Chapter 26
The Metronome
The first boat hit the quay at four minutes past midnight, and the world came apart.
He heard it through the stone: a long grinding crash, as of a freight car derailing, and then the thunder of a hundred feet on planking, and a roar from thirty throats that rolled over the cannery like a tide. A flare went up from the water. It burst over the compound in a white-hot blossom and hung there, swinging, filling the yard with a ghastly noon; and in its glare, from the foot of the tower steps, he saw every face turn toward the sea and every rifle swing.
"Contact!" someone bellowed. "Contact on the quay! They're coming in!"
"Hold the line! Hold—"
The first shots cracked, and the yard exploded.
Damen was on the fourth stair with the coffin on his shoulder. He felt the two men behind him falter. He felt the weight shift. He heard one of them say, "Jesus, what the hell—" and turn his head toward the noise.
He let go of the coffin.
He let it go to his right, off his shoulder, with a heave of his bad arm, so that the foot of it slammed down on the stone and the head swung round and struck the nearer man in the chest. The man staggered. His rifle clattered. Damen was already turning. His left hand took the second one by the collar and swung him headlong into the wall; the heavy knife came out of his boot; and in the light of the flare he drove it in, once, below the ribs, and pulled it out.
The man looked at him.
He was a boy. He was perhaps twenty-three, with a fair mustache and an Adam's apple, and an expression of such utter blank astonishment that Damen, who had seen it many times, felt the old flat cold go through him and settle. The boy opened his mouth. A thread of red ran from it. He sat down on the step, slowly, with both hands pressed to his side, and looked at the black wet stain spreading through the cloth, and said in a hoarse, bewildered whisper:
"You Metronome."
"Yes."
"They said you didn't—"
"I know what they said."
He took the rifle from the dying hands. He stepped over the coffin. The first man had risen, snarling, reaching for a pistol; Damen shot him in the throat without breaking stride, and he fell backward down the three stone steps into the yard.
The tower stair stood open before him.
It was a narrow spiral of stone, worn into hollows by a century of boots, coiling upward round a central newel. A thin yellow light fell from a lantern at the first turn. The air was cold and smelled of damp and candle grease. And from somewhere far above, down the tube of the stair, faint and clear and very regular, came the ticking of clocks.
A hundred and ninety, he thought.
Count.
He began to climb.
He did it at a steady pace, not fast, not slow, one hand on the rope rail and the other holding the rifle at his hip. He went up on the outer edge of the treads, where the stone was widest. He breathed in through his nose on the fourth step and out through his mouth on the fifth. He let the sounds of the yard fall behind him, the roar, the screams, the hammering of guns, until they were only a distant surf at the foot of a cliff. He heard nothing but his own boots and the clocks.
One.
Two.
Three.
This was the thing. This was the whole of it. The thing the others could never understand about him, who called him cold, who said he had no heart: it was not coldness. It was attention. It was the entire gathered force of a mind that had learned to stand in one place and do the next thing, and the next, and the next, without thought of the last. He did not think of the woman at the foot of the stair, or the child. He did not think of Teddy, in a dark suit, with a cap on his belly. He did not think of a girl on a stretcher, or an old man on a chair. He thought: eleven. He thought: twelve. He thought of the next step.
Fourteen.
Fifteen.
A door on the first landing flew open.
Two men came out of it, shouting, in black tunics, with rifles. They had heard the shots. They ran straight into the beam of the lantern, and the first of them, a broad dark man with a beard, stopped dead with his mouth open. He looked at the figure on the stair. He looked at the rifle, and the black overcoat, and the long gray face above it, with its eyes like two chips of slate.
"Oh, God," he said.
"Put it down."
"Knox—"
"I'm not going to say it twice."
The bearded man dropped his gun. He did it so fast that it rang on the stone. He flung up his hands, backed against the wall, and slid down it to his knees, sobbing. "Don't. Please. I've got kids. I've got three. I didn't, I only drive the truck—"
"Lie down."
"Yes. Yes."
"On your face. Hands behind your head."
He lay. The other man, a tall youth with a shaved head, stood frozen. His rifle was half raised. His face was the color of milk.
"You too," said Damen.
The youth did not move.
"Do it."
"I can't," said the boy, in a whisper. "I can't. They'll shoot me. They said if anyone ran—"
"Who?"
"Mr. Mercer."
