The Far Shores (The Central Series) (55 page)

About time
, Emily Muir thought, striding past
the unconcerned Yaojing to walk alongside Alistair as he descended from the
catwalk.
About damn time
.

***

Renton hovered near Anastasia, ready
to support her if she stumbled or fainted. Despite shaky legs and a wobbly
gait, however, she remained upright throughout a series of apports – courtesy
of Svetlana – a lengthy walk through the secure area of Heathrow airport, and
then boarding of a private plane destined for Berlin. Renton was anxious to
know the need for the terrestrial travel, rather than apporting directly back
to Central, where her security could be assured, but he kept his mouth shut,
not wanting to undermine her display of stoicism.

The plane was a sleek
silver Dassault Falcon, waiting on an isolated area of the tarmac with the
engines running. A polite Chinese crew welcomed them aboard, Anastasia pausing
to exchange pleasantries in Cantonese with the pilot before they were escorted
to their plush leather seats, done in white to match the cream color scheme of
the interior. Timor waited for them there, standing behind Anastasia’s chair
with tension etched across his features.

“Ana!” Timor cried out,
taking a half-step forward upon seeing her condition, before remembering
himself. “Are you...”

“Very well, thank you,”
Anastasia said gently, patting his hand as she took her seat. “Not to worry.”

“Is the crew cleared?”
Renton asked Timor, one hand brushing his concealed Smith & Wesson. “Did
you check the plane?”

Timor gave him a nod
while they took their seats, Timor sitting next to Anastasia, while Renton and
Svetlana sat in the row opposite.

“Everything is clean.
The personnel are Black Sun relations, and I went over the plane with a
fine-tooth comb – bombs, biologics, the works. We’re good.”

Renton nodded, fighting
the urge to double-check Timor’s work himself. Years of working as Anastasia’s
close protection specialist practically demanded that he do such things
personally, but he had ceded that responsibility to Timor when he had assumed
his new role as adjutant and Committee representative. It was technically a
promotion, but Renton would have traded it in a second for the seat next to
Ana.

The overhead speakers
crackled, and the pilot made a brief series of announcements and greetings
while the plane rolled into immediate motion. The stewardess provided them with
bottles of water, a printed English menu, and a selection of newspapers and
magazines while the plane taxied. Renton was grudgingly impressed by Timor’s
command of logistics – Heathrow was a difficult airport to negotiate, and an
at-will takeoff was a commodity that, as far as the public was concerned,
didn’t even exist. Their seats rotated forward while the jets roared to life.
Svetlana subtly took Renton’s hand, careful to keep the gesture out of view of
Anastasia, and leaned her head close.

“Are you alright?” She
studied him with moist eyes. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. I was worried.”

“Of course,” Renton
said, squeezing her hand and then brushing it aside. “I was working undercover,
so contact was impossible. I left instructions for my absence...”

“I was not concerned
about the business,” Svetlana said quietly. “I was worried about you.”

“No need,” Renton said
cavalierly, glancing to make sure that Ana wasn’t listening. She was sitting
with her eyes closed, her head resting against the soft contours of the executive
chair. “There was no more risk than is usual for these sort of things. It all
went well from my end. I wasn’t the one who suffered.”

Svetlana peeked at
Anastasia as the plane accelerated for takeoff.

“Is Lady Anastasia...is
she unwell? Was she taken prisoner? There were rumors...”

“She is fine. Simple
exhaustion, that’s all.” Renton lied smoothly, embedding minor telepathic
suggestions in the statement that would encourage Svetlana to end the
conversation. “She just needs rest. I will explain further later, when we are
alone.”

She caught the
implication, giving him the sad smile that Svetlana always did when he
mentioned their covert and sporadic assignations. Renton felt a brief pang of
guilt, then dismissed it with annoyance, closing his eyes as the force of their
takeoff pressed him back in his seat.

The plane was insulated,
the sound of the engines no more than a distant rumble. There was turbulence
until they broke free of the brewing storm that surrounded London and reached
their cruising altitude above the dark clouds. Anastasia appeared to be asleep,
so Renton allowed himself the luxury of recrimination, blaming himself for not
having moved fast enough to prevent her from suffering unnecessarily at the
hands of the Thule Cartel.

Outside of the effects
of prolonged thirst and sleeplessness; lost weight and superficial burns on her
temples, fingers, and tongue that were probably attachment points for
electrodes; and self-inflicted bites to her fingers, Anastasia appeared relatively
unharmed. Of course, she had told him nothing of her interrogation, and little
of her prolonged sequester in the labyrinth beneath the Thule compound, so he
could only make assumptions, and fight the urge to ask.

On certain subjects,
Renton probably knew more than her. Brennan Thule had been prone to drunken
exposition, and in his guise as part of the household guard, Renton had been
privy to a number of conversations between Brennan and his demented cousin, Lóa.

Renton had followed Lóa
after their meeting in the offices of the Committee-at-Large, using one of the
enhancement patches that Anastasia had supplied him with to generate a form of
telepathic invisibility. The ruse was successful, and Renton cornered the guard
Lóa sent to collect her things from the security office before her departure.
With a suppressed pistol, subsonic bullets, and a little luck, Renton had
dispatched the guard without a struggle or damage to his uniform – which Renton
had then employed to effect the guard’s replacement. Two minutes to memorize the
dead man’s features, and Renton was able to generate a reasonable telepathic
facsimile of his face. He had rejoined Lóa Thule’s entourage, banking on the
fact that no one really paid much attention to individual security guards.

