The Mask on the
Island
by Max Gladstone
Derrick Gaspard
slept soundly because he did not believe in ghosts. His
enemies were over a decade dead: his first wife slain in
her bed, his younger brother poisoned by a dart in
Shanghai, the Xu family irradiated in their undersea lair.
He rested secure in his home on his island, surrounded by
guards and the loyal sons he had raised with his second
wife, and kept a gun under his
pillow and a knife at his shin.
But when he woke in the night and saw the moon-cast shadows
on his ceiling and heard the wind outside the great glass
window, he felt death in the bedroom with him. He reached
beneath his pillow and touched the handle of his gun, cold
and heavy against the smooth cotton of the sheets.
A cool, sharp blade lay against his throat, and a silken
voice slithered into his left ear. “Release the weapon, and
sit up.”
“You won’t leave this room alive,” Derrick said.
“Perhaps. But if you call your guards, you will certainly
die, and perhaps I will escape.”
“I’m not afraid of death.”
“You were not afraid ten years ago. Now you have nothing to
die for. I’m invisible to your alarms. Guards will only
come if they’re called. If you call them, you die. And I am
not here to kill you.”
“Then take your knife away from my throat.”
“Sit up, slowly.”
The knife moved with him as he did so, its edge as gentle
and sharp as the straight
razor he shaved with every morning. The covers pooled
around his waist, and moonlight from the window played on
the graying hair of his chest. Beneath the hair, his flesh
was crisscrossed with old scars. He didn’t look left. He
knew the rules. The first thing he had to do was take
control. Sometimes that was as easy as asking a question.
“What now?”
“Stand.”
As he turned to obey, the knife left his throat for the
instant he needed. He dropped and rolled forward, one hand
darting to the calf sheath that held his own blade. He came
up in a fighter’s crouch, and whirled to face—
Himself. His own face above a knotted tie, his own body
clad in his own dark suit. Perfect, down to the scarring on
his neck from when the Xu family left him to hang fifteen
years ago. The black-bladed serrated combat knife probably
wasn’t his, but he owned twenty of its doubles.
“Drop the knife, Derrick.”
“That’s not going to save you.” Derrick said with a glance
to the other’s blade. He was old, but fast, and still
strong. He had first killed with a knife at age seven.
“No,” the other acknowledged with a nod. “But this will.”
And he raised his pistol—a silenced .45. “I can put a whole
clip in your eye before you close with me. I don’t want to
kill you now. I just want to talk.”
Even the voice
was his own. He dropped the knife.
“Good. Now.” The other Derrick motioned with the gun to the
red robe folded on the bedside table. “Cover yourself. We
have a lot to discuss.”
He pulled on
the robe. There were other weapons in this room, and silent
alarms. He just needed to string this assassin along until
he could get to one. He tied the sash around his waist.
“What should I call you?”
“You can call me Gray,” the other said. “Now, would you
please take a seat by the fireplace?”
***
The next morning, Derrick woke in a cold sweat and
staggered to the shower, past the guards he had called
after Gray left. Water steamed over and around him, but
couldn’t banish the cold from his bones. His reflection
watched him from the chrome and steel fixtures of his
shower stall, distorted and blurred by
steam.
His
assistant Gavriel met him
in his office, precise as always and dressed in black, her
iron gray hair pulled back from her round face. He watched
her, waiting for her to say something, but knew she
wouldn’t. She always let the boss speak first when he was
nervous.
“How long have you been with me, Gavriel?”
“In what capacity, sir?”
“Any capacity.”
“I was first assigned to coordinate efforts to track you
down and kill you thirty-five years and eleven months ago
last Tuesday. If I recall correctly.” And she always did.
“I’ve always considered that the beginning of our
professional relationship.”
“And during that time, what is the most intimate we have
ever been?”
She raised an eyebrow, but answered anyway. “During the
Christmas party the year after your first wife sold you out
to the Company—that would have been in seventy-six—we spent
a sloppy half-hour or so necking in a closet. After that we
each established a policy against drinking champagne when
depressed.”
