Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle

by English, Ben

  Steve found himself wondering what he would have to do to gain a bit of access to Major Allison Griffin. “Living through tonight would be a good start,” he muttered.

  The two bearded men sighed. “Too bad,” said the one called Raphael, delicately wiping his mouth with a paisley handkerchief. “Now we will hunt them like rats, eh?”

  His companion chuckled, swinging his AK-47 back inside the room. “These ones fall too easily. They couldn’t be SAS.” Then he brightened. “Perhaps we can find a few more scurrying about.”

  He paused in mid-chortle. Light from the window fell on a large, bulbous red shoe. The red shoe was half-on a polka-dotted sock.

  Alonzo flipped on the lights and kicked a shoe at either man’s face. In the time it took for the two terrorists to blink and bat at the unwieldy projectiles, he had barreled across the room and slammed into Raphael hard enough to knock him off balance. His companion seized a handful of Alonzo’s baggy shirt, and yelled in surprise as the smaller man grabbed his own hem and whipped the shirt off himself and over his opponent’s head. Alonzo slammed his forehead into the terrorist and then turned back to Raphael.

  The bearded man lunged, knife in hand. Alonzo slapped the knife away and caught his opponent by the wrist and armpit. Spinning, he sent the other man sailing into the window frame. Alonzo shoved the stunned man halfway out the window, then slammed it nearly shut with his shoulder, trapping the other’s head and knife hand outside. Bending, he slipped one handcuff around Raphael’s ankle, the other he fit over his unconscious comrade’s wrist. Raphael was beginning to struggle, so Alonzo opened the window wide enough to shove the unfortunate terrorist the remainder of the way out.

  His scream was cut short as his foot jerked against the handcuff. Alonzo shut the window as far as he could and then drew his pistol. Oblivious to the groaning man below him, Alonzo leaned back behind the window frame and shot twice point-blank into the gears governing the window’s opening system. Before the twin roars had completely died away he was testing the hinge. It wouldn’t budge.

  He looked one last time at the terrorist known as Raphael, who was swaying slightly in the wind. Raphael looked back in time to see Alonzo drop their two radios past him. The small man waved.

  Cursing steadily beneath his breath, Alonzo wiped a small trickle of blood from the underside of his arm. He’d been cut after all, but nothing a Band-aid and some bourbon wouldn’t fix. He tossed the remainder of his clown suit on the floor, and turned the lights off on his way out.

  Jack caught sight of another group of Miklos’ men in the wide atrium that opened up on the top floor of Harrods, below. There was no mistaking the three men, smooth and lethal in their gray suits like a school of sharks, one carrying a little girl in a green coat. Their manner suggested nothing of the disorientation stirred into their ranks by the earlier attack, and Jack wondered then if Miklos had survived.

  The atrium was a vast space filled only by a light rig and the occasional banner, hung from the lowest balcony to the level below. A few theatergoers still struggled down the descending stairs and across the catwalks that led to the escalators and elevators below. Their cries of alarm upon seeing the suited men and their unconcealed machine pistols echoed eerily up to Jack like the despairing, lost, half-whispers of ghosts.

  He ran along the edge of the balcony, eyes on the unfolding situation below, dodging potted plants and abandoned vendor wagons offering Pizza by the Pound. Reaching a stairwell to the floor below he leaped down it five steps at a time, passed two floors as quietly as he could, then slid to a stop a scant thirty feet behind the cowering Londoners. They were halfway across a raised walkway, one floor above darkened racks of coats and scarves. Miklos’ men were just beginning to cross the span that separated them from their potential hostages. They’d left the little girl behind, asleep and mostly out of sight on a vendor’s cart, which gave him an idea. She probably wasn’t the princess, but, well, someone’s daughter.

  Move, Jack, move faster, the silent voice within him urged.

  Two men, older, a young woman and a white-haired grandmother dressed as a beatnik, attempting to hold their own against three suited, fairly clean-cut young men with automatic weapons. A year ago, Jack would have found a sort of gallows humor in the situation. At least we outnumber ‘em!

