Jack Be Nimble: Tyro Book 2

by Ben English

  “The fundamentals remain.” The old man’s English reflected an Oxford education. Hard as he listened Jack could never hear any Russian inflections. “You obviously remember your training well enough, if you could follow this morning’s exercise.” Smoke curled around him, held captive by the newspaper. “Or are you just an actor now, playing at spy.”

  “It’s the way of an actor,” Jack agreed, in Mandarin.

  “Errol Flynn used to do this all the time.”

  “Is it true he was really working for the Germans?” Jack asked.

  “He was working for himself,” the old man shot back, sharply. “Not like you. It seems you are the last of the unsentimental patriots.” The word was a sneer. “So English, please. Stop speaking to me as if you were a Shanghai fishwife.”

  Jack paused, and let a little hardness creep into his voice. “There were two men yesterday, in a listening post across the street from Vicenzo's.”

  “That's foolish. Everyone knows Vicenzo works for the Vatican.”

  He ignored the older man’s tone. “These were out-of-towners. One of them was, at least. The other wanted me to see him. He made himself obvious, but not catchable.”

  The old shoeshine turned a page in his newspaper. “Freelancers.”

  “Like you?”

  “No, fool. Killers. I collect things—”

  “For other people,” Jack finished. “You're a lot like your sons.” He paused as another train pulled into the station. Jack sneaked a glance at the old man. For all his outer indifference, at the mention of his sons he was rapt, utterly focused on Jack, waiting for him to continue.

  Jack let the silence hang in the air, then asked another question. “Who were the two freelancers? I don’t care how you get the information, but I need to know.”

  “You can have this for free. Marvin Krest, a young arrogant child from your country, and Roland Thiel, a former Legionnaire who was…seduced by one of the terror cells he hunted when he was younger. The name of their employer will cost you.”

  Jack didn’t even wait for the other man to draw on his cigarette. “Miklos Nasim.”

  The old man's eyes jumped fractionally. He was still capable of surprise. “At the beginning, certainly. Thiel worked for Nasim for years; now he reports to another party. Whom I certainly do not know.”

  Jack started to speak, then paused. Dangerous ground. The old man knew ways of drawing information, and there was no trick Jack knew that would make their conversation a fair trade. “Any idea why the Frenchman would approach us, tip us off to what he was doing?”

  The response was considered and careful. “A parent will go to extreme lengths to show honor to a child.”

  He let that lie. “What do you know about the new employer?”

  “Rumors. There’s no pattern as yet. Our information suggests a financier, an industrialist, a technocrat. The price for certain types of scientific information has recently gone up. Pure research is being stolen and hoarded.”

  “You mean copied and collected?”

  The wizened old shoeshine lit another cigarette, took his time. “I said stolen. Downloaded and wiped. Hard copies, electronic files. In the past two days, someone has managed to hoard a tremendous amount of pure energy research. Five research teams have gone missing. Coordinated break-ins at MIT and Stanford. Certain American scientists are being made to vanish. We don’t know who the central figure is, but the rumors regarding his or her endgame scenario are…puzzling…

  “He wants to induce chaos on a grand scale, perhaps—”

  Jack gestured at their surroundings. “Bring the entire system roaring down?”

  The elderly Chinese man almost laughed. “That’s too grandiose. An industrialist would obviously reap great financial rewards during a reconstruction. A system-wide crash endangers everyone. You’re being absurd.”

  “But if I’m not, we have an adversary in common. Miklos Nasim and Roland Thiel are working for Alex Raines. Raines Capital.”

  The old man scoffed. “You are lying.”

  Jack set his palm on the armrest between them. “An industrialist. A technocrat with practically unlimited funds. Someone with enough leverage to move the earth, given a proper fulcrum and a sturdy place to stand.” Jack removed his hand, revealing a singed ticket to the Illuminatus Cineplex.

  The old man’s eyes widened in astonishment, and Jack continued. “His parents were Cold War scientists, on your side. Your old Soviet connections should help you build up quite a package of information.”

