The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(78)

“Don’t be stupid, Rurick. Pull that trigger, and you’ll be serving the remainder of your enlistment in Siberia rounding up gamblers and two-bit petty thieves. You know it and I know it, so let us dispense with these childish games and speak together as gentlemen.”

The voice was Arkwright’s; the accent was distinctly and unmistakably British. The monstrumologist closed his eyes. He was not waiting for the bullet; he was kicking himself for not seeing the truth sooner, for ignoring his misgivings and shoving aside his doubts in his lust for glory.

“It was the only way out,” Warthrop confided to me. “He knew if he didn’t confess his true identity, we were done for. To cling to his cover created a stalemate that only one thing could break—a bullet into our brains. Well, two things, counting Plešec’s knife. So he told Rurick what he already knew to be true: He was not Thomas Arkwright of the Long Island Arkwrights; he was an officer of the British intelligence service, a fact of which I had no knowledge, he assured our captors. He’d been assigned by his superiors to infiltrate the Society for the purpose of discovering the origin of the nidus ex magnificum recently delivered to me, courtesy of Dr. Jack Kearns.”

“And how do you British know of the nidus?” Rurick asked next.

“Well, how do you think? Kearns told us about it,” returned Arkwright.

“He tells you of the nidus but does not say where it comes from?”

“No, he did not say. He said he didn’t know where it came from. We knew he had it, and we knew he sent it to Warthrop, and we knew he disappeared. That is all we knew.”

“So you pay Warthrop to be your bird dog?”

“No. It was our understanding that Dr. Warthrop is one of those rare creatures whose honor cannot be bought. We decided to trick him instead. Play to his ego, which by all accounts is considerably large and substantially playable. My job was to stick with him until he found the origin of the nidus.”

“Ah. And then you kill him.”

“No,” Arkwright replied patiently. “We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it. Killing is expensive, risky, and usually results in a plethora of unintended consequences. That is what I’m trying to help you to understand, Rurick. Killing us creates more problems than it solves.”

“Not if you have discovered magnificum,” Rurick argued. He turned to Warthrop. “Do you know where it is?”

The monstrumologist turned from our reflections and sat in the chair beside my bunk. His shoulders swayed in rhythm to the rocking of the train. At that moment its whistle shrieked, a shrill, almost hysterical sound, like a wounded animal.

“It was an interesting dilemma, Will Henry,” he said calmly. We might have been sitting by a cozy fire on Harrington Lane discussing a paradox of his favorite philosopher, Zeno of Elea. “A bit more complicated than the question implies. If I lied and said no, the wisest course for the Russians would be to kill me, for the alternative was setting me free to find the answer, a risk Rurick—and his government—could not afford to take. However, if I told the truth and said yes, the decision would be even easier. He knew that his British rivals did not know the location of the magnificum, a secret they were willing to keep at all costs. He would have to kill us. Neither the truth nor a lie would spare my life.”

“The lady or the tiger,” I said.

“The lady or the what?”

“It’s nothing, sir. A story Dr. Torrance told.”

“Dr. Torrance told you a story?” He was having some trouble picturing it.

“It doesn’t matter, sir.”

“Then, why did you interrupt me?”

“Rurick didn’t shoot you or Mr. Arkwright, so you must have figured something out.”

“Correct, Will Henry, but that is rather like Newton’s saying the apple fell, so it must be on the ground! Understand that my problem was compounded by the presence of Arkwright, whom I had just discovered was an agent of Her Majesty’s government. If I told the truth and by some miracle we were spared, the British would know where to find the magnificum, and that would be only slightly less disastrous than my death.”

The answer to his “interesting dilemma” occurred to him with no more than a second to spare. Saying nothing broke rule one. Lying broke rule two. Telling the truth broke no established rule except the law of necessity; the end result would be the same.

He could feel Rurick’s sour breath bathing his face. He could hear the incessant drip, drip of water and smell the nauseating cocktail of urine and human waste wafting up from the trench below. He looked up into those depthless black eyes, the eyes of a predator, a hunter like himself—into those shining eyes, his eyes, and he said the one thing, the only thing, that could save his life:

“I do know where it is. The Faceless One hails from an island off the coast of Oman, called Masirah.”

“Masirah?” I asked.

“Yes! Masirah, a long-suspected hiding place of the magnificum. It was the perfect bluff, Will Henry. Any other answer, as I’ve demonstrated, would have resulted in our deaths. Our only hope lay in the possibility that the Russians already thought that the origin of the nidus was Socotra. If they believed I was wrong about the nidus’s origin, they might let us go. In fact, it served their interest to let us go. By the time we discovered the magnificum was not on Masirah, their mission to Socotra would be complete. It was perfect in another, albeit secondary, sense. Assuming I was correct and we survived, Arkwright would return to his superiors with the intelligence he’d been tasked to gather: Typhoeus magnificum was on the isle of Masirah!”