  He took a flash-bang in his hand and, crouching low, crept closer. His dark jacket helped him blend into the shadows somewhat. With the civilians blocking the gunmen’s line of sight and his footfalls barely a dry whisper along the blood-colored, fired-brick tile, Jack eased out onto the walkway. “Run,” he whispered, and lobbed the disk over their heads at the oncoming men.

  Although he’d clapped his hands over his eyes and shut them tightly, Jack was standing so close to the blast he could clearly see the outlines of his fingerbones. Though he expected the sudden, rushing explosion of sound and light, he was still a bit stunned by the grenade’s ferocity. It blew one of the men clean off the walkway; the other two fell to their knees in pain and shock. Rolling back to his feet, Jack drew his gun and fired, putting one of Miklos’s men all the way down and ruining a perfectly good suit. The other suited gunman skittered back along the span, and Jack lost him in the residual wash of smoke from the grenade.

  A chanced look over his shoulder informed Jack that the group behind him was clearing out fast, though not fast enough. He charged forward, thinking to at least draw the other man’s fire, and slipped in the first man’s blood, going down hard as his opponent seized the opportunity and rushed in, kicking his gun from his hand, then stomping down hard.

  Jack took the blow on the meat of his forearm, which was already flush with the floor, minimizing the damage. He was still slippery from the first man’s gore, so he gripped his adversary’s planted leg and spun into him, wrapping his foot up and around for a blow to the groin.

  The suited man left the floor, and then abruptly crashed back into it in a heap, choking. Jack shoved off him and gained his feet, then planted a low side kick squarely across his opponent’s forehead. It was inelegant and poorly delivered, but enough. Jack went to his knees, holding the sprawled man still while he felt for his handcuffs, and then shackled him to his dead companion.

  From the time he’d thrown the grenade until he clicked the handcuffs into place, perhaps fifteen seconds had passed. It seemed more like--

  –the click of metal-on-metal above and behind him drove a deep wedge of panicked energy from Jack’s heart to his legs, and he dove from the balcony, snagging the edge of one of the banners as he tumbled over the edge. The sagging cloth broke his impact with the floor somewhat, and he rolled under the walkway, jostling through a coat rack and knocking over a display of running shoes. Bullets thudded thickly into the carpet near his hands. Again from behind, he thought, and ignored the irrational impulse to cast around for the oversized thug who’d accosted him in the Parisian alley. He had the presence of mind to look down, and quickly found the unconscious form of the gunman that had been knocked off the walkway earlier, groaning in the darkness.

  “Very fast,” someone said from above, and Jack heard the impact on the walkway of someone jumping onto it from a higher level. From further above, someone barked out a series of commands, most likely in Russian but too indistinct for Jack to make out. He found the supine man’s gun–happily, a Glock fairly close to the one he’d lost–and checked the magazine. At least three bullets left.

  It would have to do.

  “Do you know what my superior just said, whoever you are?” The voice from above was high-pitched for a man, but full, not feminine. Slightly haughty. Jack placed the man about halfway along the walkway, near a potted plant he’d almost collided with earlier. He slipped under the span, staying close to it, pistol fully extended before him. He caught a glimpse of the back of the speaker’s full head of hair before the man turned to hunt for him. “He says you have real yaytsa for an Englishman. I think you are a member of your Secret Air Service, no?” Without warning, he loo
sed a spray of bullets into the shadows below, raking the carpet, shredding the hung suits. Hangers clinked and clanged like chimes in a gust of wind.

  Jack backed under the walkway. It appeared that he and the huge Russian were alone in the shop turned shooting gallery. He could see a corner of his opponent’s overcoat. “Nyet, ya Amerikanyets,” he said, and fired a shot of his own. Got you now, he thought, racing under and along the length of the walkway, keeping his pistol extended, the sights tracking along the line where he knew, he felt the other man to be.

