by Tom Wilde
It was too bad, really. The chances were better than even that Caitlin and I were going to wind up at crossed swords. She had her mission, and I had mine, and I had a bad feeling that we were going to collide over them. I held no illusions; the two of us were being pleasant with each other, but underneath it all we were like a pair of gamblers in the Old West, keeping our cards close and derringers ready while we bluffed and cheated each other. Still, at the moment, she was lovely to look at in the candlelight.
We finished with dinner, retrieved our luggage from the concierge, and called for a cab to take us to the airport. Once outside, I lit up one of my Shermans, and in the process caught the sideways glance from Caitlin. “I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.
“I don’t very often. Although there are quite a few places in the world where people would question the masculinity of a man who didn’t smoke.”
“I noticed you didn’t offer your wife one.”
“Sorry,” I said as I held the box out to her. She turned away, offering a haughty profile. “I don’t smoke,” she said simply. “And neither should you. What’s the point of keeping you alive if you’re just going to commit slow suicide?”
“You know, ever since we’ve been married, it’s just been nag, nag, nag.” I closed the box and put my cigarettes and battered old Zippo inside my suitcase. The lighter was etched with the outline of a Chinese dragon, and there was a small dent in one of the lower corners, matching a dent in the skull of the man I took the lighter from while I was working in the jungle west of Angkor Wat. I later used the lighter to set fire to his truck, after I removed a set of stolen tenth-century bas-relief pieces that the man had chiseled off ancient temple walls. “Still,” I said to Caitlin as I straightened up from my suitcase, “it’s nice to know you’ll be protecting me.”
The cab arrived and I said my silent good-bye to the Great Electric Babylon of the West as we set off for JFK International. When we reached the airport, it was in its usual state of semi-controlled chaos, but we managed to run the gauntlet of high-tech security that ultimately let me board the Air France Boeing jet, armed with only the 112 weapons that nature has provided me with. After takeoff, we settled in for our in-flight seven-hour nap and I felt fortunate that we had a row all to ourselves, though I suspected Caitlin’s elderly boss may have arranged for this small luxury. Caitlin, near the window, kicked off her athletic shoes and snuggled in with a pillow and blanket after wishing me a good night. But I was feeling too wired up to even try to sleep just then. During all of my other jobs, by the time I was in transit to whatever corner of the world I was going to raid, I’d have already planned and schemed and prepared. But this time around I was flying blind, and as I watched the stars sail by in the night sky, I thought back to how my life had brought me to this point.
And how it all began just as my first life ended.
CHAPTER FOUR
Looking back now, I see my first life was like it was an old, half-remembered movie, and not a very interesting one at that. Until I discovered that hell is a very real place and could be found right here on earth. The final night of my first life began when I was dragged out of my filthy, festering prison cell, tied with rope and blinded by a stinking burlap sack pulled over my head, then shoved into the back of a truck. I remember thinking, as I was half-choked unconscious by the toxic fumes of the exhaust and hammered by the jarring, bumpy ride over dirt roads, that I had a faint hope that I was being taken off to a place where I’d finally be allowed to die. Ultimately, the truck skidded to a halt and I was shoved out to the ground by a final kick on my back. I could hear the truck grinding its way back down the road as strong arms lifted my body and placed me in a sitting position against a tree, then the sack was pulled from my head.
I took in a shuddering breath, full of the thick jungle air that to me, after my timeless stay in a disease-ridden hellhole, was sweeter than any wine. My eye, the one I could still see out of, found a cluster of bright stars burning through a hole in the dense tropical forest canopy—stars so bright they almost hurt after all the time I’d spent in the dark. In the next instant I had to clamp my good eye shut against a sputtering glare that came from a match struck nearby. I felt the flicker of the flame through my eyelid as a deep, rough voice said in English, “Mother of God, they really did a number on you, kid.”
