"About goddamn time." Damon tried to crane his head up from the slab, but shackles held him back. Like Fischer, he'd been bruised around the jaw and temples.
"Nice briefs." Kyler couldn't hide a grin.
"Tell anyone about this and I swear …"
Kyler gave the shackles an experimental tug. "The keys are over there," Damon said, "on the gunman. Get 'em fast, and get me his weapon."
But Fischer was already headed over with key ring in hand. She waggled her eyebrows at Damon. "Well now, I think the leather look suits you."
"Stop screwing around. We've got to get the woman free before it' pissing time."
Kyler unlocked his uncle's bonds. The dark-haired woman, sluggish as if she'd been doped on something, took a little longer. He dragged her a healthy distance from the spigot, while Damon grabbed the fallen monk's SMG. He found a jacket and jeans beneath the brown robes, and slipped them on.
"I'm going after Dirac. There's another ladder behind the statue, leading to a press box. He's up there."
"Huh-uh," Fischer said. "You're wounded."
Damon patted the jacket pockets, discovered a cigar stub. "You don't look so great yourself."
"I'll go," Kyler said. "Uncle, you cover the stairwell. The door's bolted at the bottom, but it won't hold back a mob if they decide to rush us."
Damon rolled the stub around in his mouth. "You sure you're up for this?"
"I'm an agent now, remember? I've got to take risks like everyone else."
He found the ladder and started climbing, before he changed his mind. With the screamer slung over his shoulder, he clambered up the rungs. Below stretched the grandstand crowd. He forced himself to forget about them, and the hundred-meter height. The little square of trapdoor above was the only thing that mattered. Vibration on the rungs made him look down; Fischer was following. He motioned for her to go back. She shook her head, her face resolute.
No use arguing. He reached the trapdoor and poked his head through. The flared muzzle of a screamer pointed at him. Behind it, Dirac's grin split his bearded face.
"First the uncle, now the nephew. I figured Continuity would be sending someone, sooner or later."
He had a live mike clipped to his robes, and his voice boomed out over the PA system. It didn't seem to bother him. "Come up slowly," he said, backing away. "Try anything untoward and I'll give you a full-power burst. At this range it'll liquefy your skull."
Kyler crawled into the press box, keeping his hands free from the butt of his weapon. He didn't dare look down at Fischer. This high up the wind blew cold and the night sky blazed. Dirac leaned against the bulk of a television camera. "You might've tried a quieter way of taking out my monks," he said. "Besides Damon, how many more of you are there?"
"Just us two," Kyler lied. "The Strike Team was away when you jaunted."
Dirac chewed on that.
"Why'd you do it, Paul? Why'd you go rogue?"
"I'm not sure your twenty-third century mind can comprehend my reasons. You're too comfortable, too coddled by the 'civilized' world. Also, you're not a gearhead."
"All I see here are a bunch of stupid people reverting to barbarism."
"Exactly." Dirac's eyes shone. "Man's natural state. Not that puerile and overpopulated mess you're used to, back in the present. Imagine: two tribes locked in constant warfare, laying rubber across the face of history. The eternal dualism of Ford versus Chevy. Every major town in the U.S. has a racetrack like this one, just waiting to be turned into an arena. Europe, too. The cult will spread, and spread …"
Kyler thought he heard a shuffling below. He kept his eyes fixed on Dirac. "Continuity will keep sending back agents. You must know that."
"Not if I change history fast enough. There won't be a Continuity Inc., at this rate."
Beneath them came a staccato burst of automatic fire. Dirac glanced down. In the same moment Fischer popped her head, and the barrel of her flechette pistol, up through the trapdoor. No good: Dirac's screamer could pulp them both before she'd have time to aim.
Kyler leapt forward. He managed to grab Dirac's carbine in both hands. A blast of sound shot sideways, striking a camera and crumpling its metal casing like an invisible fist. Kyler was too close to the barrel. His eardrums popped, but before deafness fell he heard screeching feedback. Dirac's mike had caught the sound and transferred it to the PA speakers throughout the track.