Derrick leaned back in his leather chair. He had built his
office underground at the edge of the island, safe from the
prying eyes of satellites and spy planes, and from
long-range missile attack. One window took up its entire
back wall, affording a panoramic undersea view of the reef
at the bottom of the bay. A manta ray swam by, beating its
slick silver wings; schools of little bright-colored fish
flitted through the razor-sharp coral. If he craned his
neck, he could see the black bottoms of his patrol boats
further out, circling the quicksilver surface of the ocean,
wards against any threat.
“Last night, an
assassin came to my room.”
Her face was grave. “I heard. But who—”
“It’s an old contract, I think. Maybe even from the Xu
days. This ‘Gray’ has taken years, studied me. Waited. And
now he’s here. He announced himself to make me sweat. He’ll
bide his time, and strike when my guard is down.”
“We’ll find him if he’s still on the island.”
“Maybe. Maybe we won’t. When he came to see me, he was me.
Disguised perfectly. It was better than anything I’ve
ever seen.”
“Oh.” She took a slight step back, crossed her arms, and
looked at him for a long moment.
He returned her gaze levelly, searching her as she searched
him. “I don’t have any proof that I’m not him. I don’t have
any proof that you’re not him either.”
“Come now.”
“He’s studied me—us—for years. He may have been one of us
for a long time; he might even be one of us right now. The
closer people are, the less we can trust them.” He leaned
forward, elbows on his desk, fingers interlaced, and stared
at something that wasn’t there. “Bring me my sons.”
***
Gray stood by the mantle, gun in his hand, wrapped in
shadow. He stared into the empty marble fireplace with an
expression Derrick recognized from windows and mirrors he
had passed while deep in thought.
“It’s
impressive,” Derrick said, softly.
“Your disguise.”
“It’s a technique,” Gray replied. “Like any other. Gained
through pain and experience, practiced over time.
Honed.”
No pride in
that voice, no hubris. Try another tactic. “You use
prosthetics?”
“As few prosthetics as possible,” Gray said. “It’s a whole
body thing. Mental, physical. So much information is coded
in a person’s walk, in their facial expressions, in the
tilt of their head when they
ask a question. Twitches in the corner of the eye.
Prosthetics can cover that up, make true impersonation
impossible if one isn’t careful.” His gun didn’t waver. The
dark mouth of the silencer still pointed straight at
Derrick’s chest.
Lies and half-truths. He wouldn’t have told his secrets,
either, with a target at his mercy. He wouldn’t have spoken
at all. Why this conversation? If he made any loud noise,
guards would storm the bedroom, and Gray, or whatever his
name was, would die—maybe both of them, in the confusion.
Why talk to your target?
When Gray spoke, his voice, though still Derrick’s own,
lacked its earlier menace. “What’s in this life for you,
Mr. Gaspard?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to remain alive. You
worked for Aegis before most kids get out of high school.
They taught you how to kill, and how to steal, and how to
serve mankind. And then you went into business for
yourself.”
“Then I went into business for myself.” He spoke the words
out loud to taste them, and remembered Aegis headquarters
burning, remembered the screams. “They taught me to serve
mankind. They weren’t serving mankind. Nobody can.”
“So you serve yourself.”
“So I do what I can do, which is ensure strength and
security for myself, for my family.”
A map of the island hung above his mantelpiece,
installations marked in red, defensive perimeters in
purple, roads shown as thick dark
lines. Off the coast, whales spouted from the black deep,
amid sea monsters and blinking beacons. “And from here, you
build your world,” Gray said.
“Yes.”
“And that’s worth it to you? Worth your life?”
Derrick’s left hand was a quick strike away from the hidden
catch in the second brick from the left corner of the
fireplace, tenth from the bottom: the silent alarm. Gray
couldn’t have deactivated that one. But he couldn’t spare
the brick a glance, as long as the gun was trained on him.
