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SHELTER ISLAND, NEW YORK
November 27
The man seated at the Macassar ebony desk was not accustomed to being made to wait. He wore a tie the color of honey to call attention to his amber eyes and had the silver hair and aquiline nose of his forebears, as evidenced by the gold-framed portraits hanging in the trompe l’oeil arches. The fireplace behind him cast a flickering glare upon the Gothic armchairs, bookshelves, and red stag heads staring down at him from their mounts. The velvet drapes were drawn, stranding shadows as dark as his mood in the far corners of the room.
He was known as Quintus, Latin for fifth, an honorific bequeathed to him by his father, although if everything went according to plan, he would soon assume the mantle of Quartus, if not higher. Even his esteemed great-grandfather had never aspired to such heights, and yet here he was on the cusp of elevating the status of his family name.
For the last hundred years, the members of Pantheon Maioris Tredecim—literally translated from Latin as Pantheon Majority Thirteen—had been content in their respective roles, largely because they had all been in agreement about their vision of the future. Despite their numeric rankings, their voices had been equal. Decisions affecting all of them had been made by the majority, and always after considerable debate. Technology had shrunk the world, though. Gone were the geographic boundaries that had once defined their empires, blurring borders that had been carefully negotiated and strictly enforced since the advent of the syndicate nearly three and a half centuries ago, allowing the more ambitious among them to discreetly enter industries formerly considered off-limits to all but the specific member who controlled them, causing fortunes to fluctuate and tensions to rise.
None of them had previously contested his ranking, as the wealth and power each honorific possessed had remained relatively constant. The path to ascension—rising in rank and stature—had been one that took decades, a combination of careful long-term planning by one house and a stroke of misfortune for another, and even then, Quintus was aware of it having happened only once every few generations. Time had changed that, however. Estates had diminished, members had grown complacent, and power had diffused through lineages that did nothing but squabble over it. Families were no longer satisfied with maintaining a seat at the table and conspired to rule it. While there had always been such men, none of them had ever attempted a coup d’état.
Until now.
Secundus had fired the first shot in a war that many of them believed had become inevitable. Although he’d vehemently denied it, his family, through subsequent generations, had patiently acquired solid minority holdings in critical resources outside of its designated sphere, resources that would increase exponentially in value after the coming cataclysm, the Great Culling, the time for which, they all agreed, was now at hand. While the other twelve argued over the ultimate mechanism by which they would thin the herd, he’d gambled on releasing one of his minion’s engineered viruses—the profits from the fallout would have easily doubled his already considerable estate and elevated him to Primus—and lost. In doing so, he’d not only risked exposing the entire organization; he’d altered its dynamics by sowing the seeds of distrust and instigating what Quintus speculated would become a thirteen-way free-for-all for supremacy that each could blame one of the others for starting.
He’d spent his entire life preparing for this opportunity, though. As his father and grandfather had before him. And now, with Secundus’s failure to unleash his pandemic, his position was ripe for the taking. Tertius and Quartus were undoubtedly already implementing the machinations of their ascension and Quintus’s rise was by no means guaranteed, which meant he needed to succeed where Secundus had failed, and his entire plan hinged upon the man who had already missed the prearranged starting time of their virtual meeting.
His laptop chimed to announce the arrival of an external user to his secure virtual conference room. The screen remained black for several moments before the shadowed form of a man drew contrast from the darkness. He wore a sugegasa, a conical Asian hat woven from straw. It was frayed around the brim and concealed the upper two-thirds of his face. Only the lobes of his ears, the tip of his nose, and his effeminate mouth and chin were visible above his slender neck and narrow shoulders.
“You’re late,” Quintus said.
The man made no reply. He rarely spoke, for reasons that were obvious to anyone who’d ever heard the sound of his voice.
“I trust you had no trouble relocating my cache.”
The man offered a nearly imperceptible nod.
“Then I assume we’re still on schedule.”
Again, a slight dip of the chin.
“You know why I called this meeting. Are you prepared to commence?”
A faint shake of the head.
“Must I remind you that the remainder of your payment is contingent upon the successful demonstration of the efficacy of the product?”
The sound of breathing from the speakers became agitated. Quintus intuited the man’s question.
“You want to know what happened to the team at the slaughterhouse.”
The man nodded.
“Let’s just say that no one who knew you were there is in any kind of condition to share that information.”
The man made no appreciable movement.
“I’ve reviewed the forensics reports myself. The containment tanks were pulverized and buried under tons of burning rubble when the roof collapsed, and the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer failed to detect the presence of any of the precursor chemicals. Everyone with working knowledge of the experimentation is dead. No one has any idea you were ever there.”
The man’s lips tightened.
“As far as the Thirteen are concerned, you were only there for your experience in bioengineering, to help incorporate that infernal bacterium into the Hoyl’s virus. None of them has the slightest idea of what you were working on for me. Or what I intend to do with it. Trust me when I say that if they did, we’d both already be dead or spending what little time we have left on the run, like Secundus.”
The man’s facial expression remained unchanged.
Copyright © 2020 Michael Laurence McBride
