal hook from his coat. This one was dug
into the roof of the building he was standing on, deftly hooked
under a piece of pipework that ran past his feet. Using all his
strength, the wire was tightened, and tightened.

He'd collected all the skills
he would need. Acrobats, sharpshooters, knife throwers... and high
wire artists.

"Magda," said Magpye, and
whatever small fragment of his mind that was Able Quirk surfaced
for a moment to offer a rare memory. Magda the Magnificent, one
half of the circus' high-wire act. Able remembered her making him a
sandwich, and letting him watch her practice with her husband.
Magpye hadn't been able to find any trace of him yet. Whatever had
happened to him that night at the circus hadn't even left a stain
behind.

Stepping onto the wire, Magpye
slowly inched out across the gap between the buildings.

Cane King watched through the
limo window as the rusting iron and crumbling brick of the
slaughter district gave way to the chrome and glass of the city
proper. He'd travelled all over the world, built an empire across
continents, but still this place was home. It was a city like no
other, a place with a heartbeat and rhythm all of its own. Anything
was possible here.

"Did you know that it's
impossible to lie to me, Mr. King?" asked Taylor, interrupting
King's train of thought.

"Is that so, Jack? I'll keep it
in mind."

"I discovered it when I was
eight years old. The doctor in the orphanage was telling me that I
had a disassociative disorder, but I could tell he was lying. The
truth was that he didn't know what was wrong with me."

"Is this going somewhere?"

"I knew then that what I had
was something that nobody else had. I had clarity. Absolute
clarity. I could see the truth in all things. I can see how they
work, inside and out."

Cane leant forward and opened
the mini bar. "That's pretty deep, Jack. Personally, I've never
been one for poking around inside my own head too much."

"I know you were lying to
them," Taylor continued. "About your plan. They couldn't see it,
but I could. You're not sure it will work."

Cane sat back, a large drink in
his hand. "You never cease to amaze me, Jack. Thank you for your
candour."

"Am I wrong, Mr. King?"

King watched as Taylor's eyes, one blue
,
one
green, zeroed out and focussed on the middle distance between them.
Behind them, somewhere, Jack Taylor's mind, razor sharp and dark
and bloody, was thinking, and planning, and calculating. King
realised that he'd locked himself in a small metal box with
probably the most dangerous man alive.

"No, Jack, you're not. That's
why I've called in some outside help, someone who's worked for the
family before."

"A specialist?"

"Something like that."

Ben Ryan hadn't started out a
bad kid, but that's what everyone said. Well, not everyone. When
he'd been in prison, he'd heard every hard luck story in the book.
Most of the guys there were innocent, the rest were there because
of someone or something else. Parents, wives, girlfriends, kids,
booze, drugs. For Ryan it had been Iraq. Iraq had crept inside his
head and come home with him. That's how he thought about it. Iraq
wasn't a place, wasn't a time he'd lived through, wasn't even a
memory. It was a thing, a living thing, like a parasite, that had
latched onto him and wouldn't let go.

After all, he didn't have a family. He didn't have a
wife
,
or a girl
,
or kids. He drank,
sure, but no more than any other soldier, and drugs had never been
his thing. So what was it that drove him to be here, on this night,
finger nervously stroking the trigger-guard of an assault rifle,
twitching at every little sound? How had he ended up as a
god-damned Kingsman?

Guard duty wasn't the worst gig
in the warehouse though. Piotr, a mountain of Russian muscle with a
face like a slab, had to feed the kids. Ben had watched him
prepping the food, stirring the giant rusty cans of low grade meat,
pouring in the antibiotics, the hormones, the sedatives. Enough
food to keep them alive, hormones to keep them small, antibiotics
to keep them healthy. Sedatives to make them shut up. Ben had joked
that Piotr should put it on the market, every mother in America
would want the recipe. That had got him a black eye and trip to the
dentist. After that, he'd steered clear of Piotr and the kids. He
stuck to his route around the gantry way, checking windows,
listening. A hundred or more kids at a time safe and sound
underneath him, at least until the next truck came.

He didn't ask where they went.
It didn't really matter. Not asking questions was one of the major
job requirements if you wanted to last a long time as a Kingsman.
Questions got you killed. Answers got you killed quicker. So Ben
Ryan carried on being a good bad soldier and didn't ask
questions.

He didn't ask questions when he
heard the crash above him, he just raised his gun.

He didn't ask questions as the
black shape came plummeting towards him, he just took aim.

He didn't ask questions as his
gun fell forwards. He didn't ask questions as he felt the hot gush
of his own blood splattering his thighs. He didn't ask questions as
his gun and most of his right hand clattered to the floor. All he
did was clutch at the mangled stump protruding from his wrist and
scream.

The screaming stopped as Magpye
landed on top of him, crushing his windpipe with the
steel-reinforced heel of his boot. Ben Ryan's vision went dark and
he realised, at the very end of his life, that he had a lot of
questions after all.

Quickly un-clipping the trapeze
wire from his belt, Magpye shook his line loose from the broken
skylight above him. The other guards were already on their way,
boots hammering on the gantry steps. Three in front of him, two
behind. Another two downstairs, running in a different direction to
the others. The ghosts sharpened Magpye's senses - the advantage of
having more than one mind at a time was an almost endless surplus
of concentration.

Magpye threw back his greatcoat
and drew the twin pistols. From the bubbling soup of memory,
Malcolm surfaced. "Trick shot time," said Magpye, unable to keep
Malcolm's affected Texan accent at bay. "Yee-ha."