Moving in complete silence, hands still clamped around the screamer, Kyler recalled his unarmed combat training. He pulled on the gun and rolled backwards. Momentum carried Dirac forward; Kyler thrust his foot up against his stomach. He let go. Dirac went sailing over him, over the press box rim, out into night air. He seemed to hang suspended for a moment. Kyler leapt up in time to see him plunge into the reservoir on the statue's back.
There must've been a lot of acid in the mix. Dirac's face contorted in a silent scream. Wisps of smoke rose from his skin, already sloughing away like old paint. He tried to paddle for the side of the tank. His head dipped once, twice below the lethal brew, and disappeared completely.
So much for bringing him back alive.
Fischer leaned into his field of vision, her lips moving, but all he heard was white noise. She pointed at the ladder, made a downward motion with her hand. They descended.
Damon crouched by the stairwell. His gun bucked and casings flew as he fired at unseen targets below. Kyler rushed to join him. The crowd had battered down the door and were making a half-assed attempt at rushing the stairs, but suppression fire kept them pinned.
Kyler unslung his screamer. Two short bursts cleared the stairwell.
The ringing in his left ear gave way to a roar. He could hear words slipping in.
"—got him," Damon was saying, giving him a thumbs up. "I knew you could do it."
Fischer slapped him on the back. "I don't know if you can hear me or not, but that was one hell of a tomoe nage. Textbook perfect." Her eyes seemed to regard him differently. Was that respect, or just his wishful thinking?
"I can hear you. Uncle, with Dirac out of the way I don't see what's keeping us in this god-awful era."
Damon glanced over to where the dark-haired woman lay. "Me neither. We can't take the girl back with us, but I think the crowd has other things on its mind right now. Look."
The spectators had become a mob. Desert camo fought with hooded green jersey, using fists, feet, and beer bottles. Two dozen people had climbed the fence and rushed the pit where the prize truck stood on display. They overcame the monks guarding it, then turned on each other for the honor of ownership. No one seemed to be paying any attention to the battle still raging at the center of the arena, between bus and truck.
"I think these people are about to get a taste of real apocalypse." Kyler reached under his belt and activated the recall beacon.
†
BABYLON HEIST
Outside a Bronze Age sun baked the mud bricks of a thousand dwellings, beat down on the heads of slaves, soldiers, and nobles alike, dulled the bray of the onagers and parched the myriad voices of the marketplace, even hoarsened the Priest King himself, as he called out noon rites from the tallest ziggurat in the city. But there were places the sun couldn't reach …
Beneath an abandoned temple near the hovels of Buzzard Gate, a secret chamber had been dug. Light from a clay lamp flickered in the cooling darkness. It threw shadows across the faces of three men and one woman, hunched around a table of precious cedar wood. They spoke in whispers and passed a jar brimming with black beer.
Criminals, all.
"Let me express my gratitude," said the oldest, a merchant-type with silver shekel weights woven into his white beard. "First for your being so prompt in response to my summons. Second, for having the bravery to—"
The man-mountain of a Sumerian sitting to his right let out a grunt. "Time is money. Spare us the pleasantries, Arshan, and get down to the job."
"Shumir doesn't speak for me," said the plump, painted woman seated to the
old man's left. A fillet of tiny golden bells circled her brow. She wore a harness of crisscrossed threads hung with hundreds more, and there was a tinkling sound as she passed the beer. "Some of us have plenty of time."
"Ha." Shumir leveled a thick finger. "That's because your 'Temple of Holy Love' doesn't open for business until nightfall. What's a glorified whore doing here, anyway?"
Arshan cleared his throat. "I'll remind you that Iltani is a priestess. As such, she plays as vital role in our plans."
"So you keep saying." Shumir nodded at the fourth member of the group, who had yet to speak. "And what about him? What do we need some blonde Hellene for? 'Kyros the Eel.' I've never heard of him."
Faces swiveled to regard the foreigner.
"Well, Kyros," said Arshan, "would you like to give us an accounting of yourself?"
The slender man drew a deep breath. He'd been dreading introductions all morning. And not because he was supposedly a Macedonian Greek, who'd left his hilly homeland for the gold and intrigue of Babylon. No, Kyros the Eel, aka Kyler Knightly, field agent for Continuity Inc., had traveled back in time more than three thousand years to get a piece of this action.
