One Knight Only Read online

  Then there was a brief flowering burst of red from the middle of the ring of Secret Service men on the television screen, and Stockwell realized that it was blood fountaining, perhaps from an artery, and oh my God, it was shots, someone had been shot . . .

  The door to the study exploded inward, and for a split second Stockwell thought that it was assassins. He threw his hands over his head, surrendering, and then the study was alive with Secret Service men. “We have to go, sir,” one of them said briskly, and Stockwell—who hadn’t had his feet leave the ground since the tackling injury in college that had ended his football career—was suddenly airborne. Cordoba was gone from his view, the room blurring around him, and he barely had time to think, I didn’t really mean I’d kill them, oh my God, they’re going to blame me for it, before he was whisked away.

  THE IS SMILING, greeting the people, and they’re cheering his name. He thinks, This was for you, Merlin, this whole presidency, it was for you. For you and for Gwen ...

  He glances over at her as she squeezes his arm tightly, affectionately, and she is smiling, her eyes alive with light and joy and love. And then she staggers, and for a moment Arthur thinks that she has broken a heel on her shoe, or perhaps snagged the hem of her gown, because the shouting and cheering obscure any other sounds.

  She looks up at him, and her mouth moves but no sound emerges. Instead blood comes out, trickling down as if she’s a vampire in a horror movie who’s just fed off a victim. The love and joy evaporate from her eyes to be replaced by bewilderment, and the whole thing takes barely two seconds between the first confusion and the second time she staggers, except this time it’s far more pronounced. This time she is actually thrown against him, propelled by an outside force even as Cook, the burly Secret Service man, shouts, “Gun! Go go go!”

  Arthur is shoved forward, Gwendolyn next to him, and just like that, she is not supporting herself at all. Instead she’s little more than a meat sack, a collection of blood and muscle, bones and organs no longer working in unison, and Arthur hauls her forward with his powerful arms even as the Secret Service men come in from behind. Everything is a blur to him. He is in the limo, and Gwen is there and there’s blood everywhere. He is not afraid of blood, not daunted by it. He has waded hip deep through it in his time. He has seen grown men carved to bits, women and children savaged by vicious soldiers seeking to expand the holdings of some petty warlord. He’s seen people hung, drawn and quartered, eviscerated, decapitated. There is no atrocity that can possibly be committed to the human body that Arthur has not witnessed and, in some cases, inflicted with his own hand.

  But this . . .

  This . . .

  Gwen is slumped against him, and Nellie Porter is screaming, and then Gwen is pulled away, pulled to the far side of the limo, and an oxygen mask is being strapped over her face. A paramedic (where the hell did he come from?) is trying to staunch her wounds, but there’s more blood, and it’s as if it’s flowing from her by the gallon. Cook’s hands are all over Arthur, and it seems bizarre until he realizes that Cook is checking him for wounds. Arthur shoves his hands away. “I’m fine, I’m fine!”

  “The First Lady to the hospital, the President to the lockdown at the White House!” Cook orders.

  “I’m staying with her,” says Arthur.

  “Mr. President—”

  “I’m staying with her!” he thunders, and that is really all there is to it.

  The limo’s siren kicks into overdrive and the long black car, like a great metal dragon, roars toward the hospital.

  Don’t let her die, don’t let her die, Merlin, save her, and it is only later on that Arthur realizes that he is praying to a statue rather than to God. But somehow, at that moment, God seems farther away than ever he has before . . .

  CHAPTRE THE FIFTH

  “MISS BASIL! YOU’RE back!”

  Miss Basil was sitting on her customary bar stool at the Jamaican resort wherein she had taken up semipermanent residence. The bar was situated outside, down toward the beach, so thirsty hotel guests didn’t have to pad far from their towels to obtain liquid refreshment. Furthermore there were waitresses and servers eagerly scuttling up and down the beach, making sure to accommodate everyone who looked the least bit parched. Miss Basil was wearing a skimpy green two-piece bathing suit with a pattern on it that looked a bit like a reptile’s scales, and a printed skirt tied around her middle that was settled comfortably around her lengthy legs. Her hair was long and blacker than would have seemed natural, her neck extraordinarily long and her jaw well-rounded. Her eyebrows were thin and arched, and when she looked out toward the rolling water with her dark green eyes, it would have seemed to any passerby that she was able to discern things beneath the waves that no other living creature would have been able to.

