Jack Be Nimble: A Lion About to Roar Book 4

by Ben English

  Alonzo forced himself to smile at one of the women, and his hand found its way to the gun.

  Negotiations were going downhill with the Turk. “No! You cannot take new girls out for a night on the town, outside this club.” Jack asked something else, his voice pitched low. The Turk went purple. “You can’t buy these girls, what do you take me for? Go home to your ugly wife!”

  Jack’s hands were wide, empty, friendly. The madder the owner grew, the more affable Jack became.

  “Hold on there, brother. Let me make sure I’ve got your prices right: 600 Euro for a single girl, if it’s her first party, and 200 Euro after that.” His voice dropped a few degrees.

  “Half a million new girls a year come into Western Europe, each one on average earning—how much a night?” He threw the question over his shoulder.

  Hanneke responded, “Between 700 and 800.”

  “Between 700 and 800 per night, drinks and sex combined, according to vice squad detectives here in Antwerp. You get two-thirds of the take.”

  The Turk’s eyes went wide at the words ‘vice squad’. He glanced over at the man in the grey suit, then back to Jack as the smile finally faded from the American’s face.

  Alonzo didn’t recognize anything in Jack at that moment. His energy was still there, voice carrying soundly through the cabaret, but the mirth was gone. And he was somehow suddenly holding his gun. “I would think you could be more generous.”

  The cabaret, suddenly quiet.

  Jack was making a common mistake with his weapon. He stood too close. He fit the barrel of the gun neatly over the Turk’s right eye socket. “How many? How many new girls tonight?”

  “Twelve.” Only his lips moved. The rest of the cabaret was motionless, the guards near the door having taken a few steps toward their boss before the gun appeared. Alonzo wet his lips. Any moment now, and there’d be a general exodus onto the street. Belatedly, someone screamed.

  “An even dozen?” Jack glanced back at Hanneke for a second, shifting his weight. “We’re going to need a bigger car.”

  The Turk made a quick move, feinting away from the gun and slapping at Jack’s arm. The gun fired, deafening under the low ceiling. Jack took a smooth step back and fired again, spidering the mirror behind the bar. And completely missing the Turk. Again.

  Both men looked equally surprised, then irritated, and as chaos erupted around them, they completely violated each other’s personal space, swinging fast.

  The street-facing windows shattered inward, and a dozen people threw themselves to the ground. Not the gunner in the grey suit. He shouldered a girl out of his way (directly into the line of sight between himself and Alonzo) and drew his gun, sighting down on one of the fast-moving men in the center of the room.

  Alonzo broke the woman’s fall, caught an armful of fascinatingly smooth, resilient red silk and slithered around it. “Don’t!” he cried, but he shot the man anyway, even as the words left his mouth. Shot him in the gun hand and then in the leg. Not an easy task, when you’ve been trained to instinctively go for center mass or a headshot. His mother would be so proud.

  He looked over at Jack, and realized that someone had taught his friend how to fight. Somewhere, Jack had learned to punch with great authority.

  Jack hit the Turk open-handed, and jammed an elbow into his throat very fast. Choking, the big man lumbered forward. Jack gave way, punching and slapping at his opponent’s face. The Turk got two big handfuls of Jack’s shirt, and Jack grabbed him above the wrists, planted his feet, and crossed the other man’s elbows the opposite way from which Nature and orthopedic doctors intended. He gave a mighty heave, and the Turk spun sideways in the air, crashing to the floor with a short whoosh of emptying lungs.

  From the floor, he growled weakly, struggling to get up. Jack picked up his gun and shot him in the foot.

  When the Turk took a break from screaming to inhale, Jack leaned in close. “You’re very lucky my wife decided to stay home. Put some direct pressure on that.”

  The patrons had evaporated onto the street. Many of the girls had run out with them; a few remained, curious or uncertain.

  Hanneke cuffed a third man whom Alonzo hadn’t even noticed, and shoved him face down onto the floor. Her foot on the back of his neck, she whistled for mob’s attention. “This place is going to be raided in a few minutes by the authorities. I don’t care who you are or where you came from. If you want a hot meal, medical care, and if you need a real work visa, you should get your things and come with us right now. All who want to come with us, come.” She said much the same thing in French, and for good measure had Alonzo repeat the message in Russian. The language classes at the Naval Academy finally came in handy.

  Jack was already up the stairs, kicking in doors.

