Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (38 page)

Major Griffin worked the last of the princess’ shirt material through her fingers. “That’s the third go for the lot of it. She’s clean.”

“And her shoes are regular leather,” said Alonzo. “What kind of a sicko would dress a little girl up in a bomb?”

Jack tipped the pile of detonators into an empty trashcan and fastened its lid. “They wanted to make a statement, probably catch the whole thing on CNN.”

He helped the heir to the British Empire on with her socks. “I don’t get it, though. What about the machine Ian found down below?”

Griffin regarded Ian. “The wires you describe, with the miniature computer chips embedded, sound like some sort of elaborate grounding mechanism. And you said that your phone is nonfunctional?”

Ian nodded. “That’s not all. The tank of goop in the middle of the whole thing, maybe a power source, or whatever–looked like nothing I’ve ever seen. Like it was alive.”

“Some kind of bomb?” Solomon wondered. “Chemical?”

“Maybe as a catalyst for the whole system, but in form it’s electrical,” said Jack. He told them about the power-engorged conduit in the central shaft.

“We can only assume the bloody thing is going to go off,” said the major. The first rule in dealing with a bomb.

Jack thought a moment. “Steve’s all alone up there.” He ran his tongue across his lower lip. “So. We’ll split up. Ian, you think you can remember how to get to the machine from below?”

The stocky man nodded, and Jack handed him his earbud and phone. “You and the major get Christine out of the building first, then try and shut it down, short it out, I don’t care. The three of us will go with you as far as the elevator you used to come up. Solomon, you and Al and I will get to Steve.” To the major, he said, “Do whatever you have to do, but get her Highness back to her family. New clothes as quick as you can manage.”

As if to punctuate his statement, there was a muffled
chuff
from the covered trashcan, and greasy-gray smoke instantly boiled out from under the lid.

Everyone moved.

Like Shining From Shook Foil

Once they reached the elevator, Jack passed the child over to Major Griffin. “Here you go, Christine. I’ll see you later.” The little girl gave him an almost perfunctory peck on the cheek and laid her head against Griffin’s shoulder.

The major squeezed her sleepy burden tightly. “Thank you, Jack.”

“No, thank you, major. I feel,” he traced a line across Christine’s cheek. “This feels
good
.”

Jack moved for the stairs. “Come on.”

Alonzo had to sprint to keep up. “Here we go,” he muttered.

The footprints on the floor lacked any semblance of symmetry. A lunatic’s checkerboard in grime and dust.

They’d just reached the top floor when the first tremor butted up through the building. It was a minor jar; not much more than a whisper, but it made Alonzo’s blood run cold all the same. There was something odd about the way the building’s walls and floor trembled. Something not right. Jack paused also, and Solomon ducked his head as if he thought the roof might fail, squinting against the fine dust that trickled from the exposed beams.

Around them, from at least two directions, echoed brief, surprised murmurs. The three companions remained motionless in the shadows of a half-formed room as a group of three men walked by, not daring to breathe. Each of the pale, suited figures carried an automatic weapon and scanned about themselves as they patrolled, but too sloppily in Alonzo’s opinion. They’d been startled as well by the sudden, curious quake. Uneasiness showed in each face as the men made hasty, perfunctory sweeps of unlit spaces grown opaque in the falling dust.

When they had passed, Solomon placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder and whispered. “If you were Steve and this place was full of unfriendlies, where would you hide away?”

They found him huddled under a mound of pink insulation near the access to the roof, the light from his computer screen doubly shielded under a plastic bag. True to their guess, Steve had spliced into a communications panel and was attempting to phreak a call for help.

“None of this works anymore,” he wheezed, jabbing at the cluster of splayed wires. “Everything’s down. No dial tone, nothing. Raines had a state-of-the-art system up here, maybe as good as the array the NSA’s got set up in Alice Springs, but now it’s just so much platinum wire.” A vein bulged across Steve’s temple. “Some of it works, but I can’t figure out how.”

Behind them, in the direction of the makeshift helicopter hanger, something crashed to the floor. “Sounds like someone dropped the silverware,” Alonzo said. No one laughed.

“Al, can you fly the Sikorsky?” Jack asked.

“I’ve got 400 hours in something similar; yeah, I should think so. You thinking that’s our way out?”

“It may be, if Raines has put together a Tesla machine.”

Steve gave him a blank look.