“Of course. I have power. Control. This world is mine to
shape, and I have shaped it for years. My enemies are dead
by my hand or hands I hired. My children and my forces rule
the seas and walk unafraid on the land. The men and women
of the cities know nothing of me, because their governments
won’t let them know people like me exist. I have made
myself a world.”
“And now you’re about to die.”
“You said you weren’t going to kill me.”
“I said I wasn’t going to kill you now. I didn’t say
anything about later.”
Outside, the wind.
“Isn’t that what life’s all about, though?” Derrick asked
the ceiling. “Making things? Becoming yourself?”
“Not always,” Gray said through Derrick’s thin, hard lips.
***
Derrick’s sons came separately, and armed. Victor, the
youngest, was the first to arrive. He wore a black blazer
and pale slacks and moved soundlessly,
dangerously.
“Father.”
Marius was next, dark circles under his brown eyes, clothes
and hair in disarray. He had been up late working on the
Sri Lankan job. A bioweapons deal didn’t plan itself, not
when one intended to sell to both sides, especially not
when the weapons in question had to be lifted from a
government facility in Argentina. He grunted a hello, which
Derrick returned with an approving nod. Enterprise.
And last came Alain, the dark-haired king of the sea. His
skin was nearly black from the Pacific sun, weathered and
pitted by the spray. Their military answered to him, as the
arms business answered to Marius, and the assassins to
Victor. His voice was deeper than Derrick’s, his shoulders
broader.
“Hi, Dad,” he said.
Derrick looked over the three of them, tall and short,
stocky and slender, all strong, all fast, all smart. They
were the best of his genes, of their mother’s genes;
products of the finest education and martial training,
hardened by wars and their own will. And here they were.
He saw their square faces, their strong jaws so like his,
and loved them, and trusted them absolutely. But Gray might
have counted on that.
“Give me your weapons,” he said.
They did not pause to look at each other. In a moment, four
handguns were on the desk—a pearl-handled .45, a Desert
Eagle, a utilitarian Glock, and Victor’s derringer, small
enough to fit in the palm. Derrick picked up each in turn,
popped their clips, examined both weapon and ammunition.
Satisfied, he returned them to the boys.
It was hard to say the words, but he had to say them:
“There is a traitor among us. An assassin.”
They said nothing. They had been told.
“He came to my
room last night, disguised perfectly as me—not to kill,
yet, but to gloat. He is among us even now. Among those we
trust—I trust.”
And they understood.
***
“Consider,” Gray continued, “yourself. You say you are what
you make yourself. But which one of us is really you? No
one who entered this room would be able to choose between
us. I know your passcodes, I know the little things you
hold as secrets—or think you hold as secrets. I have your
identity, as I can have anyone’s, with only a little twist
of the features. Like so.”
And something about Gray’s face changed—not the distance
between the eyes, not the angle of the jaw or the wrinkles
of the brow or the scars at the neck. Yet something was
different, and now Derrick saw it, peering through the
layers of makeup—
His first wife. He had ordered her death. He had seen her
corpse. “Gwendolyne?”
“No.” The resemblance faded, and Gray was Derrick Gaspard
again. “But you saw her here, even though it was just me.”
Gray’s face changed, and Derrick saw his son Victor, and
Oscar Xu, and Gavriel, and a host of others, men and women
in his employ and out of it, enemies and friends, dead and
living. And then they all submerged beneath his own face—a
mask, like any other. “It’s a simple trick. Just be
born...mutable.”
Derrick laid his hands in his lap, all thought of the alarm
gone. “A man could make a lot of money with a talent like
that. Or a woman.”
“I’m not for sale.”
“Somebody hired you.”
Gray began to pace before the empty fireplace,
zebra-stripes of shadow rolling over him as he moved. “I
didn’t take the job because I wanted money, Mr. Gaspard. I
can get that whenever I care to. Nor did I take the job
because I relish the kill. I’m here because I want to
understand you.”