I squinted a look out and saw a rounded, silver-wreathed face and a pair of blue eyes reflecting the match flame. “My name’s Nick Riley,” the man said. “Just sit still awhile. I’m getting you out of here.”
I didn’t say a word as the match guttered itself out and the world turned back to black. I’d had many, many lessons pounded into me during my incarceration, and the first lesson you learn is never to talk back.
In the starlit darkness, I heard Nick grunt as he stood back up. With the noise of the truck receding in the distance, I could now hear the sounds of the nighttime jungle coming back to life. As for me, I was like a wounded crab in a broken shell as I scuttled back and pressed against the rough bark of the tree behind me.
“It’s all right now, boy,” Nick rumbled gently from above me. “You’re safe now. I just bought your way out of prison. Even though the crooked cops I bribed will have to say that you escaped.”
I tried to swallow around a tongue and throat as dry as leather before I spoke through my broken teeth. “Escaped?”
“Yeah,” Nick sighed like an old bellows. “It was the quickest way. I wasn’t sure how long you were going to last locked up in there. But for what it’s worth, I know that you’re no drug smuggler.”
I didn’t dare believe what I heard. “You … you know?” I mumbled.
“I know,” Nick said with a heavy voice, “that you were nothing but an innocent dupe. You thought you’d signed up for a legitimate archeology field dig with a certain Professor Wainwright. What you didn’t know was that the guy who calls himself Wainwright is actually a thief and a relic smuggler. He must have thought you were onto him; that’s why he slipped the drugs into your luggage and tipped off the local cops about you.”
My head was swimming with Nick Riley’s words. I’d lost track of how long I’d been trapped in an absolute nightmare, far from home in a foreign country where no one believed me, cast into prison to rot.
But now, I was pulled out of that abyss and was listening to a man tell me in my own language that I was free. Free. I barely noticed the fact that he had bent down and had cut the rough ropes binding my hands. “We’ll be getting out of here soon,” Nick explained. “There’s a plane coming. Then we’ll get you to a hospital. Can you stand?”
I reached up with the hand that still worked and felt Nick’s strong grip as he hoisted me upright and then steadied me on my shaky feet. As I leaned on him, I could feel hard muscle buried beneath a soft padding of fat. I forced out the words, “Thank you.”
Nick made a growling sound, and then said, “I wouldn’t be so quick to do that, boy. In a way, it’s my fault all this happened to you.”
Nick sensed the question I wanted to ask, and said to me, “Professor Wainwright used to work for me. But I had no idea he was going to do anything like this. Especially to an innocent like you.”
“Wainwright worked for you,” I whispered out of a tight throat.
“Past tense. I fired the bastard. If I’d known he’d go and do something like this, I’d have seen him sent to hell.”
Everything was happening so fast, I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I kept sucking in breaths as if the world were going to run out of air. Then I realized Nick Riley was speaking again, in a low, gravelly voice, almost as if he was speaking to himself.
“Listen, you’re going to have to face some facts. I’m going to see that you get to a doctor and get fixed up when I get you out of here. But I’m afraid your life is ruined. Everyone is going to think you’re an escaped prison convict and drug smuggler. But I can offer you another option.”
I was seeing the truth in Nick Riley’s words
, knowing that I’d never get completely free of hell, no matter how far away I got. Then Nick’s next words changed everything.
“I can give you a new life.”
I didn’t speak; I couldn’t speak. Nick continued, “I figure I owe you that much—a new name and a blank slate. After all you’ve been through, it’s the least I can do for you.”
I was trying to grasp the thoughts Nicholas Riley floated before me. They hummed around my head along with the mosquitoes as Nick said, “And I can see to it that you would never, ever have to be afraid of anyone, ever again.”
That’s when all the small, broken bits inside me struck together like flint and steel, sparking a flame that burned away the last traces of the person I used to be. I pulled my arm back from Nick, feeling my legs take hold, and then I was standing on my own. I didn’t know who Nick Riley was at that time, and I didn’t know what he’d want me for. But in exchange for what he offered me, at that moment I’d have signed a pact with Faust’s pen and my own blood.
