Fool's Errand

Piccadilly London, England — October 1969

The auction house was dark except for a light in the back. A gentleman in a waistcoat with a cup of tea and a paperback novel. The transfer confirmed. A brown paper package tied with string. Sign here, please. Thank you, sir.

Roarke pushed the door open. The bell chimed. He stepped onto the pavement.

A half-second of wrongness. The street was too quiet for Piccadilly at seven. The couple was gone. A car idled at the far kerb with its lights off.

A suppressed rifle doesn’t bang. It coughs. A flat mechanical exhalation from the shadows across the street.

The impact hit him center mass before his brain finished processing the sound. Through the chest. Through everything that mattered. The brown paper package fell from his hands and the pavement came up to meet him and the streetlamp swung in a circle that had nothing to do with wind.

Wet cobblestones. The sky orange and black. Footsteps – unhurried, hard soles on wet stone.

A face leaned into view. The lavender tie. The smile gone to something quieter.

He picked up the journal. Leaned close.

Lodin said he would send you out on your own sometime during this trip. I just had to wait for the right time.

Roarke’s hand shot up and closed around Quinn’s throat. Quinn’s eyes widened. He gagged. Clawed at Roarke’s wrist. Hit him in the chest where the hole was. White light. The fingers loosened because the blood was leaving and the muscles followed the blood and the dark was patient.

Quinn pulled free. Rubbing his throat. Looking at Roarke on the pavement with something that might have been respect.

Tough old bastard.

He uncorked a small glass vial. Dark liquid, almost black, thicker than blood. Pressed it to Roarke’s lips. It tasted like time. Like something so old it had forgotten what age meant.

The dark came anyway. Slower than it should have. Somewhere underneath, something ancient kept a candle lit in a room that should have been empty.

Roarke’s eyes closed. The last thing he saw was the orange streetlamp and the gargoyles on the building across the street and the sky that wasn’t his sky over a city that wasn’t his city, and somewhere under all of it, quieter than the blood and the bullet and the sixty-one years, the thought that he had spent his whole life carrying things for other people and the last thing he carried was a package he couldn’t hold on to.