Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle

by English, Ben

  “–and the network of diamond fiber optics wired into every major support structure,” Solomon added.

  “To build one big-ass weapon.” Alonzo finished.

  Jack licked his lips, eyes narrowing. “What about a power source? Steve, do you still have the city blueprints you downloaded back in the train?”

  “Right here.” Steve clicked twice more, opening a screen superimposed by the title Greater Metropolitan London Power Grid.

  Jack frowned at the schematic. “I don’t know how to read this.” It resembled nothing so much as a road map of freeway interchanges, though with hundreds of alternating junctions and over-and-under crossroads, all in different colors. Steve zoomed in on a particular section.

  He pointed at several intersecting stripes. “These all come together underground at Oxford Street. Not much runs under Hyde Park, so the major lines lie right under this building. Raines could have tapped into—well, all of them if he wanted.”

  “Can we shut it down?” Jack nodded to Alonzo, who started dialing on his phone.

  Steve pursed his lips. “If I were building this, I’d set up failsafes with the electric company–the substations here,” he gestured, “and here. That’s where I’d control the flow of electricity from, if something went wrong when I needed power. Raines could be carrying a remote-control device. Oh, and there should be a final switch at the point of delivery.” He looked momentarily bewildered. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this. An entire building as a weapon? Something so big can’t really exist, can it?”

  Alonzo cleared his throat. “My phone’s gone out.”

  Lightning played somewhere above them, refracted oddly through the nooks and crannies and billowing, snapping plastic sheets, casting each man in a liquid blue, speckling light. It continued for several seconds, eerily silent, peculiarly luminous, turning the walls into shimmering, blue fields of dark-bright-dark, like arctic light off turbulent, chaotic waters.

  “Solomon and I will get up to the transmitter: maybe we can figure out a way to shut this contraption down from there. Al, you and Steve see what you can do about securing the—” Another tremor shuddered up through the floor. “Helicopter.”

  *

  “Stand your weapons down, men, stand them down.” The D-11 commander raised his own hands to show that they were empty as he backed into the street. Behind him, eight other policemen lowered their weapons. “Here now,” said the commander. “You’ve got what you want, now take the car and go.”

  The bearded man in the gray suit stepped guardedly onto the loading dock platform, his four companions immediately behind, equally deliberate. At this range, the MAC-10's constituted as formidable a weapon as anything the men from D-11 carried, made even more so by the fact that one was directed at the back of a little girl in red, which the lead terrorist prodded before him. The commander winced, as perspiration burned into his left eye. If he could just get the muzzle of that weapon off the back of the little miss’ head—

  “We will need two additional guests.” The first terrorist smiled and nodded towards the car. “Perhaps you will volunteer yourself, constable?”

  He grimaced inwardly. They’d read the response booklet. “You’ll never make it out of London, mate,” he said. “Hostage attempts are always unsuccessful these days; you must have read that in our tactics book as well.”

  The bearded man dropped his smile. “I don’t believe we’ll take you with us, actually.” He raised his machine pistol–

  Crack, crack, crack! The commander dropped to his knees as the snipers on the roof opened fire, dropping the first three men instantly. As the little girl stumbled woozily to the ground, the commander drew his own pistol. “Drop your weapons!” he boomed at the two surviving suited men.

  They were professionals, even so they complied, no doubt aware that the three snipers had already acquired new targets. As his men swarmed in to cuff the two terrorists, the commander gently examined the little girl. Activating his collar mike, he said, “Sir, this is Walters at the north entrance. We have a fourth young lady and two survivors in custody. Requesting instructions.”

  The same constable who’d nearly throttled him an hour before now merely grunted as he handed Ian two steaming cups of coffee. Most of the policemen had left the crowd to take up positions around the Princess Christine, who stood with her hand in Major Griffin’s. Ian handed the coffee to the major and looked up with them at the face of the Tower. An odd, sort of shimmering light played through the clouds directly over the central tower. It had begun the moment the rain stopped.

  “We’re lucky to have gotten out of there alive, is what I’m thinking,” the major said. Ian nodded soberly.