"Mr. Mercer is not here." He kept his voice level. "I am. And I'm telling you that if you lift that gun I'll put you down, and if you drop it I'll let you live. That is the whole of the offer." He looked into the boy's eyes. "I'd take it."
For an instant the youth swayed.
Then the rifle slid out of his hands, and clattered, and he knelt down beside his friend with a long shuddering sob, and laid his shaved head on the stone.
Damen stepped over them.
He did not look back. He went on up the stair, and the clocks ticked, and he thought, with a distant detachment: There. That's two. I could have shot them both.
Why didn't you?
I don't know.
Because the girl was watching?
She isn't here.
She's always here, said the voice. You carry her.
The next landing was bloody.
He saw it from three turns below. A trail of dark spots on the steps, widening to smears, and a man's body half in a doorway with one boot kicked off. As he came round the curve the light changed, from yellow to white, and he smelled cordite and meat. There was a window here, narrow, barred, cut in the stone; through it he could see the quay, and the flares, and in the red glare the crawling, shouting, shooting chaos of the battle. The fishing boats were drawn up along the quay like a row of black beasts. Men were swarming up their sides. Varga's voice, enormous, roaring, rolled across the water in a bellow of Hungarian and English and profanity. Fire stabbed from the roof of the boat shed, from the cab of the crane, from the windows of the cannery. A truck was burning. A man ran across the yard with his coat alight.
It's working, thought Damen.
They've drawn them out.
He turned from the window.
The man who stood on the landing was the biggest he had seen that night. He was wide as a door, in a gray sweater, with a shaven head and small cold eyes, and he held a fire axe in both hands. He had been waiting. Damen saw it in his stance. The axe was lifted over his right shoulder, in the posture of a man about to split a log, and the little eyes were fixed on the stairs, quite calm.
"Hollis's cousin," he said.
"I didn't know he had one."
"He had six." The man smiled. It was a slow, heavy, gap-toothed grin. "Mercer says you did him with your thumb. I've been thinking about that for three days."
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not."
"No."
The axe came down.
It was a clean, fast, brutal stroke, a woodcutter's, and it would have split him from the crown to the collarbone. He was not there. He had stepped inside the arc with the rifle held crosswise in both hands, and the haft of the axe struck the barrel and jarred along his arms; he felt the shock to the shoulder, and the bandaged wrist screamed. He shoved. The big man staggered. His grip loosened. Damen drove the butt of the rifle into his face, once, twice, with the whole weight of his body, and felt the bones go. The man roared. He dropped the axe. His hands came up like hams and closed on Damen's throat.
The stair spun.
For a moment he saw nothing but the little eyes, a foot from his own, bright and wet and quite calm, and the great red face with its broken nose, and the grin. He felt his feet leave the stone. He felt his spine bend against the rail. A cold roar filled his head; the lantern swung; a bell rang somewhere; and in the middle of it all a single clear thought fell through the dark like a stone down a well.
Hollis. The tub. The thumb.
He did it again.
He drove his thumb, rigid, into the left eye, with every pound of strength he had left. It went in with the same dreadful ease. The big man shrieked. His hands flew open. Damen fell, and rolled, and came up on one knee with the knife in his fist, and drove it upward through the soft place beneath the jaw. It went in to the hilt. The scream stopped.
The giant stood for a second, swaying, with a look of vast surprise. Then he went over backward and fell the whole length of the flight, and landed at the bottom with a sound like a dropped sack.
Damen knelt on the stair, coughing.
There was blood in his mouth. His throat was on fire. He put a hand to it, and the hand came away red. For a minute or more he could not stand. He crouched on the cold stone with his head down and his chest heaving, listening to the crash of the guns outside and the dry sweet tock of the clocks above, and he was aware, with a strange remote clarity, that he was shaking.
Nineteen, said the voice. Twenty. You keep count.
I don't.
You do. You always have. A pause. Thirty-one in eleven years. Eighteen in three days. Do you see the arithmetic?
Be quiet.
I am only asking whether you are still the man who made the rule.
He got up.
He wiped his face on his sleeve. He picked up the rifle. And he climbed the next ninety steps without once looking down.
At the hundred-and-fortieth he heard her scream.
It came from below. It was thin, high, ragged, muffled by stone; it came from the foot of the tower, from the hall, from the door. A woman's voice. He stopped dead. The rifle came up. The scream came again, and then a second voice, a man's, lower, harsh, snarling, and the crash of something heavy, and a child's cry, shrill with fear, calling a word that tore his heart in two.