  “That would be worth a great deal of money.”

  “Find a buyer quickly. The market on information about Alex Raines is about to crash.”

  “And what do you want in return?”

  “A copy of your completed file on Raines. It will be worthless in a few weeks, anyway. Today I need a shopping list of potential scientists, specific titles of research papers—anything Raines hasn’t gotten his hands on yet.” Jack pretended to read the entertainment section of the Mandarin newspaper. It always vaguely bothered him that he’d never have enough time to learn to read most of the languages he could speak. “I need to know who’s next on the list.”

  His Sphinxlike companion blew a smoke ring. “I am an old man. I usually don’t take such an aggressive stance.”

  “The French said much the same thing in the spring of 1939.” Jack waited.

  The old man switched back to Mandarin. “You’ll have the names of all the scientists targeted for assassination in one hour. Is there anything else?”

  “I‘d very much like to hear the story sometime, how you got your family out of Tienanmen Square. Brad won’t discuss it.”

  Real emotion flickered across the old man’s face so briefly Jack wondered if he imagined it. “How is my son?”

  “He’s going to be fine. Right now he’s much safer than you or I—if I’m not mistaken, he’s got the same nurse Bill Clinton had last year after he fell off the balcony at the 12 Bar Club.”

  The old man started to laugh, then caught himself and fished for another cigarette. “You’re always trying to be funny. Pain in the ass.”

  Jack folded the newspaper, eyes on the crowd.

  The match flared, pale grey smoke swirled above their heads. “Your wife now, she could make me laugh. Never met an Irish who didn’t know how to tell a story.”

  Jack Flynn dropped the newspaper, stepped off the platform, and vanished into the crowd.

  Snowstorm in a Sardine Tin

  Liverpool, England

  Colin “Smigger” Smythe waited for his three bodyguards to join him before leaving the gym. Morning in Merseyside was the opposite of a combat zone, but it was an odd morning. Two hundred miles away, in London, the Illuminatus Tower still burned. The newsies had yet to decide the safest group to blame, and this made life a shade more interesting for the head man of the Liverpool mob.

  Smigger cheated only once, you see.

  *

  My, my. Time certainly brought advances. At the beginning of his career, Armand Lopez would have merely kidnapped the man, perhaps his entire family. Youth is often unimaginative; as a lieutenant in the West Valley cartel, Lopez had focused on abducting local doctors for ransom. Foreigner visitors to Columbia typically had more money, and as Lopez widened his vision, he began collecting them as well—mostly women or middle-aged men, if their companies carried kidnapping insurance, which was easy enough to find out.

  At twenty he personally killed his first rival, a deputy of police in a western province. Beat him into soft pieces with a rusty pipe. This felt most satisfying, and he had every intention of continuing to address such things personally, but his own strength became a problem. Lopez was already becoming so powerful in the organization that his underlings began to take care of the wet work. Unfortunate, but the suggestion of restraint came from the kings above him.

  So he busied himself with running the businesses, the companies, the endeavors that were sometimes legitimate but just as often allowed hi
m to launder the billions of dollars flowing into the cartel from the sales of product. By the time he was thirty, Lopez ran a network of thirty radio stations, a chain of pharmacies in twenty-eight cities, and a Panamanian bank. Outside the bank, his consortium was valued at three hundred million dollars. Inside the bank, he’d washed over six billion for the cartel. The kings and princes at the top allowed him to celebrate.

  A reporter for the largest Bogota newspaper was working on a story about one of his companies—it was a bicycle-messenger firm, actually inconsequential, but he convinced his superiors that the reporter could leverage the story into a larger expose. Peel back the layers and uncover more sensitive information on the cartel, so they gave him the go-ahead to close the story. Lopez met her alone the evening of his thirtieth birthday. No lieutenants, no underlings of any kind. After a quiet dinner and an off-the-record interview, he hung her upside down from a neon billboard over the Avenida de las Américas and flayed the skin and most of the muscle from her thighs to just past her navel. He’d read a book on circulatory anatomy just for the occasion, and was able to avoid severing any major arteries. A pleasant discovery: blood rushing to her head kept her conscious longer than expected. It took hours for him to lose interest, and he left the corpse there under the glowing Postobon sign. Her story was over; the work remained unpublished.