My second life began after I was taken to a private clinic in the Caribbean, where Nicholas Riley’s Argo Foundation kept a staff of doctors who, for reasons both varied and criminal, had lost their licenses to practice in their respective countries of origin. It was here where my body was treated and repaired. It was also here that I had written my final letters to the people I had to leave behind: a sister and a niece that I would never see grow up, a couple of close friends, and a girl I thought I had a future with. I wrote and explained the simple truth about how I was wrongly accused, and that I had escaped prison and for the rest of my life I couldn’t risk the chance of letting them know where I was. I hoped they believed me. But I would never know. And nothing could change the fact that there was an international warrant issued for my arrest due to my “prison break.”
It was during this hospital stay that Nick came and visited me for the first time since he rescued me. We were sitting on wooden chairs in the shade of the clinic’s veranda, overlooking a sand beach so pure and white it hurt my eyes to look at it in the sunlight and the blue ocean beyond, savoring a clean salt breeze. After the hell I’d been rescued from, I could almost believe this was heaven. Nick, wearing a wrinkled white Panama suit, was opening the first of a case of Red Stripe he’d brought for the occasion as he said, “From what I hear from these quacks on my payroll, you’re expected to live. Happy birthday.”
“Thanks,” I said after taking the offered beer. “But it’s not my birthday.”
“It is now,” Nick said as he handed over a manila envelope. I set my drink down and slid the contents of the envelope out. I looked at the birth certificate and other documents, reading the name they bore out loud. “Jonathan Blake?”
“That’s you,” Nick said agreeably. “I promised you a new life, didn’t I? And there you go, a blank slate. Blank slate. Blake. Get it?”
I spoke the name again, trying to get a feel for it. It was as strange to me as my own face had become. It wasn’t just that my nose and jawline would never be the same, or even the scars I now had, but I swore that when I looked in the mirror, my eyes were those of a stranger as well. “So what am I supposed to do now?” I asked.
Nick took a long swallow, and then said, “Since the docs tell me you’re expected to make a good recovery, I’m thinking it’s time you quit malingering and decide what you want to do with this new life of yours. I can offer you a job with the Argo Foundation.”
“Doing what?”
Nick smiled. It was an expression I was going to learn to both love and hate. “Well, that all depends on you now,” he drawled. “I’ve seen where you were a pretty promising archeology student. Now, I can always use people for everyday research and such, but what I really need is a good criminal.”
“Excuse me?”
“Criminal,” Nick said deliberately.
I felt a cold dagger of fear stab me in the gut. “Uh, in case you’ve forgotten, I just got out of prison.”
“Yep,” Nick said agreeably. “And that proves to me just how tough you are. I need tough people for what the Argo Foundation really does.”
Nick stood up, eclipsing the sun as he turned and said to me, “In case you haven’t heard, there’s bastards like Wainwright all over the world who steal what’s left of mankind’s past just to sell it for money. They take priceless, irreplaceable artifacts out of sheer greed. Governments and private agencies do what they can to stop them, but it’s never enough. That’s where I come in. The only good way to stop a thief is to use a thief against them. That’s what I can use you for.”
“And you want me to become a thief. Just like Professor Wainwright.” I felt my new teeth grind together when I spoke the name of the man who had torn my life apart.
“No,” Nick said seriously. “Not like Wainwright. He stole relics for his own profit. What I do with the Argo Foundation is to steal from bastards like him, so we can save and preserve what little we have left from our own history. But we do manage to make a little money off it, too,” he added slyly.
“But I’m not really a criminal. I was framed, remember?”
