Shadow Pursuit by Alistair Birch

Author:Alistair Birch [Birch, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speculative
Publisher: Dark Edge Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

***

Easter sat quietly before reaching across his leather-topped desk to select a pencil and cigar cutter. His grey eyes never strayed from the monitors in front of him, but his fingers methodically placed the tip of the pencil into the cavity where a cigar would normally sit before snapping it off brutally. The wooden tip flew across the desk and disappeared. He repeated the process three more times until only a short stub remained. Most people would have squeezed hard and only managed to draw a pair of grooves into the wooden stem, but Conrad Easter’s grip was immense. Each splinter sliced from the stem of the pencil reminded him of his childhood, his mum, the foster care, the running away, and everyone who’d ever opposed him. He frequently had moods like this but today he took comfort in the fact that he was nearing his goal.

He reached down and pulled open a drawer, extracting an envelope. Carefully he emptied the contents out across the surface. Photos and test results spread out in a grisly collage, victims lain to waste and possible targets. He smiled, not a happy smile, but a deep and controlled – nearly there – kind of smile as he pondered all the events that had led him to this point. Despite the upturned side to his mouth, his eyebrows remained thick and furrowed. After a few more seconds of sifting through the evidence he identified the person he was after and the frown relaxed. Tapping the photo with his thick index finger he set the picture to one side before gathering the remaining papers, which he carefully placed back into the envelope.

Content now, he made a call to two of the techs and summoned them up to his office.

Downstairs, the younger tech decided to head upstairs on his own. He took the stairs, recalling an ancient battle from the deep recesses of his school years. The battle of Tigranocerta in Armenia, where the Romans, led by Lucullus with ten thousand men, defeated King Tigranes, who had three hundred thousand warriors at his disposal. The tech couldn’t quite identify why this memory chose that moment to float to the surface of his mind, though he pictured himself as a general, reluctant to tell the Armenian King how badly the battle was raging. In those days, he suspected they really did shoot the messenger. Today, he hoped to come out of the meeting unscathed.

He approached the furthest-most oak door. Everything on this floor projected a blend of strength and comfort. The dark panels across the wall looked like they’d been there for decades, but he knew they were just a fascia, and reinforced concrete sat a few millimetres beneath it. Off to the left was another bedroom. He knew the girl would be in there. She was an enigma to him. He’d seen her on the camera feeds when she’d first arrived and felt a stirring of excitement as she walked into the building. At first it seemed she was a prisoner and yet within the building the video portrayed her as having teenage petulance.

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