“When I entered the service of House Ashford, I was younger than you are now,” my father said. “I’d just left school and was looking for a job. My mates were going into all kinds of things – sales, building, the army. The economy was better then, but it was still hard if you didn’t have the right piece of paper. I knew about drucraft by then – you know that story – so I thought I’d look for work with one of the Houses.
“Well, I learned pretty fast that most Houses weren’t interested. They were snobby old-money types who didn’t have time for a poor working-class kid from the East End. But I stuck with it, and eventually a woman I knew gave me a tip about a place called House Ashford. Still an old House, but they were up-and-comers – they’d just bought a big mansion and they had boots to fill. So I gave it a shot, and I probably wouldn’t have made it, but as luck would have it, I managed to impress someone. The new Head of the House, Charles Ashford.”
“You impressed him?”
My father grinned. “Sounds funny now, doesn’t it?”
“I’m pretty sure that Charles absolutely hates you,” I told him. “Enough that just us looking alike is enough to make him hate me as well.”
“Yeah, that one’s my fault. Sorry. Though the thing I did that pissed him off the most is also the reason you exist, so I’m not actually that sorry. Anyway, I served as an Ashford armsman for two years. Got tapped for drucraft training – usually Houses don’t give you that until you’ve been there five years minimum, but rules don’t matter when the boss likes you. In exchange I did off-the-books work for Charles, including bodyguarding his younger daughter. And that was where the trouble started.”
“Okay, I know I said ‘everything’, but you don’t need to give me the details on that part.”
“Good, because I wasn’t going to. Anyway, short version is that it was a secret, until it wasn’t, and then everything blew up. I went to Charles to talk things out and . . . let’s just say it didn’t go well.”
“What did you do, tell him you quit?”
“Worse. Asked him if I could marry his daughter.”
I blinked. “Really?”
“Wanted to do the stand-up thing,” my father said with a shrug. “Plus, I thought he might say yes. He’d started almost treating me like a son, some of the time – he had two daughters and had never done the father/son thing, so I think he enjoyed it just a little, though he’d never admit it. So I thought, hey, give it a shot, maybe he’d be willing to let me join the family. Stranger things have happened.”
“And you actually thought that would work?”
“I was twenty years old, and like all twenty-year-olds, I was a bloody idiot.”
“Hey.”
“Yes, I know you’re twenty-one, and no, that doesn’t make much difference. Trust me, when you’re my age, you’ll think your current self was a bloody idiot as well. Anyway, that was when I discovered that rich guys only like you so long as you know your place. And that’s how I got fired and your mother got disinherited and we both ended up living hand-to-mouth in Plaistow.”
I sat quietly for a few seconds, taking that in. Was that why Charles had always been so harsh with me? Because he felt as though he’d trusted my father, and wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice?
“You said you’d talked to your mother,” my father went on. “How much did she tell you about that part?”
“That you two fought like cats and dogs. Then her sister died, and Charles came to her and invited her back.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s the part she’d have remembered,” my father said. “For me . . . I came home one day and found her gone. Flat was stripped of all her things. All that was left was you.” His mouth set in a hard line. “She never talked about it with me. Not once. Just walked away. I never forgave her for that.”
I sat there uncomfortably, not sure how to answer.
“So, there I was,” my father said. “Back where I started, with a couple of sigls that they missed when they tried to confiscate them, and with you. And that’s how you ended up growing up in Plaistow, with me and your babysitters and your aunt.”
I hesitated a second before speaking; I was afraid of hearing the answer to the next question. “Byron said you worked for him,” I said. “For the Winged.” With an effort I looked my father in the eye. “Was that true?”
My father met my gaze. “Yes.”
I felt my heart sink. I think at some level I’d known it was true – it explained too much – but I’d still hoped Byron had lied.
“There were reasons,” my father said when I stayed silent.
“These guys . . . seem like really bad news.”
“Actually, they’re probably even worse than you think they are.”
“Then why did you work for them?”
My father sighed. “Like I said, there were reasons. Anyway, listen and you can judge for yourself.
