by Marko Kloos
“Let’s get you out of this place.”
He used one of his claws to snip through the plastic ties, carefully stripping them off her wrists and tossing them to the ground one by one. When he was finished, he put his tiger arm behind her shoulders and helped her to a sitting position.
“Soft,” she mumbled. “’S like you’re a cat.”
“Half right,” he said. “Can you walk?”
She swung her legs over the edge of the cot and tried to get to her feet, then stumbled sideways almost immediately. Khan caught her before she could fall, then raised her and draped his arm across her shoulder again. “This is going to be a mess,” he said. “We have to go, kiddo. Can’t call the cops from in here. Gotta get outside. Come on.”
He practically carried her up the hallway back to the entrance to the main part of the nightclub. She was holding on to him, but clearly out of it, and the toes of her white linen shoes touched the ground maybe three times in the entire awkward twenty-meter shuffle to the door.
Almost there, Khan told himself. Across the dance floor, out the main doors, call the cops once we’re outside.
In the nightclub, the thumping music was still churning up the crowd. The flashing lights of the dance floor illumination painted the fog from the machine in bright streaks of red, green, and blue. He went for the most direct route to the exit, straight across the dance floor, bumping people out of the way left and right.
In the space between the dance floor and the exit door, a familiar shape was making its way through the fog toward him: thick arms and legs, short hair on a square-looking head, beady eyes in a face that looked like it was hewn out of a petrified tree trunk. Mukha moved without hurry, but Khan knew that he would not be able to get past the bastard and through those doors, not with Natalie to safeguard.
He lowered Natalie until she was standing on her own very unsteady feet. Then he drew a deep breath and roared at Tree Guy, the loudest roar he had ever squeezed from his lungs and vocal cords. In the confines of the Flakturm, it sounded like a slowly imploding building.
That got the attention of the crowd. They retreated from his vicinity like the tide pulling away from a shoreline at the onset of ebb. Mukha didn’t seem impressed, however. He kept up his infuriatingly unhurried gait, advancing without any hint of hesitation: stomp, stomp, stomp.
When Mukha was ten feet away, Khan reached into his sport coat and brought out the bottle he had prepared in the hotel room’s bathroom before he had set out for the Flakturm. It held a mixture of gasoline, procured by Eli at a nearby service station, and high-proof alcohol, all mixed in with hand soap and a few scoops of laundry detergent. In his youth, back when Khan was still scrawny Samir Khanna, he had experimented with many flammable and explosive substances with his friends, and he hoped that he had remembered the ratios for this particular cocktail correctly. He granted himself the luxury of an extra second to aim. Then he hurled the bottle straight at Mukha.
The cocktail hit the joker-ace right in the middle of his chest. The bottle shattered, and the flammable liquid inside sprayed, and left globs and droplets on the floor in a wide arc in front of Mukha. Most of it, Khan was happy to see, remained on Mukha’s body, soaking the clothes he had draped over his bulky frame. Khan reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the road flares he had brought along. He ignited it with a quick swipe on the leg of his pants. Mukha hesitated, then stopped and looked down at the sticky goop that was covering the front of his torso.
“Step aside,” Khan shouted in Polish, the only Slavic language he knew. He had no idea whether Georgian had any similarities to his mother’s native tongue, but he guessed that Mukha spoke Russian, and maybe he knew some other language that was similar enough to Polish to get the gist. Mukha raised his head again and looked at Khan with an unreadable expression.
“Step aside,” Khan repeated, and waved the road flare for emphasis. “Or I swear I will burn you down along with this shithole. I bet you’ll stay on fire for days.”
Mukha’s face showed no indication that he comprehended the threat, but Khan guessed the smell of gasoline and the lit flare in his hand conveyed the message clearly enough even if this guy didn’t understand a fucking word of Polish after all, because a few heartbeats later, he raised his hands slowly to chest height and walked back half a dozen steps. Khan loaded up Natalie again and headed toward the exit, road flare extended toward Mukha.
