Warlord (The Gift Book 5) by Marc Stapleton

Author:Marc Stapleton [Stapleton, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 35

Ihead back out to the restaurant car, and take a seat at a table set for two. There are a couple new faces here; an African man wearing some sort of traditional shirt – full of vibrant, zigzagging colors – and an older, grey-haired westerner, entirely red-faced and looking like he’s being cooked alive in his suit.

There’s music coming from somewhere; a jaunty, happy little ditty with drums and trumpets, emanating from behind a closed door. It makes for a surreal backdrop to my mission.

A waiter – a slender man wearing a white shirt and black pants – files between the tables and holds up a finger to suggest he’ll be with us soon, and I lean back in my seat, idly tapping a finger on the table in a displeasingly Baynes-like fashion.

“Excuse me, sir,” a voice beside me says; male, deep, and Nubalayan accented. I turn my head slightly, expecting to see that white shirt of the waiter again, but instead I’m greeted by something else entirely. The dark, taut skin of a bicep, and a crisscross of veins straining out like a roadmap. I’ve seen that bicep before…

“Huh?” I mumble, looking up. I’m greeted by a pair of my own images again, reflected at me from a set of black sunglasses. But there’s no mistaking the man behind them. It’s him; it’s David Faye.

“Can I ask, do you have a pen?”

His voice is deep and assured; polite, but assertive. He doesn’t sound at all like I expected; the only thing I can think of is that he sounds like an airline pilot. A man whose voice conveys confidence and competence; a man trained to speak that way.

“A pen?” I ask, dumbly. “No, sorry, I don’t.”

He’s motionless beside me, his hands clasped before him, quite inoffensively. Below his sunglasses, he smiles politely, his teeth gleaming like the spotless plates on our tables. He’s clean shaven, both on his chin and his head, and he wears a necklace of wooden beads, and a neat, patterned polo shirt, from which his massive arms are struggling to be free.

It feels like an eternity; me sitting there, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, and he standing over me, poised and assured, like we’re locked into some unspoken, ambiguous game of chicken. He’s massive; perhaps six and a half feet tall, with proud shoulders that extend wide, like the wingspan of an eagle.

Does he know who I am? Has he made me? I’m wearing the same face I had when I collared Jonathan, but surely he couldn’t yet have raised the alarm, let alone described me. Do I move first? Or do I wait for him to throw the first punch? He’s still, but I don’t doubt that he could spring into action at any moment, like a coiled rattlesnake…

“No problem,” he says, slapping me on the shoulder with enough force to make my entire ribcage shudder. “Sorry to bother you.”

And like that, the moment that seemed to last an eternity is over and he’s walking to the other side of the car.

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