by Jay Brandon
The shop was silent in a very strange way, silent beneath the continued clanging of the alarm down the street, a silence fragile as a soap bubble, sure to burst any moment. The shuffle of a foot sounded like a lion’s cough, the sliding of cloth against skin like an urgent whisper. Jack stood absolutely still for a moment and heard them closing in on him. He stepped back and could hear his own footfall, sure they could hear it too. He wanted to pick up something and toss it across the room to distract their attention, but was afraid of knocking over something if he moved his arm, giving away his position for real.
Ten feet farther along that back wall he almost fell over as he reached an open doorway. Jack went through it, hearing someone yell behind him. He found himself in a hallway even darker than the shop had been. With two directions to choose, Jack went right, immediately regretting it because that would be most obvious, at least to an American. He hoped Europeans thought differently, from years of driving on the wrong sides of roads.
By the time he reached a very narrow staircase, he could tell that his pursuers had guessed correctly, or maybe they had split up, because at least one was coming after him. And when Jack started up the stairs, making more noise than he intended, the man shouted something in Czech for his companion.
The stairway was so narrow Jack’s shoulders brushed the walls on either side. He suddenly realized that the shopkeeper might live upstairs, and hoped he wasn’t leading these killers into a family home. But when he got to the top there was no other hallway, just a big open room, obviously used for storage. Bulky objects lurked everywhere, undefinable in the darkness. And two of the walls had windows.
Jack ran to one, looked down, saw only a long fall to a hard street. Nevertheless, he yanked up the window and leaned out. His pursuers’ truck was below, the engine still running. A police car had arrived, just as he’d prayed, and was stopped behind the truck. The police weren’t getting out yet, though. Like their counterparts worldwide, they preferred to stay in the relative safety of their vehicle to take their initial surveillance of the scene.
Jack reached and grabbed something, a small chest of some kind, made of heavy wood. Without the power of adrenaline he might not have been able to lift it, but now he did easily. He hurled it out the window as far as he could, aiming for the truck, then ducked back inside without seeing what he’d hit. He did hear police voices, though, as they obviously came scrambling out of their car.
It was still the middle of the night, but closest to the windows was where the room was lightest, because of streetlights outside. Jack moved quietly back into the interior of the room and crouched behind a cabinet. A moment later one man came hurtling into the room, in such a headlong rush that he skidded to a halt in the middle of the room without even pausing to survey the new setting.
It was the burlier of the two thugs, the one who had spoken French. So he had escaped from his brief prison after all. “Monsieur,” he said, then continued in English, “Come out. We are your friends.”
He would have been more convincing if he hadn’t held his pistol at the ready position, barrel tilted upward, poised to spin in any direction where a befuddled Jack might stand up to accept his offer of friendship. But no sound came from the room, and the man cursed.
Then he saw the broken window and hurried over to it. Obviously he thought Jack had made his escape this way. The man leaned out with his gun hand leading, looking for a fire escape or ladder.
And Jack was behind him in an instant, grabbing his feet at the ankles and lifting. God, the guy was heavy. And struggling. The thug tried to twist around, but his head and shoulders had already been out the window, and there was nothing to grab out there.
Except the window frame itself. The man dropped his gun and grabbed the window’s edge. He was as strong as he was heavy. His grip was implacable, even though he was already three-fourths of the way out the window. Jack pushed at him but couldn’t dislodge that hand. The man glared at him, straining to pull himself back up, and succeeding.
Jack yelled in frustration, leaned forward, and dug his teeth into that hand on the window’s edge. The thug screamed too, let go his hold, and fell. For a moment his ankles hooked the windowsill, but Jack lifted them off easily and his pursuer fell, still screaming, the scream cut short with a crunch.
He heard the gabble of police voices rise higher, then cut off as they separated. Presumably at least one of them was rushing inside here to look for the person who had thrown the other one out into the street. Good. That was what Jack wanted.