We may make it out of here alive after all, he thought. But the brief glimmer of triumph he felt was extinguished a moment later, when the front door opened and four broad-shouldered guys with pissed-off expressions hurried through. They spotted Khan and Natalie, and one of them shouted something at his companions. Then he pulled out a handgun and held it low as he was advancing.
“Shit,” Khan said.
He tossed the road flare in Mukha’s general direction, not aiming to hit the guy but not particularly concerned whether he did. Then he scooped up Natalie and carried her over to the nearest emergency exit he had spotted earlier. He kicked the door open at a run and catapulted two of the stoners behind it into the staircase. A few people were hanging out on the stairs, and Khan barged through them, ignoring their yelled protests as he knocked them aside. He took four and five steps at once, up onto the next landing, and then up the next staircase. Below him, the door banged open again. He peered over the railing to see the four broad-shouldered goons huffing up the first set of stairs. Behind them, Mukha filled out the doorframe and followed the goons with heavy steps that kicked up cigarette butts and concrete dust. One of the armed goons looked up and spotted Khan. He raised his gun and cranked off a shot. Khan flinched back and heard the bullet smack into the concrete somewhere above his head. For the first time since he had walked through the front doors of the Flakturm, the thought came to him that he could die in here. Too many bad guys, a joker-ace who couldn’t be beaten in a stand-up fight, no weapons, no allies, and now nowhere to go.
Make it up to the roof, he told himself. Take it from there. At least the phone will work again up top.
He raced up the stairs and the landings. Natalie’s weight wouldn’t have slowed him down much even under normal circumstances, and with adrenaline flooding his system, it was like she was barely there. By the time he got to the top landing on the sixth floor, their pursuers were only halfway up the stairwell.
A steel door with large rust stains marked the end of the escape path. Khan put down Natalie and threw himself against it. It took several attempts to dislodge the rusty piece of shit from the frame, but on the fourth body blow, it popped open with a sharp metallic squeal.
* * *
Outside, the night air was warm and humid. The stairwell door opened onto one of the circular gun platforms Khan had seen jutting from the top corners of the tower. The guns were gone, of course, and nothing but rust-stained concrete remained where the gun pits used to be. Khan could tell that there used to be concrete catwalks connecting the gun platforms, but someone had demolished large chunks of them, and there was nothing left to get them safely across to the next platform. He had run into a dead end, and the only way out was a hundred-foot drop they wouldn’t survive. The gun platform had a waist-high concrete balustrade, and he lowered Natalie in front of it so she wouldn’t fall off the roof, and away from the door so gunfire wouldn’t hit her by accident.
Behind him, the pursuers were almost at the top of the staircase. If he wanted to hold them off, he’d have to fight them while they were trying to make it through the door, not when they had space to spread out and hit him from several directions.
“Call the cops,” Khan told Natalie. He hoped that she was awake enough to understand what he was saying. “One-one-zero.”
He handed her his phone and turned toward the door. Then he took off his sport coat to free up his range of movement, unsheathed the claws on his tiger hand, and roared a challenge at the unseen pursuers who were just now making their way onto the top staircase landing.
The
y didn’t do him the favor of coming through the door single file and letting him pick them off one by one. Instead, the goon with the pistol stuck his head around the corner of the staircase and aimed his gun at the doorway. Khan leapt sideways as the shot rang out, losing sight of the top landing.
“Come out and let’s settle this shit,” he yelled through the doorway. The reply came in Georgian, and it didn’t sound like they agreed with his proposal. He glanced back at Natalie, who was still looking like she had just woken up from a deep sleep.
For the next minute or two, they were at an impasse. It was a true Mexican standoff. Every time Khan stuck his head around the corner, the mobster with the gun would fire a round in his direction. He couldn’t rush them without catching a bullet or two, and they couldn’t come out to finish him off without getting cut to ribbons. But time was working against Khan, because he knew that with every passing moment, Mukha made his way farther up the stairs. And there was nothing he could do about it, because he had gotten them stuck in a dead-end kill trap like a fucking amateur.