  After that, other aspects of the cartel’s business in Colombia still held the media’s attention, but not his. For some reason his operations were never considered newsworthy.

  There simply wasn’t anything as personally satisfying as taking care of matters yourself. Armand Lopez lived the life of an upper-echelon manager in the Colombian West Valley Cartel, with women, money, and homes to spare, but in his heart he enjoyed only one luxury.

  Perhaps it was the risk. Perhaps it was the idea of assaulting the innocent, but Lopez didn’t fool himself. There were no innocent. Only the unsuspecting.

  Time advanced, as was its wont. As attrition wore away at the ranks of the cartel, Lopez rose. The Medellíns were long gone. The Cali cartel shattered in upon itself, losing compartmentalization until one day it was nothing resembling the former whole. Most of his superiors in West Valley had been arrested and extradited to the U.S., with their futures uncertain as they faced judges and political machines they hadn’t yet cultivated through bribery, graft, and nepotism. Among other duties, Lopez inherited the responsibility for new market development.

  Perversely, the new freedom granted him the opportunity for more personal risk. In Cuba a few years ago, he’d been glad to escape with his life and a gut full of lead. He owed that and other scars to a black-haired Irish woman and her team of mercenaries. Now that Cuba was ready once again for penetration, he held out hope that destiny would again bring him the woman.

  The Liverpool mob deal was his first successful new market. By and large men after Lopez’s own heart. Partnership with the richest gang in the U.K. gave Lopez access to new contacts and a strong distribution chain throughout the European market, and there was opportunity; upheavals in Iran disrupted the flow of drugs from the Middle East. Suddenly, Colombian White was on the table again. The West Valley cartel was in place to provide, and the world was indeed flat. Money roared in.

  Until the drug baron for the Liverpool gang cheated.

  *

  Smigger held the door for the first two guards, and allowed the third to fall in beside him as they exited the gym. He hated exercising by himself, next time they’d bring equipment. They were all new men, still learning his routine. They were Irish gougers, the lot, but seemed to pick up fast enough. Ex-IRA paramilitaries. Contract killers all, glad to triple their salary guarding his hide.

  Normally he drew bodyguards from a local pool of muscle, a firm of nightclub bouncers that doubled as foot soldiers for the mob. He’d go back to them once the Colombians stopped asking about the five hundred kilograms of product he’d reported as rotting in police custody. Loss was a part of the business, everyone knew this, even the kings and princes in the Far Away Place, as they referred to South America.

  Of course, the five hundred kilos was on a dock in Amsterdam, all lined up pretty as a picture. They’d bring it into the country later this week, packed in sardine tins. It was still uncut and required processing; they’d bash it up to at least eight hundred kilograms and sell each kilo on the street for eighty-thousand pounds apiece. A month from now, the Liverpool coffers would be richer by seventy-two million pounds. And he could buy another home on Cyprus.

  Smigger was distracted that morning, as were most of his countrymen, by the horrific fire and power outage in London. Various terrorist groups claimed responsibility, but no one really knew who lay behind the burning of the Illuminatus Tower. It was the kind of thing Lopez would do.

  He’d listen to the news in the car, for once. Perhaps pick up a paper—

  And the lead guard’s head exploded, spritzing blood, brains, hair, and teeth back onto Smigger’s track suit. As the other front man drew his weapon, the bodyguard at Smigger’s side shouldered him into a doorway, and pulled his own gun, shouting. A shotgun roared (neither of his men carried a shotgun) and Smigger saw the first man’s legs go out from under him before he found the door handle, locked.

  The gun roared again, answered by screams, and Smigger pounded on the door. Reinforced wood, no glass. Three locks, all pig iron. The kind of door people buy when the mob moves into their neighborhood.

  Bone cracked behind him, and the scream stopped. Didn’t end, just stopped.

  He knew all these sounds.