“Things were okay for a while. Money was tight, but we scraped by, and it got easier once you started school and I could work through the day. I’d burned my bridges with the Houses, but I’d picked up a few contacts while I was with the Ashfords and I was able to find enough work to keep us going.
“But then the recession happened. Rent went up, hours went down. I’d never managed to get anything long term, so when the jobs dried up, I didn’t have much to fall back on – I needed to have started saving years ago, and I hadn’t. We started missing payments, having to go short on food. And then I meet this weird guy who says he wants to hire me. Better pay, better hours, and all I have to do is not ask questions.”
“Did you know he . . .”
“Worked for the Winged? No. I could tell he was dodgy, but I thought his crew were just regular crooks. Stolen goods or something.”
“You always told me to steer clear of all that.”
“Yeah, I know I come across like a bloody hypocrite here. But . . . look, you said you were living on your own for about three years?”
“Plus a year with my aunt.”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t easy.”
“No.”
My father nodded. “Imagine doing all that, but with a kid to take care of. Sorting out babysitters and food and school. You were an easy kid – looked after yourself and didn’t cause problems – but there’s always something. And then the money started drying up, and . . . I’d look at you and think about how I could hardly even buy you food, much less anything nice. I’d wonder if you were getting enough to eat, whether you were getting picked on at school for having holes in your clothes. All the things other parents did for their kids, holidays and trips and nice restaurants – you weren’t getting any of that.”
“I didn’t care about any of that,” I protested. “I mean, yeah, having newer clothes and a console and TV that weren’t made in 1990 would have been nice. But at least you always paid attention to me. I mean, look at Colin – his dad was so caught up in all that drama with his mum that there were whole weeks where he’d barely say a word to him. Or Gabriel, his dad isn’t even there. I never felt like I was the unlucky one.”
“And if the money had run out?” my dad asked. “If the landlord had thrown us out on our ear and we were living off charity? Moving from place to place, no real home, living out of a suitcase and a cardboard box?”
I hesitated.
“You see, it’s not easy,” my father said. “Knowing what I do now, yeah, working for Byron was a mistake. But knowing what I did then . . . different story. And Byron knew how to sell it. He’d dug up my history with the Ashfords and made the Winged out to be the underdogs. Rebels fighting against the rich Houses.”
“Is that true?”
“Half true,” my father said with a grimace. “But it’s the other half that’ll mess you up. Anyway, I didn’t really need much persuading. I was pretty bitter about the way things had gone with the Ashfords – I was still in touch with your mother, and when you’re scraping to find enough money to pay the gas bill, while they’re going on summer holidays in the Mediterranean . . . well, working for the Winged let me feel like I was getting back at them somehow.”
“Working for them how?”
“Grunt work, to start. Watching doors, driving people around, walking the floor at parties. I didn’t have the shortcuts I had with the Ashfords, so I had to work my way up from the bottom this time. From time to time Byron’d hint that he could get me special treatment if I showed ‘extra commitment’, but I’d always shut him down. But the work was steady and the money was good. And after a while I started getting given more sensitive stuff. Stakeouts, watching houses, sealed deliveries. Never anything blatantly illegal, but enough that you could tell something was up.
“And gradually I started to build up a picture of the Winged. At the lower levels they’re less of a cult and more of a big patronage network. Really active in the arts, which was a new experience for me. I’d never been part of that world, you see. Then I started driving Byron around, and I’d take him to one of his parties and show him in the door and you’d see every artist in the room turn and stare like wolves at a hunk of meat.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because artsy middle-class kids are taught growing up that success is all about getting in with the right guy,” my father said. “And back then, Byron was that guy. Could make or break a career with a phone call. Every party, all the young hopefuls would buzz around him like flies, hoping to be the one he’d pick. Was an education for me, I’ll tell you that much.”
“So the Winged spend their time. . .” I said with a frown, “. . . going to parties?”
“The ones I was hanging around with.”
“And that turns into something else later?”
“No, they mostly just keep on doing the same thing.”
“I thought the Winged were important.”
“They are.”
I gave my father a confused look.