"I'd, ah, like more beer, please."
* * *
Calling the stuff "beer" was too charitable. Flat, warm, and floating with hazy chunks, you didn't drink the dark liquid so much as chew it. But alcohol was alcohol. Kyler drained the jar, stealing a glance over the rim at his companions. Like him, one of them wasn't who they appeared to be. Another time-traveler, sent back to swipe a priceless artifact for a collector in the twenty-third century. Continuity Inc. had received solid intel what they were after, but not who was involved. Finding out was Kyler's job. He'd spent several days nosing around the Babylonian underworld before he'd discovered this group. The fact they were planning something big, and soon, he took as more than a coincidence.
"The man's dry," Iltani said, noting the empty jar with a smile. She clapped her hands. "Slave! More beer."
A tall Egyptian eunuch appeared, veiled like a woman. He hustled over another jar and placed it on the table before scurrying off.
Kyler reached for the brew. Irritated with his silence, Arshan said: "Our Greek friend specializes in getting inside tight places. Hence the nickname."
"Bah." Shumir spat. "Unnecessary. With my muscles I can bore through any mud-brick wall."
"Your muscles are part of the problem," Arshan said. "Cutting a hole to fit those shoulders would take too long. And timing is crucial if we want to break into the manor of Naram Eil."
Iltani straightened. "So old Naram's our mark. What's the loot?"
Arshan and Shumir traded looks. "A tablet," the white-bearded man said at last. "A treatise on astronomy Naram keeps in his library. There's an Assyrian scholar willing to pay fifty gold minas for it—and I can probably drive him higher."
Iltani's painted face went pale. "Fifty gold minas …"
"I wouldn't bother putting a caper together for less," Arshan said.
The linguistic chip implanted in Kyler's mastoid process was having a hard time with Neo-Babylonian slang; words like "mark," "loot," and "caper" were criminal argot, and not in the regular lexicon. So he was several seconds behind the conversation. But he was willing to bet the "Assyrian scholar" offering the money was several thousand years in the future. And the piece of clay they were talking about was none other than the Kidinnu Tablet, a significant work of early science.
"Enough," Shumir said, looking like he wanted to spit again. He rounded on Arshan. "Whatever's going down, one thing's for certain: your fingers won't touch any of the dirty work. Not our Honest Arshan. So tell us the master plan, already."
If the old man took any offense, he didn't show it. "The plan," he said, unrolling a hide map across the table. "Now, that is a thing of beauty …"
* * *
After the meeting, Kyler slipped off to a shadowy bar to guzzle date wine. His nerves were still shot. Everyone he glimpsed, from the one-armed bartender to the withered old scribe sitting two stools down might be a spy for Arshan. Or Shumir. Or Iltani. They could have someone tailing him right now.
He reached down to touch the focus object he carried at his side. A bronze-headed mace, "borrowed" from the British Museum and contemporaneous with this time period. The artifact had allowed Continuity Inc.'s powerful Zygma projector to send him back circa 770 B.C. He took a measure of comfort knowing he could also use it to bash in someone's head.
"Hot day, isn't it?" the bartender said, giving him a look that could mean suspicion or nothing at all.
"It is at that."
He paid with a silver shaving and got the hell out of there. 'Hell' being an apt choice of words. The temperature in the offal-strewn streets hovered around a hundred and twenty Fahrenheit. No breeze stirred. Babylon's massive walls blocked most of the wind from the plain, and the ubiquitous mud brick trapped heat like a sponge. To make the vision complete, a huge tower straight out of Bruegel dominated the skyline, with antlike figures ascending a ramp around the exterior.
He passed a squad of soldiers in long leather capes. War season was coming up fast, and there was talk of conflict with Nineveh. He shook his head. Things never changed, did they?
A quarter-mile from Buzzard's Gate lay a smaller portal called Whore's Gate, leading to an older residential section. Kyler slunk down the adjacent alley, ready to pull his mace on any would-be muggers. He brushed aside a pile of desiccated straw to reveal a crack in the wall. A tiny roll of parchment jutted out from it.
He unrolled the message, written in Continuity Inc. cipher. Translated, it read:
NOTHING NEW ON MY END. MISS AIR CONDITIONING AND BUBBLES IN BEER. WILL RENDEVOUSZ AT THE USUAL PLACE.