  “Sir, we’ve rounded up some equipment for you,” one of the agents from D-11 said to Ian. “Bulletproof vest, a helmet.” A group stood ready to assault the underground portion of Raines’ machine.

  He took the helmet. “Thanks. My jacket will be enough.” He zipped up the jacket made of leather and more-than-leather. “Your men are doing a good job of keeping the press back.” So far, no one had gotten close enough to take his picture, or for that matter, get any kind of hard look at the little girl he’d carried off the construction lift.

  “That’s according to a direct order from His Majesty, King William, sir.” The burly man swelled with pride as he spoke the name of his monarch. Acting on the king’s business was much more engaging than writing parking tickets, Ian decided.

  “Good enough. Let’s get this over with.” He patted Christine’s head and got a sleepy smile in return. “Your Highness, you take good care of the major ‘til we all get back, okay?”

  She nodded. “I’m a gargoyle.”

  Ian let that one pass, trading looks with Griffin.

  The D-11 man cleared his throat. “Right then, let’s be off.”

  The sky that greeted Jack and Solomon as they made their way to the roof held a kind of incandescence neither man had seen before. Clouds varying from slate-gray to lustrous pearl roiled in the heavens above and to either side of the Tower, themselves a distortion of the light below. Upward and before them, through the overlapping configuration of beams and posts, the aircraft-warning signal throbbed like an eye of molten steel.

  Stray lightning played all around the roof: arc-blue, fiery green, arterial-red, turning the gusting rain into single-minded squadrons of fireflies. Both men watched as a ruby-colored ball of lightning orbited the central tower, spinning wider and wider as it dropped, finally circumnavigating the entire Tower at their level and exploding into a shower of dim sparks.

  Solomon cleared his throat, eyes wide. “‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’” he said plainly.

  Jack nodded. “A poem.” There was a mundane explanation, of course. The earth sought equilibrium in all its systems; the tremendous charge building up in the Tower, both on or just below the earth’s surface, would naturally call up an opposite charge gathering as energy in the atmosphere above. Nature simply responded, seeking balance.

  A hundred feet from the ladder to the upper platform, Jack and Solomon spotted the figures of the two men at the base of the wall. The two guards were holding their weapons carelessly, trying without success to light cigarettes in the gusting wind. Solomon and Jack crouched low, though their outlines were broken up considerably by the honeycomb of unfinished steel forms and aluminum molding. Jack drew his pistol.

  “Wait.” Solomon had to speak in a normal tone of voice to be heard above the wind. He pointed.

  Two more figures, wearing rain slickers and hunched against the wind stood sullenly at the top of the ladder, the barrels of their weapons protruding from the wide sleeves of each man’s overcoat. Solomon pulled the elephant gun from his shoulder.

  “You can make the shot, in this wind?” said Jack. It felt odd not to be whispering.

  Solomon nodded grimly. “I’ll need a few moments to figure angles. Give you time to get close to the fellows at the base of the ladder. I�
��ll wait.”

  The big man had noticed Jack’s replacement pistol was not threaded for a silencer; for surprise to be on their side, the assault needed to be up close. Jack left the “hallway” and headed into the construction, keeping the bulk of ductwork and angling I-beams between himself and the sentries at the ladder. The wind made a warbling, bleating whistle as it gushed about the braces and girders. For all the adrenaline he was beginning to feel the cold again, and moved faster, casting his thoughts ahead to the men at the base of the wall.

  The raised section, upon which rose the transmitter with the disk-like apparatus at its peak, extended the width of the building. They’d be right about over the center here, he noted. Right about dead even with the central elevator shaft and the conduit of energy.

  Seventy feet from the ladder, Jack abandoned the shadows and stole to the wall. Gun in his hand, he crept closer to the guards, who’d finally managed to work their lighters. Twin points of glowing orange marked the embers of their cigarettes, barely twenty feet away.

  Lightning flared again all around them, a ghostly strobe silhouetting everything in a lambent glow. Thunder followed immediately, only it was a flat, sullen sound, as if the raging powers of the storm were being kept at bay, caged. For the first time Jack became aware of a deep hum, suddenly loud in the silence after the thunder.