“You’re not thinking big enough,” my father told me. “Listen. I worked for Byron, driving him to parties. Byron would use the parties to meet up-and-coming artists. The artists he liked, he’d tap to make films. The films get funded by finance companies linked to the Winged. Eventually the film comes out and nudges the audience into whatever message the Winged happen to be pushing. Add in all the other guys doing the same thing as Byron, and that’s hundreds of films a year. It adds up.”
“It still sounds . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Ordinary.”
My father laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“What did you think the Winged spent their time doing?” my father asked. “Trying to overthrow the government?”
“I guess.”
“You know why they don’t?”
I shook my head.
“Because they’d be overthrowing themselves.”
I stared for a second. “You mean . . .?”
“Well, not completely,” my father said. “They have a lot of people in their pocket, but not everyone. But the point is, these guys aren’t trying to overthrow the establishment, they are the establishment. A massive network, everything from artists to security to bankers to politicians. And not only in the UK. We’re just one piece of their network, and not even close to the most important one.”
I looked at my father dubiously.
“I told you, you’re not thinking big enough,” he said. “The Winged are one of the most powerful factions on the planet. They count support in countries, not men. Their only real rivals are the Order of the Dragon.”
“Who are they?”
“The Winged’s opposite number. If the Winged are about getting what you want, the Order are about holding on to what you have. Stability instead of freedom. They and the Winged have been fighting over who gets to be top dog for hundreds of years. Remember what I told you about the Cold War? The US and their allies on one side, the Soviets on the other?”
I nodded.
“That was one front in the Winged against the Order. Not the whole war; one front. That’s the kind of scale these guys work on.”
I tried to wrap my head around that.
“But at the time, I didn’t know any of that,” my father said. “And neither did the guys I worked with. There’s a big cut-off in the cult. The patronage network, the money and the parties and the circuit . . . the bottom ninety-five per cent of the Winged, that’s all they ever see. It’s only the ones on the upper level, the guys like Byron, who know the real story. They call themselves vanguards. Lower-rankers don’t have any clue about what the vanguards really do – all they see is that the vanguards have all the money they could ever want, people jumping to their feet when they walk in the room, and an entry pass to every VIP event in the city. So they spend all their time trying to get into the vanguards’ orbit so that they can get some of that, too.”
I remembered what Father Hawke had told me about the Winged’s “inner circle”. “Was that what you did?”
“No,” my father said, shaking his head. “I just wanted to take care of you. From time to time I’d get approached for shadier stuff, but the payment they’d offer would always be things like expense accounts at a club, so you could sit in a booth and pretend you’re a high roller. Stupid shit like that. So I turned them all down. I had the feeling I was probably shooting myself in the foot, cutting myself off from the fast track, but I didn’t care as long as I was earning.
“But I was wrong.
“You see, I didn’t understand the Winged back then. I saw how most of the guys were just in it for the money and women and parties, and I thought that was all there was to it. What I didn’t get was that the ones at the very top, the vanguards . . . they’re believers. It’s why the Winged are so powerful. The corps might be rich, but they don’t care about anything but next month’s bottom line. But the vanguards, they actually believe in the cause. And so when I didn’t act as corrupt as the others, I got their attention without realising it.
“So I started getting given the sensitive jobs. And I found out what the people I’d been working for were really like.
“The world at the top of the Winged is totally different from the layers underneath. Think of it like a very exclusive club. Hard to get into, but once you’re in, you can do whatever you want for the rest of your life. And when I say whatever you want, I mean it. They go in every direction you can think of. Some of them sit in their studies writing political philosophy. Some pull strings and move money around. Some are warriors – they fight the enemies of the Winged, and they’re no joke, believe me. Some are sex-and-drugs hedonists. And most are some mixture of those things.