"Dad!"
He turned.
He was on the stair, a hundred and forty steps above the ground, with fifty to go. The door at the top was close. He could see its edge: a rim of gold. He could hear the clocks, loud now, all of them, a chattering, clicking, ticking chorus like a forest of insects. Below him, a long way down, down the dim spiral of the stair, there came the sound of boots.
She's in the hall. They've got her.
Go, said the voice. The book. The old man. The door.
Mercer's coming up behind me.
Of course he is.
Naomi—
Is a nurse, said the voice, with a needle in her sleeve.
He stood, torn, for the space of one breath. Then he began to run. He ran down the stairs, three at a time, with the rifle swinging, and his feet struck the stone in a rapid beat, and the stair went round and round and round, and he was falling toward the light, and the scream came again.
He reached the bottom of the stair.
The hall was a stone vault, lit by a ring of candles. A heavy oak door stood open on the yard, and in it, silhouetted against the red glare of burning, a tall man in a charcoal peacoat stood with his back to the room. He had a pistol in his right hand. In his left, held at arm's length, by the hair, he had a child.
Ivy hung from his fist like a doll.
She did not struggle. She did not cry out. Her feet scraped the stone, a handsbreadth off the floor; her braids were in his fingers; her face was white and calm. She had her notebook clutched against her chest. She was staring across the hall, straight at her father, with enormous gray eyes. And behind him, on the floor, in a heap of torn clothes, a woman lay on her face with her hands behind her head and a booted foot between her shoulder blades.
Naomi.
There were three men. One, at the door, with a rifle. One crouching over the woman. And at the foot of the stair, hands loose at his sides, in the full glare of the candles, with the blood of nineteen men on his coat, stood the Metronome.
"Hello, Damen," said Cassian Mercer. He did not turn his head. "I wondered how long you'd take."
It was very quiet.
Outside, the battle raged. Inside, in the stone hall, the candles burned straight and still. A wind came through the door and bent the flames. And through the silence there came, from the dark of the stairs above, as faint as a pulse, the ticking of fifteen clocks.
"Put it down," said Damen.
"Which?"
"The child."
"Ah." Mercer lifted her, an inch. She swung, light as a leaf. "I thought you might say that. It's very simple. I don't need you to climb." The voice was bland. "I never did. I need you here. I need you in this hall, with that rifle in your hands, in front of my men, while the rest of them are out there being murdered on the quay by a lot of fat Hungarians with fishing nets."
"You wanted the diversion."
"I arranged the diversion." The handsome face turned, at last. The eyes were gray, and quite empty. "Do you think I didn't know? You told Calloway's boy to drive the lead boat. He told his father's friend on the radio. The friend told Vance. Vance told me." A pause. "I've known since four o'clock. I've had my men inside the tower for three hours. They're upstairs, with the old man, now. And at the top of the stair is a very large charge of Semtex, wired to the clock-room door."
He felt it go through him, cold and slow.
"It's not a big one," said Mercer. "Just big enough. It will bring down the roof, and the fifteen clocks, and Everett, and the Registry, and the ledger, and the music box. And you." He smiled. "I thought it would be a fitting end. A tower. A man, and his work."
"You'll kill your own men."
"I have already told them to evacuate."
"And Strand's Table?"
"The Table will have a new Chair," said Cassian Mercer, "by morning."
The pistol lifted.
It rose, slowly, quite unhurried, until the muzzle was an inch from the top of the child's head. She did not flinch. She was looking at her father's face. He could see her lips moving.
Five, they said.
Four.
"Drop the rifle," said Mercer.
"Let her go."
"Drop it, Damen. I won't ask again."
He looked at his daughter.
He looked at her, across twenty feet of candlelit stone: the small white face with the dirt on its chin, the gray eyes, the quivering pink rabbit on her chest. He looked at the notebook she was holding, and at the pencil, thrust through the cover, and at her mouth.
Three.
Two.
She was counting. She was counting backward. She was counting from five, as she had done at three years old, in a road, in front of a barking dog, and he understood suddenly and with perfect certainty what it was that she was trying to tell him.
Don't look at the dog.
Look at everything else.
He did not look at the pistol.
He looked at the floor. He looked at the shadow on the stones, thrown by the candles. It lay long and black from Mercer's feet toward the foot of the stair, sharp as a drawing, and in it, creeping, silent, slow, was another: a smaller one, a woman's, rising from the floor behind him, one arm lifted, with a glint at the end of it, like a star.
