Shadow Knight's Mate Read Online Free PDF

out to be a bad location. The hotel had changed hands several times in the last few years, and was now called The Lamplighter Inn, for no good reason at all. Ithad a spacious lobby that was usually empty, and a comfortable semi-hidden shabbiness. The gift shop was always closed. A large meeting room on the second floor could be used for receptions or speeches, but usually stood empty. Most groups would not book a meeting in this out-of-the way spot.
    The hotel didn’t have the high-tech security of newer hostelries, which was one reason the group had chosen it. The group’s own team had swept the place a day earlier, making sure there were no recording security cameras in the meeting room and no one else’s bugs either.
    Starting in the early afternoon people began arriving, some in cars, some in cabs from the airport, a couple on bicycles. These latter two wore hiking boots and khaki shorts and didn’t bother to change for the meeting that started at five o’clock. They didn’t stand out in their appearance. A handful of men wore suits, some women wore nice dresses, jeans were common, and one couple in their late fifties wore a tuxedo and evening dress. “We have an
important
function after this one,” Alicia Mortenson said, and her husband Craig laughed.
    These people trickled into the spacious meeting room from about four-thirty on. There were two self-service bars at either end of the room and a few uninspired hors d’oeuvres, but no bartenders or other servers. The members were of all ages from late teens up almost to a hundred. They wore no buttons or lapel pins, and there was nothing to identify their common interest. On the hotel’s register this was called a meeting of stockholders of Western Amalgamated, a name chosen to be both uninformative and too boring to provoke curiosity.
    Some greeted each other with nods, others hugged enthusiastically. A man and woman who hadn’t seen each other in three years but kept in near-constant e-mail communication stood side by side, their shoulders touching, and didn’t say a word, just watched the others together and communicated completely by smiles and body language. Two men in their seventies, on the other hand, chattered like jays even though they had had lunch nearly every week for fifty years.
    Jack sidled through the door at about five-thirty, looked over the crowd of several dozen people, and smiled gently. Janice Gentry waved at him from across the room. Janice had been his history professor at Yale and one of his early mentors in this group. She had helped teach him the Real History. She looked more like a retired fashion model than a grandmother and professor. She looked a question at him, glancing at the empty space beside him, and Jack shrugged. Thirty yards away, Professor Gentry laughed as if he’d said something witty.
    Jack edged around the group, seeing people he’d known for years, but he wasn’t yet ready to dive in. He couldn’t stop smiling, though.
    A rotund young man in an expensive suit stopped on his way to the bar, looked Jack up and down and said, “How’s the kiddie porn business?”
    â€œAwesome. Wicked good.”
    The young man looked at the goatee Jack had started growing in Asia, made his mouth small, and said, “It’s so sad to see a chronological adult captured by a teenage fad. Or more pathetic yet for a grown man to want to appear to have the intellectual capacity of a baseball player.”
    Jack took out his baseball cap, the one with the company logo on it, and put it on backwards.
    They both burst out laughing.
    â€œHi, Jack.” “Hey, Ronald.” Ronald hugged him one-armed, holding his drink glass out to the side. “I’m headed to a convention in Vegas after this,” Jack explained his appearance. “Got to appear. There was a rumor I was going to be named Gamer of the Year this year, but at the last minute a bloc of east coast