by English, Ben
He simply squeezed the trigger, and lived with the memory.
As the last man–he’d actually managed to draw his gun–stumbled to the ground, a second explosion shuddered through the floor. Alonzo rolled to his feet and slid another clip into his gun as the brief heat washed over him. Incendiary grenade. Jack.
Major Griffin stepped over him, giving him the thumbs-up and waiting for his in return before continuing down around the corner. In the center of a growing circle of billowing black smoke and flames lay a single body. Around the grenade’s blast radius lay globs of searingly white-hot liquid. Belatedly the sprinklers on the ceiling activated, covering everything in a fine mist.
“No Raines. No Jack, no princess.” Alonzo said, scanning the empty doorways. He and the major retreated to the hall and Alonzo watched as Griffin quickly examined each of the dead men’s faces before gesturing for him to follow her to the stairs. He looked back at the fire; it was growing steadily but slowly. They wouldn’t have much time. He shut the door. “See anybody you recognize back there?” he asked the major as they began to run up the stairs two and three at a time.
Jack locked the double doors behind him and flipped the lights on in what he supposed eventually would become an executive office suite. Bending to the floor, he fixed another grenade against the crack where the two doors came together, then activated it. There. Anyone opening either door and breaking the adhesive connection would get a nasty surprise. Princess Christine Windsor clicked the backs of her heels against the desk where she sat blinking, watching him work.
Jack faced her and breathed a sigh of relief. She was groggy and confused, but past the stage where she had screamed incoherently at the explosions. He looked about. The office held another desk and two high-backed swivel chairs still sheathed in plastic, but nothing they could use. The balcony doors were locked; leaning against the glass Jack could see the balcony proper remained, as he had feared, incomplete. In its place between the two arms of the building stretched a narrow, suspended scaffold. It looked as if it would sway under any considerable weight. This was going to be interesting.
“Jack?” The child on the desk rubbed her eyes and made to sneeze. Jack crossed the room, pulling a handkerchief from his inner pocket in time to catch the sneeze and the immediate snuffle that followed.
“How are you feeling, your Hi--” he began, then more slowly, “How are you, Christine?”
“Rather like a small animal’s been sleeping in my mouth,” she answered. She beamed up at him. “I knew you would come.”
It was ridiculous in the face of their situation, but for the first time in as long as he could remember, Jack found himself grinning like an idiot.
Ian and Solomon nearly drew on Alonzo and the major as they cleared the next floor. “There’s guys with Russian-type accents all over the place up here!” Ian whispered ferociously at Alonzo as the smaller man inserted a long, narrow rod into the lock of the door he and Major Griffin had just come through.
“They won’t be using this door,” the smaller man said through gritted teeth. He leaned hard on the narrow lockpick, producing an audible snap from deep within the door. “Jack’s got Christine, I guess. We’ll meet him in the other wing, one floor down. Where are your phones?”
“I think I found one of those Tesla electric machine-things downstairs.” The major looked at him quickly. Ian ignored her. “Now I can’t even get a dial tone.”
“I fell on mine.” Solomon frowned.
“Did you say ‘Tesla machine?’” Griffin asked.
Ian nodded, then looked sharply down the hall. “Whatever it is, somebody’s turned it on.”
Jack hated heights in the first place.
He scooped up the little girl and pulled the edges of his coat firmly around her. The scaffolding they had to traverse was less than a hundred meters long, and firmly anchored at either end, but the wind was bitingly cold. Holding the princess would prevent him from maintaining any kind of grip on the thin handrails. Better do this as quick as possible, he thought. The gridwork of streets far below cast a surreal light up against them, and Jack couldn't shake the sensation that the entire building was swaying slightly. It had rained earlier in the day, and wind whistled up between the slats of the darkly slick gangway, through a shiny rime of ice. He fleetingly remembered his backup parachute, stowed several floors above under a stack of insulation. Just look over at the building, he thought, the nice solid building. Focus on the other end, look where you’re going.
The wind gusted again, and the entire wooden structure along the building's face breathed out a long, eerie moan. "What was that sound, Jack?" The princess asked from the folds of his jacket.
This was no place for a child. "Hold on now, Christine. Hold tight." He gathered her close and stepped out onto the platform. It did sway under his weight.
"Ooh! Look!" her voice was muffled by the coat, but Jack glanced down long enough to see her eyes were locked on something above and behind them. He turned, and momentarily forgot the yawning chasm below.
Wings and arms outspread as if in supplication or flight, the Herculean statue of the angel loomed over them. It had been completely worked, Jack noticed, sculpted down to the most minute detail. He took it in for a moment, wondering why Raines would set it and the other stone-and-mortar figures so high on the building, above the scrutiny of anyone. "Wow," he said, more for the little girl's benefit than anything else. The wind shuddered along the wooden planks once again, and he braced his legs wide on the scaffold. "Tell you what," he said, sure she could feel his heart slamming away. "You just look really hard at that gargoyle, sweetheart, okay? Can you describe him to me?" He took a few hesitant steps toward the gaping hole at the other end of the gangway. "What does he look like?" Jack slid his feet along the sopping boards. Further out, where the gangway hung in the constant wind, he found the dampness had frozen deep into the wood, turning the entire middle section of the scaffold into a heavy, icy deathtrap.
Jack hated heights.
"He looks a bit mean, but that's just because somebody stuck him up here all alone. I think he's too big and strong to be cold.”