“My new job was ‘cleaner’. As in, someone who cleans up a mess. And just like everywhere else, ten per cent of the people cause ninety per cent of the problems, so I wasn’t seeing the ones holed up in their studies, I was seeing the bad ones. I did that for maybe two years, and I saw things that’d make your hair stand on end. Remember that movie we watched together the last Christmas before I left? Where some junkie hitman’s in a car and he manages to shoot one of his own partners in the face? And now the third guy’s driving a car that looks like a prop from a horror movie and he’s trying to figure out what the fuck to do next?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember how I didn’t think it was very funny?”
I nodded.
“Because I’d been in pretty much the same situation as that guy driving that car. Trust me, it’s not funny. And that was just an accident. I’m not going to get into the things that were on purpose.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” my father said. “I’m not proud of what I did in those couple of years. I didn’t murder anyone, or rape anyone, or torture anyone, but I drove cars and watched doors and cleaned up problems for people who did.”
I stared at my father for a second, trying to figure out how to take that. It was a disquieting thing to hear. “Do all the Winged spend their time doing stuff like that?”
“No, thank God. But they all know about it. Every now and again it spills out into the news, and you’ll see people on TV saying they’re shocked, shocked, to find out that their dear friend and colleague was doing something so horrible.” My father’s expression was grim. “It’s bullshit. They know. They always know.”
“But why? What do they want?”
“They do dirty work because it gets them in with the rich and powerful. That gives them influence, and they use that to push their agenda.”
“What agenda?”
“Freedom, progress, all that stuff,” my father said. “There are a hundred sub-groups and they all have a different emphasis. Mostly they pull in the same direction, but when you’ve got a group as huge as the Winged you get a lot of little variations. and those little variations make a big difference to whoever’s on the receiving end. You told me Byron already gave you his recruiting pitch, but if you went to a different member of the Winged, they’d give you a different one. Probably be about three-quarters the same, but the disagreements over the last quarter can get pretty nasty. Some of those jobs I was doing for Byron, it was other members of the Winged who were the targets.”
I couldn’t wait any longer. I’d been holding off on this for a while, but I’d been waiting for an answer to this for a long, long time. “Why did you disappear?”
My father was silent for a moment. “Something finally happened where I couldn’t look the other way,” he said at last. “I had to choose. Stay with the Winged, or leave.”
“What was the ‘something’?”
“You’re better off not knowing.”
I frowned.
“I mean that literally,” my father said. “You are better off not knowing. Because that way, if someone from the police or the Winged asks you about it, you won’t have to lie when you say you don’t know.”
“The police . . .?”
“Well, probably not the police,” my father amended. “The Winged couldn’t pin the whole thing on me – too much mess. So they had to sweep the whole thing under the rug. In the meantime, I was gone. Had just enough time to leave you that letter before I had to run.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew that the first place the Winged were going to look for me was with you,” my father said. “And if they couldn’t immediately catch me, their next move would be to go after you. These are not nice people, Stephen. They do not play by the rules. Kidnapping a kid and threatening to hurt or kill them if the parent doesn’t cooperate is absolutely in their playbook.”
“Then why didn’t they—?”
“Because I put a lot of effort into making sure that didn’t happen,” my father said. “As soon as I realised that you could be a target, I started preparing. Every time I was with other guys on a job and the subject came up, I’d talk about how badly you and I were getting on and how I was thinking about just walking out and never coming back. There are probably guys in the Winged who’ve never even met me who think you and I absolutely hate each other, that’s how hard I sold it. So if you ever do run into them, they’re probably going to assume you’ve got the biggest case of daddy issues known to man.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Next step was to make sure they couldn’t talk to me. Pretty hard to blackmail someone if you’ve got no way to get in touch. I couldn’t hide or guard you well enough that they couldn’t get you, but I could disappear well enough that they couldn’t find me. So that was what I did.”
“You could have taken me with you.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“I would have come if you’d asked.”
“Yeah, and that was why I didn’t do it. You don’t know what you would have been signing up for. Look, Stephen, I know your life’s been hard these last few years, but no matter how tough it was, no matter how much you had to go through, you still had a life. You had friends, a job, a normal place to live. You didn’t have to sleep in hotel rooms with a gun under your pillow.”
“You could still have given me the choice,” I said. I could hear the resentment in my voice, but I couldn’t help it.
