Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (23 page)

Hradek

London

12PM

“This will mean an end to hope.”

He could feel night at the edges of noon. Alex Raines stood at the window of his London office, and flung the Sanderson toile drapes wide to let sunlight scour the room.

The onrushing radiance set his white suit aglow. He reveled in the light; soaked in it; drank it in as if it were a featherlight, intoxicating nectar. Or, better yet, a kind of nourishment. Raines savored the sunlight like the heavy aromas of the Italian cuisine he relished preparing personally, meticulously, lingering for hours in the kitchen of one of his homes. Steam from risotto, just after you poured the seasoned broth over the rice. Freshly baked ziti drowned in virgin tomato sauce. He wet his lips.

His entire adult life he’d been thrust into the role of the connoisseur.

Raines stood in the very center of the window, the streaming light turning his pale linen suit to pure gold. He touched his long fingers to the glass. London at noon in the early spring was deliciously luxuriant. Raines counted it one of his life’s greatest blessings that he was able to see the joy in his life, more specifically, in this particular day, with such completeness and overpowering depth. In his forty-five years he’d met no one capable as he was of savoring the daily slices, the tartness, of reality. Perhaps he alone among men looked down on the London of this particular moment and
tasted it
, tasted it as sure as if it were a dessert of zabaglione, made with a touch of Marsala wine from his own vineyard. Delectable. He considered bowing his head briefly and offering thanks for the clarity granted him, but his chosen deity had never required that particular obeisance.

And the moment was passing. Already the sun overhead was sliding on toward a twilight that waited like a patient leviathan under the waves to the west. Raines could feel the day dying, and he relished that, too. Below him spread Hyde Park, and beyond that the Royal House at Kensington Gardens. The long, narrow lake they called the Serpentine shimmered like a giant tear between the two. His office was almost too far up to see the people milling about. The parks below teemed with Londoners on their lunch break; sojourners, tourists, quite possibly the odd provincial visitor come to explore the city. Blissfully unaware. Not a one of them could feel the darkness coming. He closed his eyes and gasped gently at the pressure of the subtle juggernaut, the utter blackness bearing down above the illusion of a blue sky. He looked up, and saw the marred blueness, heard the distant, tenebrous unraveling. The edges of the day were tattering into night.

Behind him, slightly to the left and just beyond the reach of the light, Miklos Nasim stood with his hands folded across the knifelike pleats of his impeccable grey suit. Miklos was a tall man, but nothing about his posture or build seemed to suggest height. He was all angles, from the abrupt vee of his eyebrows to the lines down along his cheekbones, pitted slightly by sun and a frantically adventurous youth, to the precise jut of his frown. Long, lank, colorless hair fell past his collar.

Motionless, he surveyed the room, letting his awareness sift past the expensive art and lavish decor. He noted the bulletproof Lexan glass, the stance and posture of the man before him who so arrogantly leaned back on his heels in the light. Miklos noted the various bulges in the suit of a third man, an enormous, powerful Chinese, also dressed with improbable fashion, who sat typing at a computer terminal a few meters away, and knew instinctively what weapons the larger man had secreted on his person.

Bah. Armed or not, Miklos had no patience for accountants.

His gaze returned to bore at a spot between the shoulder blades of Raines as the other man motioned to him, never turning from the window. “Look, Miklos, and remember it while we still have the chance,” Raines said.

“You put that in an interesting way, ‘an end to hope,’” Miklos said. He shifted his head, as if looking out the window, but kept his focus on the older man. He was able to meet Raines’ gaze as he turned.

“What would
you
call our wondrous project? We are about to purify the entire human race–at least, that portion which believes itself capable of coherent thought–through despair.” He motioned with his thin, spidery fingers at the city beyond the glass. “And tomorrow, by the time these people wake up from the shock to realize that their lives are over, we’ll be ready to begin the Cuba phase.”

Miklos raised an eyebrow. The phase of the project that would be fulfilled in the Carribean had bothered him from the beginning. The overall goal was clear: destroy and humiliate as many world leaders as possible; after the operation in London, they’d unmake the symbolic heart of what was fast being seen as a succeeding democracy. Their allies, however— “You know my people report that Armand Lopez is unreliable. Probably unstable in the extreme. His vendetta against the Cuban president has led him to commit tactical errors in the past—”

Nothing could spoil Raines’ appreciation of the bright afternoon. “But can’t you appreciate the irony before us, Miklos? Laundering the profits Lopez funnels toward us from his sales of illegal narcotics in the United States and Western Europe helped us construct this building and its counterpart on Rockwell Island. Or do you simply dislike the fact that Armand’s money bought your freedom from the Albanian authorities?”

