The Jewel of Babylon (The Unusual Operations Division Book 1)

by Jacob Hammes

  He stumbled on, looking for an entrance into the airport. His skin had been painted a darker color over the natural accumulation of dirt to match the Arabic man in the fake identifications. He had let his beard grow out over the last few days, too, giving him the illusion of a true middle easterner. No one would question the man or his origins here. John doubted they got much tourism from the Arabic nation anyway.

  A hot pain shot through his right knee and it gave way, sending him stumbling into the two men smoking a cigarette. He had no time to react, to right himself; the pain was too intense. The hot pang of sudden agony had come out of nowhere making John gasp. He managed a moan before he hit the ground. The backpack he guarded closely went tumbling off over his head.

  Even through the haze plaguing his eyes he could tell now that the two were cops. They wore dark dress hats with white decorations, black uniforms, and polished boots. One had dropped his cigarette and the other had spilled his coffee. Both looked angry.

  The yelling started immediately. John understood what they were saying but feigned ignorance; maybe they would let him be. He did not have the time, strength, or the state of mind to deal with two police officers whom he was actively trying to avoid.

  “Are you drunk?” asked the cop who had dropped his cigarette. He was a small man, but he had a big gun strapped in a holster and a telescopic nightstick. It was the type of stick you flicked to expand and in less than a second he had the thing out. The malicious clack it made as it snapped to full length sent alarms through John’s head. The sound meant danger, and John was trying hard to avoid danger.

  “He must be drunk,” said the other, both speaking Mandarin. “Look at him, he can’t even stand up. Get up, drunky. We have a place for you to sleep.”

  “I’m not drunk,” John said in the native language. “I’m very sick and I lost my balance, I’m sorry.”

  “Where are you going, sick man?” the cop asked, poking him in the ribs with the expandable stick. The end of the steel nightstick was hard and cold and sent a pang of anger through John. A fire was burning inside him that had nothing to do with the cops. It was a fire he could not explain.

  “Home to Dubai,” John said. He tried to look down, to avoid eye contact with the police. They were making this harder than it had to be.

  “Not until we give you some tests you aren’t,” said the guard who had dropped his cigarette. “You are drunk. I can smell it on you. Get up and let me search you.”

  “That is not necessary,” John said, becoming more agitated by the moment. No one was around and these two cops had to pick on him. He could be beaten to death in the middle of this terminal and no one would be any wiser. What was he supposed to do against two armed men who were obviously asking for a fight, besides take them out?

  “We will search you or you will be going to jail,” said the other cop. He made a grab for John’s backpack. Seeing the man grab the bag sent an even stronger pang of anger and frustration flowing through him. “You cannot fly like this anyway, sick man. Either we take you to a hospital after we search you, or you will go to jail.”

  Either way, John was going to jail. The thought of being distracted from his mission was maddening. The desire to finish what he had started, to get home and see his family, was so strong that nothing else mattered. He felt the thing inside growing stronger, taking over. Now, as he saw the cop opening his bag, he let the visitor take full control. John knew what it would mean for him and for the cops.

  “Look inside of my bag and you will find my documents,” John said, putting his hands behind his back and standing up suddenly very tall and very still. There was no pain anymore, just hot anger and darkness. What little vision he had left had disappeared. A quick glance around and what was inside John was sure no one would see what he was about to do to the two bored cops.

  One of the cops looked suspiciously at him while the other bent down to look inside his bag. Almost as if the cop was bragging, he flicked another cigarette from a box and placed it between his lips. There were no security cameras here that John could see and the terminal was quiet; lots of dark corners on its long stretch. Their police cruiser, a very small Kia looking vehicle, was only about twenty feet away.

  “Look at this,” the man searching his bags said. “American identification.”

  He had to look in the only pocket in the entire backpack that held the wrong ID.

  The standing cop looked down and John reacted immediately. With his right foot he kicked the backpack hard enough to send it flying into the cop’s face. John used the momentum he had built from the kick to continue forward and plant his right fist into the standing cop’s throat. The blow was hard enough that John felt his windpipe collapse. He fell to his knees grasping his throat as John moved on to the man on the ground.

  The officer was busy getting ready to make some space between himself and his assailant but John was on him too quickly. He grabbed the cop’s hair from behind and planted his foot at the base of his neck. The cop could not move, just grab John’s hands and whimper.

  “You should have left me alone,” he said in English, a moment before stepping down hard on the cop’s neck and pulling up even harder on his hair. His neck snapped at the sudden torque and the cop stopped breathing. The groping hand fell lazily to the blacktop as John let the cop’s hair slip from his grasp.

  The madman turned his gaze to the other cop. In the throes of death, he was trying to figure out whether or not clawing at his own neck or pulling his gun was more important. John did not let him make the decision.

  A quick punch to the groin and the man doubled over. John pulled him up by his nostrils and landed another punch to the throat, just as hard as the first. If the cop could scream he would have. Instead he gurgled, grabbing his destroyed throat as he sank to his knees then toppled over onto his face.

