“You never knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Mithril was like my bastard child: a tool to oppose Amalgam, which had gotten too big for me to control, and to bring it new rules,” Lord Edmund clarified. “The rivalry between good and evil, order and chaos... The balance of overwhelming power that’s continued uninterrupted since the days of myth.”
“Too big for you to control?”
“My son, you still don’t know anything about Amalgam,” Lord Edmund rebuked him gently. “Its origins, or the ideals it originally held.”
“Ideals? What nonsense are you—” Just then, blood began to spurt from Edmund Jr.’s gun hand. At first, he thought he’d lost the hand entirely. Against his will, his right arm had jerked, and the pistol had spun away, hit the wall, and fallen. He thought the gun had exploded, that the bullets loaded into the grip had magically burst on their own...
In fact, someone had shot him through the window.
Who did it? he wondered, as other questions began to form in his mind, which was going hazy with pain. When did they arrive, and how did they know I’d be here? First, he stumbled away from the window to check the status of his hand. His entire arm was in blinding pain as if it had been blown off from the elbow, but in fact, his fingers mostly appeared intact. Only the first joint of his pinkie appeared to have been blown off, and there was a copious amount of blood pumping out of the wounded digit.
Idiot, he thought, mentally castigating himself. Why did you let your guard down? Immediately, Edmund Jr. abandoned his rage for his aged father. Cursing his foolishness for not having noticed the ambush, he reached for his fallen pistol with his uninjured left hand, aware that he didn’t have a spare weapon.
But before he could reach it, a man in black stepped through the door from the kitchen. He kicked the gun away, slamming the stock of his own submachine gun into Edmund Jr.’s head. Sparks raced in front of his eyes as he lost his sense of balance, and his vision went dark.
“Ugh...” When Edmund Jr. next emerged from the mist of semi-consciousness, he was able to make out the other man’s face: it was the commander of the forces who had entered the house. Gray hair on his head and his face, a melancholy air and the chiseled features of a marble statue... He looked somehow older than Lord Edmund, but Edmund Jr. knew that was just an illusion; this man was probably no older than him. He knew him, after all. “Andrey Kalinin...” he groaned.
“Sir Mallory,” Kalinin, the former ground forces commander of the Mithril West Pacific Battle Group, replied. “It’s been a while.” His tone of voice was absent any fragment of goodwill.
It seemed to have been less than a minute since the attack. Edmund Jr. could feel his back soaked with sweat, and he was almost delirious from the pain in his hand. On Kalinin’s orders, the men must have treated his right hand while performing a careful pat-down of his body. At least, he thought, they don’t seem to want to kill me right away...
The elder Mallory had remained sitting in place, but he did seem to be surprised by the raid. He must not have organized it, nor known that it was coming.
Kalinin was the first to speak. “Sir Mallory,” he said succinctly, “I’ve been watching you for two months now. We’ve been looking for your father and thought that tailing you would be the best way to find him.”
“You used me, then?” asked Edmund Jr. “Is it my father you’re after?”
“Yes,” Kalinin answered. When he gestured slightly at his subordinates with his jaw, they quickly picked up on the message and left the room. Once they were all gone, Kalinin went on to say, “Your father has information that we require.”
As if anticipating his next words, the elder Mallory let out a soft groan. “The registry?”
His son looked up questioningly.
“We know you have it, Mr. Mercury,” Kalinin told him bluntly. “There are other things I want to confirm, though, which is why we stopped your son before he killed you.”
Edmund Jr. didn’t know what Kalinin was talking about. No, that wasn’t exactly true—a desire not to know was blocking the recognition from his thoughts. “Registry?” he muttered. “Mr. Mercury? What are you talking about?”
“Amalgam has a ‘manager,’” Kalinin explained. “A unique individual who never gets involved in its policies, but has authority over its procedures. He’s like an arbitrator, watching to make sure nobody breaks rules. That is Mr. Mercury. Until now, nobody knew his true identity.”
