Free TW04 The Zenda Vendetta NEW by Simon Hawke Page A

made physical appearances deceptive, as in his own case, but there were other indicators of the fellow’s youthfulness—the tension in his bearing, the restlessness which made him shift position constantly, the subtle yet telling sounds he made despite his efforts at not making any noise. He was like a small boy out on his first hunting trip with an old veteran, spending his first night in a hunting stand. The old hunter, experienced and calm, knew to blend in with the silence of the forest; he knew how to relax into complete motionlessness. The small boy was too excited, too inexperienced to appreciate such subtleties. Despite all his best efforts, he moved too much, unable to synchronize his heartbeat with the gentle sighing of the wind. He would think that he was being quiet, but the tiny sounds he made, almost inaudible to him, would be like claps of thunder to the forest animals. The old hunter, of course, would know this, but he would say nothing. He would know that there would be no game on such a night, with such a green companion. The object of the lesson would be to give the boy an opportunity to learn to wait. In time, the boy would learn. But this boy would never have the time.
    Drakov, the old hunter, wondered why it was that artists always attempted to poeticize death and violence. Death was merely final, finality in itself, and real violence was sudden, terrible, and often totally incomprehensible. It wasn’t death that was poetic, he thought as he watched his young victim with a mournful gaze, it was survival. That was something few artists ever understood. The Russians understood it. Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, especially Tolstoy. The Russian loves to suffer, Drakov thought, because he has never known another state, and so he has embraced the only state he knows.
    Wistfully, he thought that the soul of a Russian peasant was a lovely thing, simple and innocent and pure.
    “It is from the soil of Russia,” his mother had once told him in Siberia, “watered by the tears of all of those who’ve suffered, that the flower of the new world will one day spring.”
    “And what if that flower turns out to be a weed?” he had asked her, already a cynic at the age of fourteen, never imagining just how prophetic his words would turn out to be.
    “Then that weed will be watered by those self-same tears of suffering,” his mother said. “One must suffer before one can know redemption.”
    If that was true, thought Drakov, then his mother had been redeemed many times over. But he was not certain it was true. He was not certain that one could be redeemed. Another writer, an American—who else?—had written that Byronic melancholy was the opium of the intellectuals and the last refuge of little minds. No doubt Falcon would agree. She never had the time to grieve, as she had so simply and mercilessly put it, for all the souls who fell by the wayside. Reluctantly, he took out his laser and aimed it at his victim’s head. He hesitated.
    The beam flash would undoubtedly alert the others, who were neither as young nor as inexperienced as this one. He transferred the laser to his left hand and moved forward slowly, silently, closing the distance between them. He raised his right arm and brought the edge of his right hand down hard on the back of the young man’s neck, just below the point at which the spine met the base of the skull.
    He heard a voice cry out as he struck and he spun instinctively, firing blindly with his left hand and hitting the chronoplate remote with his right. Even as he fired, he felt a searing pain lance along his side and the next thing he knew, he was back in the turret atop the keep of Zenda Castle, collapsing to the floor and grimacing with pain. He had not been the only hunter on the stalk. Just before he had clocked out, he had caught a brief glimpse of a dark shape silhouetted against the moonlight. And, irrationally, in that brief instant he had known exactly who it