The Golden City fr-3

by John Twelve Hawks

  Alice jumped off the boulder, turned away from the convent, and headed west across the rocky ground. The island was formed when two mountain peaks pushed their way out of the water, and the bluish-gray limestone was riddled with caves and sinkholes. During her months on Skellig Columba, she had stacked up columns of rocks; some were signposts for her different pathways around the island while others were false clues that might lead a careless invader off the edge of a cliff.

  Her storage spot was a badger-sized hollow hidden inside a patch of weeds. She kept a rusty butcher knife that she had found in the storage hut and a paring knife stolen from the convent kitchen wrapped in a sheet of plastic. Alice thrust the butcher knife beneath her belt, wearing it like a short sword, and strapped the paring knife to her forearm with two large rubber bands. There were no trees on the island, but she had found a walking stick down by the landing dock, and she used it as a tool to probe mysterious places. Now that she was armed, she tried to walk like a Harlequin-calm but alert, never fearful and uncertain.

  After hiking for about twenty minutes, she reached the western end of the island. The constant attack of the waves had cut away chunks of limestone. Now the cliff looked like five gray fingers reaching into the cold water. Alice walked to the largest of the fingers and stood near the edge. It was a six-foot jump over a crevasse to the next section of cliff. If she slipped and fell, it was a long drop down to the jagged rocks that received the surge of each new wave.

  The gap between the two sections of cliff was wide enough to make the jump difficult, but not impossible. She had already imagined what it would feel like if she didn’t reach the other side. Her arms would flap wildly like a bird that had just been shot. She would have just enough time to hear the waves and see the rocks before the darkness reached out and claimed her.

  A flock of shearwaters circled overhead, calling to each other with a wavering cry that made her feel lonely. If she looked toward the center of the island, she could see the cairn that marked Vicki’s grave. Hollis Wilson had dug a hole and piled up stones like a madman. He had refused to speak, and the only sound came from the blade of his shovel as he jabbed it into the rocky ground.

  Alice turned and stared out at the empty horizon. She could walk away, returning to the warmth of the cooking hut, but then she would never know if she were as brave as Maya. Alice placed her walking stick near a clump of grass and adjusted the two knives so that they wouldn’t shift around when she moved quickly. She stood at the far edge of the cliff and realized that she had only about ten feet of running space before she had to leap across the gap.

  Do it, she told herself. You can’t hesitate. Clenching her fists, she took a deep breath, and then dashed forward. As she approached the edge, she stopped suddenly. Her left foot kicked a white pebble into the gap; it bounced off the walls and disappeared into the shadows below.

  “Coward,” she whispered as she backed away from the edge. “You are a coward.” Feeling small and weak and twelve-years-old, she gazed out at the seabirds riding the air currents up to the heavens.

  When she took a few steps back to level ground, she saw a black shape come over the ridge. It was Sister Maura, red-cheeked and breathing hard. The wind grabbed at her veil and the sleeves of her dress.

  “Alice!” the nun shouted. “I’m not pleased with you. Not pleased at all. You didn’t finish diagramming your sentences and Sister Ruth said you didn’t peel the carrots. Back to the hut. No dawdling. You know the rule-no play until work is done.”

  Alice took a few more steps back and concentrated on a patch of red lichen on the other side of the gap. There must have been something in the way she held her body that told Sister Maura what was going to happen.

  “Stop!” the nun screamed. “You’ll kill yourself! You’ll-”

  But the rest of the words were absorbed by the wind as the Warrior Princess ran toward the edge.

  And jumped.

  3

  Hollis Wilson carried his new weapon in a guitar case stuffed with wadded-up newspaper. A few weeks ago, he had asked Winston Abosa to supply him with a bolt-action rifle capable of hitting a target at least a hundred yards away. Winston owned a drum shop in Camden Market and he used his contacts there to purchase a stolen Lee-Enfield with a hunting scope. The original Lee-Enfield rifle was used in World War I; this Mark 4-T version had been developed in World War II for snipers. After Hollis had fired the rifle, he planned to leave it on the rooftop and walk away.