“Understand me.”
“Yes.” Still the deadly precision of that aim,
intractable—the only thing about Gray that did not shift,
no matter the face he wore. “What drives you to build? Or
to destroy? You have killed your kin, you have betrayed any
country that you might once have called home. And now I
find you here, settled into your life of lordship and
depravity, the man on the island, secure and absolute.”
And there it was—the opening. Not in a moment of
distraction, but in a moment of eloquence. Gray was a
professional, but whoever hired him had missed that edge of
obsession, the wisp of vendetta or instability that,
properly exploited, could shatter professionalism.
“You’re not here to understand me, Gray. You’re here to
understand yourself.”
***
“What do you want us to do?” Alain asked.
Bare your thoughts to me. Open your mind and let me see
inside. Believe in me more than I can believe in you. “I
need to know if I can trust you.”
“Ask us anything, Father.” Victor leaned forward in his
chair. “Ask anything and we will do it.”
“But anything I ask you, he may have thought of first. He’s
prepared for us—when he showed me his many faces, you were
all there, as were a host of our friends and enemies, some
of whom have been dead for years. You all leave the island
to carry out our operations. One of you could have been set
upon shoreside, overpowered—”
Victor chuckled at that, but controlled himself when
Derrick shot him an angry glance.
“Overpowered,” he repeated. “It is possible. And then they
would have... examined you.”
“You can’t believe we’d—”
Derrick cut Marius off. “People talk, even when they don’t
mean to. You don’t need torture. You three should know that
at least.”
“Yes,” said Alain.
“And,” Victor put in, “he wouldn’t necessarily need
information. Just some time to see how we move and handle
trouble. Any information he wanted, he could get in other
ways. There are files on us, after all.”
“Which is the problem,” said Derrick. He stood. His shadow
extended before him, edges rippling with the underwater
light. “There are files on us longer than
War and
Peace. This man
could know anything, everything about us—scars, hidden
bodies, birthdays, where we had our first kiss.” His had
been in the backyard of his orphanage, with a girl two
years his senior, with beautiful dark hair. “He may have
been here, on our island, for weeks, months, years for all
we know, learning, studying. And now that he’s announced
himself, he’ll sabotage our plans, become a canker in our
mouth, stinging as we chew on the world. We must trust one
another, and work together. And all I can do to be sure of
each of you is ask this one question.”
He turned to
Alain and looked into his deep black eyes.
“Do you love me?”
***
“I understand myself,” Gray said.
“No.” Derrick
stood slowly. “You don’t. You won’t kill me,
because you want to know what drives me. Because you’ve
never known what drives you.”
“I’m driven to become. I make myself every day, every
moment. I make myself in service, in your death, and in the
destruction of what you’ve created here.”
“But who are you, under that makeup, under your fancy face
games? You’re nobody. A fragment of a man, or of a woman.”
Derrick closed the distance between them as he spoke, his
footfalls light on the red and gold rug. Gray was exactly
Derrick’s height, which surprised him more than he’d
expected. Scars, eye color, hair, voice, all these things
could be faked, but height—he had thought that would have
been harder. “You’re a bear
cub before it’s been licked into form.”
They stood exactly eye-to-eye now.
Gray’s voice, when he spoke, was colder than Derrick had
expected. He—she—it—was off-balance, but not enough to
create an opening. “You’re a mass murderer, Mr. Gaspard.
You’ve broken nations. You’ve killed your own family.”
“Yes. I did those things. Me. What have you done? Who are
you? Aegis’ hound? Some last servant of the Xu family,
hunting me down across the years? Who are you beneath your
masks?”
“I am what I’m ordered to be. Or what I want to be.”
“You’ve never wanted, never decided. You’ve never known
what you are.”