It had worked, though
the effort of maintaining a constant telepathic disguise for days on end had
taxed Renton’s abilities to their utmost limits and beyond. Without the help of
a stack of extraordinarily expensive nanite-infused patches to supplement his
protocol, it would not have been possible. The first three days had been the
worst, partly because Renton could not allow himself to sleep, settling instead
for self-inducing the telepathic equivalent – a process that would have
deleterious long-term effects. Renton tried not to think about Ana undergoing
interrogation in a sealed chamber in the Thule compound’s secure wing,
experiencing who knew what pain and indignity, while he methodically identified,
killed, and replaced the appropriate personnel. It took three murders to achieve
the position he required, each arranged to look like an accident or cast
suspicion in a direction that did not imperil his mission.

After pushing a member
of the cartel guard from a balcony overlooking the main corridor in the early
morning, with hardly enough time to switch the corpse’s clothes and apply a
patch to create the two telepathic disguises that were needed – one for himself,
and another for the dead man – in order to achieve the replacement, Renton
achieved the operational necessity of a position in Brennan Thule’s personal security
detail. Fortunately, Brennan Thule was accustomed to privilege to the point
that he hardly noticed the staff that served and protected him. Renton took the
place of another completely interchangeable servant as far as Thule was
concerned. Despite a few missteps, it only took the occasional telepathic
maneuver to remain entirely unsuspected. Another two days worth of telepathic
manipulation and secretive violence was required before he was assigned to
close protection duty, and another agonizing day of delays while Brennan Thule
watched the drugged and delusional Anastasia wander the labyrinth via closed-circuit
television before the head of the Thule Cartel decided that she was finally
ripe for conversion.

Once Brennan Thule had
decided to make his pitch, things had gone rather smoothly. Anastasia’s act of
violence at the end – whether the result of drugs, long confinement, and
torment, or a calculated act on her part – was the only part of the conclusion
of the affair that bothered him. Anastasia’s protocol was a matter of absolute
secrecy. This, Renton knew, was in part due to its Deviant nature, as Central
still had laws on the books requiring execution of any Operator afflicted with
a Deviant Protocol. Anastasia was more concerned with the advantage operating
an unknown protocol gave her than any potential threat to her well-being from
Central, however. Renton, knowing the nature of her protocol, even to the
extent that he did, regardless of his own loyalty, was a grievous threat to her
existence. He would be forced to guard the knowledge carefully, going forward,
to avoid being an instrument in her downfall. Any knowledge he had, after all,
would automatically be targeted by her innumerable rivals.

At some point, he must
have slept, because he was stirred to wakefulness by the sound of a seatbelt
releasing. He roused himself in time to see Anastasia stand and ask the
stewardess a question in Cantonese.

“Ana?” Renton kept his
voice low, but left his own seat to stand beside her. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, Renton,” Anastasia
said curtly, pushing him away. “But I haven’t bathed or brushed my teeth in
better than a week. Since we are in the air, I will have to make do with a sink
and a change of clothes.”

Anastasia followed the
stewardess behind a curtain while Renton returned to his seat. Svetlana was
occupied with a book, sitting in the halo of a reading light, but Timor was
awake and alert.

“You should have
followed her,” Renton growled at Timor as he sat back down. “Even in an
airplane. Even to the bathroom, if only to wait at the door.”

“You don’t have to tell
me,” Timor corrected mildly. “I was trained as a bodyguard, Renton. I tried to
go with her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. You must have slept through our
disagreement.”

Renton accepted the
rebuke grudgingly, and stewed over the situation.

“I don’t like it,” he
said, more to himself than to Ana’s cousin. “We should be back in Central,
where it’s safe.”

“I believe she intends
to return,” Timor offered, paging through a German sports magazine with little
evident interest. “I suggested the same thing, and she told me that it was an
issue of timing.”

“Ah,” Renton said,
nodding as if he knew what she was referring to. For some reason the very
appearance of Timor being more in the know than him rankled Renton,
professionalism aside. “That makes sense.”

“To you, maybe,” Timor
said, turning the page.

“You aren’t curious?”

“I am,” Timor said,
glancing at Renton. “But I trust Ana.”

Renton smiled when he
wanted to grit his teeth. He turned his attention to the console inserted in
the wall in front of him, an icon tracking the plane’s slow progress over the
North Sea.

“Do you know what they
did to her?”

Timor’s question
surprised him. Renton shot him a look, trying to determine if Timor knew
something he didn’t, but judging from his expression, he decided that the
question was legitimate, rather than rhetorical. Renton suppressed the urge to
delve into Timor’s mind for answers, knowing that he could not brush aside the
elaborate defenses constructed around it without alerting its owner.

“Not as much as I’d
like,” Renton admitted, hoping to draw out any further information Timor might
have. “I know they drugged her. Poison, really. A deliriant.”

“Not surprising.” Timor
nodded solemnly. “I talked to one of the chemists who put together that
antidote she had surgically implanted. He said it was configured to purge a
whole range of substances from her body. Hopefully that was one of them.”

“Anastasia does not make
mistakes,” Renton said, a little surprised to hear the words coming from his
mouth, instead of being told the same. “The precognitive pool didn’t offer
much, but they warned her about poison, and drugs. The precautions she took
were radical, but they paid off.”

“You’ve been with her a
long time. Longer than I have. I envy your confidence.” Timor shook his head.
The admission made Renton feel better than he would have admitted. It was a
petty victory, but if he could, Renton would have made Timor repeat himself. “I’ve
been sick with worry. The idea of Anastasia being in enemy hands, well...”

Timor blanched, and
Renton felt a moment of genuine empathy. He had forgotten, until that moment,
Katya’s adolescent captivity, and how she had suffered. Obviously his sister’s
ordeal would have weighed heavily on Timor’s mind.

“It was no easier for
me,” Renton admitted. “I don’t think I’ve slept at all since she was taken, and
the anxiety inside that place was even worse. The rescue couldn’t be rushed,
but I could hardly stand to wait, either.”