  London police officers usually noticed Hollis when he strolled down the sidewalk or sat in an underground train. Even when he wore a business suit and necktie, there was something in the way he carried himself that seemed a bit too confident-almost defiant. The guitar case was the perfect camouflage. When Hollis encountered a police officer near the entrance of the Camden Town tube station, the young woman glanced at him for only a second and then turned away. He was a musician-that’s all-a black man in a shabby overcoat who was going to play on a street corner.

  The rifle shifted inside the case as he passed through the turnstile. For Hollis, the London underground always felt less intense than the New York City subway. The cars were smaller, almost cozy, and the train made a soft whooshing sound when it entered the station.

  Hollis took the Northern Line to Embankment and then switched over to the Circle Line. He got off at Blackfriars Station and walked briskly up New Bridge Street, away from the river. It was about eight o’clock in the evening; most of the suburban commuters had already left their jobs and hurried home to the warm light of their televisions. As usual, the drones were still working-sweeping the street, painting women’s toenails, delivering take-out food. Their faces showed hunger and exhaustion, a grinding desire to lie down and sleep. A billboard hanging on the side of a building showed a young blonde woman looking ecstatic as she spooned a new kind of custard out of a carton. Happy Today? asked the billboard, and Hollis smiled to himself. Not happy, he thought. But I might get some satisfaction.

  ***

  During the last few months, his life had been transformed. He had left New York, traveled to West Ireland and buried Vicki Fraser on Skellig Columba. A week after that, he was in Berlin, scooping up Mother Blessing and carrying her out of the Tabula’s underground computer center as alarm bells rang and smoke flowed up the stairwells. Before the police arrived, he had just enough to time to walk two blocks and hide the body of the dead Harlequin behind a trash dumpster. Then he stripped off his blood-stained jacket and went to find the car they had left near the dance hall on Auguststrasse.

  It took him several hours to get back to the body and dump it into the trunk of the Mercedes Benz. The Berlin police had blocked off the area around the computer center and he saw the flashing lights of fire engines and ambulances. Eventually, a reporter would show up and receive the official story: MADMAN KILLS SIX-POLICE SEARCH FOR VENGEFUL EMPLOYEE.

  Hollis was out of Berlin before sunrise and stopped at a motorway service center near Magdeburg. At a little shop in the area, he bought a road map, a fleece blanket and a camper’s shovel. Sitting in the service center restaurant, he drank black coffee and ate bread with jam while the waitress kept yawning. He wanted to fall asleep in the back of the car, but he had to get out of Germany. The Tabula search engines were gliding through the Internet comparing his photograph to the images picked up by the surveillance cameras. He needed to get rid of the car and find someplace that was off the grid.

  But the burial was his first objective. Hollis followed the map to a place called Steinhuder Meer, a nature park just west of Hanover. A descriptive plaque in four languages showed a pathway that led to Dead Moor, a low, boggy area of heather and brown grass. It was a weekday, not quite noon, and there were only a few cars in the area. Hollis drove down a dirt road a few kilometers, wrapped Mother Blessing in the blanket and carried her across the moor to a cluster of bushes and dwarf willow trees.

  When she was alive, Mother Blessing had radiated a constant rage that people sensed t
he moment they encountered her. Lying on her side in the shallow grave, the Irish Harlequin appeared smaller than he remembered, less powerful. Her face was covered with the blanket, and Hollis didn’t want to look at her eyes. When he shoveled in the wet dirt, he could see two small white hands still clenched into fists.

  Hollis abandoned the car near the Dutch border, took the ferry to Harwich and a train to London. When he reached the apartment hidden behind Wilson Abosa’s drum shop, he found Linden, the French Harlequin, sitting at the kitchen table, reading a stolen bank manual about money transfers.

  “The Traveler has returned.”

  “Gabriel? He’s back? What happened?”