  Despite the fact that she was dressed so lightly, the night air did not bother her. She wasn’t especially fond of the cold; she far preferred the warmth to bathe her old bones, but she had learned to tolerate much in her time.

  “Yes, Carlos, I’m back,” she said. She tapped the bar in front of her and within moments Carlos, the heavyset bartender who could mix a drink faster than anyone on the island (or so he liked to boast), had a rum placed in front of her. “I was off attending to some business for the boss . . . but it’s good to be home.”

  He was looking at her with open curiosity. “What sort of business, Miss Basil?” he asked.

  “The sort that smart bartenders don’t ask about, Carlos,” she said wanly.

  He clearly did not take the least offense. “You are absolutely right, Miss Basil. I should remember that. Welcome back, then. It’s good to have you back . . . because life here is good.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly and thoughtfully. “It hasn’t been a bad life here, Carlos.”

  “No, it hasn’t, Miss Basil,” he said agreeably.

  “This wasn’t my first favor for the boss . . . and likely won’t be the last. That’s why he lets me stay here, as his permanent guest. I do him . . . favors. You’ve heard about that, haven’t you, Carlos?”

  “Yes, Miss Basil.” He turned his concentration to cleaning glasses.

  “Have you ever wondered about the nature of my favors?”

  “No, Miss Basil.”

  She fixed a stare at him, and smiled to herself, for she knew that he was uncomfortable beneath her gaze, and she knew why he was uncomfortable, even if he didn’t. “Really. And why is that?”

  “Because,” he said, fixing his attention even more attentively upon the glasses, “you appear to me to be someone about whom the less is wondered, the better.”

  She laughed lightly at that. Then she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, with a very faint hiss. “The wheels are turning, Carlos.”

  “Wheels?”

  “The wheels. A storm is rolling in on them.”

  Carlos looked in the direction that she was looking. Although it was a night sky, it was still quite obviously cloudless. “I don’t think so, Miss Basil, but I don’t want to contradict you,” he said, doing his level best to be accommodating. “If you think there is . . .”

  “Not that kind of storm, Carlos,” she assured him. “The wheels of fate are turning. They do so all the time, but sometimes with greater force and more inexorably than usual. They’re like great cogs, as you would see in a watch, Carlos. And every so often, those cogs come together and crush anyone who happens to get in between them.”

  “I see,” said Carlos, who didn’t. “And . . . how would you know that this is happening?” He had ceased polishing the glass, instead focusing his full attention on his very curious late-night drinker.

  “Because, Carlos,” she said patiently, “when you have been around for a long enough time—as I have—you learn to intuit these things. I have attended to the advice of Santayana, and listened to the lessons of history so that I am not doomed to repeat them.” Her glass was devoid of rum. Without having to be asked, Carlos reached over and filled it, and she gave him a g
rateful inclination of her head. “I smell it in the air, Carlos, just as a sailor can smell a storm. Those ever turning wheels.” She ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “So . . . I have been out of touch with the news as of late. Anything interesting going on in the world? I notice you don’t have the television on,” and she nodded toward a small TV with an eight-inch screen that was mounted along the upper section of the bar.

  “Yes,” said Carlos, the edges of his chapped mouth turning downward. “The guests would just sit here and watch it and get upset, with all the coverage of . . .” He paused, his eyes wide. “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?” She couldn’t quite keep the boredom out of her voice. Considering how long she’d been around, she found it hard to believe that anything could possibly occur in the world that would seize her interest. “Something going on that’s out of the ordinary?”

  “President Penn. His wife was shot. They say it’s very bad.”

  Immediately Miss Basil snapped to full attention, her green eyes narrowing. “Gwen?”