  And they’d seen him. Jack tracked back up the path of a falling cigarette and squeezed off two quick shots, then threw himself forward and to the ground, ducking his head against the chatter of the automatic weapon. He hoped the darkness would provide enough cover to shield him from the 9mm slugs tearing rough holes through the air above his body.

  A resounding boom rolled across the escarpment, simultaneous with a scream from the top of the stairway.

  Jack rolled up and into a run, aiming for the guard as he lowered his machine pistol to scrape the pavement. The sentinel’s head had jerked towards the sound of the elephant gun. He just began to look back as Jack’s foot caught him in the side of the head. For the most part the blow glanced off, carrying a piece of headset, and as Jack sailed past he followed up with a quick punch to the inner arm, sweeping the machine pistol to the ground.

  The guard recovered quickly, flexing into a classic tiger stance and snapping a clawlike hand at Jack’s face. Jack pushed the hand harmlessly up with his rising elbow, then shifted to the side, slapping his opponent. As the man fought to recover, Jack accepted a weak punch, then followed his slap with a brutal elbow strike to the underside of the jaw and a kick to the back of the guard’s knee. As the man fell backward, Jack stepped in close and brought his elbow down with all his strength into his opponent’s sternum and throat. The pop-crack of snapping bone was drowned out by a second roar from the elephant gun.

  A spurt of fire chattered up into the sky, the death reflex of the second guard at the top of the ladder.

  Jack’s opponent hit the ground solidly, breath whooshing from his lungs. When he struggled to twist to his feet, he screamed in pain.

  “You’re collarbone’s broken,” Jack said, bending to hold the man still. “You’ll be fine if you don’t try to move.” The man began swearing in Russian, and Jack repeated himself in that language as he took a pistol and knife from the broken man’s belt.

  A few moments later Solomon joined him. “The rifle’s going to draw some attention,” he said to Jack. “We’d better get up to the transmitter. Is he secure?” he asked, gesturing at the writhing guard.

  Jack nodded. “We’ll let D-11 clean up when they get here.”

  The other guard was dead, one of Jack’s first two shots having taken him in the head. Luck, he reflected. He retrieved his Glock and began climbing the ladder. Solomon was already almost to the top.

  The third tremor was the worst of them all.

  Jack felt it build beneath him, heard a rising clatter from a nearby stack of aluminum rain gutters, tasted the rough, thick ozone in the air before the tremendous jolt passed up from the foundation, from Hell itself for all he knew, and shook him from the ladder.

  He tried to angle onto his feet but the wrenching shift of the roof threw him to the side and spun him about like a rag doll. The wounded guard shrieked as a few loose boards and one actual rafter thudded down heavily. Loose wood and steel, nails and bits of aluminum, and even a dozen irregular chunks of the building itself stuttered and skittered along the surface of the roof near the two men, like pebbles on a drumhead.

  Jack covered his head and rolled from the wall as bits of the upper platform chewed themselves loose and rained down around him. He heard the ladder crackle loose and clang down.

  Everything slid a few feet to the side. Piles of aluminum squealed and chittered towards the edge.

  Lying there, Jack felt his stomach plunge and winced--sure the building had begun its final sway, had started a long, sheering, final drop to the ground.

  Another internal lurch, then everything settled. He lay there for a long moment before daring to breathe. When he opened his eyes, he saw that a great portion of the building had given way and splintered off, falling onto tiers below or onto the street. Huge cracks had appeared in the stone and steel walls–but from his vantage at the peak of the artificial summit, he could see a symmetry to the destruction, an evenness. Jack’s stomach plunged again as a growing sense of dread swept him. Raines’ weapon was functioning perfectly. Already, light filtered from those crevices and crannies, flickering out over London.

  Worst of all was the approach to the transmitter platform. The ladder was gone, probably over the edge. Though the wall had taken damage and patches had fallen, it was still smooth and unclimbable; too high to use some of the building materials as a ladder–

  Solomon leaned his head over the edge. He looked unshaken, as always. “I’ve found a cutoff switch, must have been what those four were guarding.” The great black disk of the transmitter loomed behind him like a negative halo. “There’s a problem, Jack.”