  “He was captured in the First Realm.” Linden pulled the cork from a half-filled bottle of Burgundy and poured some wine into a glass. “Maya rescued him, but she could not return to this world.”

  “What are you talking about? Is she okay?”

  “Maya is not a Traveler. An ordinary person can only cross over through one of the few access points around the world. The Ancients knew where they were. Now most of them are lost.”

  “So what happened to her?”

  “No one knows. Simon Lumbroso is still at the Mary of Zion church in Ethiopia.”

  Hollis nodded. “That’s where she crossed over.”

  “C’est correct. Six days have passed, but Maya has not reappeared in the sanctuary.”

  “Is there a plan to save her?”

  “All we can do is wait.” Linden took a sip of wine. “I got your email about what happened in Berlin. Did you leave Mother Blessing’s body in the computer center?”

  “I drove north and buried her in the countryside. But I didn’t put up a headstone or any kind of marker. “

  “Mother Blessing would not care about that. Did she have a Proud Death?”

  Hollis was startled for a second. He remembered Maya using the phrase. “She killed six men and then someone shot her. You decide if that was a Proud Death.” He opened the metal carrying tube, took out Mother Blessing’s sword, and placed it on the kitchen table. “At the last moment, she handed me this.”

  “Please be precise, Mr. Wilson. Mother Blessing gave you her sword or you took it from her body?”

  “She gave it to me, I guess. So I’m returning it.”

  “Perhaps she wanted you to accept her obligation.”

  “That’s not going to happen. I didn’t grow up in a Harlequin family.”

  “Nor did I,” Linden said. “I was a soldier with the First Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment until I had a disagreement with a senior officer. For two years, I worked as a bodyguard in Moscow and then Thorn hired me as a mercenary. Right away, I knew this was what I was meant to do. We Harlequins do not defend the rich and the powerful. We protect the prophets and visionaries, those Travelers that push history in a new direction.”

  “You do what you want, Linden. I’ve got my own objectives.”

  Linden waited a few seconds, as if he wanted to confirm what he had just heard, and then seemed to shut down one of the compartments in his mind. He flicked his fingers and that was it. Hollis left the room.

  ***

  Feeling conscious of the hidden rifle, he turned right onto Ludgate Hill and took the first left onto Limeburner Lane. The Evergreen Foundation occupied a large glass-and-steel building about a hundred yards down the street. Black support beams and black granite panels framed the building’s tinted windows. From a distance, it looked as if a massive vertical grid had been dropped into the middle of London.

  The building was guarded by an armed security staff. Pretending to be a bicycle messenger, Hollis had entered the building a few days ago and asked for directions. Anyone visiting the Foundation had to pass through a short “L” shaped corridor made of green glass which allowed a backscatter x-ray machine to look beneath their clothes.

  A Victorian-era office building was on the other side of street. An international architectural firm was the sole tenant and photographs of buildings in Dubai and Saudi Arabia had been placed in the ground floor window. Hollis had studied the photographs and decided that the architects had simply taken the designs for a prison and had added palm trees, fountains and a pool.

  He rang the doorbell at the architectural firm and waited to see if anybody would come to the door. When no one responded, he stood directly in front of the entrance door and unbuttoned his overcoat. A crowbar hung from a cord around his neck. He forced the edge of the bar between the door and the lock and then pushed sideways with all his strength. The screws holding the drop-bolt lock were ripped away and the door popped open.

  When Hollis got inside the building, he took a steel wedge out of his pocket and kicked it into the crack beneath the door, jamming it shut. He decided to avoid the elevator and climbed the emergency stairs to the top floor. Inside the men’s room, a short wall ladder led to a Plexiglas skylight in the ceiling. Hollis pushed back the latch with one hand and was on the roof seconds later.

  The cold night air touched his skin and he could hear the distant sound of a bus moving up the street. Slipping a little on the wet roof slates, Hollis reached the iron railing at the edge of the roof. He sat down and opened the case.