  No, I’m American. The voice was naggingly familiar to the big Slav. He’d heard it before, and recently, though not speaking Russian. The accent was even Moskovian, though the vicissitudes of that fact were lost on him as he ducked under the clap and whine of a bullet. A glimmer of movement from below, and he emptied his magazine into the shadows, then stepped quickly away from the edge of the walkway as he ejected the clip from the MAC-10 and withdrew another. He backed all the way across the width of the narrow bridge, wondering fleetingly if the man below had any chance of tracking him, of guessing his movement. None, he decided in less than a second. His footfalls were silent; he wasn’t even breathing loudly. Following Miklos’ example without fail. Sasha had never felt so calm, so completely in control in his entire life. Just to be sure, he glanced behind and down as he ran the clip into his weapon.

  And looked straight over Trijicon night sights into the American’s eyes as the other man slid smoothly out of the shadows.

  Brad’s injuries weren’t as grave as Solomon had feared. He’d taken at least two bullets clean through his thigh, and another had grazed his lower abdomen. It was when he tried to remove his friend’s jacket that Solomon received his biggest shock of the night.

  The two shooters had been excellent marksmen, lapping almost all their hits over what would normally have been vital areas. The leatherlike material had taken several bullets before finally shredding, but the inner lining itself had stopped nearly a dozen rounds. They had lodged between disks of metal Brad had roughly glued into the jacket’s lining. Most of the disks had bent or broken under impact, but they looked to Solomon like—no, they couldn’t be. But that’s what they were. Antique silver doubloons.

  Brad cracked open an eye and moaned. “Saved by a life of crime.”

  Solomon smiled for his friend’s benefit, and yanked open his medical kit.

  *

  Miklos and his companion strode down the shadowed hallway. He was furious. Raines had betrayed him! Him! Inwardly, Miklos cursed himself. How could he have not seen the duplicity for what it would become? He had assumed the decoy maneuver was for the crowd’s benefit, so that someone would recognize him in the morning when his manifesto was broadcast. Of course Raines had known there would be men above the theater with rifles. He sneered indignantly into the dark. Instinct and training demanded that he run, that he mingle and vanish into the mindless herd that even now was stampeding down the stairs and escalators. Once out on the street it was only a few meters to an entrance to the Tube, and the two men would be untraceable. They could even make Belgium before dawn. But how to balance this, this--

  Betrayal! His mind still reeled from the possibility. Then, like an eagle wheeling in the sky, Miklos’ thoughts came fully about. The man at his side, at least, he could trust. “Tovik! We’re not going to leave just yet. Raines owes us a soul. Blood for blood, eh?”

  Tovik’s impassive frown remained unchanging. “You know he will use the Sikorsky.”

  “And we’ll be there to greet him,” said Miklos. The two checked their weapons. Each carried an American-made MAC-10, a fine piece of deadly art that fired over forty five rounds every second and a half. Its design was not necessarily to kill, but to wreak shattering havoc on the human body--as different from a regular revolver as a sledgehammer is to a surgeon’s scalpel.

  “We’ll use the service lift in the back of the building, the one used by the workmen to reach the construction site.” Miklos explained to the other man.

  “Blood for blood.”

  *

  The little girl asleep on the vendor’s cart bore a striking resemblance to Christine Windsor; she was a closer match than the girl at the theater had been. Same height, same hair, different nose–another one of the four abducted girls he’d read about in the major’s file, no doubt. Jack ran a fresh clip home and then stowed the Glock before picking her up.

  There were still a few people left at the top of the escalators leading to the next lower level, and Jack whistled to get their attention when he drew close enough. “Hey,” he said, slipping automatically into a West End accent. “Would ya mind getting the little miss down below with ya?”

  The couple he approached looked at him, dazed, and Jack realized he was still half-covered in blood. “Not to worry, I slipped into one o’ those demmed American hotdog wagons up top.” They took the snoring little girl, still eying the stains on his black clothing. “Right then, be down m’self in two shakes. Just see her to a bobby, will ya?”

  He spent half a minute in a men’s room cleaning himself off and checking his equipment. His headset was still in his jacket’s inner pocket, and he put it on immediately. “Steve?” The lift had to be around here somewhere.

  “Jack, where’ve you been?”

  “I’m on the floor above Harrods, in the big atrium, facing north. The window’s behind me. Which way to the elevators?”