“No, I couldn’t,” my father said, emphasising the word. “If you’d associated yourself with me, you’d have had no chance of a normal life, ever. I got into this whole stupid mess because I wanted to help you.”
“And you didn’t think to at least ask?”
“No,” my father said flatly. “I knew you wanted me to stay. I knew that by leaving you, your life was going to be pretty hard and lonely for a pretty long time. But when you have kids, your job is to do what’s best for them, not what’ll make them happy right now. I hate that I had to leave you alone for so long, and if I could go back, there are a lot of things I would have done differently. But leaving . . . that’s not one of them. Given the situation, I’d do the same thing in a heartbeat. No matter how much it hurt.”
I opened my mouth to fire back an angry retort, then stopped. Why was I acting like this? I’d come to talk to my father, not to fight with him. I stared down at the floor, the feelings draining away.
The silence stretched out awkwardly. “Shall I go on?” my father asked.
I nodded.
“Once I’d left, I knew Byron was going to try to find me,” my father continued. “I don’t think he cared personally, but that didn’t matter. And I knew the first thing he’d do would be post men to watch you. It was the same job I used to get.”
“Yeah, I know. That white Ford.”
“White Ford Fiesta with 2009 plates,” my father agreed. “Every time I showed up, it was there. You ever wonder why it was the same car?”
“. . . No?”
“I mean, that was how you were able to spot it, right? Same car, same plates, every day?”
“Yes . . .”
“So if you’re watching someone, that’s not the best way to do it, right? Even someone who hasn’t been trained to spot tails, they see the same car outside their house every morning, they’re going to catch on eventually. And it’s not that hard to fix. Most of the cost of putting men on a job is the men. Having them switch cars isn’t much dearer.” My father looked at me. “So why do you think they didn’t?”
I looked at my father.
“If you just want someone watched, you send out a guy,” my father said. “If you really want someone watched, you send out a guy, then you send out another guy where he can watch anyone watching the first guy.”
I felt stupid. All this time, and that had never occurred to me.
“The first time I came back to our house, all I saw was that white Ford,” my father said. “Second time, all I saw was that white Ford. Third time, all I saw was that white Ford, and by then I was getting impatient. I knew Byron wasn’t going to give up that easily. But I also knew that you were on your own in that house, and you had no idea what was going on, and I wanted to talk to you. So that night, I came back. Hoped to sneak in and spend the night talking, just like we’re doing now. If I’d been more careful, I’d have waited longer, taken more precautions . . . but I didn’t. I figured maybe Byron’s men had got sloppy.” He rolled up the sleeve of his left arm and held it up to me.
I stared at my father’s forearm. There was a faint, puckered scar that I’d never seen before running from just above the elbow to just below the wrist.
My father held his arm up for a few more seconds, as if to make sure I’d got the message, then lowered it again and began rolling up his sleeve. “It was close,” he said. “If I hadn’t had that one extra sigl Byron’s guys didn’t know about . . . well, let’s just say we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Anyway, I learned my lesson. I sent that letter, but when I didn’t get an answer I went no-contact. I knew the more times I tried to contact you, the more likely the Winged would get suspicious. My best chance – your best chance – was if they believed I wasn’t coming back.”
“But I just emailed you,” I said. “And you said my account was compromised. Does that mean . . .?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” my dad said. “But if I had to bet on it, I’d say probably not. The first few weeks after I left, I guarantee you there was a guy reading your emails every day. But that was four years ago and the Winged have a lot of people on their shit list. Very unlikely they’re still watching you after all this time. Still, that’s only going to be true so long as they don’t realise anything’s changed. If this Mark guy tells Byron what he did, they’re going to start paying you attention again. So first thing you do, when you get home, delete those emails from your folders, and you make damn sure you never mention me or the Winged in any other communications you send, email or phone or letter or anything else. There has to be absolutely no visible link between the two of us.”
“Why do they want you so badly? What did you do?”
“Well, it’s not just a matter of what I did.”
I looked at him with eyebrows raised.