Khan could smell and hear Mukha as he lumbered up onto the top landing and toward the door. He reeked of gasoline-and-soap mix, and his footsteps echoed in the staircase. Khan bared his teeth and growled. Then he backed up to the low balustrade where Natalie was still hunched and took a running start toward the door just as Mukha filled out the doorframe with his bulk. Khan put all his weight and force into a flying leap, three hundred pounds of pissed-off ballistic feline, thousands of foot-pounds of energy, and slammed his feet right into the middle of Mukha’s chest.
It felt like trying to dropkick the front of a speeding truck. The shock of the impact traveled from Khan’s feet to the top of his skull. He bounced off Mukha’s chest and careened into the doorframe, then back out onto the gun platform, where he landed flat on his back. He turned his head to see that Mukha was on his back as well, lying in a cloud of dust a few feet inside the staircase landing.
Mukha sat up, slowly shook his head once, and started to get to his feet.
“Come on,” Khan groaned. “What does it fucking take.”
He fished for another road flare, but his hands couldn’t find a pocket, and he remembered that he had just discarded his coat. It was on the ground by the edge of the platform, fifteen feet away. Khan stood on aching legs and staggered over to the coat, but it was too late. Mukha was already at the door again, and behind him, three mobsters brought up the rear. They followed Mukha onto the platform and fanned out behind him. One of them aimed his gun at Khan in an infuriatingly casual manner.
He flexed his leg muscles for another jump, even though he knew that he’d never take down all three men in time, not even if they didn’t have the fucking Mukha as a shield.
Sorry, kiddo, he thought. I fucked this one up for both of us.
In the cloudless early morning sky above the Flakturm, a thunderclap boomed. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, and it was so loud that it made Khan’s teeth rattle. He felt the impact of something heavy landing on the gun platform behind him. Khan turned his head to see a man in a military-type flight suit straighten himself out as if he had just landed a mildly challenging acrobatic routine. The newcomer was wearing a helmet with a gold-tinted visor that made him look a bit like a robot. The helmet was white, and it bore a call sign written onto the side with stick-on vinyl lettering: ÜBERSCHALL.
For a heartbeat, time seemed to be frozen.
Then the mobster with the gun raised his arm and moved the muzzle of his weapon from Khan over to the newcomer.
The guy in the flight suit clapped his hands and pushed them outward in a shoving motion. There was another thunderclap, this one so unbearably loud it made Khan roar in pain. When he looked up again, all three mobsters were on the ground, and Mukha was on his back again, twenty feet inside the staircase hallway beyond the door. This time, he didn’t try to get up again.
Khan heard the soft rustling of very large wings behind him. He turned around to see Fledermaus come to a soft and gentle landing on the gun platform right near Natalie, who recoiled at the sight of the white-fanged German joker-ace.
“He’s all right,” Khan assured her. “He’s with the good guys.”
The man in the flight suit took off his helmet and ran a gloved hand through his hair, which was ash-blond and cut short in the military fashion. He looked like a runway model, blue eyes over chiseled cheekbones. When he spoke, his diction was perfect, even if his accent was so German that it made him sound like a war movie villain.
“Is everyone all right?”
“Yeah, we’re okay,” Khan replied. “They pumped Miss Scuderi full of sedatives. She’ll need to get to a hospital, and soon.”
“This is my colleague,” Fledermaus said. “Major Florian Lambert, also called Überschall. Also with BDBF.”
“I figured. Very nice of you to drop by,” Khan said. “Could have shown up a bit sooner.”
“Like I said, we were keeping an eye on things from above. Pardon my late entrance, but my colleague here is a bit faster in the air than I am.”
“So you knew where we were all along?”
“We were tracking you since you left the hotel. But we are not allowed to intervene unless we have positive verification of a special abilities target.”
“This oaf over there,” Khan said, and nodded at the hallway where Mukha was lying. “I told you he was around.”