  Before anyone got to the airport, John had one body stuffed inside the cop car’s trunk and the other in the tinted backseat. John moved the car into the long term parking using an automated ticket machine. He was back to the scene of the crime and waiting for the terminal to open within ten minutes, just in time to see the morning shift of cashiers walk in through a side door.

  Another ten minutes and the doors would open. John would buy the tickets he needed under his alias and he would be off to the states. The cops would not be discovered for at least a few hours.

  “All in a day’s work,” he said to himself.

  Chapter 14

  “It’s a funny story, actually,” Jeff Chang was still talking. David had made the mistake of asking the talker how he saw John walking through such a crowded city. “The best food is always found in the questionable parts of town. I was in the district getting some to-go and making my way to the shop where the guy was murdered. I wasn’t even paying attention really, just sort of walking with my head down.”

  “This hulk of a dude walked out, big white guy with what used to be a crew cut before it grew in. I hadn’t seen any Americans in a while and he looked really suspicious for some reason. You know when you get those feelings…”

  “Yeah, the suspicious guy feelings,” Marcus said sarcastically. He rolled his eyes away from the driver in disinterest.

  “Yeah, that one,” Jeff didn’t skip a beat. “Well, I had a picture of him on my phone and I caught a quick look at his face. It matched up so I just figured I’d walk the same direction he was walking. I wasn’t on this guy for two minutes before he pulls a blade and rips some poor old guy’s throat clean out of his neck. He didn’t die quickly either; he was laying there writhing around in a pool of his own blood for a few minutes.”

  “Sounds horrifying,” Marcus said. He meant it.

  “Yeah, it was pretty gnarly,” Jeff said, acting like nothing bothered him. “Anyway, I couldn’t help the guy on the ground much and when I looked up John was gone. I figured it was probably better for me to let him go anyway. It was definitely better for me to split the scene.”

  “And why is
that?” Stephen said from the back seat. A toddler couldn’t fit in between David and Stephen. The backseat may have been big, but they were massive. “You afraid he was going to knife you?”

  “Or other people,” Jeff said. “If he indiscriminately pulls one lucky winner out of a crowd of people to end his life just so he can get away from someone tailing him for two minutes flat, why wouldn’t he kill more?”

  Even Stephen could not argue with that logic. Kill one man and let ten more die or save the ten and get the son of a bitch later. The cost was just too high to keep after John at the time.

  “Anyway, I was on orders to leave the guy alone on the off chance we ran into each other. The Department of Defense really wants this dude alive.” Jeff had a wonderful habit of picking his teeth while he drove. It made mostly everything he said sound gargled.

  The city of Xian suffers from something called yellow dust. It is a type of pollution kicked up from Mongolian deserts and Chinese factories, as well as dozens of huge mines that leaves the air looking like it was used to separate mustard particles. On a calm day like today, Marcus could barely see the skyscrapers in the distance. Especially since the sun was hardly lighting the clouds up yet. As hard as he squinted out into the pre-dawn darkness, he could only make out a few of the well-lit windows in the distance. The rest were lost in the dark fog.

  Marcus figured it was time to look at the freeway again instead of straining his eyes on a cityscape he could not see. It was flat and straight and boring. The signs overhead were indiscernible characters that meant nothing to him. What a joy.

  It was another twenty minutes before the team showed up at the shop. It was located in the back of something that looked like a Gotham City alley. They had to park on the street and walk down an open market strip, take a turn here and there and finally down an alley to a very dimly lit area. Trash was piled in open pits where it could be picked up by small trucks, water trickled down the street, and the stench of decay hung heavy in the air.

  “Good thing it’s such a nice place,” Marcus said under his breath. “Otherwise I might be afraid any old punk could show up and kill these guys.”

  A barred door stuck between two bigger buildings bled a little bit of light into the street. Behind it, through the dirty single pane of glass, moved a solitary man. It was the surviving shopkeeper and he had been informed by the loudmouthed Jeff that Marcus and an investigative team was coming.

  Behind the opened door and the small Asian man was a cluttered store that looked a lot like an American convenience shop. Very skinny aisles had too much stuff packed on the shelves and the lighting gave the place a dingy look that the grime didn’t help. The only difference was that this place did not sell chips and soda pop. Marcus saw thousands of trinkets, beaded necklaces and tall statues, dried fetuses and magic books. You could call the place a magic workshop or a collection of freaky objects a serial killer might find confounding. Marcus liked the latter.

  The small Asian man introduced himself as Ho Chung. Mr. Chung was missing two front teeth, both on the top of his mouth. The rest were black. He smelled like he had not bathed in two years and his dirty clothes gave the impression that he was a beggar. His smile looked like he had been in too many fights and seen more years than he actually had. He was ugly, no two ways about it.

  Even Jeff grimaced.

  The shop keep made himself comfortable quickly and found the only seat in the house which just so happened to be behind the counter. The small man had a shuffle in his walk like he was seventy years old, though he looked to be in his late forties. Marcus could still see small specks of blood on the frame of the window behind him.

  “Is that hair?” he wondered, looking at one particularly big splatter. It was.