Kyler's uncle Damon had been sent back undercover as well. Communicating with him by shortwave was strictly a no-no, given that another time traveler might have a receiver. He took a stylus from his tunic and clicked out a hidden ballpoint.
IT'S GOING DOWN TONIGHT.
Message replaced, he hurried back the way he came.
* * *
"Cops. Into the shadows, moron."
Shumir grabbed Kyler by the arm and hauled him flat against a wall. A chariot drawn by four onagers rattled close. The soldier at the reins gripped a three-meter spear, and the scarred man crouched beside him, dressed in a corselet of bronze scales, held a compound bow. Their eyes raked the street. But the moon was a mere sliver, and the absence of lamps made Babylonian night dark as a closet. The chariot passed without slowing.
"Keep bungling," Shumir whispered, "and I'll drag your ass back to Arshan, tablet or no tablet."
"Sorry."
"Not as sorry as we'll both be if we're caught. This is the wealthy quarter, and crimes against nobility mean death."
They'd had to slink through several gates, past checkpoints and guard posts to get here. The richer portion of Babylon felt like a different city. Brick surfaces had been enameled in vibrant reds, yellows, and blues. Walls enclosed gardens of slender date palms, where unseen fountains splashed. Even the air smelled better; human waste was carted off to be dumped elsewhere. Night-blooming jasmine replaced the stink of open sewage.
They stole across a broad plaza. Shumir carried an ox-hide bag that occasionally made a clinking noise. "There's our target," he said, nodding at a walled manor nearby. "Naram Eil's place."
Kyler recalled the layout from Arshan's map. The estate boasted a tall tower, rising well above the surrounding four-meter wall. Lamplight flickered steadily at the top. Among other things, Naram Eil was an amateur astronomer.
Shumir's grin showed white against his soot-blackened face. "Stargazing as usual. Lucky for us he's got his head pointed at the sky, and not the grounds below."
They found a shadowed spot well away from any street traffic. In lieu of checking his watch, Kyler gauged the time from the moon's position. Close to midnight.
The tinkle of bells carried up the plaza. After a tense minute Kyler could make out th
eir source; a half-dozen feminine shapes, approaching on bare feet. They'd painted their faces with talc and kohl, nude save for the jangling harnesses they wore. Iltani marched at their head. The temple prostitutes made straight for the manor's front gate. Iltani clashed a pair of cymbals together and waited, her face expectant.
"There's our distraction," Shumir said. "Move."
Kyler approached the manor wall. Gritting his teeth, he knelt on all fours and made a human table. Shumir planted a foot on his back. For a second, unbearable weight pressed against his spine. Then Shumir leapt up and caught the top of the wall. With barely a grunt, he hauled himself up one-handed. Fucking showoff. He hooked a leg over the far side and dangled his muscled arm towards Kyler. A jump, and Kyler grabbed him by the wrist. With a combination of Shumir's strength and his own scrabbling, he gained the top.
The wall was half a meter thick. Kyler pivoted on his knees to get a view of the courtyard. Young ash trees formed a walkway around a low fountain, filled with shimmering water. Just beyond he could see the inward side of the front gate and four hairy silhouettes hunkered around it. Those would be the Guti tribesmen old Naram employed as guards. They were talking in gruff voices through a small window to Iltani, on the other side. Negotiating prices.
Shumir huffed. "I guess Arshan was right about her being useful. I wouldn't care to take my chances with that lot."
Kyler nodded at the shadowed main house. "We don't have much time."
They leapt down among ferns and flowers. Shumir's bag made a muffled clank that thankfully didn't carry far. "Around back," he whispered. "Trying to force the front door puts us in view of the guards."
They circled to the rear of the house. There were no windows on the ground level, and the slits above were too narrow for even Kyler's thin frame. Ergo, they had to bore through the wall. Shumir felt along the bricks with an artist's concentration. He halted, nodding to himself, and pulled a strange tool from his bag. It had a wooden disk at one end and an auger-shaped head.
Apocalypse Soon (Kyler Knightly and Damon Cole Book 2) Page 3