It was true; Miklos would still be awaiting execution if not for the bribes cast on his behalf. “Caution is all I advocate, sir,” he said, deferring to the older man. “Lopez is a psychotic.”

Raines smiled, disquietingly. “Exactly what we need.

“And everything else is ready. The actors,” he made a face, “are rehearsing in the studio below. We’ll actually use the apparatus itself to broadcast our message tonight, shortly before you return the princess. If you have any further preparations, I suggest you see to them.”

He knew a dismissal when he heard one. Miklos nodded curtly and stepped out of the room.

As the door shut, Raines’ assistant cleared his throat. “Sir, I have an item requiring your attention.” The giant Asian in the pinstriped suit nodded at the screen before him. “Regarding the copy of the Hradek file. The network at MIT was wiped, but we believe a copy was forwarded to someone in California.”

Raines steepled his fingers. The project was too far along now to be checked. Still . . . A copy of Hradek, the complete files on his apparatus, not to mention the blueprints of the office building in which he now sat? Discovered? Probably by some idiot at the plant in Czech–but then why send the file to MIT? And California? Odd.

“We still have angels in California. Have them do whatever is necessary. Stay on top of this, Michael.”

The Asian called Michael busied himself at the keyboard.

Raines turned back to the sunlight. Whoever had unearthed the Hradek file, odds were they had no idea what they’d stumbled across, and even less likelihood they’d be able to alert anyone who could do anything about it.

The project was too far along now, too perfect. Nearly done.

*

Miklos swore quietly to himself as he spiraled down through the darkened stairways and halls. The project was flawed, faulty, and much too reliant upon unstable elements–unstable
fools
. There, he’d thought it as loudly as he dared. Sometimes he swore Raines could read his mind.

Alex Raines was a genius: that much he’d seen from examining the machine in the basement and on the roof, but the man’s quiet, unnerving faith in the overall project struck Miklos as empty and arrogant as belief in the absentee Christian god. Yet Alex Raines and Miklos Nasim were not markedly different. Of Serbian descent, Raines could conceivably be connected somehow to Miklos’s own noble Albanian ancestry.

The man intrigued Miklos. Nothing in the whole of his experience could have prepared him for someone like Raines, not even the years of abbreviated childhood he’d spent behind the Iron Curtain. Miklos had been one of a handful of Albanian children deemed worthy of special training, selected by local KGB officers to attend a school located not far from the main headquarters at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. There they were painstakingly trained in the arts of covert war, destined by the State to return to their homeland and impart their knowledge and leadership to others. Miklos excelled, pummeling himself toward perfection. He’d begun the preparations for his first assignment with an inkling of awe, a certainty of his destiny. It was a great thing to make a difference in the world.

Then one day, a Wall fell down.

Before they cast him aside, the Soviets taught Miklos that most of his fellow human beings were inherently weak-willed, led as easily as sheep when the right amount of pressure was brought to bear in the form of a bomb or a bullet. Terror was nothing more than a goad. Mankind exists to be controlled through fear, to be compelled and coerced toward a realization that ultimately, there was nothing else. Nothing. Even the so-called “holy books” named fear of God as the greatest motivation.

There was nothing as pure. Nothing but fear, and the man who controlled the fear eventually controlled everything. History had already proven Miklos right.

Occasionally, of course, the sheep would rally around a person or an idea which, by its novelty, would captivate them and lull them into forgetting their reverence for terror. This anomaly in the true order of things had many names–love, brotherhood, joy, esteem, faith . . . useless, worthless concepts, made up out of scrabbling desperation in the face of the truth. The people needed someone to remove these distractions–gently or not--to cleanse their lives of examples of such empty ideas, and thereby lead them along the path toward humble subservience. Individual self-realization was an illusion, a distraction, a paper grail. To feel alive, men and women needed fear. Only then could they order themselves according to their individual paranoias, and realize their potential.

For more than twenty years Miklos had considered himself something of a dark shepherd, ranging over the fields of the earth, tending to the flocks of whatever lord and master could meet his price. Bombings in major population centers, gradual poisoning of water supplies, explosions aboard airliners in flight, carefully orchestrated mishaps involving biohazardous materials. His resume was his contribution to mankind.

The Soviet inculcation had wedged another truth into Miklos’s psyche: Westerners were utterly unpredictable, completely without culture, and pitiably mad in the pursuit of their mass delusions. If there were any truer evidence of this fact, it surrounded him now. The Illuminatus Tower, as Raines had christened his new building, was a monstrosity.