  Blood ran by the stoop. It steamed a bit in the morning sun.

  “New bodyguards, Smigger?”

  Armand Lopez? He’s making the hit himself?

  “They look Irish. Are you Irish, Smigger?”

  First Order of the Day

  Paris

  Mist persisted low on the flatlands north of the city center, keeping the full light of dawn momentarily at bay. Le Bourget was the quietest of Paris’ three airports. Since closing to regular passenger flights in the 1970’s it catered exclusively to business jets, air trade shows, and earthbound visitors who felt the need to visit the site made famous by an American tourist from a younger era; Charles Lindberg landed at Le Bourget in 1927.

  Hanger 7 wasn’t quite as old—barely older than the war, Jack guessed, and probably full of ghosts. It looked to have been constructed with the same single-minded anxiety that characterized Paris in the last months before the Nazi invasion. Cold aluminum crossbeams matched the cement floor. Every other roof slat was translucent, and faint, steel-colored slices of sunlight checkered the floor and walls, carving square shadows among the looming, covered shapes. Black plastic wetly reflected the new light. Slow-spinning dust motes angled in and out of the checkerboard illumination. He saw the reason for the disturbance: two figures sat hunched over a computer screen near an open door, next to a pyramid of duffel bags identical to Jack’s.

  He smelled the cigar before he found Alonzo, wandering among the vintage aircraft. “Bet there’s a lot of stories in here,” he said, moving slowly. The room had grown light enough for Jack to see Alonzo's easy, spellbound smile.

  "How're your ribs?" he asked.

  Alonzo shrugged with his face. "Look at that beauty." He pointed to a grey bomber with a nose-mounted gun turret and a double-barred blue cross painted on the fuselage. “That’s a B-26.” Behind it loomed a riveted steel giant, two engines on either wing. “B-17”.

  “You had a model of that one when we were kids.”

  “I’ve still got it. And the model we put together is a P-51, not a B-17. Different aircraft entirely. You should read a book or something.”

  "You should write one. Hey, where did you get the cigar?"

  "William sent them over. Don't tell me you want one."

  Now Jack shrugged. "Where’s the rest of the gang?"

  Alonzo cranked a thumb over his shoulder, eyes still roaming the contours of the aircraft. "Back with our
stuff." He took a step, looked back at Jack for an instant, wavered.

  "Steve’s completely frit. You should talk to him."

  Jack wondered what he meant by that. Sounded like something the Major would say. "I'll see what I can do. Hey, William's got another surprise for you."

  It was lost on Alonzo. He was lost, enthralled, transfigured into a small boy among the planes. Many of them, arrayed seemingly at random, were covered in black plastic. Occasionally a gleaming piece of metal pushed free, a prop or the tip of a wing or a fin. Even in tarpaulined profile, Alonzo could recognize them. He jabbed in the air with the cigar: “There’s a Spitfire! A Buchon. P-47!” He indicated a single-seater with a long nose that jutted out far in front of the cockpit. “That’s a Dewoitine D.520, made right here at Le Bourget. Nothing they make these days can stay in the air as long as a Dewoitine.”

  Alonzo reluctantly blinked. His head barely turned fast enough to keep up with his eyes, and the cigar had completely gone out.

  “Why are they covered in plastic?” Jack said.

  “Asbestos contamination. Hey, that’s a Martinet!” He took several steps toward a massive twin-engine craft with a bulbous, flame-colored nose. The front carriage and wingtips were painted bright orange, as if in answer to the sunrise.

  At the edge of the shadows, near the open hanger door, Jack paused to listen to Ian and Steve. They sat with their backs to him, crouched over a collection of bright wrappings and glinting metal objects. Neither man noticed his arrival, so intent were they on the small bright things before them.

  Ian took a noisy drink through a straw, and another bite of something. Over the scent of old steel and dust, Jack smelled barbequed chicken.

  “Now,” said Ian. “Use your .40 caliber bore brush to clean only the wide part of the chamber. When you’re done, use the 9mm brush to clean the rest.”