“Unfortunately, our rules of engagement make no allowance for hearsay,” Überschall said. He walked over to the goons he had knocked senseless and began to tie up their wrists with plastic restraints he fished out from a pocket on his flight suit. The pistol was on the ground next to one of the mobsters. Überschall picked it up, ejected the magazine, racked the slide to clear the chamber, and fieldstripped the weapon with quick and practiced motions. Then he tossed the parts of the gun into the concrete dust. Khan watched him walk into the staircase vestibule to the spot where Mukha was laid out, still motionless.
“Not that I’m holding a grudge,” Khan shouted after him. “But if that fucker moves, stick a match up his ass and let him burn until Christmas.”
When the adrenaline subsided, Khan felt utterly drained. He sat down next to Natalie while Überschall played field medic and checked her overall condition. Now that the fight was over, the top of the Flakturm was an oddly peaceful place. The sun had started to rise above the eastern horizon, painting the sky in shades of deep purple and orange. Down below, life continued as if nothing had happened. Khan heard the laughter and chatter from nightclub patrons as they left and made their way through the park, and all around them, the city was starting to stir from its brief slumber.
“What’s going to happen to Mister Woody over there?” Khan asked Fledermaus and nodded in the direction of the unconscious Mukha.
“He did not register with the authorities when he entered the country,” Fledermaus said. “That is a violation of our law. I imagine we will have strong words with the authorities in his home country. As for him, we have a facility in Butzbach for people with special abilities. I think he will spend a bit of time there as our guest.”
“That’s a lot of risk they took. Six guys, two cars. And a joker-ace smuggled in. A lot of effort, and no guarantee of a payout. Why would they do that?”
“They told me,” Natalie mumbled behind them. Khan and Fledermaus turned around in surprise. She was sitting up with her arms wrapped around her knees, and she merely sounded drunk instead of incoherent.
“They told you what?” Khan asked and sat down next to her.
“They said my father owed them money. Lots of money. Said they weren’t letting me go until he paid up.” She shuddered a little and hugged her knees tighter. “Told me they’d start cutting off fingers if he didn’t. Send ’em back to him in a box, one by one.”
Khan looked over at the still unconscious mobsters and suppressed his sudden desire to grab them by the neck and throw them off the gun platform. He didn’t much care f
or her music or her social circle, but Natalie was just a kid, barely out of her teens, and no threat to anyone. He had killed mobsters and other dirtbags in cold blood before, but he’d never lay a hand on an innocent, especially not one so close in age and appearance to his little sister Naya. All of a sudden, he didn’t have any more scruples about the mook he had slashed to shreds down in the nightclub’s back hallway.
In the distance, sirens cut through the tranquility of the park. Khan looked over the balustrade and saw blue lights flashing. At least a dozen police cars were rushing up the access road from the nearby parking lot. The German police sirens had a two-tone pattern that was somehow even more annoying than the shrill ululating wail of the cop sirens back home: BEE-DO, BEE-DO. The blue lights cut through the semi-darkness of the early morning and drew erratic light patterns on the concrete walls of the Flakturm.
“Some things are the same everywhere,” Khan said.
“What is that?” Fledermaus asked.
“The cavalry always shows up five minutes too late.”
Forty-eight hours and an interminable amount of police interviews later, Khan and Natalie’s entourage were in the air again. He had fully expected to join Mukha, the Tree Guy, in whatever high-security facility BDBF had set up for wayward wild cards in Butzbach. But the BDBF guys seemed to have a great deal of pull with Germany’s federal police. He’d had to sign a legal paper obliging him to return for a court appearance if the prosecutor decided to file charges, and then they released him on his word and returned his passport, much to Khan’s astonishment.
There was no Top 40 music blaring in the cabin of the Learjet on the way to Keflavik. Natalie and her friends were huddled on the lounge seating and talking while sipping drinks. Khan knew the shell-shocked look in their eyes all too well. He spent most of the flight to Iceland thinking about the kidnapping and of all the ways he screwed up. In reality, he knew that he couldn’t have done much better, but he also knew that the open wound on his professional ego would take a much longer time to heal than the bruises on his body.