  Papers fluttered over the digital line. “‘Kay, go straight until you come to the wall, then it should be 50 meters to your right, near an information kiosk. Hey, Al and the Major are going to meet you on the 35th floor. Raines is moving.”

  Jack found the kiosk, a touch-activated show-and-tell of the whole building, hard-wired into a black plastic pillar with a slanted face, in the general three-tiered three-winged shape of the Illuminatus Tower itself. The bank of elevators–three in all–sat behind it, obscured slightly by a BBC display on easels. Jack stabbed at the call button, then glanced again at the plastic-faced BBC announcement.

  Intense Broadband Capability–Tower Transmits Crystal-Clear Images Using New Technology.

  Above the fine print was an artist’s rendering of the transmitter Jack had parachuted past only an hour before. Light refracted off the ad, however, and he had to tilt his head slightly to block the glare and see the huge, electronics-laden disk at the tower’s summit. As he moved, the weak light behind him played out over the plastic laminate covering the poster, casting an illusion of energy coruscating over the disk.

  The elevator chimed and Jack entered, pressing the button for the thirty-fifth floor. Staring at his vague, streaked reflection, Jack cast his thoughts upward. He hoped Christine wasn’t too frightened. There were myriad tortures that could be inflicted upon a child–though Jack quickly locked his imagination away from such possibilities. No, she would be fine. If Raines wanted her for ransom, he’d keep her safe; as intact mentally as physically.

  Yet ransom made no sense. There’d been no demands made, no price allotted for her return. Besides if there was any truth to the plot William had mentioned to Alonzo–to weaken the collective British resolve?–the perpetrators of the kidnapping must have taken into account that they’d be running for the remainder of their lives, once the ire of the people stirred against them. Nothing was more cherished in any given nation than that country’s children--and Princess Christine was the embodiment of the entire extended British Family. The kidnapers would have nowhere to–

  The elevator shuddered to a halt. Jack looked up; he was barely above the twentieth floor. Before he could move, the lift began moving again, but now descending. Rapidly. Jack touched his headset. “Steve?”

  Rain was beginning to fall in irregular, fat drops on the street and the gathering crowd. Ian exhaled in relief as he handed the little girl off to a paramedic, turning his attention from the looming building above to the approaching police vans. Behind them, he could see flashing lights of the fire truck variety, with accompanyi
ng sirens. A mounted officer reined in between the gathered crowd and the vacant lobby. “Here now, what’s all this?

  “And where would you be goin’?” He pressed his heels into the horse’s flanks, moving to interpose himself between Ian and the entrance.

  Before the other policemen in the crowd could react, Ian patted the horse on the neck, then took a firm grip on the halter. It wouldn’t do to pull FBI credentials here; besides, nobody was supposed to know he was even in the country. “The King’s business, mate,” he said, jerking the horse’s head. The animal shied and reared slightly, and its rider had to struggle to keep his seat.

  Ian jogged into the lobby and pressed the call button for the elevators. There were five banks of them at this level, not counting the service lift he’d used to bring the little girl down. If he remembered right, the middle three went all the way to the top.

  “You there, you!” Two of the bobbies he’d seen in the street entered the lobby, their batons loose and ready at their sides. Except for the truncheons, they reminded Ian unfailingly–like every other first-time American in London, he supposed--of Mack Sennett’s classic Keystone Kops.

  He looked back at the elevators. At least one would surely–

  Ian swore in dismay as the backlit numbers above the door diminished. First one, then another, then a third elevator passed him on its way to the basement. He heard the fourth descend past the lobby, then turned in dismay.

  Only to be rushed by four big policemen who hammerlocked his arms before he could get a word out. Someone punched him hard in a kidney, and he collapsed, gasping, into their collective grip. “Jack,” he blurted into his headpiece, and then it was ripped from his ear.

  “Jack Scratch is what you’ll be getting, my friend,” said the burliest of the officers. “‘Ere Charlie, look at this! Bloke’s got a gun!”

  “Steve, what’s up with the elevators?” Jack swallowed hard. Shouting would not do just now. “I thought you had control.” He flipped open the emergency call box.