  He nodded. “Several days ago. She is in the hospital. Shot here”—he tapped his chest—“and here,” and he put a finger to the side of his head.

  “That’s terrible,” she said, doing her best to keep the amusement out of her voice. She had never been particularly enamored of Gwen; her antipathy for her was one of the few things she’d had in common with Merlin. Still, the little queen had never done her any harm personally, and she’d even shown a bit of spunk now and then that Miss Basil would never have ascribed to her upon first meeting her. But the whole thing struck her as ironic. All the things that Arthur had done for her, the sacrifices he had made, the risks he had taken throughout the ages . . . and now, here they were, reunited—he through Merlin’s magic, she through the oddities of reincarnation—with the world at their feet, and boom. Fate had conspired to deprive him of her yet again. She couldn’t help but wonder whether Arthur was finally going to take the hint. “Will she survive?”

  “No one knows. Do you want to see? The news station speaks of nothing else these days.”

  “Yes. Yes, by all means,” she said thoughtfully. She stuck her finger in the rum and swirled the liquid around a bit.

  She smelled the young man approaching her from behind before she saw him. Carlos didn’t notice him, since he was busy tuning in the television. The set operated off a satellite dish, and it wasn’t always cooperative in picking up broadcasts. But Miss Basil was aware of him without even having to look at him. Her sensitive nose cut through the cheap cologne he was wearing and detected the heightened stimulus coming from the hormonal odor he was unconsciously emitting. She sighed deeply and didn’t bother to look at him as he sat on the stool next to her.

  “Hey, there,” he said. From his voice and scent, she pegged him as being mid to late twenties. He twanged like a Texan, and also had that smell of oil and cattle and pollution adhering to him with a permanence that no amount of bathing could ever erase. She shifted in her seat and leveled her gaze on him. He was lantern-jawed with two days’ worth of light blond stubble and hair that hung partly in his face. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a blue flowered shirt that was unbuttoned, revealing a tanned and hairy chest. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  She held up the rum.

  “A refill, then?”

  She shrugged.

  He leaned forward, the alcohol floating off his breath. “Name’s Ricky. How you doing?”

  “I’m doing fine, Ricky.” Her gaze flickered to his hand. “And you’re married.”

  “Heh.” He glanced down at his ringed finger. “Well . . . it’s a funny thing about that. See . . . this here trip, well . . . it was the in-laws’ idea. See, they don’t wanna accept the fact that the marriage is over, so they offered to send the wife and me on a second honeymoon. Hoped it might ‘rekindle something.’ ” Ricky shook his head, obviously doing his best to try and look sorrowful. “Some people . . . they just don’t get it. But you . . . you look like a woman of the world. You look”—he rested a hand on her thigh—“you look like someone who gets it.”

  “Oh, I get much more of it than I could possibly want,” she replied, and put her own hand on his leg. She squeezed it, found it a bit muscular, but probably not stringy. “So let me see if I understand this, Ricky. . . You’re down here on a second honeymoon, with your wife, on your in-laws’ dime, and you’re hitting on me.”

  He laughed, his large Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he did so. “You’re direct! I like that in a woman! What’s your name?”

  “Miss Basil.”

  “My my. Keeping it awful formal, aren’t we?”

  “Well,” she said easily, sipping her rum, “if one lives long enough, one tends to appreciate that too much informality is never a good thing.”

  Then her attention was drawn to the television.

  Carlos had been absolutely right. The news station was talking about nothing but the shooting, and inside of ten minutes, she’d seen film of it twice. She watched with fascination as Gwen went down, saw the blood jetting onto Arthur’s suit, except he didn’t seem to realize it at first.

  “Terrible thing,” Ricky said, shaking his head. “Crazy world. Goddamn crazy world.”

  Miss Basil looked to Carlos. “Did they get the shooter?”

  But Ricky interrupted before Carlos could respond. “Oh, they found him, all right. What was left of him. From the tenth floor of an office building with a high-powered rifle. They had the building surrounded in no time. By the time they got to him, he’d already blown the top of his skull clean off.”