But he was gripped in fleeing mindset now. He couldn’t stop moving even if he thought rescue was on the way. Jack crouched again and half-crawled, half duck-walked across the room to those other windows. He went along the row quickly, poking his head up to glance out each window. Very little to see. The building across a side street, narrow as an alley. Maybe ten feet away. He couldn’t jump that distance, but if he could find some rope—
Then he looked down and saw a very old-fashioned fire escape below one window. He raised up higher to get a better look—
And a small, delicate cough stopped him cold. The soft sound stopped him because it was accompanied by the click of a handgun being cocked.
Jack turned very slowly to see himself. In the dim light it was like he was looking into a mirror. His counterpart smiled at him in a way Jack didn’t think he himself had ever smiled: confident, satirical, with one eyebrow cocked.
“Now there are only two of us left, brother. Or should I say only one.” The man chuckled, gesturing at his own face.
“What’s your job now?” Jack asked. “Capture me, kill me?”
“The latter, I’m afraid. It is unfortunate, because one doesn’t find a twin every day. But my instructions are very specific and leave no room for individual initiative.”
He raised his gun, his smile turning regretful. Jack raised his own arms out to the sides, making a target.
“You’re in an interesting position. You might even say unique.”
His twin hesitated. Jack went on talking quickly. “Do you know why you’re supposed to kill me? Are you supposed to take my place after that? Where are you supposed to go? Have they given you the next step yet?”
He saw that the answer to his last question was no. The man with his face frowned. He didn’t know what came after this room, this murder. Jack shrugged in a way he hoped was very knowing. “It would have been more subtle of your boss to give you some bullshit story about what came next after you killed me. You might have believed they wanted you to take my place. But after my body’s found here in this very public way, by those policemen who will make their way up here at any moment, well, you do the math.” Jack frowned as his lookalike continued to hesitate. “You can, can’t you? I hope there’s a brain behind my face.”
He had almost gone too far. The man glared at him. “I do hear you,” he said in that strange accent. “It is just that English is not my first language. Nor my second. I have to translate in my head before…”
“Would you be more comfortable in—Deutsche?”
It was a quick shot in the dark, trying to prevent the man from taking an actual shot in the dark, and it hit. An educated guess on Jack’s part. The man didn’t sound Czech, he hadn’t answered his companion in French, and he’d just said English wasn’t his native language. And he didn’t look Latin of any strain.
Jack had guessed right. The man suddenly began talking in German, offering Jack some kind of explanation. Unfortunately Jack’s German was very sketchy. He caught the words for “family,” “debt,” and some kind of threat. This man obviously needed a soulmate. He hadn’t had someone to tell his story to in a long while. Jack tried to look attentive, but what he was really watching was his lookalike’s gun hand slowly lowering. Jack took a deep breath.
Then he shouted one of the few German words he knew, “Achtung!” meaning, he hoped, Warning! There was a sound at the door and his lookalike spun. The policeman had also heard Jack’s shout, and
any kind of cry sounded like a warning to him. There was a quick exchange of gunfire.
And Jack jumped out the window, shattering it, ducking just enough not to bang his head against the crosspiece. The glass was old and thin and broke easily, hardly slowing him at all. But his foot caught on the windowsill, he tipped over as he went out, and fell heavily on the fire escape outside, first onto his shin, then his shoulder. He continued rolling, bumping, reaching, trying to stop his fall but continuing to get away.
Finally, near the bottom of the metal steps he caught the rail and brought himself up short. Taking a quick breath, he stood up. Above him, the gunfire had stopped, which wasn’t good, because it meant either his lookalike or the police officer could concentrate on Jack now. He ran, or rather limped, to the bottom of the fire escape then back under it deeper into the alley, away from the street.