  “He welcomes us to his shop and asks that we help find who did this,” Jeff was translating the man’s quick, chirping words. “He says that he will help in any way.”

  Marcus pulled a picture of the Jewel of Babylon from his pocket and put it on the counter.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It is the thing that the murderer brought,” Jeff translated. “He doesn’t know its name, but the man said it is very expensive and he was going to pay them lots of money to clean it.”

  “Why would he come here?” Marcus said. “There must be thousands of places around the world a man could take a piece of jewelry to get it fixed up. Why did he bring it to this particular dump?”

  Something clanged behind him. David had knocked a chickens head from its shelf and in turn dumped a bowl of marbles on the ground. This place was obviously not built for muscle bound jocks. Marcus smiled painfully at Chung as David bent down to pick the marbles up.

  “He says he has no clue,” Jeff said in lieu of the man. “Maybe his partner knew something about it but this guy says he didn’t take care of stuff. He only cleans.”

  “Well ask him why his shop’s address is on the side of the crate will you?”

  After some more babbling between Jeff and Ho Chung, Jeff was back to translating.

  “Chung here says that his partner has had a very loyal customer for decades now. The customer was passed down from his father and they have been doing business since the shop opened. Mostly, the shop will keep a certain piece, clean it up and make it look pretty, get paid big bucks and ship it off when the customer asks for it again.”

  “Any idea who the customer is?” Marcus asked.

  “I’ll ask,” Jeff answered then went back to exchanging quick phrases with the shop owner. Stephen was almost invisible through the dirty glass door, guarding what looked to be their only escape route if things panned out poorly. It was getting considerably lighter, however.

  “His name is Lambert Fredrickson,” Jeff said. “It doesn’t matter, though. This guy sends stuff in from all over the world and then has it delivered to different places. This guy says he’s never sent a package to the same place more than once. We can run him through the database later.”

  “Any idea why John was here,” Marcus asked. He was getting sick of asking questions already. This was obviously going nowhere.

  “He says the thing is cursed,” Jeff said. “He could feel the curse radiating from the orb. It made him and his partner very uncomfortable. John said that he was here to get this thing cleaned up, but killed his partner and stormed out.”

  David was busy walking up and down the aisles, using the electromagnetic frequency detector to look for any signs of strange activity. The Geiger counter remained silent.

  “We’re not getting anywhere here,” Marcus said. “Ask him one more time why a guy would walk into their shop, kill his bestest buddy and walk out with no more than he came in with.”

  Marcus was busy watching David while he spoke. The man was browsing! The EMF detector dangled at his side and remained pointed at the floor. The damned ogre was not even paying attention.

  “The guy said John didn’t leave with just the sphere,” Jeff said. “He left with something else. A box in the back was broken open and whatever was inside was stolen.”

  They were finally getting some information.

  “It was one of the packages sent by this Lambert character,” Jeff continued. “He doesn’t know what was inside the box, but when the police brought him in to look over the shop they found a broken box in the back. It was a crate similar to the one he was carting around.”

  Marcus was still listening, trying to piece all the information together to make one solid picture. He was just about to turn back to Jeff and the ignorant shop owner when he noticed the needle on the electromagnetic frequency detector in David’s hand bounce and then stay on the maximum reading. As David moved on, the reading went away.

  David did not even realize the needle had moved. Marcus could see from ten feet away that the needle bounced lazily from zero to near its maximum reading, yet David was obviously more intrigued with the inside of the shop. He also bore a noticeable green tint and looked nauseous as hell.

  “Hey,
big guy,” Marcus said. “Give me that thing.”

  Marcus snatched the EMF detector from the big man’s hand, leaving him stammering for a moment before giving up the fight and admitting he had been daydreaming.

  The needle spiked again at something beneath their feet. Just to make sure, Marcus pointed the detection device at the windows and then at the roof, then back to the floor. The only place that Marcus picked anything up was when the device was pointed straight down.

  “Ask our buddy here what’s hidden down there,” Marcus said. “I think we’re going to find some answers after all.”

  Chapter 15

  Cynthia spoke the local dialect well enough to get by. If anyone took the time to analyze her, they would know she was not a local. Her accent was passable as a Chinese citizen, though, giving them a small advantage. No one raised an eyebrow at a Chinese woman and her American boyfriend wanting to see the city. The only suspicion was that five o’clock in the morning was not an acceptable hour to sight-see. Regardless, the streets were nearly empty except for those that rose early to tend greenhouses or open shops.

  She gave the taxi driver the address of a hotel near the scene of the crime. Both of them decided it would be better to walk the extra mile to the scene of the double homicide. Two people walking down the street with a cup of warm tea would be less conspicuous than a taxi with a foreign man inside pulling up just outside. The trip was quiet and Cynthia basked in the fact the taxi was warm.

  Bishop tried to look inconspicuous. He covered his hair with a black beanie that made him look like an American hoodlum instead of an American surfer. The guise worked. Apparently it was better to wear a beanie than have blond hair. There was hardly anyone on the street anyway. Opening time must have been a few hours away.