  “What’s that?” Must be a way to get up there. A second ladder; something.

  “Just like Steve told us, two big levers connected by a grip, though it’s all I can do to pull it down. Like a circuit breaker. Keeping it down is easy enough, but there’s some sort of spring device inside that snaps the whole affair up again as soon as I release it.”

  Jack looked around the roof, then back at Solomon. “Can you hold it down?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  Both men spoke at the same time.

  “You’ll have to--”

  “I’ll stay and--” Solomon smiled. “I’ll stay. You go.” His eyes shone.

  Jack looked at him a long moment, then spun and raced into the darkness.

  Solomon shrugged and worked his neck. The access panel before him lay in tatters; he’d ripped it off to get to the breaker. There were other controls on the board; a bank of digitized numbers and touch commands, backlit for easy reading; and three ports for cable and network access.

  He ignored them. His task was simple. Solomon gripped the enormous lever in an equally large fist, and forced it down.

  The reverberating hum, which he’d noticed upon climbing the ladder, quieted to a droning hiss.

  Either the architect never intended the top floors to be completed, or they were predestined to be part of a model for a madhouse, Alonzo decided. There seemed to be no point to the rambling passages and mismatched floor plan, though Steve assured him the way was clear to the makeshift hanger. “Fine. I’ll check out the helicopter. See what you can do by way of diversion. Here.” He handed over his last grenades. “Be careful with the remote detonation.”

  Steve agreed. “The stray radiation in this place is really messing up radio frequencies. So I plant the grenades. Then what?”

  “Just meet me here. If Jack and Sol aren’t back by then, we’ll think of something.”

  Alonzo ascended an unworked staircase, senses straining. Very few of the rooms were lighted, and he stayed low, moving cautiously from room to ro
om. The maze of two-by-fours and half-laid drywall gave way to a wide loft overlooking the main room below. Ahead, the voices of at least three men were accompanied by the clatter of mechanic’s tools. The loft evidently served as a temporary rough work and storage area, piled with drywall slats and spare wood of various dimensions. Alonzo crept up behind a moveable rack of power tools and peered over the edge.

  Raines stood below, in heated conversation with a long-haired man in a grey suit, who held a machine pistol. They stood near the helicopter; sure enough, a three-bladed Sikorsky. Three 7500 shp General Electric turboshaft engines, gaping open to receive as much air as possible. Usually they required a three man crew, but he’d do fine without a navigator or a flight engineer–the transports couldn’t fly themselves, but each Sikorsky carried a state-of-the-art avionics package which included a weather radar, radio navigation gear, Doppler radar, and a moving map display. He’d flown birds similar enough.

  The suited man turned his head, and Alonzo got a good look at his face. Miklos Nasim, and he was furious. Raines offered a cigarette to the gesturing man, then lit one himself before continuing the conversation. Alonzo strained but couldn’t make out their exchange over the noise of the three mechanics and the increasing thrum of the turbines on the Sikorsky. Have to get closer.

  He mentally noted the positions of five other guards in the room, then retreated from the edge. No sign of Raines’ personal secretary/bodyguard/whatever, the burly Oriental he called Michael.

  Another minor tremor passed, rocking the sixty-watt bulbs in their hanging cages. Alonzo circled through the loft, moving clockwise. If he could get closer to the helicopter he’d be able to see exactly how many guards watched the room. The loft extended around half the vault; providing a view of the entire lower floor. He clung to the darkness, skirting the open rooms and stealing along the walls.

  Only a few more minutes and the Sikorsky would be fully flight-capable. Alonzo wondered how they planned on leaving the country. Getting to a private airfield wouldn’t be difficult at all, he supposed, considering the chaos that Raines’ weapon would spawn over London. He had no conception of the exact manner in which the maser would detonate, but his mind’s eye filled briefly with images of an unearthly crater, a mile wide and deep, filling rapidly with gushing, acrid seawater.