The three bedrooms upstairs are all off a narrow, carpeted hallway. The carpet has short fibers but is surprisingly springy, feels soft against my bare feet.
The night and house are quiet. Everyone is supposed to be sleeping. The only steady sound is the wind brushing up against the house. Trees rustle at random intervals. Even less frequent is the sound of a hovercar driving overhead.
Puo’s white generic bedroom door is cracked open—that’s Puo and me. We operate on the same wavelength. He knew I would come visit to talk over everything that had happened and left the door open for me.
I creep into the room, silently closing the door behind me.
Puo hasn’t stirred—he needs to work on his reflexes.
I ghost over to the near side of the bed and try to rouse him—
Where the hell is he?
I can’t find him. All I can feel is his balled up sheets.
I turn on the table lamp next to the bed.
Freaking Puo.
The punk made a Puo-shaped figure in his bed with his clothes and covered it with the blanket.
Well, if he’s not in his room, then he’s in the basement.
I turn off the light and silently retreat, returning the bedroom and door to its previous state.
Sure enough, a sliver of bluish computer monitor light under the back kitchen door leads down to the basement. I open the door and walk down the stairs.
Puo sticks his head around the monitors to watch me close the door.
“Good morning,” Puo says as I walk up. He hands me a hot cup of tea in a thermos—it’s still really hot.
Show off.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Puo gestures toward the screen. “Looking over the sequence of how the Muppies hijacked our squiddie. You look for me in my room first?” Puo clearly can’t wait to ask.
Bastard. He purposefully baited me. “No. Why?”
“No reason,” he says innocently in a tone that makes it clear he doesn’t believe me for a second. “But look what I found with an image search.” Puo gestures at his computer screen.
I walk around the other side of the desk and look. It’s a badly translated Chinese newspaper story about a string of high profile arrests of Chang’an members. And there’s Liáng’s picture front and center, except the name reads Wei Jing; arrested for gang related activities and sentenced to thirty years of hard labor in West China.
“So he’s a pawn,” I say.
Puo nods and brings up a different news story from a French news outlet. Same picture. Same crime. “Looks like it. And Shǐ is his handler.”
Great. Just. Great.
“We have other problems,” I say to pile on the bad news.
“Yeah, so about your meeting with Shǐ ….” he mistakenly leads me.
Oh, right. Shǐ. All three of us, including Liáng, covered my meeting with nem last evening when I got home. Puo thinks there is more to discuss without Liáng present.
“I ran into Ham.”
“Ham? The Cleaner Ham?” Puo asks in disbelief, sitting up.
“That Ham,” I confirm.
“What is he doing here?”
“He said he was hiding—and I believe him.”
Puo wipes his large hands over his face. “What is he hiding from?”
I go over our conversation in the pub and my inability to get anything concrete out of him. But there are certain things it points to. He thinks we stole his code (which we did, but he can’t prove). And the “both sides” verbiage points toward—
“Colvin and Christina,” Puo whispers.
I nod. James Colvin is the Boss of the Seattle Isles, the guy in charge of brutally enforcing order on the criminal world there. And Christina was the head of the Cleaners Guild there until she tried to overthrow Colvin. Now she’s dead. And we kinda played a small, teeny-weeny role.
It’s why Winn left. All that death.
When I recruited Winn, I told him we never hurt anyone, which was true. But since he joined, we’ve left a wake of dead bodies behind us.
Shit.
It all comes suddenly slamming back. Waking up that morning to an empty bed. Winn had told me he loved me only hours before it all went to hell. And then the next morning he was just gone, his silver caduceus necklace curled up on the plastic-storage nightstand. It had been my gift to him.
I even said I loved him back later that evening after remotely watching Colvin execute one of the traitors. If I had told Winn I loved him when he had said it originally, would he have stayed? Never had my bare feet that morning sounded so loud moving across the wood floors of the empty bedroom.
Puo shoots out of his chair and helps support me as I collapse into his chair, suddenly weak.
This is not what I need right now. I take deep breaths and exhale slowly, filling my lungs, deep down to the bottom, expanding my ribcage in a dull pain that’s somehow comforting.
Puo hands me the thermos of tea I had hastily set down on the table.
The metal thermos is hot in my hands, bringing into sharp relief how freaking cold it is down here. I sip the hot tea: chamomile. I can tell only by the floral scent—the water is too hot and burns my tongue to keep me from tasting it.
After a minute or two, I say, “Sorry.”
Puo chews on his lower lip, worried, staring at me. He starts to say something, then stops. Eventually he just reaches out and rubs my shoulder in a comforting and fortifying way.
“You believe Ham?” Puo asks quietly.
“Yeah, why?”
“If he’s hiding, why reveal himself?” Puo asks the obvious question that I completely missed.
I’m getting sloppy to have missed that. This shit with Winn needs to get resolved so I can get back to being myself.
But why indeed?
Puo continues his train of thought, “It’s not like anyone familiar with you would fail to notice your touch of smashing rocks through the glass roof of the Museum.”
I cock an eyebrow at him.
“It was all over the news,” Puo says.