“And he’s... my father?” Edmund Jr. stared at the old man, who remained expressionless, staring unresponsively at a point on the wall.
“What about it, Lord Mallory?” Kalinin asked.
Edmund Jr. found his voice breaking, annoyed at his father’s continued silence. His right hand felt like it was on fire. “Answer him, Father!”
After some time, the elder Mallory finally opened his mouth. “The Russian is correct. I am the arbitrator of Amalgam, Mr. Mercury.”
“It can’t be...” his son choked out.
“I always meant to tell you when the time was right,” Lord Edmund admitted. “I thought that once you’d matured sufficiently, you might consider taking over for me.”
Ridiculous! thought Edmund Jr. He didn’t think his fifty-year-old son had ‘matured sufficiently’? And... take over for him? Out loud, he said, “I might be the son of a traitor, but I’m not one myself.” He meant it to sound like a scathing rebuke, but it ended up sounding more like self-reassurance.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” his father protested. “Amalgam wasn’t always the evil organization you people imagine it to be.”
“They’re a terrorist organization starting wars for short-term profits!”
“True, but they weren’t always,” Lord Edmund said firmly. “Amalgam first formed after World War II—the summer of 1948.”
“1948?” Edmund Jr. echoed incredulously. “That long ago?”
“Even we didn’t know that,” Kalinin put in. He sounded almost impressed. “We’d assumed it was an old organization, but nobody knew the precise history, not even the current executives. Many have taken on the names ‘Gold’ or ‘Silver,’ but most of them never knew who their immediate predecessor was.”
“The only information they were ever given was a page number in a textile trade journal, and the method of communicating with others through the numbers printed there,” Kalinin continued. “Whatever you might call them, it was shocking to learn that an organization like that could make decisions and influence policy on a global scale based on that information alone.”
“Not knowing each other’s names or faces... That was the real source of its power,” the elder Mallory said. “It meant nobody could create factions or try to seize power. For instance, during the sixties—the Cuban Missile Crisis—there were three people calling themselves Mr. Gold at the same time. It made it impossible to tell who was who.”
“But it still functioned?” asked Kalinin.
“Yes,” Lord Edmund affirmed. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the Mr. Golds was a man close to Khrushchev, and working to get the missiles removed from Cuba. The rest of the executives agreed with him and worked to secure the situation.”
“Ridiculous,” Edmund Jr. snorted. Any student of modern history knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis: in 1962, the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, effectively holding a gun to America’s head. Of course, the US wasn’t about to take that lying down, and the tensions over who would shoot first began to rise. The situation grew more and more serious, until all-out nuclear war seemed inevitable. All of human civilization had been on the verge of collapse, until bold decisions by leaders in both countries pulled things back from the brink.
His father was saying that Amalgam had seriously influenced First Secretary Khrushchev’s decisions—that, in effect, Amalgam had saved the world.
“You don’t want to believe that your enemy saved the world, I’m sure,” the elder Mallory observed, as if reading his mind. “But—as I’ve said several times before—Amalgam began with ideals. After the fall of Nazi Germany, many feared the nascent US—Soviet Cold War, both in the East and the West. My grandfather, who held a key intelligence office during the war, formed the organization afterwards with a mere four like-minded men. One was an American oil baron, one a Russian scientist, one a former German SS officer, one a Japanese trader... and then there was my grandfather, a real estate giant and cryptologist.”
“Only five...”
“Five brilliant men,” Lord Edmund insisted. “Their beliefs and ideologies differed, but they were united in their desire to provide a future for humanity. Five very different men, bonded together with one ideal as their catalyst: to guide the world from the shadows. And so, they called their curious empire ‘Amalgam.’”
“‘A future for humanity’?” Edmund Jr. scoffed. “Please. The arrogance!”
Following his outburst, Kalinin whispered, “It’s not so different from Mithril. The only slight difference was in the topics they dealt with.”
“Of course, a traitor would say that!” Edmund Jr. said accusingly.