The crisis had begun two weeks ago, and things were only getting worse. Neither the USA nor the USSR were backing down, and violence was breaking out in Poland, the Balkans, and Kurdistan. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact Army was holding large-scale exercises and preparing nuclear missile firing tests. In response, NATO was mobilizing its forces on all fronts, “just in case.” Though unconfirmed, there were reports of small-scale armed conflicts breaking out as well.
The light from the little screen cast flickering shadows over the elderly man’s melancholy face.
“Lord Mallory,” Edmund Jr. said to his aged father.
“Sir Mallory,” his father said back to him, as if he hadn’t even seen the gun in his son’s hands. “Good to see you.”
As the heir apparent to an earl, Edmund Jr. held the title of ‘viscount,’ which meant that he could also be styled a lord, along with his father. However, Edmund Jr. preferred to be called “Sir Mallory,” in recognition of the knighthood he’d been granted after having earned the Order of the Bath for a dangerous mission conducted during his days with the Royal Navy. The alternate title, despite being lesser in rank, also served as a way for Edmund Jr. to distinguish himself from his father.
“I thought I’d see you sooner,” remarked Lord Edmund.
“I came as fast as I could.”
“Oh?” The old man closed his Bible and set it down on the table next to him.
His hands are more wrinkled now than when I last saw him a year ago, Edmund Jr. thought.
“I thought you knew about this place,” said Lord Edmund.
“Yes,” Edmund Jr. agreed. “Only you, the butler, Dent, and I knew about it. Dent died a long time ago, which leaves only the two of us.”
Every year, the two of them had stayed in this village for one week in the summer. They’d lived in this bare-bones house together with no hunting or riding, no mother or sister, doing all of the housework themselves. Even when their butler would look in on them, worried, his father had refused the man’s help. Together they’d chopped wood, drawn water from the well, and on the last night, taken apart a chicken and cooked it.
It wasn’t an especially grueling lifestyle, but it had been an invaluable experience for a child of nobility. The young Edmund Jr., who had been born heir to the title Earl of Hereford, had been learning things that any human should know. He didn’t like to admit it, but the experience had served him well, first at Eaton and then during his time in the military.
Lord Edmund turned his enfeebled gaze to the window. “Dent, eh? I wonder what he’d think if he saw us now.”
“He’d be greatly saddened, I’m sure,” Edmund Jr. replied.
“I wonder. Perhaps he knew this would happen.”
“Why?”
“Dent brought me wine when you were injured in the Falklands,” Lord Edmund explained. “A Cheval Blanc, from the year you were born, to celebrate. He said, ‘Now Master Edmund will never do as you say ever again. He’s become a true man.’”
Edmund Jr. wasn’t sure if his father was praising him or grieving. Even so, Dent’s prediction had been right; the reason he’d come here was not to ask for his father’s counsel, but to finish things with him.
“Did you come here to kill me?” Lord Edmund asked suddenly.
“Yes,” Edmund Jr. immediately responded. “But first, I want to know why you betrayed us; why you sold Mithril out to them.”
The old man, Lord Edmund Mallory Sr., had been Mithril’s original founder. The still-unexplained use of nuclear weapons during the Gulf War; the sudden reignition of American—Soviet hostilities; the ideological, ethnic, and religious wars that flared up in the world from time to time. Energy issues, food issues... Coals that fed the fires, crisis after crisis. If such things were allowed to continue, they knew, the world wouldn’t survive into the 21st century. National interest couldn’t stop these escalations, and it was unlikely that any country’s politicians, bureaucrats, or officials could stem the crisis. To quell internal distress, a surgeon was needed, and Mithril had been the scalpel capable of performing the delicate work.
Edmund Jr. and his father fancied themselves as the Tracy family from the puppet drama Thunderbirds. But the purpose of their “international aid organization” would be to protect people not from accidents and disaster, but from war.
The biggest issue they’d faced in Mithril’s creation hadn’t been funding—Lord Edmund had easily worked up the necessary funds by mobilizing his family’s entire portfolio of assets. By selling off real estate, corporations, and intellectual property holdings in their various forms, as well as by flexing his considerable personal connections, Lord Edmund had worked a miracle.
Instead, the main problem had been acquiring the appropriately skilled personnel. Spending ten billion pounds on hardware meant little with mediocre hands at the helm. You needed a large force of soldiers with talent, experience, and most of all, loyalty. Men of a younger generation than Lord Edmund’s set. That left things up to his son, Sir Edmund Mallory Jr.
Edmund Jr. was a war hero. He’d been injured saving the crown prince, who’d been left in enemy territory when his helicopter went down, and received the Order of the Bath for it. Afterwards, he’d traveled the world as a military attaché and intelligence officer, contributing to the mitigation of various military crises. He’d done everything in his power to scout the people needed to found Mithril. He’d faced many challenges on the way, but his judgment had always been top-notch.
“I poured my whole life into that organization because I agreed with your ideals, and because I was proud of you,” Edmund Jr. said bitterly. “I didn’t care about the fortune I was supposed to inherit. You made me believe that the hideous ‘reality’ I’d witnessed during my time in the military might just be changed.”
“It was always a fantasy,” Lord Edmund said in an exhausted voice. “Think about it. The name is Mithril—a fictional metal, cooked up by a daydreaming linguist.”
“So you’ve been mocking us from the start?” Edmund Jr. asked.
“I wanted it to be true,” Lord Edmund insisted. “I wanted the evils in the world to be something that could be slain, for there to be a silver sword that could slay them.”
“We were that sword!”
“No, we were not.”
“Only because of what you did. You were Mithril’s founder, but you were also in league with Amalgam,” said Edmund Jr., accusing his father. “You disappeared just before their all-out attack, as if you’d known about it beforehand. I figured out the codes you were using—stock prices from companies in your holding—along with numbers written in obscure trade journals, converted through a unique algorithm to be used as a public key on the network.”
It was a simple yet powerful method of encoding, especially when used in tandem with modern communications methods. Those who analyzed things through a lens of modern technology would be inclined to overlook such outdated means, just as the methods which spies in their fifties might catch on to were frequently missed by modern spy organizations.
“Those stock prices were merely my personal encryption key,” Lord Edmund told his son. “But I’m impressed you figured it out.”
“The trade journals you left in your office were my clue. When you looked at each edition from above, there was a gap in the same area, a sign that you’d held each one open on that same set of pages,” Edmund Jr. explained. “Once I realized that, it took me close to six months to track you down because I was trying to stay anonymous while I looked into it.”
“Then you found me and came to have a showdown?” Lord Edmund surmised.
“There’s always an order to these things.”
“That’s the kind of thing I expect you to say.”
“But I still don’t understand,” Edmund Jr. insisted. “Why did you do it? You didn’t start the organization for fun. Did you simply tire of Mithril and cast it aside?”
“Certainly not,” Lord Edmund said, his tone one of self-recrimination. “Mithril is too vast to be a mere child’s plaything.”
“Then tell me. Your behavior... It’s not like you at all. You worked with the enemy, abandoned the organization you founded, and became a hermit all the way out here in the country,” said Edmund Jr. “It would be easy to blame you, but I don’t understand. Why?” It was as if he was accusing his father of cheating on his mother.