Jack was beginning to shiver. “Lucky for him. Keep looking at the gargoyle, Christine. What else do you see?”
Steve could see he was in trouble. Even rotating his feed from the cameras as fast as he could, he still only saw so much of what was going on a few stories below. The first warning that someone else had entered the warehouse-like room where he hid was the muted voices coming from behind the layers of insulation and plastic. Something metal a few dozen feet away clanged against a long I-beam he sat next to, and Steve could have sworn what was left of his hair stood straight on end. He disconnected all the attachments to his computer as fast as he could while slowly rising to his feet. His hand found his Glock as he eased the screen down.
Shadows and indistinct shapes loomed beyond the plastic barrier as the footsteps grew louder. One roughly resolved itself into a bearded face.
A stray ribbon of plastic snapped in the wind at the ice-sheathed entrance to the other wing. Jack staggered in, shivering, through the triple-layered plastic sheets, stomping his feet to force circulation back into them. At least the air was heated. Jack glanced quickly around for a safe place to tuck Christine, and settled for an empty wheelbarrow. Then as quietly as possible he set about stretching some warmth back into his arms and legs. He and the princess were safe for the moment.
They were in a workman's area, a section of bare wooden two-by-fours bracketed with steel casing. Cold, impersonal light issued from a florescent bulb hung in a jumble of cords above them. He checked the load in his pistol. Seven bullets left and one more clip, stuck horizontally in its clasp on the back of his belt. He slid the first clip home and let the bolt slip forward slowly, deliberately. A Hollywood-style lock-and-load (Chack-chaack!) let too many people know where you were. Wouldn't do to attract that much attention.
Jack set the gun down and worked two grenades out o
f their padded scabbard in the small of his back. He never knew how to check if the smallish, dark disks were fully operational or not. The contours along their edges identified them as flash-bangs. Lastly, Jack checked his most important weapon: the phone. He'd lost the remote headset somewhere in the other wing, automatically disconnecting the conference call option. He speed-dialed Steve's extension, smiling at Christine, who was regarding him curiously. The ketamine or whatever they'd given her was beginning to wear off, he saw by the clarity of her eyes. Their little jaunt out in the wind had helped too, no doubt. Steve's number rang on; no answer.
"Jack, where do they come from?"
"I'm sorry sweetheart, what?" He laid the phone aside and hunkered down close to where she was stirring in the coat.
"The gar-, the gar-"
"The gargoyles?" She nodded. "Well, they’ve been around for hundreds of years. People make them, mostly, and then they put them around where they live to help scare away bad things." She seemed unimpressed. He lowered his voice to a whisper. "Have you noticed how some are really scary?" She nodded again, eyes wide. "The scarier they are, the better job they do of frightening away all the evil stuff."
"But they are good?" She was dreadfully serious, Jack noticed. He smiled, brushing a few stray hairs back from her face.
"Oh yes. They keep the evil away. They watch over us at night when we sleep." He paused. "And you know what else they do?" She shook her head. "They do whatever they have to in order to take especially good care of little children."
Christine sat back in the wheelbarrow, pleased. She yawned. “Do you think I might take a little nap before we go home?”
He couldn’t help but grin. “I think that would be the very best thing, if we had a little more time.”
Then something made him turn; an almost imperceptible noise, a shift in the air. His hand found the gun while his eyes tracked a group of deeper shadows within the darkness. Jack spun towards it, leading with his pistol, when a whisper seethed out of the darkness.
“For crying out loud, Jack! It’s us!” Alonzo, Solomon, Ian, and the major melted in from the darkness.
Immediately Major Griffin rushed to the little princess. As Jack, Alonzo, and Ian reprised each other of the night’s events, the major quickly examined the girl from head to foot. “Hello, your Highness, I’m Allison. Your mummy and daddy sent us to look after you, did you know that?” She continued, speaking in soothing tones as she worked. Everything looked all right, in fact, the princess was even wearing new–wait.
“Jack; gentlemen; what do you make of this?”
The major held a section of cloth from Christine’s jacket. The princess looked up at the three men. “They said the new clothes would help keep me warm.”
Ian hunkered down, squinting at the material. “They did? Why, this looks like–get it off her, get it off her now!” He reached over and nearly tore the jacket off the suddenly frightened little girl.
“What?” demanded Jack, turning away with the two other men as the major comforted Christine.
Ian was cursing a steady stream under his breath as he held the small coat up to the light. “Look at this.” He indicated a thicker-than-usual portion of padding underneath the blue fabric. “This is a detonator. This whole thing is made of high explosive, Jack.” Ian whispered. “Remember that stuff we used to blow the doors in the embassy in Norway?” he asked Alonzo.
Alonzo breathed in sharply. “The really thin stuff we slipped between the—” His eyes widened. “This is bad, Jack.” He took a step back, away from the coat. “That’s ammonium picrate, bad medicine. If this is it, or close,” he pointed at the jacket, “she was wearing enough to kill her.”
“And I doubt Raines would want to stop there.” Jack knelt back down in front of the princess, She stared distrustfully over his shoulder at Ian. “Sweetheart,” began Jack, smiling confidently. “We need to look at the clothes those nasty guys gave you.”
Nearly five minutes later the four adults had accumulated a small pile of the bottlecap-sized detonators. Ian knifed a final one out of the top of a sock and threw it on the pile. “Ammonium P in cloth form is really stable–requires a lot of heat to set it off. She should be okay wearing it until we can get her out of this funhouse.”
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--”