“I haven’t been just sitting around the last few years,” my father explained. “Let’s just say I’ve been giving the Winged other reasons not to like me very much.”
“All right,” I said. “That answers the first big thing I wanted to ask you about. What about the second?”
“What’s the second?”
I looked at him with eyebrows raised. “You can’t guess?”
My father shook his head.
“You told me in your letter that the Winged are a cult that worships some kind of a spirit and they have demons giving them gifts.”
“. . . Oh. That.”
“Yes,” I said with some asperity. “That.”
“Right now I’m a bit more concerned about the guy who stabbed you.”
“I kind of think there might be a bit of a connection!”
For the first time in the conversation, I saw my father hesitate. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know the truth,” I said. “Do these things really exist? Is that how the Winged get those weird powers?”
“. . . I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
My father was silent for a few seconds before answering. “The Winged vanguards have some abilities that are hard to explain,” he said at last. “A couple of times I saw Byron talk people into things they should never have been willing to do. He didn’t seem to use a sigl to do it. Maybe he was using some new kind I’d never heard of, but . . .”
“When I was there for that raid last year in Chancery Lane, I heard my half-brother talking to Byron about that,” I said. “He claimed mind-controlling someone with drucraft was supposed to be impossible. Well, I looked it up afterwards, and as far as I can tell, he’s right. Every expert says magical suggestion is something drucraft just can’t do.”
“Yeah, I got told the same thing. Still, a lot of Drucraft Houses have secret techniques. And the Winged have more resources than any House.”
“You think that’s all it is?”
“It’s as good an explanation as any.”
“That wasn’t how you made it sound in that letter.”
“That was a while ago.”
“So what happened since then?” I said with a frown. This wasn’t at all how I’d expected this conversation to go. I’d come here braced to hear something completely crazy. Now my dad was walking his claims back, and I wasn’t sure how to take it.
“Like I said, the Winged aren’t the only cult out there,” my father said. “And they’re called ‘cults’ for a reason. They don’t think they’re just a bunch of drucrafters. They think they’re agents of some kind of god.”
I hesitated a moment before replying. “Are they?”
“Who the hell knows? If you listen to these guys, they’ll all try to tell you they’re got some kind of secret knowledge or special power. They’re the chosen ones, they’re on the right side of history, whatever. It’s all bullshit. As soon as your back’s turned, they’re giving the same speech to the next guy, trying to convince him that he’ll have everything he wants if he just does as he’s told.”
I gave my dad a dubious look.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I do. I’m just . . . having trouble squaring all this with what you wrote.”
“When I wrote that letter, I’d been working for the Winged for nearly ten years,” my dad said. “It changes your thinking, being in a cult that long. You start believing stuff that an outsider would think was crazy.”
“Is that really why?” I asked. Something about my father’s manner seemed off, as though he was trying to convince himself more than me.
My father looked to one side, staring at the wall of the flat. “Maybe,” he said at last.
“Maybe?”
“When I started working for the Winged, I thought they were just a bunch of criminals who used the whole cult thing as a con,” my father said. “Keep the gullible in line, that sort of thing. By the end, I thought they were a bunch of demon-worshippers. Back then, I thought that the worst case was that some of those demons might actually be real.” He paused. “Want to know what I think the worst case is now?”
I nodded.
“That we’re all playing pieces on a gameboard the size of the universe, and there are gods looming over us playing a game of death chess where the moves are our lives.”
I couldn’t think of how to respond to that.
“Anyway,” my father said, and shook his head, seeming to throw off the thought. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. If you’re trying to deal with someone more powerful than you, how they got that way doesn’t really matter. That fight you had with Vermillion – does it make that much difference where his powers came from? If you’re lying there bleeding to death, is your last thought really going to be ‘wow, I wonder how he did that’?”
“He didn’t use any really special powers. Just a pair of high-tech goggles and a transparency sigl.”
“He’ll have more up his sleeve than that,” my father noted. “So let’s not give him a second chance to use them. Now I want you to go through that fight with him again, in more detail this time. After that we’ll look at your home setup, so we can start making some contingency plans . . .”