A few seconds later, the man with Jack’s face also half-fell out of the upstairs window. Bleeding, he slid down the fire escape by hanging onto the railing. He was gasping into a phone as he walked around the corner onto the street, away from his stopped truck and the police car. Within half a block a black Volkswagen pulled to the curb beside him. A door opened in the back and he stumbled into it. There was time to talk as the car moved briskly but at legal speed away from the scene of the crime. The car seemed to be safely away, several miles and minutes later, when there was another gunshot from within it. The body of Jack’s lookalike was pushed out, into the gutter, and the black Volkswagen sped away.
Jack made his way back to the coffee shop where he’d been earlier. He was walking better by the time he knocked on its service door in the alley. There was a long pause. Jack felt himself observed. Then the door opened and the waiter from earlier stuck his head out, looked both ways down the alley, and pulled Jack inside, closing the door firmly behind him. A finger to his lips, the waiter pulled Jack along a short hallway, then into a pantry. He closed the door, there was a flash and a flare, and the waiter lit a very small candle. In its flickers, he and Jack looked ghostly in the confined space, as if they were holding a seance.
“I don’t usually get such quick return business,” the waiter said. “I didn’t realize my coffee was that good.”
And he grabbed Jack in a bear hug. Jack winced but hugged back. When they stepped apart the waiter had a broad grin, Jack an ironic one.
“You scared me just walking in like that earlier,” the waiter said. He had plump cheeks, very black hair and now, unlike earlier, merry eyes. “It was good to see you, but mon dieu, you startled me. Silence, exile, cunning. Have you forgotten?”
He was reciting James Joyce’s advice to writers as if it were the creed of a secret cult, which in a way was true. “I remember. I’m just not very good at cunning. Anyway, that’s why I stopped at every table on my way out, in case anyone was watching me. Which I don’t think they were. They were waiting outside. Man it’s good to see you, Stevie.”
The waiter laughed and brushed a tear from his eye. He had always been very sentimental. “No one’s called me that for—I don’t know. Seen any of the old crowd lately, Jack?”
“Not yet. But I’m going to need you all. Did you understand what I was saying?”
Stevie grinned. “Oh, it was subtle, but I think I puzzled it out. You want a couple of riots, then to bust open the conspiracy. Not as easy as you make it sound, Jack. And a little premature, wouldn’t you say?”
“It’s horribly premature. It’s an abortion. But I don’t have any choice, with the peace summit coming up so soon. And you know we’re under attack?”
“Of course. When stealth planes cross America—.”
“I don’t mean that ‘we,’ Stevie, I mean us. The Circle. Have our communications broken down so badly you haven’t—”
“Yes, Jack, I know. You think I’ve gotten slow in my old age? I’ve been following what we were taught, Jack. In a crisis like this, go to ground. Work your contacts. Avoid each other.”
He said the last with a significant glance at Jack, who obviously hadn’t learned this lesson. That “old age” remark of Stevie’s might have been funny, too, in another context. He and Jack were the same age, mid-twenties. They’d been classmates at Bruton Academy.
“Yeah, well,” Jack said ruefully. “Sometimes only old friends will do.” And he and Stevie said together: “This is one of those times.” They laughed. For a moment, there in the confines of the pantry, in the candlelight, it was as if they were back in school, pulling some midnight prank.
Esteban Vincenzo Romani Vosovitch—is name was a map of Europe. Stevie was Portugese but had grown up in America, spoke Spanish rather than Portugese when he wasn’t speaking English, and in America had affected a Puerto Rican accent sometimes just to be more confusing, even though he had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line in the western hemisphere. He had been recruited into the Circle at nearly as early an age as Jack. Stevie was good at making friends, Jack at alienating them, so their talents had meshed well. Stevie had respect for authority, too, a virtue that Jack had spent their school years trying to change, with only limited success.
After graduation Stevie had returned to Europe for college but he and Jack had stayed in touch. Stevie was one of the few people Jack trusted completely and one of the very few who knew about Jack’s recent activities.