Nick barked out a laugh. “Crime is just a trade, like anything else, boy. I can see to it that you learn that trade from the masters of the craft.” Nick was quiet for a moment, then said in a serious tone, “I won’t lie to you. If you come in with me, it’ll be a hard, dangerous life. But I’ll see to it that you’ll be equipped to survive. Not only survive, but get back at bastards like Wainwright and all the others like him. And truth be told, you’ll be doing a service to the world, even though no one will ever know. Unless you screw up,” he added as an afterthought.
I took a long look out over the ocean, watching the tides roll in and out as I thought about Nick’s offer. “What would I have to do?” I asked.
Nick sighed, as if in satisfaction. “All you have to do now is make it through Nick Riley’s School for Artful Dodgers. I’ve got people who can teach you all you’ll ever need to know. And not just how to steal, but how to fight and to survive anything. When my people are done with you, you’ll be a dangerous man to mess with. You’ll never have to be afraid of anyone, ever again.”
That cold knot of fear I had suddenly broke up and melted as Nick’s words wove their spell around me. I took a drink before I replied, “Call me Jonathan.”
The next phase of my rebirth took the form of brutal physical regimens that hammered and strained my body as if it were steel being forged, until I was stronger and faster than I ever thought I could be. When I was ready, I was sent all over the world to train with men, and in some cases, women, who taught me all the skills that I would come to rely upon. It was like being initiated into an arcane school of black arts. I was taught how to fight, and even maim and kill my fellow man, with not only my bare hands, but also by utilizing common, everyday things, transforming the innocuous into dangerous weapons. I learned how to transmute the chemistry of harmless commercial products into the alchemy of explosives and incendiaries, and how to use the sciences of electronics and mechanics to create detonators or neutralize security systems and bypass locks with tools made from simple, ordinary items. In fact, if there was one overriding theme to my education, it was learning the art of improvisation. Or as Nick Riley himself put it, “By the time my people are done with you, you’ll be able to do anything with nothing.”
And so my education in matters most criminal went on for nearly a year, amidst the more mundane aspects of learning things like rock-climbing, scuba diving, shooting, and other commonplace pursuits. But during this time I found out that Nicholas Riley was dead wrong about one thing. While it was true that through my training I had lost my fear of others, it was replaced by a new and different fear. I had come to fear myself. More specifically, I’d come to fear what I could do with all the deadly and dangerous abilities I now possessed. Then came the day I had to face this final, ultimate fear.
In a small bungalow house in Southern California, near the border of Mexico, there lived
a man who used to call himself Professor Wainwright. He came home one night to find a stranger sitting in one of the guest chairs in his small and untidy office. He was fatter than I remembered, and had grown a brown beard that was flecked with gray. But I was certain it was he when he turned and found me sitting there after he turned on the lights.
“What! What are you doing here? Who are you?”
I just smiled, savoring the moment. “Good evening, Professor Wainwright.”
His face flushed with a ruddy red color as he sucked in air. “How dare you! How did you get in here?” His eyes darted around the room like an animal looking for an escape.
I didn’t answer his question, and in truth the locks on his doors were no challenge to me at all. I just sat there with my gloved hands tented, waiting to see if he would remember me after all.
“I’ve a good mind to…” His voice trailed off as the color left his face, and I saw his mouth move silently, framing the name that used to be mine.
“Come now, Professor,” I said gently. “Surely that man was left to die down in Central America. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”
“Oh my God,” Wainwright wheezed hoarsely. He stumbled and more or less fell into his chair behind the desk. “What … what do you want?”
My heart was pounding in my chest and my pulse throbbed in my temples as my mind flashed through all the lovely ways I could hurt this man. Nick Riley had taken me out of the jungle prison a broken shell of a human and had transformed me into a creature that was more of a biological weapon than a man. And after my training was completed, Nick had told me where to find Wainwright, to go and do whatever I wanted, like it was some macabre graduation day present.
Looking across the table at Wainwright, I was almost surprised that my voice remained steady as I answered him, saying, “What do I want? It’s really very simple, Wainwright; you took a life, now you owe one. I’m here to collect.”