One, whispered Ivy.
He dropped the rifle.
It struck the stone with a crash. Mercer's eyes flickered to it. And in that half second, in that blink, a woman who had lain on the floor for four minutes with her face in the dust and a boot between her shoulders, and had been counted dead, rose behind him in a single movement and drove a needle into the side of his neck.
He did not fall at once.
He swung. He wheeled with the pistol, and fired, and the child dropped from his fist as though cut from a string; and the shot went wild, high, into the candles; and a hundred flames leaped and died. In the new dark there was a scream, and a roar, and the heavy crash of bodies on the floor. Damen was already moving. He crossed the hall in three strides. He took the man at the door in the stomach with his shoulder and drove him back against the wall; he took the one on the floor by the collar, and the scruff, and flung him into the candles; he heard bones break. He seized the child. He had her in his arms. He had her against his chest. He felt the small body shaking, and the thump of her heart, and her voice in his ear, high and clear and astonishingly steady:
"I counted! I counted to one!"
"I know. I know you did."
"Mama did it! She did it!"
"I saw."
He turned.
Cassian Mercer stood in the middle of the hall, swaying.
His face had lost its color. His hair hung in his eyes. The pistol had slid from his fingers and lay at his feet, and he was pawing at his neck with one hand, as at an insect, with a puzzled look. A dribble of blood ran down into his collar. His lips moved. His eyes, the gray, empty, polished eyes, had gone wide and soft and strange.
"What did you give me?" he said.
"Morphine," said Naomi.
She stood in front of him, five feet away, in her torn cardigan, with her hair in her face and her hands hanging. She was white to the lips. She held the empty syringe loosely at her side, like a spent cartridge. She was looking at him as she had looked at six hundred dying people, with perfect, level, impersonal attention.
"Forty milligrams," she said. "Straight into the carotid sheath. It will take about forty seconds."
"You, you little—"
"Don't talk." Her voice was gentle. "It's quicker if you don't."
He took a step. He swayed. The mouth opened. He lifted his hand, and it did not obey, and drifted in front of him like a thing under water; and he looked down at it with an expression of the most profound surprise.
"I wasn't, I hadn't—"
"I know."
"I was going to be—"
"Yes."
"Everett was—"
His knees folded.
He sat down on the stone, quite suddenly, in a neat heap, with his back against the foot of the stair, and his head fell forward. The breath went out of him in a long slow sigh. It was an odd sound, almost a sound of relief. He lay with his face turned up to the ceiling and his eyes half open, and the candlelight flickered on them, and did not move.
Nobody spoke.
Damen stood with his daughter in his arms, in the ruined hall, among the bodies. He looked at his wife. She did not look at him. She was looking at the man on the floor, at the slack, handsome, empty face, and her lips were moving, very slightly, as they did at a bedside.
"Is he dead?" said Ivy.
"No," said Naomi, in a low voice. "Not yet."
"Will he be?"
"Yes."
"Did you want to?"
Naomi was silent.
She stood for a long moment with the syringe in her hand, and the fog blowing through the door, and the shouts of the battle faint and far; and when she spoke it was in a voice Damen had never heard from her, very small and very tired and very clear.
"I wanted him to stop," she said. "I think that's the same. I'm not sure."
Damen put out a hand.
He laid it on her shoulder. She did not flinch. She did not lean either. She stood stiff as a post, under his palm, with her eyes on the floor; and then, slowly, as if every muscle in her body had been unclenched one by one, she bent her head, and rested her forehead against his arm.
"Later," she said.
"Later."
"We'll talk about this."
"All night."
"Yes." She straightened. She wiped her face. "Now. Is there a bomb?"
"There's a bomb."
"Then I think," said Naomi Whitlock, quite calmly, "you had better go and stop it."
He looked down at her.
He looked at the face he knew better than his own, white and bruised and set, with a wisp of hair stuck to its cheek. He thought: I have never loved anyone so much in my life. He thought: I may have just killed that.
He gave her the child. She took her. She held her tight.
"A hundred and ninety," said Ivy, into her mother's neck. "It's fifty to go."
"I'll be quick."
"Dad." The child lifted her head. "You can't be."
"Why not?"
"Because," she said, with enormous seriousness, "you're the Metronome. You have to keep time."
He almost laughed.
Then he turned, and went up the stair.