“The high-density fiber optics and the other stuff you and Brad found in Czech, remember? What would something like that be used for?” Jack continued at a whisper. “Ian found what’s got to be a battery or a charging system down below, when he came in through the sub-basement. In the middle of the main elevator shaft there’s a solid conduit, like an optic line, or--”

“Like one long lens!” Ian clicked open another program on his computer. “Well, not really a lens, but a solid-state magnification system.”

“What?” Alonzo squinted at the screen, at the blueprints for the Illuminatus Tower.

“Raines built a maser, Al.”

“And he’s used this building, with its steel superstructure--”

“–and the network of diamond fiber optics wired into every major support structure,” Solomon added.

“To build one big-ass weapon.” Alonzo finished.

Jack licked his lips, eyes narrowing. “What about a power source? Steve, do you still have the city blueprints you downloaded back in the train?”

“Right here.” Steve clicked twice more, opening a screen superimposed by the title Greater Metropolitan London Power Grid.

Jack frowned at the schematic. “I don’t know how to read this.” It resembled nothing so much as a road map of freeway interchanges, though with hundreds of alternating junctions and over-and-under crossroads, all in different colors. Steve zoomed in on a particular section.

He pointed at several intersecting stripes. “These all come together underground at Oxford Street. Not much runs under Hyde Park, so the major lines lie right under this building. Raines could have tapped into—well,
all
of them if he wanted.”

“Can we shut it down?” Jack nodded to Alonzo, who started dialing on his phone.

Steve pursed his lips. “If I were building this, I’d set up failsafes with the electric company–the substations here,” he gestured, “and here. That’s where I’d control the flow of electricity from, if something went wrong when I needed power. Raines could be carrying a remote-control device. Oh, and there should be a final switch at the point of delivery.” He looked momentarily bewildered. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this. An entire building as a weapon? Something so big can’t really exist, can it?”

Alonzo cleared his throat. “My phone’s gone out.”

Lightning played somewhere above them, refracted oddly through the nooks and crannies and billowing, snapping plastic sheets, casting each man in a liquid blue, speckling light. It continued for several seconds, eerily silent, peculiarly luminous, turning the walls into shimmering, blue fields of dark-bright-dark, like arctic light off turbulent, chaotic waters.

“Solomon and I will get up to the transmitter: maybe we can figure out a way to shut this contraption down from there. Al, you and Steve see what you can do about securing the—” Another tremor shuddered up through the floor. “Helicopter.”

*

“Stand your weapons down, men, stand them down.” The D-11 commander raised his own hands to show that they were empty as he backed into the street. Behind him, eight other policemen lowered their weapons. “Here now,” said the commander. “You’ve got what you want, now take the car and go.”

The bearded man in the gray suit stepped guardedly onto the loading dock platform, his four companions immediately behind, equally deliberate. At this range, the MAC-10's constituted as formidable a weapon as anything the men from D-11 carried, made even more so by the fact that one was directed at the back of a little girl in red, which the lead terrorist prodded before him. The commander winced, as perspiration burned into his left eye. If he could just get the muzzle of that weapon off the back of the little miss’ head—

“We will need two additional guests.” The first terrorist smiled and nodded towards the car. “Perhaps you will volunteer yourself, constable?”

He grimaced inwardly. They’d read the response booklet. “You’ll never make it out of London, mate,” he said. “Hostage attempts are always unsuccessful these days; you must have read that in our tactics book as well.”

The bearded man dropped his smile. “I don’t believe we’ll take you with us, actually.” He raised his machine pistol–

Crack, crack, crack!
The commander dropped to his knees as the snipers on the roof opened fire, dropping the first three men instantly. As the little girl stumbled woozily to the ground, the commander drew his own pistol. “Drop your weapons!” he boomed at the two surviving suited men.

They were professionals, even so they complied, no doubt aware that the three snipers had already acquired new targets. As his men swarmed in to cuff the two terrorists, the commander gently examined the little girl. Activating his collar mike, he said, “Sir, this is Walters at the north entrance. We have a fourth young lady and two survivors in custody. Requesting instructions.”

The same constable who’d nearly throttled him an hour before now merely grunted as he handed Ian two steaming cups of coffee. Most of the policemen had left the crowd to take up positions around the Princess Christine, who stood with her hand in Major Griffin’s. Ian handed the coffee to the major and looked up with them at the face of the Tower. An odd, sort of shimmering light played through the clouds directly over the central tower. It had begun the moment the rain stopped.

“We’re lucky to have gotten out of there alive, is what I’m thinking,” the major said. Ian nodded soberly.