  She took that in. “Obviously he didn’t want to be captured. Afraid of being forced to name his connections or employer.”

  Carlos started to speak and again Ricky cut him off. “Hell, everyone knows it was that sumbitch Sandoval. The President thought he was dead—announced it and everything. This was the sumbitch’s way of announcing that he was alive and kicking and just as mean as ever. He sent out a press release about it. People think he’s still hiding in Trans-Sabal . . . that the whole treaty thing is just a ruse. Everyone’s screaming war; that we should just bomb the place back into the Stone Age.”

  “I’ve been to Trans-Sabal,” Miss Basil said. “They’re not all that much advanced beyond the Stone Age now.”

  Ricky smiled in what he obviously thought was a winsome manner. “My, my. You get around, don’t you. So do I. Why don’t you tell me more about yourself?” He slid his hand farther up her thigh.

  Carlos stepped forward and said to Ricky in a low voice, chancing a quick glance in Miss Basil’s direction, “Sir, I don’t think you want to be doin’ that.”

  “Oh, now Carlos,” Miss Basil said, her voice faintly scolding. “You shouldn’t be so concerned. Ricky’s a big boy. You are a big boy, aren’t you, Ricky?” And she brushed her fingers lightly over his crotch, causing him to jump slightly on the bar stool. “A big man, in fact. Probably too much man for his wife, aren’t you?”

  “Well . . . Rhonda is kinda holding me back.” Ricky sighed. He leaned forward, looked right and left, and said, “Truth to tell . . . I wasn’t all that keen on getting married. But it’s what my folks wanted, and Rhonda’s dad’s loaded, and she frankly ain’t too bad to look at.”

  “And does she love you, Ricky?”

  He shrugged. “Way I see it, that don’t really matter. If it ain’t two ways, what’s the point?”

  “Indeed.”

  Carlos rested a hand on his arm. “Mister . . . I gotta tell you, you might be sorry—”

  But Ricky yanked his arm away, and with obvious anger he snapped back, “Look, buddy, your job is to pour drinks. You just mind your own business or you’re the one who might be sorry, okay?”

  Carlos stepped back, putting his hands palms up in an “I give” manner. Ricky returned his focus to Miss Basil. “You know what I like about you, Miss Basil? A man knows where he stands with you.”

  “Oh, he does indeed, Ricky, he
does indeed. Tell you what,” and she rested a hand on his. He shivered slightly; although her leg was warm, her hand was cold, and he probably noticed that. Or perhaps it was the sudden sense that he was in trouble and just didn’t quite know why or how yet. She could tell that a fight-or-flight instinct was seizing hold of him, but fortunately enough, he was far too civilized to be aware of it for what it was. “Tell you what,” she said again, “how about we go someplace”—she ran a fingernail along the curve of his jaw—“somewhere . . . private.”

  He rallied. He had no idea why his courage was faltering, because the notion of reacting on a gut basis to unrecognized primal evil was alien to him. “Well, that sounds . . . that sounds really great to me.”

  She eased herself off her stool, turned, and winked lazily to Carlos. “Keep the set on,” she said. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes.” And she and Ricky walked off into the night.

  Carlos sighed and finished cleaning the glasses. The night air seemed more still, and the breeze that had been blowing steadily had ceased. He waited to hear a scream, but knew there would be none. There never was.

  Miss Basil returned a few minutes later, easing back onto her stool. Carlos slid a fresh glass of rum to her without comment, and she took it and bobbed her head slightly in appreciation. On TV, there was a news conference with a doctor—the one who apparently had been working on Gwen. He looked tired and careworn, and he had nothing new to report, but the reporters didn’t appear to know how to handle lack of news and were acting as if they wanted him to manufacture something, accurate or not.

  “You, uhm,” and Carlos touched the side of his own mouth, “you got something . . . right here.”

  Miss Basil reached up and pulled a piece of thin blue cloth, with the hint of a flower on it, from between her teeth. “Thank you, Carlos,” she said. The breeze had returned, and she tossed the cloth carelessly into it, letting the tropical zephyr carry it away.