There was a mark on his wrist, a tattoo. A very distinct tattoo!
I was no stranger to them. Point of fact, I had one of my own, acquired on one of my travels. But this one had specific significance.
It was a tattoo of a black hand, the anarchist’s symbol that I had seen on that banner in Budapest, a tattoo that Soropkin supposedly also had as well as those loyal to him!
“Get out of my way!” Salisbury demanded.
“Sir, you must remain here!” Alex repeated.
The blow caught Alex by surprise. It was a glancing blow to the face, momentarily surprising him.
“Stop him!” I told the officer who had accompanied us. “He’s not the Prime Minister, he’s an impostor!” And a very dangerous one.
The officer was slow to react, or possibly didn’t believe what I was saying. Lord Salisbury, or the man who wanted us to believe he was Salisbury, would have bolted out the door if I hadn’t caught him by the back of his coat.
I had the advantage of height. He had the advantage of greater weight as he turned with a revolver in his hand.
I struck it away, landed the blow to his left cheek, then swept his feet out from under him.
He landed hard, then scrambled to retriever the revolver. However, I was able to reach it first.
The “Prime Minister” pushed to his feet on a flood of curses and would have escaped if Alex hadn’t grabbed him by the front of his coat.
He glared back at me through the swollen eye above his cheek that bled profusely.
I stared at the damage, not the same sort as the blow I had given Brodie, barely a bruise that had already faded.
This was different and quite ghastly as blood seeped from a hair-thin scar that had barely healed and had ruptured open, a flap of skin sagging away from his cheek. Grafted skin peeling away.
Mr. Brimley had spoken of the possibility of such a surgery during our visit with young Ethan after reading Dr. Bennett’s notes, and that ancient Coptic text that Sir Reginald had translated. Procedures over three thousand years old practiced by the Egyptians that Dr. Bennett had lectured on and was then censured for. A new face in place of the old one.
In Ethan’s case to restore a young boy’s features after he had been horribly burned.
What was I staring at now? An entirely new face to hide one’s identity?
“Good heavens!” Alex said, equally stunned. “You needn’t have struck so hard.”
“I didn’t,” I assured him, then introduced him.
“Meet Dimitri Soropkin.”
Alex looked at me as if I might have taken several steps away from sanity.
“You don’t mean…”
“At the inside of his right wrist you will find a tattoo of a black hand. It is the mark of the anarchist and those who follow him.”
“Hold him!” Alex ordered the officer. “Do not let him escape.”
“He said that you were quite extraordinary,” the man I was now certain was Soropkin said in a scathing tone.
“A woman!” he spat out as the officer produced manacles and snapped them shut about his wrists.
“Intelligent, fearless, someone who understood the injustices that are all around us. He believed that he could persuade you to join us.”
By that, I assumed that he meant Redstone.
His English was almost perfect, just as that face that Dr. Bennett had given him was almost perfect. But not quite.
