Marjorie’s voice floated up loud and clear. “Tommy and Philippa are hidden inside their paintings, and Adrian is ready with lengths of rope.”
“Understood and standing by,” Stephen answered. “Ring thrice if you need assistance.”
He placed his unobstructed eye on the spy tube leading to the dungeon. They couldn’t see up here, but he could see down there—sort of. This was the longest series of mirrored telescoping tubes he’d ever connected. The dim torchlight in the dungeon was not ideal, and the spy tubes could not change angle or pivot, but Stephen could still make out two of his machines next to three open cells.
The untrained eye would notknowthat these were machines, however. The shadowy contraptions looked like nothing more than unnecessarily elaborate wooden frames for two eerily life-size portraits, one of an elderly man and the other of an elderly woman.
Marjorie and Adrian were out of sight, but Stephen had no doubt that they—
A bugle sounded from the front lines.
Stephen jerked back from the spy tube and leapt across the turret to the front-facing window.
Reddington and his well-armed eight still stood below, but they were not watching the front door. Their gazes were fixed high up on the castle walls. As Stephen watched, a projectile appeared from far above the soldiers’ heads and splattered on the grass before them.
A tomato, courtesy of Graham Wynchester.
Reddington’s face ruddied, and he pointed his sword up at the side of the castle. “You have daggers, men. Get him!”
Stephen lowered his eye to the castle-facing spy tube as eight knives soared toward the castle.
None struck their target.
Graham nimbly spidered along the gray stone exterior, pausingonly to hurl rocks from the bulging leather satchel draped across his chest.
Stephen returned his gaze to the front-facing tube.
“Yowch!” One of the untapped soldiers in the audience rubbed his shoulder with a vexed expression.
“I said,get him,” Reddington bellowed.
Six of the eight foot soldiers took off in hot pursuit, throwing daggers at impossible-to-catch Graham as they chased him around the side of the castle to the rear.
It was all Stephen could do not to cackle in anticipation of the surprise to come.
The soldiers drew to a stop several yards short of the trapdoor. Stephen tugged a cord that led to a bell in the murder room. This was Elizabeth’s sign that her skill as a mimic was required posthaste.
He could not see into the murder room or hear the words she spoke, but according to contingency plan eight, she was calling out, “Over here, men!” in Reddington’s voice.
Her trick worked, as the soldiers took off running to obey.
The moment the soldiers crossed the trapdoor, Stephen flipped the lever.
Howls of surprise rang out as the men’s feet found empty air and they fell twelve feet to the hard stone floor below.
After resealing the trapdoor, Stephen ducked his eye from the exterior telescope to the interior dungeon spy tube.
The soldiers had landed on the stone floor in a graceless, inglorious heap. That made six fallen soldiers versus four waiting Wynchesters—an uneven pairing, if not in the way the soldiers imagined as they scrambled to their feet.
To them, only Marjorie was visible in the darkness, looking tiny and scrawny and pathetically easy to capture.
“A hostage!” shouted one of the soldiers, his voice distant but audible through the whispering wall.
As they advanced obliviously between the dim portraits, the lifelike paintings twitched. Tommy and Philippa stepped out of the canvases with weapons in hand. Silently, they swung large wooden clubs at the backs of the heads of the two closest soldiers.
The men dropped like lead balloons, unconscious.
The other soldiers spun about, goggling at their fallen comrades—and the spectacle of two octogenarians bearing wooden clubs before them.