“Mmm …” right. That did have a certain kind of ballsy panache. Big-ass rocks smashing through their precious underwater museum that no one can visit—I imagine that did piss off quite a few people.
Heh. Well that’s somewhat comforting. Winn hasn’t completely made me a duffer.
But with Ham in the area accusing us of stealing his Cleaners’ code, we can’t sneak into the Muppies’ headquarters anymore and upload the Cleaners’ code. That will only convince Ham more. Another idea starts to form.
“What are you thinking?” Puo asks quickly.
“What?”
“You got that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“That look that we’re about to do something stupid.”
“I was just thinking—”
“Isa,” Puo says, his voice rising in worry, “We got MI5 on our butts, the Muppies are sniffing around, and now potentially the Cleaners for some reason. All of them know, or likely know, that we’re here operating. And all the signs point to the British Museum—”
“You’re absolutely right,” I say, and throw up my hands in mock surrender. The Chinese Government isn’t going to come after us for the lost capital, making the job easier to split from. But this job was going to finally pay off the Citizen Maker once and for all.
Puo looks at me, clearly not believing my agreeing with him.
I pause to draw it out—let Puo know he doesn’t know everything.
He continues to stare at me, waiting on what I’m about to say.
Finally I say, “We’ll have to do a smash and grab.”
“What!” Puo says. “Isa, no. We need to get outta of here. It’s time to cut our losses—”
“Yeah,” I mutter to myself. A smash and grab. “I like that.” It’s what’s left to us, and not what they should be expecting.
And if smashing rocks through the Great Court’s glass roof is recognizable as one of our
jobs, then I’m going to leave the British Isles behind with one hell of a signature.
CHAPTER TWENTY
IN THE END, I love this shit.
All the hassle, all the near-death experiences, the broken heart, the dead bodies, constantly looking over your shoulder—at the end of the day, I love being an underwater reclamation specialist.
I feel like I did back in the rental air-delivery vehicle over the North Sea before I dropped on Amsterdam. Full of energy and an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. Let’s do this thing.
Puo on the other hand, balances me on the cosmic scale and looks positively wretched.
Puo and I stand alone in the front entrance of the house in Hampstead just after midnight waiting for Liáng taking his sweet-ass time. Once pretty-tattoo man shows up, then we’re off, while Puo stays behind to get things ready here and work his digital magic.
“Everything in place?” I ask Puo again to try and help smooth out the awkwardness of us standing there and Puo looking like he’s going to grab me in a big hug and start bawling.
“Yeah,” Puo mumbles.
Rain patters against the front door from the leading edge of a storm. We’ve been waiting for an optimally timed storm to come through to help provide cover. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long in England in late November.
“C’mon, Puo,” I say cheerily, “we’re going to make history here today.” I grin at him. “One way or the other.”
“It’s the other that has me worried,” Puo says.
“Bah,” I say. “We’ll be fine.”
Liáng finally crests the top of the stairs and heads down. He’s dressed similarly to me, in black tight pants and a black polyester-sporting shirt. In my mood I can’t help me but grin at the unusual sight. I look good in tight clothes, thank you very much. So does Liáng for that matter, but it’s just weird to see a man in them.
“Are you wearing a cup?” I ask.
Liáng blushes, and switches his equipment bag from one shoulder to the other. “Can never be too careful,” he says without making eye contact. He joins us at the front entrance.
“Well?” I say to Puo.
“Well what?”
“It’s time for your blessing,” I say. “Here’s the part where you tell me that this is stupid and reckless and is never going to work. C’mon, it’s tradition.” Once Liáng and I leave, we’ll be out of comms for our dramatic entrance.
Puo doesn’t look like he’s going to oblige but then says seriously, “This is a whole new level of stupid and well beyond reckless.” He looks like he’s about to say more, but closes his mouth slowly to stare at us.
“Well, all right then,” I say. A sudden urge to hug Puo hits me, but I resist. It’d be bad luck to be melodramatic. “See you in a few hours wearing a pair of hand-made jade earrings.”
Puo just shakes his head as we leave.
* * *
The Elgin marbles, originally from the Acropolis in Athens, are something of a sore point between the British and Greek governments. Lord Elgin (an Englishman) in 1801 allegedly bought them from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and had them transported to London, where they’ve been ever since. I say “allegedly” because the original document permitting Lord Elgin to move the marbles is lost, while an Italian translation of the original is the subject of much interpretation and legal wrangling.
Personally, I wouldn’t care, and might even side with the Brits on the grounds that thieves should stick together, but I thoroughly detest official governments acting like they’re holier-than-thou when they’re nothing but a bunch of thugs with legal backing.
So there’s all this consternation between the British and Greek governments on the Elgin marbles about what the document actually said, and then floofy British arguments about housing the marbles properly in an “international context” and whatnot. I’d respect the Brits a whole lot more if they just said, “It’s ours, you can’t have it, nana-nana boo-boo.”
But either way, the Elgin marbles remain controversial and are, therefore, an absolutely marvelous way to make a splash of an entrance.
