Cerdic watched Jakie leave, congratulating himself on having handled the boy perfectly. Jakie had expected much worse. Now he would be even more cautious on the job, and feel an even deeper need to keep doing his best to please the man who held his fate in his hands.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, when Jakie’s screw-up would have earned him a beating. But in these modern times Cerdic had learned to temper the impulse to administer a severe thrashing when a boy blew a job, or came close to it. The authorities in this day and age took a dim view of corporal punishment unless they were the ones administering it. And, since he had civilians working with Jakie and the others, to wit Mr. Shadrick, their tutor, he couldn’t take the chance that one of them would decide to report any suspicious bruising to some agency such as Child Services.
He’d often thought that was part of the reason it was so easy these days to corrupt the populace in general. They needed outlets for their innate viciousness and depravity. Outlets that were being kept from them by governments and religious organizations who felt it was their duty to legislate morality.
At least he, and others like him, were doing their parts to bring down those entities and thus, in the end, humanity itself. His only regret was that it was taking so long, thousands upon thousands of years. If it weren’t for the do-gooder Caomhnóir who were trying to redeem themselves by working for the very superiors they should despise… He shook his head. That mystified him and always would. But, he figured, that was the way of the world.
For now, he had to do something interesting with the information he’d gotten from the wallet Jakie had lifted and that in the folder Manny had so conveniently found in a foreign dignitary’s hotel room. Crossing to his rack of music, he thumbed through the CDs, finally settling on Iced Earth’s ‘The Crucible of Man’. That should put him in the proper mood.
Smiling, he set to work.
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