Who in their right mind would mix Georgian and medieval architecture, then gild it over with the mirror-and-steel-facade common to office buildings worldwide?

Who but a genius or madman could envision and then create the nightmare machine hardwired into its walls? Miklos stepped lightly through the dark halls.

Raines stood at the window and pulled at the corners of his pale linen suit. “History will call this terrorism,” he said.

“What was that, Mr. Raines?” The massive Chinese looked up from his desk.

“The systematic use of terror, violence, or intimidation to achieve an end. Not very poetic, is it? That is to say, for the glorious ends we will accomplish tomorrow, eh, Michael?”

The other man’s broad Asian face creased with a grin as he resumed typing.

Just then there was a rapping knock from the door. Another man, coiffed and dressed as impeccably as the other two, entered. Raines smiled. “Yes, Chomriel?”

“It’s our young guest, Mr. Raines. She’s taken to crying again.”

The thin man in the pale suit turned back to the window. The clouds had begun to crowd back in over the city. London was already wrapping itself in shadows as thick as cobweb. Below him, to the south, lay the Thames and an unsuspecting Buckingham Palace. “Let her cry, my son. Such a cleansing sound, wouldn’t you say? Enjoy it while it lasts.” He smiled at the reflection of himself. “I’ll show them terror.”

Raines turned his consideration fully back to the unusually bright London day, the radiance pooling in shimmering lakes on the rooftops and burnished byways below, the brilliantly blue sky splashed with sunlight. He devoured it whole.

Lessons in Flight

Paris

11AM

The second pay phone downstairs at Vincenzo’s was fairly safe; it used a randomized algorithm to encode messages over a power line that fed directly into the central switch, a few blocks away, where it was re-encoded as pieces of a random MP3 from the Beatles catalogue. A second, hard-to-notice program “followed” the MP3 down the line; only a phone with a SIM chip incorporating a special hardware key could decode the original message. It was entirely original, and it was entirely Alonzo’s idea, and he was completely proud of it every time he used Vincenzo’s phone. Too bad the French government was catching up with the technology; in a few years he’d have to think of another way for Vincenzo to get free phone calls to his uncle at the Vatican.

“The Eurostar, right. Repeat the time.” Alonzo paused for the response, then added, “No, ‘Stefanovich’. Pull whatever you can find and dump soft copies onto everyone’s pda.” He sighed. “No, I’ll comp you for the train tickets, just like before. SOP applies. Nothing’s changed.”

Nothing’s changed. As he hung up the phone, Alonzo spotted Jack walking slowly out the restaurant’s side door, making way for a middle-aged couple headed in. Alonzo glanced once at the stairs, and wondered about the woman. The major could take care of herself—frankly, he admitted, they’d be better off without an outsider once they really started to move, if Jack’s little club still functioned the same.

And that hinged on the man himself, which is why curiosity pushed Alonzo himself out the door and into the Parisian foot traffic.

He kept his distance as Jack wandered, staying across the street, taking care to always fall in step with anyone around him—a myriad of tricks to mute his presence. Jack kept his head down, hunched a bit, stiffer than he’d remembered—stiffer than he’d moved after any of his injuries, that’s for sure.

Victoria would know what to do for Jack now. She could’ve figured it out. Jack always liked women smarter than he was, and he had loved Victoria. There were ways to engage him, focus his mind and his abilities by distracting him at opportune moments, but for the life of him, Alonzo didn’t know what magical buttons to push that would snap Jack back into himself. The group needed him, not this somber, un-Jack little old man with a furrowed brow.

Alonzo trailed, wondering if Jack could follow his own orders and lose a shadow. Jack slowly entered a WH Smith’s, and vanished in the fiction aisles. Alonzo felt the smile on his face grow as he strode back and forth through the store. None of the clerks had even seen the American enter.

The major was already gone from Vincenzo’s. Alonzo wondered if Jack paid the bill before slipping out, or if they’d stiffed the major. That thought entertained him all the way across town, until he arrived back at Jack’s apartment.

Jack was on the balcony, moving quickly in the wind that blew ahead of the storm. It was close to T’ai Chi Chuan, or looked similar, but Alonzo figured the stretching-striking-flexing exercise was something Jack had cobbled together himself, drawn from any number of martial arts. He breathed deeply as he moved, and Alonzo knew better than to interrupt. Jack believed that stuff was good for the soul. He found a phone and checked up on everyone’s progress.