There are fifteen panels, twenty-one figures and two-hundred-odd feet of a frieze in all that Lord Elgin removed. But mostly when people think of the Elgin marbles they think of the fifteen panels that were on the Parthenon, so that’s what we’re going with.
Fifteen heavy-lifting drones are now in flight toward the Sea of London carrying fifteen fake-Elgin panels. Each panel is roughly four feet square and two feet deep and weighs over one thousand pounds. The perfect size to hide all kinds of goodies inside of, including two humans, as the panels smash down into their targets.
Liáng and I are in separate, but specially modified panels (well, more modified than the other fake ones—the real Elgin panels are not two feet thick) in closed scuba suits. Based on the digital time floating out in front of me, we should be flying over the north coast of the Sea of London.
I’m smushed flat, like I was lying face down on a small bed, in a near pitch-black tight space with a very full equipment bag filling up the rest of the space, waiting to smash through glass, stone, and concrete—I’m not normally claustrophobic but at the moment, I’m a little antsy to get this part over. And since we’re dark on comms because of the overtness of what we’re doing and the interference caused by the fake-Elgin panel surrounding me, I can’t pass the time bantering with Puo or Liáng.
The heavy thump-thump-thump of the drone’s copters create a kind of white noise mixed in with fat rain drops pelting against the panel. Occasional gusts of wind buffet against and sway my panel. I exhale heavily. There’s a slight tremor in my hands. It’s pitch black in here except for the digital readouts floating out in the rendered void around me.
This is going to be one hell of a ride.
Fortunately, our panels, along with two others, all have drogues attached to help slow our descent. Once we touch down, the panels will split open and hatch two humans along with a number of other goodies.
The rest of the panels don’t have drogues. Quite the opposite. The other panels have bubble jets attached to increase their speed of descent. Thousand-pound panels dropping at near terminal velocity in air is going to make a statement.
My stomach jumps. The drone carrying my panel just dropped in altitude, preparing to deliver its payload.
If that’s true, the first group of panels should already be in the water, zooming downward in a bubbly froth.
Sweat slicks the back of my neck.
Fifteen panels are about to drop over three different sites: three on Buckingham Palace, three on Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, and nine for the British Museum. Iconic sites deliberately chosen to make a statement to the British government over the controversial Elgin marbles.
We’re about to announce our presence in very dramatic terms. The authorities might be able to contain the chaos we’re about to unleash at one site. Maybe even two. But not three.
By the time the authorities have a handle on what’s going on, we’ll be long gone.
I feel the teeniest bit squeamish crammed inside the panel, which is mostly because I’m about to free-fall in a thousand-pound hollow stone, but partially because we are making history here.
The Brits are going to be pissed. Royally pissed.
Like, drop everything, it’s-now-a-national-fucking-imperative-to-figure-out-what-happened pissed. But, hey, Puo wanted to drop on way more sites than we are, underwater carpet-bomb the Sea of London. But I argued for a more focused approach and won out. Now the authorities will think it was Greek activists or a Greek crew that was involved.
So, if you think about it, I single-handedly saved countless iconic English sites from being destroyed from Puo’s underwater carpet-bombing. I’m practically a patron of English culture. Maybe I should join their preservation society.
The panel drops into free-fall.
My breath catches in my throat.
I squeeze myself tighter as the panel hits the water.
I jerk forward in the panel. I can hear water spray up into the air over the storm. The heavy thump-thump-thump of the drone fades away.
The panel shifts in the water as it sinks—I’m upside down.
Cold water seeps into the panel. I feel the water drip down onto the back of my thighs; feel it creep up past my helmet in a tilted line. The heater in my dry suit quickly adjusts, but not quickly enough for me not to feel the icy cold as it envelopes me.
The panel picks up speed. I’m rapidly submerged within the panel.
There’s a slight pop as the drogue deploys at thirty feet underwater.
The panel jerks a hundred and eighty degrees as it rights itself and the downward motion arrests slightly.
My breath is hot and moist in my helmet. At least I’m facing the right way. The backs of human necks were not designed to be landed on.
BOOM! reverberates up from below me. There’s no mistaking the sounds of the first panels with bubble jets plowing through the British Museum below. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Within another few seconds the next and final round of bubble-jet panels strike. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The second round is a precision round, dropped after Liáng and I; it’s designed to strike where the first panels had already hit, plowing deeper into the vault tunnels below the museum.
The alarms of ploppers in the museum pierce the water, muffled by my stone sarcophagus. NEE-eu! NEE-eu! NEE-eu!
The panel jerks suddenly, throwing me to the side. A horrible scraping sound drags past on my right. The sound cuts off suddenly and I start free falling again, until I smack suddenly to a stop, knocking out my breath. The panel feels like it’s lying flat on its back.
I’m not moving. The NEE-eu! is louder here. I must be in the museum. Time to hatch this egg.
I retrieve the carefully placed trigger from a hard pocket on my calf and press the button. There are several small pops and a grinding sound as the stone splits lengthwise in the middle. Pneumatic chugs take over as the top of the stone is slowly lifted up.
NEE-eu! NEE-eu! NEE-eu!
The Elgin Deceptions (Sunken City Capers Book 2) Page 16
