Broken City

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Six

All this time and they never knew. They had no idea who their enemy was, they just knew they had one—and it took them long enough to come to that conclusion.

I could never have dreamed that it would work so well as this, sure I was careful, I picked my moments, but they never even thought of me, as always I was invisible. It’s strange to think that the very reason I hate them so much has proved to be their undoing, and consequently my salvation.

Andak…how I despise the name, for me it conjures up all their oppression and power, their arrogance: this whole compound built around them to glorify them—well what’s so special about them anyway? The sons of an egotistical swine who extorted money out of those who could afford it, by preying on their fears, and yet once they were ensconced in this place after the breakdown happened, what had they done but blindly follow him, willingly being seduced by a dream that was not their own.

He trapped them all in his power and then played the king and lorded it over them—and they had enjoyed it! They had strengthened him and had brought up their daughters to want an Andak and nothing else.

 He thinks of Nova, of her icy beauty that is so far beyond his reach, of the indifference with which she treats him and yet the affection she lavishes on them, all of them, giving away her smiles and throwing herself at them, only to be laughed at. All with the hope that one of them will throw her a bone, her head so filled with the desire to be called Andak that there is little room for anything else.

He feels sickened, disgusted by her and yet longing for her still. Well she would see, they all would, he would drag their precious Andak’s through the mud! He would fight and come off the winner and, victorious, he would make her Queen of his kingdom—or then again maybe not. Maybe he would let her work for it, for him—after all there would be plenty of beautiful women to choose from.

He thinks of Tom and Ryder even now on their way to this place with no knowledge of what was in store for them. It had been easy—too easy, Dax’s son had been forever shouting for his ‘Uncle Tom’, he had listened and waited and watched—and he had been rewarded: Ryder’s interviews with Keya had been edifying in the extreme. He had learnt with joy that her tribe held Tom prisoner, even now he couldn’t help thinking that it was a pity that they hadn’t dispatched him.

Then those girls had turned up and had given him a great deal more information, they knew Tomasz, that had been clear, even if they were behaving as though they had only just met him, and they knew him well from the accuracy of their information and they also knew Dec, having, it seemed, lived in the same tribe as him and Tom. In fact the recordings had proved so interesting, he had copied them from the computer—before Ryder had erased them from the data banks—and now they had been his trump card.

On Tom’s arrival home he had gathered the council, with the exception of Tom and Ryder and had explained to the brothers on their arrival the plight he had found himself in. He can hardly contain the smile he feels—they had listened, and more importantly, they had believed his every word. His supposed stumbling over the recordings, which it had taken him half the night to doctor that they might be as incriminating as possible, their subsequent deletion from the system and Ryder’s pass code that had been given in authorization.

Jimmy keeps quiet letting it sink in, it was of course a masterpiece—some of the sentences he had had to make up from scratch—but still it was possible, he couldn’t have just brought the recording to the council, even in their heightened state of paranoia they would have needed more evidence. How amusing that Ryder should have been the one to provide the last killing blow. Jimmy revels in the irony, that in deleting the files, presumably to keep them all safe, Ryder had destroyed the one piece of evidence that could have saved them.