  The Lee-Enfield was a long, heavy rifle that had been modified to shoot 7.62 mm cartridges. Hollis pulled the bolt handle straight back and then shoved an ammunition clip into the receiver in front of the trigger guard. When he pushed the bolt forward and down, a cartridge was forced into the firing chamber. Hollis felt like he had become part of the weapon: locked, loaded and ready to fire. Peering through the scope, he saw two bisecting lines that met in the center of the door across the street.

  His hatred of the Tabula was powerful, sustained emotion-unlike anything he had ever experienced in the past. After he buried Vicki on the island, he had covered her grave with a pile of large gray stones. Sometimes it felt as if one of those stones had been absorbed by his body.

  He waited for a target, not knowing what to expect. A few minutes later, a Land Rover pulled up in front of the Foundation building and two people got out. Hollis raised the rifle and peered through the sight at a bald man in his sixties and a young woman wearing a fawn-colored overcoat. As they stood on the sidewalk and gave instructions to the driver, a blond man carrying a briefcase strolled down the street and joined them. The blond man said something and the young woman laughed as the Land Rover left the curb.

  Hollis aimed his rifle at the blond man’s head. A gust of wind made Hollis shiver and he realized that his face was covered with sweat. Calm down, he told himself. Breathe slowly. Then he pulled the trigger.

  He expected a loud noise and recoil, but nothing happened. Without taking his eye from the scope, Hollis moved the rifle bolt. The unfired cartridge was forced out, and a new round entered the firing chamber. Once again, he pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. Time itself had vanished, and the only reality was the present moment: the rifle and the blond man’s head held within the circle of the scope. Move the bolt again. Snap. Click. Nothing.

  The third cartridge fell beside his right foot. It bounced off the roof and hit the sidewalk below. No one heard the sound. The three targets had already climbed up the stairs and were entering the building.

  Hollis heard footsteps on the roof and twisted around. Linden was ten feet behind him, looking down at the street. The French Harlequin was wearing a black wool overcoat. With his broad shoulders, shaved head and blunt nose, he looked like a mechanical creation built to resemble a human being.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the rifle,” Linden said. “I told Winston to give you dead bullets.”

  “If you didn’t want me to use this weapon, then why did you let me come here?”

  “You had some sort of plan. I wanted to see what would happen.” Linden nodded in the general direction of the Foundation building. “Now I know.”

  “You’ve killed a lot of people, Linden. So don’t tell me this is wrong.”

  Linden sho
ved his hands into the outer pockets of the overcoat and his right foot slid a few inches forward. Hollis knew if was impossible to stop the Frenchman from drawing and firing a handgun. A minute ago, Hollis had been a human being with a name and a past. Now he was simply a target.

  “Harlequins are not terrorists or assassins, Mr. Wilson. Our only obligation is to defend the Travelers.”

  “Why should you care what I do with my life?”

  “Your actions will only bring unwanted attention to the Traveler and I cannot allow that. This means you have two options. You can leave Great Britain or…”

  The threat was unspoken, but the message was clear. A bullet from Linden’s gun would push Hollis over the railing. Within his mind, Hollis saw his body falling, a flurry of arms and legs and then stillness. After the police photographed his body, he would be scooped off the pavement, tagged and discarded like a piece of trash. The vision didn’t frighten him, but it didn’t soothe his anger. If he died, then his memory of Vicki would die with him. She would perish a second time.

  “And what is your response?” Linden asked.

  “I’ll-I’ll go away.”

  Linden turned his back and disappeared through the open skylight. And Hollis was alone again, still clutching the useless weapon.

  4

  The next morning, Hollis woke up in his rented room on Camden High Street. He felt like the last man alive as he started his daily routine: two hundred push-ups and an equal number of sit-ups on the stained rug, followed by a series of martial arts exercises. When his T-shirt was soaked with sweat, he took a shower and cooked a pot of oatmeal on the hot plate near the bathroom sink. After cleaning up and leaving no visible sign of his presence, he went downstairs.