“Did anyone come in after I left?” Jack asked. “Or leave right after I did?”
Stevie shook his head. “I heard the alarm going off after that at the building across the street, but I didn’t know if that was because of you and I didn’t think I could help by running over there and getting arrested. But I got rid of my customers as quickly as I could—I had the singer start singing pop hits of the eighties—and stayed near the back door. I had a feeling you might find your way back here. So you think this business is connected with the peace summit?”
“I don’t know.”
Stevie took Jack’s shoulders again, looking at him fondly. Then he frowned. “Were you really in London recently?”
Jack nodded. As quickly as that, there were tears in his eyes. He could hardly stand to hear the sound of the word.
Stevie’s grip on his shoulders tightened. “Find anything?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean yes, I found something, but I don’t know what it means. She kept—not a diary, but notes. Like clues to herself. Or maybe they would have been clues to me once she’d told me more, but she never got the chance. Stevie—I think she was part of it.”
Stevie’s eyes widened. His hands fell to his sides. “Are you sure?”
Jack shook his head. “I’m not sure of anything. But she certainly knew about it. Stevie, I think maybe that’s why—why she took up with me. I think maybe she was trying to recruit me.”
Stevie shook his head, his eyes gone fierce. “Madeline loved you, Jack. I saw it. I saw her look at you. Touch you. Nobody can fake love around me, Jack.”
One tear escaped Jack’s eye and ran down his cheek. When he started to speak he choked up and had to start over. “Even— Maybe that would be a reason to recruit me.”
Stevie looked speculative as he worked through the emotional logic. Madeline had loved Jack. She had been part of a large plan. She must have been very devoted to it. If so, how could she not bring her two passions together?
“Unless she wasn’t part of the conspiracy,” he finally said. “Unless she was infiltrating it. Then she might have been afraid to bring you in. Or didn’t think you were ready yet. But she didn’t have time to—” His voice stopped as his eyes widened. “Oh, my God, Jack, does this mean she didn’t die of cancer?”
Jack couldn’t answer. Both because he couldn’t speak and because he didn’t know the answer.
The two old friends talked for another few minutes, while the candle burned low and began guttering. Their own shadows flew around the pantry shelves as Stevie finally asked, “Is this all connected, Jack? The conspiracy we were investigating and the attack on your country and the�
��someone being out to destroy the Circle?”
Just as the candle flared and went out, the waiter looked into his friend’s face and saw that Jack didn’t know the answer.
A few minutes later Jack was again walking the dark streets of Prague, having declined Stevie’s offer of a ride. This time he was much more wary, though, so he heard the car approaching before it was upon him. Jack turned and saw something small and black and European—he was not a car person—speeding toward him. Jack already knew the hiding places around him, he had been picking out new ones every few steps, and thought maybe he could pull the same dodge again, jump through a shop window after the car’s occupants shot it out. But he was weary and aching and didn’t know how far he could get this time. He felt like an idiot as his death hurtled toward him.
The car braked to a quick halt, the driver’s door opened on the other side of the car, and Arden stepped out, holding his cell phone.
“Next time at least take this, okay?”
She drove at an un-arrestable speed back to their hotel. On the way Jack asked, “How did you find me?”
“From the way you talked about Prague on the plane, I figured you’d go into Lesser Town. When it got late I was afraid you might be in trouble. So I borrowed the desk clerk’s car and drove around until I heard an alarm going off. I figured you must be in the vicinity of that, so I kept driving around until I saw a man walking alone without a bulge anywhere on him that might be a cell phone. I figured there could only be one such person in a city this size in the twenty-first century.”
Jack smiled. But Arden saw the dried tear on his cheek and knew it had nothing to do with whatever danger he’d just been though. And his smile was sad. She knew one soft sentence would open him up, but she didn’t speak again until they got back to the hotel.
They were standing outside their respective doors, each with a key card in hand. But both stood there for a moment longer.
“Jack?”