“Sir, we’ve rounded up some equipment for you,” one of the agents from D-11 said to Ian. “Bulletproof vest, a helmet.” A group stood ready to assault the underground portion of Raines’ machine.

He took the helmet. “Thanks. My jacket will be enough.” He zipped up the jacket made of leather and more-than-leather. “Your men are doing a good job of keeping the press back.” So far, no one had gotten close enough to take his picture, or for that matter, get any kind of hard look at the little girl he’d carried off the construction lift.

“That’s according to a direct order from His Majesty, King William, sir.” The burly man swelled with pride as he spoke the name of his monarch. Acting on the king’s business was much more engaging than writing parking tickets, Ian decided.

“Good enough. Let’s get this over with.” He patted Christine’s head and got a sleepy smile in return. “Your Highness, you take good care of the major ‘til we all get back, okay?”

She nodded. “I’m a gargoyle.”

Ian let that one pass, trading looks with Griffin.

The D-11 man cleared his throat. “Right then, let’s be off.”

The sky that greeted Jack and Solomon as they made their way to the roof held a kind of incandescence neither man had seen before. Clouds varying from slate-gray to lustrous pearl roiled in the heavens above and to either side of the Tower, themselves a distortion of the light below. Upward and before them, through the overlapping configuration of beams and posts, the aircraft-warning signal throbbed like an eye of molten steel.

Stray lightning played all around the roof: arc-blue, fiery green, arterial-red, turning the gusting rain into single-minded squadrons of fireflies. Both men watched as a ruby-colored ball of lightning orbited the central tower, spinning wider and wider as it dropped, finally circumnavigating the entire Tower at their level and exploding into a shower of dim sparks.

Solomon cleared his throat, eyes wide. “‘
The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’
” he said plainly.

Jack nodded. “A poem.” There was a mundane explanation, of course. The earth sought equilibrium in all its systems; the tremendous charge building up in the Tower, both on or just below the earth’s surface, would naturally call up an opposite charge gathering as energy in the atmosphere above. Nature simply responded, seeking balance.

A hundred feet from the ladder to the upper platform, Jack and Solomon spotted the figures of the two men at the base of the wall. The two guards were holding their weapons carelessly, trying without success to light cigarettes in the gusting wind. Solomon and Jack crouched low, though their outlines were broken up considerably by the honeycomb of unfinished steel forms and aluminum molding. Jack drew his pistol.

“Wait.” Solomon had to speak in a normal tone of voice to be heard above the wind. He pointed.

Two more figures, wearing rain slickers and hunched against the wind stood sullenly at the top of the ladder, the barrels of their weapons protruding from the wide sleeves of each man’s overcoat. Solomon pulled the elephant gun from his shoulder.

“You can make the shot, in this wind?” said Jack. It felt odd not to be whispering.

Solomon nodded grimly. “I’ll need a few moments to figure angles. Give you time to get close to the fellows at the base of the ladder. I’ll wait.”

The big man had noticed Jack’s replacement pistol was not threaded for a silencer; for surprise to be on their side, the assault needed to be up close. Jack left the “hallway” and headed into the construction, keeping the bulk of ductwork and angling I-beams between himself and the sentries at the ladder. The wind made a warbling, bleating whistle as it gushed about the braces and girders. For all the adrenaline he was beginning to feel the cold again, and moved faster, casting his thoughts ahead to the men at the base of the wall.

The raised section, upon which rose the transmitter with the disk-like apparatus at its peak, extended the width of the building. They’d be right about over the center here, he noted. Right about dead even with the central elevator shaft and the conduit of energy.

Seventy feet from the ladder, Jack abandoned the shadows and stole to the wall. Gun in his hand, he crept closer to the guards, who’d finally managed to work their lighters. Twin points of glowing orange marked the embers of their cigarettes, barely twenty feet away.

Lightning flared again all around them, a ghostly strobe silhouetting everything in a lambent glow. Thunder followed immediately, only it was a flat, sullen sound, as if the raging powers of the storm were being kept at bay, caged. For the first time Jack became aware of a deep hum, suddenly loud in the silence after the thunder.

And they’d seen him. Jack tracked back up the path of a falling cigarette and squeezed off two quick shots, then threw himself forward and to the ground, ducking his head against the chatter of the automatic weapon. He hoped the darkness would provide enough cover to shield him from the 9mm slugs tearing rough holes through the air above his body.