Jack snatched a towel off the back of a chair near the balcony door. “How the hell do you keep getting in here?” He watched Alonzo as he mopped his face and torso. If Alonzo read his expression right, it was almost a joke.

He covered the phone’s receiver. “Get a shower and some deodorant, or have you lived long enough in Paris to evolve beyond that kind of thing?” He ducked the thrown towel as the other man left the room.

*

When Jack returned ten minutes later, Alonzo had collected enough info for a rough readiness report. “The thing that worries me is the connection between Espinosa and whatever is going on with William’s daughter.”

Jack shook his head. “We’ll have to let London play out first, before we can focus on Cuba. Don’t you have the Tanner twins down there right now, training up the new Cuban army?”

Alonzo grinned. “You
are
paying attention. Vern and Mack had a whole platoon at Herefordshire up until last week, training with the SAS; that would have been some welcome help.”

“But when does timing work out in our favor?” Jack perched on the sofa opposite. “You’re eating again?”

The smaller man glanced down at a plate of eggs on the low table between them, next to his glass of Foster’s and the crystal bird—it was some kind of predator, a hawk or a falcon. “We’ve got a good three hours. You ever eat the food on the Eurostar?”

Jack yawned and stretched, relaxing a shade. He stared for a long moment out through the open balcony doors over Alonzo’s head, at clouds already beginning to glow with the coming night.

His friend certainly looked better, more himself than he had a few hours ago. The dark hardness under his eyes had nearly vanished, and Jack had steadily become more expressive, more voluble while he’d worked. It was only a matter of time, Alonzo was certain, until Jack would be . . . Jack again.

There was still a lingering wistfulness about him that defied release. What would Victoria have done to break the spell? Sitting there in what had been her home, the answer came to Alonzo in a rush, almost as if she’d whispered in his ear.
Get Jack to tell a story. Get him to use that fat brain.

On the cushion next to Jack, taken from one of the shelves above his head, lay a framed picture of Victoria. Taken–what? Almost a week after she learned to waterski. It wasn’t that good a picture. For instance, the lighting was way too bright, she was slightly out of focus and not even centered properly, and she’d just gone across a wake, scattering up a rainbow. She was gorgeous, her already dusky skin burnished nearly into chocolate by the summer sun. The femininity of Irish women in general had always been more apparent to Alonzo in their overt intelligence, attitudes, and sensibility, rather than in their physical appearance. Meeting Victoria, more pointedly, meeting Victoria in her bathing suit, had caused him to rapidly rethink that philosophy. He remembered then that the picture had been taken just before she’d lost a ski and fell, and how mock-mad she’d been when she thought her undignified wreck had been caught on camera. Alonzo smiled at the thought. He’d taken the picture himself, from the deck of his parents’ boat.

He allowed his eyes to drop to Jack, who suddenly furrowed his brow in thought. The movement only added to his expression of melancholy.

Alonzo leaned forward, plucking up the wrought-crystal bird from the coffee table. Jack’s gaze shifted downward slightly and he raised his eyebrows. The smaller man met his gaze.

“I miss her, too,” he said softly.

Jack nodded, his frown reversing itself gradually into a smile. He looked briefly again at the picture in the golden frame, then stood and returned it to the shelf. “She sure got dark fast that summer.”

“Well, she might have been Irish, but she grew up in Asia. She was used to a lot of sun.”

“Yeah. Toria had a head start in just about everything.”

Alonzo emptied his glass. “You always did date the ones that could tan,” he said around a mouthful of food. He lifted the crystal bird. “When’d she give this to you?”

Jack looked down over his shoulder. “What? Oh, the falcon? Toria didn’t give it to me.”

Alonzo took a closer look at the crystal. It really wasn’t carved that well. Although a special care had been taken with the details of the eyes and wings, overall the piece was substandard. “Who, then?”

“Remember that girl, when we were seventeen, and you’d just gotten back--”

“Back from Australia, yeah, I remember. Oh, that’s right! What was her name?”

Jack sat and reached for the falcon. “Mercedes.”

“Yeah. Hey, you got anymore Foster’s?”

“In the fridge, behind the fruit cake-thing your mom sent me last Christmas.” Jack studied the crystal as Alonzo stood. Flashes of coruscant light played across his face, refracted from deep within the translucent falcon. “She was really amazing.”

Alonzo raised his head from the refrigerator in order to yell back. “Sheeze, Jack, my mom’s still alive, you know.” He took a bottle of springwater for Jack and a thick can of Foster’s for himself, then reentered the library. “Bad luck to speak of the living in the past tense, man.”