The first bullet tagged the
front running guard in the shin, shattering the bone and bringing
him down instantly. The second guard was so close behind that he
tripped over the front runner, his own legs snarled up as the first
guard howled and clasped his lower leg. His head snapped back as
Magpye put a bullet through his throat.

Spinning around, Magpye raised
his left hand and shot the first guard coming up behind him. The
bullet smashed into the guard's eye, blowing out the back of his
skull. Behind him, the second guard stopped to wipe blood and brain
out of his eyes. Unbidden, Magpye swung the second pistol around
and took another shot. The bullet hit the same spot on the first
guard, travelling cleanly through the vacant and ruined eye socket
and struck the guard behind in the forehead.

Turning again, Magpye saw the
fifth guard drawing a bead on him.

"Take your shot," said Malcolm,
moving the Magpye's lips underneath the mask.

The guard shot and, impossibly
quickly, the Magpye moved. The bullet raced past and winged off the
railing behind him.

"Shit..." whispered the guard,
pulling the trigger again. Another shot, another miss, the Magpye's
body twisting itself around the bullet.

"The thing with shooting
somebody is," said Magpye, "You can't let them know where you're
gonna put the bullet. And you're telegraphing, son. I know where
you're shooting before you do."

"Fuck you, telegraph this!"
shouted the guard, flicking the machine gun to full auto and
pulling hard on the trigger. Shots rang out, one after another, a
staccato rhythm of guttural grunts. Magpye twisted, ducked, spun,
and twisted some more, dancing around the bullets as if they were
paper aeroplanes. His hands slid back into his coat as he moved,
smoothly holstering the pistols and pulling out a small blade in
their place.

The final flourish of movement
brought Magpye in close to the guard, just as his clip proclaimed
itself empty with a sharp click.

"All yours, Able," whispered
Malcolm, descending once more into the Magpye's mind.

Able Quirk shoved the blade
into the guard's throat. It wasn't clean, or skilful, Able had
never been a fighter, but it did the job. Sometimes the job was the
reward too.

From somewhere downstairs
Magpye heard splashing, and caught the tell-tale smell of gasoline.
Fire. It was always fire. It always had to be fire. Fire was how
the Magpye had been born, and it had followed him ever since.
Leaping down the stairs, Magpye headed for the warehouse
floor...

Garrity slammed the van down a
gear and ran the red light. On the passenger seat next to him, the
bag shifted and festered and oozed. "Fucking King, fucking Taylor,"
he muttered, cutting through the traffic. "Fucking Jack, fucking
psycho Taylor."

Garrity was dirty, he didn't
deny it, but it wasn't how he saw himself. In this city, there was
nothing more pedestrian than a dirty cop. Corruption was the norm,
the standard. Garrity was far more than that. He was a survivalist,
an animal adapted perfectly to this fetid city. He thrived here,
while so many others failed. Even psychos like Taylor, Garrity had
seen them come and go too. Most of the time, Garrity was the guy
with the sack and shovel that got rid of the body. This city, this
damned place, it attracted guys like Jack Taylor. Diseased moths
drawn to crematorium flames.

And now Garrity had more dirty
work to do. He had to deliver a message, a bag full of pieces of
what had used to be a person, used to be a cop. Some message. It
didn't sit right with Garrity, as dirty as he was. It wasn't the
way things were done. People got hurt, sure, if they didn't follow
the line, didn't do what was expected of them. People got killed
too. But what was in that bag? That was new territory. That was a
city opening up its rotten womb and spewing another Jack Taylor
into the world. Garrity had put his share of killers away, Cane
King's protection only extended to people who were killing on his
orders, but he'd never seen anything like this. What was in that
bag... that was what Jack Taylor did for fun.

A bus pulled out in front of
Garrity, forcing him to stab the brake. The bag pitched forward,
bumping off the dashboard. The underside was slick with blood,
seeping through onto the seat next to Garrity.

"Fucking Taylor," he
muttered.

Up ahead, the precinct house
was lit up white and blue. There had been a time when those colours
had meant a lot to Garrity.

The youngest of nine children,
he'd learnt about survival the simple way - when there wasn't
enough food at meal times, when there weren't enough clothes to
keep everyone warm. When you were the smallest, the weakest, you
learnt to be smart, you learnt to be fast, and you learnt that if
you had dirt on the bigger kids... well, they weren't that much
bigger after all. Garrity had learnt the subtle art of listening at
doors, of being invisible in corridors and corners. A peep, a
snitch, a snoop and, at times, a pervert, Garrity had learnt the
value of secrets. It was his trick to surviving. He'd gotten out as
soon as he could, left his family behind, and gone police at a time
when it was the worst career option in the city. But he was good at
listening, good at finding things out. He'd risen fast, got off the
street and got his shield, all fast enough to attract the kind of
attention that he'd wanted since his first day on the force. For a
master of secrets, the big secret that was Cane King had been
obvious for a very long time. And now Garrity wasn't the smallest
anymore, far from it, but he still amassed those secrets. Cane King
was tight lipped about his business, sure, but Garrity knew where
the bodies were buried. Hell, most the time, he'd buried them.

The problem with King was, no
one knew how far his power went. His money could make you mayor,
his newspaper could see you stripped of office in a week. The
political press called him "King the King-Maker", such was his
power, his influence. Garrity wondered what secrets his boss had
been privy to, over the years. There was no way anyone, anywhere,
could think about turning state's evidence on Cane King. King had
the cops, he had the judges. He had the mayor, everyone knew that,
and he probably had the governor too. There was a joke that went
around that when Cane King had shaken hands with the president, the
caption in the newspaper had read "President meets most powerful
man in America."