“No.” Gray shook his head. They were so close now that when
Derrick breathed in, his chest brushed the barrel of Gray’s
gun. “I decided. I lay broken and bleeding, young and
abandoned, on an open plain beneath a driving storm, and I
decided I would be what was needed. Whatever was needed,
wherever it was needed.”
***
“What?” his son asked.
“Do you love
me, Alain?”
He searched the young man’s strong face, the dark skin
around his eyes, the pronounced muscles of his jaw, the
smooth curve of forehead. He felt it within himself, the
bond, the pull to protect. His world, all he had built, was
bound up in this tight, muscular form. Don’t let it be
Alain. Alain, who had fallen once, as a child, and sprained
his ankle. Spent the rest of the month on crutches; by the
end of that time he could kill with them. His arms had been
strong ever since. Don’t let it be Alain. And yet in his
son’s face he saw...what?
“Sir, I—”
And out of the corner of his eye, he saw Victor lean
forward, focused, concerned, wearing an expression Derrick
had never seen before. For a moment, Victor was something
other than his son.
Derrick raised his weapon in a blur of black and grey—
Two loud noises.
***
Derrick told Gray: “And inside,
under it all, you’re the same kid you were then, small,
terrified, makeup streaked by the storm. You’ve become me,
and you’re going to kill me. It’s a shame.” Gray’s
expression hadn’t changed, but now, beneath it, Derrick
could just see the outline of an alien face, formless and
soft. “You’ve got talent. You could have become strong, but
look at you. You can’t even tell me why you’re here, why
you’ll kill me.”
“But I will.”
“Big deal. Many people have tried. And if one of them had
succeeded before you, I would have died as myself. Evil,
you say, but myself. You were nobody. And you’ll be nobody
long after I’m gone.”
Gray closed his eyes then, but before Derrick could move,
Gray fired. A tiny dart buried itself in Derrick’s chest,
and the big man slowed and fell.
“But I’ll still be here,” Gray said, and dragged Derrick’s
unconscious body back to bed.
***
Derrick felt the bullet enter him as a sudden weight in his
chest, and slumped, his left side numb. He saw Alain
fall too, blood leaking from a pea-sized hole in his
breastbone. Victor’s weapons were small in caliber, but
powerful. Love. Trust.
He could add it all up as he bled out on the floor, gasping
for breath.
Alain, seeing his father turn on Victor, had
believed, for the
necessary second, that Derrick himself was the
impersonator. And Victor, seeing his brother kill their
father, had thought it was Alain.
And here he was, Derrick Gaspard, dying. He tried to speak,
but blood filled his mouth.
He had been somebody, dammit.
***
Gray was one of the two orderlies who came in to clean up.
Later, he was the coroner’s assistant who conducted the
autopsy. For a lark, he became a guard, and for the fifteen
minutes necessary to get himself onto the beach, he was
Gavriel. Gaspard’s organization was already falling apart.
Victor had disappeared, while Marius ran about trying to
get guarantees of loyalty from his father’s old friends and
servants. Without Alain’s charisma, the men wouldn’t fall
into line, and with Victor absent, there were already
whispers Marius had initiated a coup, that there had been
no assassin after all.
Gray started some of those whispers himself.
And in a way, they were true. There had been no assassin,
no need to kill or even impersonate, not really. All
Derrick Gaspard needed, all anyone needed, was a bit of a
push, a bare hint that those he relied upon might not, in
fact, be all they seemed. And after that, everything
followed naturally, because people were always more than
they seemed. Or less.
Gray stopped
being Gavriel and became, for a moment, a man he had passed
in Beijing years ago, thin and small and flushed, a
drifter, a bum, a man without a past and without a
future.
“I could become
you,” he said to himself, under his breath, to Gaspard’s
voice in his mind.
But Gaspard was dead.
Gray dug his
scuba gear out from the sand where it lay concealed and
strapped it on over his wetsuit. He fastened the mask on
his face and walked out into the water until it covered
him.
Copyright 2007 by Max Gladstone