Jack snagged the bottle thrown at him. “Not your mom, you moron. Mercedes.”

Ensconced once again in the sofa’s cushions, the smaller man popped the tab on the can of beer. “That’s right. She was—Diane Bergstrom’s cousin, or something. You really had it going on that summer, amigo. State Champs coming up, you were finishing that chemistry assignment for Mrs. Riley for fall semester, working on your tan guarding pool honeys all day, then, wham, in walks this chick.”

“In walks Mercedes.”

Alonzo poured some beer into a glass, then drank straight from the can. “So what ever happened to her?”

Jack took a long pull on the water bottle. “I never told you the whole story, did I? ‘Bout how she showed up at the pool at four in the morning, and all that.”

Alonzo blinked. “Four o’clock? No way! What, when you were doing one of those crazy workouts under the spotlight? Why’d she come to the pool at four?”

“Couldn’t sleep, I guess. This was the day after she ran into Kyle.”

He sniffed again. “Dremel. That guy. So what happened?”

Jack set down his water and the crystal, so as to have his hands free. His hands are half the story, Alonzo thought, but he kept his mouth shut. It had been months since he’d seen Jack this animated. His friend leaned forward as he spoke, grinning unselfconsciously. Points of green and blue light gathering in the falcon found his face, and Jack paused, an expression somewhere between guilt and amusement rippling out of the silent, dark waters that made an island of his soul.

“First off, I about break my leg when I see her . . .”

*

Forge

5AM

He felt like an idiot, but he offered his hand anyway. “My name’s Jack.”

“Mine’s Mercedes. Nice to meet you Jack.” She had a firm, no, a
hard
grip; almost like she was trying to cement him to her. Her hand was calloused from much use.
What is she, some kind of spot welder?
Jack thought. No, not this girl. Couldn’t be.

He’d simply never seen anyone as beautiful as—what was her name, again?

“Mercedes,” he said agreeably, taking a step forward. Without warning, Jack went down hard, landing with a grunt on the concrete deck. Grimacing, he noted that his foot had become tangled in the black, ropy cords of the electronic time clock.
Brilliant
, he thought.
Yeah, Jack, this is a great impression.

He untwined himself, stealing glances at the girl, who was trying valiantly to hide her laughter (and almost succeeding, he noted ruefully) behind a feigned cough. She was wearing an old denim jacket over white shorts and pink t-shirt. “How’d you get in here?” he pressed.

“You left the door open. Hey, you’re bleeding a little.” She pointed.

Jack looked down at his knee. Sure enough. It wasn’t much of a wound; merely an abrasion, and the chlorine and other pool chemicals would probably be antiseptic enough, but you never could tell. He kept his eyes firmly on the blond girl as he walked over to the shower and yanked the chain. “Not a mass-murderer or anything, are you?” he asked as he rinsed his stinging knee. “Come in here to, um, add another felony to your list of crimes, maybe strangle me?”

Her reply was quick. “I think you’re doing a good enough job of that on your own.”

Now it was Jack’s turn to laugh. He slipped a pair of cotton shorts on over his suit.

Mercedes continued. “My grandparents–do you know the Adams’?–live a couple blocks away, and I couldn’t sleep.”

He was incredulous. “Couldn’t sleep–what, in Greater Metropolitan Forge? Holy cow, Mercedes, that’s a first.” He sat, crosslegged, on the lower diving board. Watching her talk, Jack surprised himself by wondering if her mind was as flawless as the rest of her. Careful, buddy, he told himself. She was perfect for him at that moment. No nicks or chips marred his perception of her, which was only a few minutes old. Well, that wasn’t exactly true.

“I saw you at the pool yesterday afternoon. All those kids were with you?” She nodded. “Any of them yours?” She looked confused, so he added, “I mean, do you have any kids?” Now, why had he asked
that?

He got another laugh in response, and she joined him on the board. “Are you kidding?”

Mentally, he backpedaled fast. What was wrong with him? He found himself almost wishing she’d go away, just vanish back into the soft summer night she’d conjured herself out of, or something.

On some deep level, Jack realized the longer they spoke the more he could very well be getting himself into, well, what?

She was saying something, something about walking to the pool . . .and Jack suddenly wondered what it would be like to sketch her face. If he had a good piece of charcoal and a little bit better lighting, he could probably capture her wide brow and straight nose. The full, sleek lips and strong jaw might be a bit hard for him, but he didn’t doubt he could do it, given a little time. She’s Italian, he thought abruptly, surprised at the flash of insight, despite her Nordic hair and body type. If he only had a pad of paper and a good pencil–