  The man in the grey suit turned out to actually be carrying a badge along with a government-issue gun. “Thank Heaven,” said Hanneke, dryly, “the police are here.” She showed him a badge of her own, threw him a handful of expensive napkins to help staunch his bleeding leg (the wound in his hand was barely flowing), and rattled off some statement which sounded official and perfunctory, maybe a local version of the Miranda rights, Alonzo couldn’t tell. Halfway through the man in the gray suit interrupted, gesturing at Alonzo.

  Hanneke responded in English, probably for Alonzo’s benefit. “Him? He’s from a rival shop, near the Tippelzone. Probably one of the Chechen Boys.” Alonzo grimaced in what he hoped was a threatening manner. “Don’t worry, Inspector, I’ll get to him later. How long have you been abducting young women for the purpose of selling them into slavery?”

  There was a crash from above, and several happy yells of “Tito, Tito!” Later, Alonzo would learn this was the Tagalog word for ‘uncle’. It would become the girls’ name for Alonzo, as well.

  Jack somehow got them all outside and down the street, along with nearly a dozen other women clutching cheap suitcases. Hanneke waved gaily at them from the front door, sirens in the distance. As they walked out Alonzo noted that two of the guards, the most heavily-armed, had been shot cleanly in the head, no gunpowder burns, which meant from a distance. Three more heavyset men were stacked up, practically on top of each other, right outside the door. He hadn’t noticed them outside earlier and wondered where they had come from. Similar wounds. A sniper had shot them, quickly, from a distance.

  A block away they met Jos, who was behind the wheel of a lime-colored VW bus. As soon as the van held everyone but Jack’s niece and her two silent friends, Jos waived merrily at them and sped away without a word.

  There was no sign of the dapper and colossal Solomon Keyes, apart from three fresh tulips in the back of the car.

  Jack spoke quietly to the girls in Tagalog as they walked, and by the time they reached the tiny car, he’d managed to coax a few words out of each. Even with the heater on full blast, it took the car a long time to warm up. The girls kept their mittens and knit hats on, and were asleep by the time they got out of Belgium.

  Anna had gotten herself into one of those wrong-place, wrong-time deals.

  The facts were these: Anna’s two college friends had met the Turk several weeks before, in the Philippines. He promised them legitimate jobs upon graduation, helped them mortgage their parents’ homes to raise the $4,000 necessary for false papers and plane fare, and prepared them for job training. The original group consisted of twenty women, mostly unmarried, each the epitome of the self-contained, confident Filipina who was prepared to work their professional craft in the E.U. and send money back home to support her extended family. One-sixth of the population of the Philippines was already working abroad; these girls were lucky to get the chance. The Turk had even flown out with them, to assist with their job training.

  Their “training” took place in Capri, where their passports and return tickets were promptly confiscated, and where they were given new “uniforms” to wear. They spent a month in Capri. For the first week, no one touched them.

  A few days after arriving
in Belgium, several of the girls escaped and did their best to melt into the vast ocean of Europe’s undocumented workers. Anna’s schoolmates found her through mutual friends. Anna had no idea of her friends’ plight up until the moment the grey-suited police inspector showed up in a van and quite literally pulled the three of them off the street.

  Jack didn’t drive quite as recklessly or fast on the trip back to Paris, and as dawn caught up with them, the green, green countryside slowly began to take on definition outside Alonzo’s window. The moon was a tiny fingernail above the western edge of everything. An indistinct light pushed up and out from the opposite horizon. They were the only car on the road, and the three girls snored in the back.

  He realized he hadn’t thought of the Navy in hours. He would always miss the powerful thud of an Osprey’s rotors, but that was the moment Alonzo stopped comparing every mechanical sound in the world to the perfect song of a flying machine.

  “I’m so completely screwed,” he heard himself say. “Completely FUBAR. You know what the Navy will do to me, with my status? When word gets out about --”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Hanneke and Jos are part of an anti-slavery taskforce. They’ll see to it that everything we did won’t make it into the papers tomorrow, anywhere in the E.U. They erased the video surveillance of you and me, erased our presence. They’ll get credit for the bust, and hey, good for them.”

  Alonzo waited for more. Jack watched the road, but his mind was distant, focused on something Alonzo couldn’t guess at. As a kid, Jack had always felt things deeply, and sometimes had to struggle to keep his feelings from spilling out. Alonzo wondered what kind of man his friend had grown into.

  Jack winked. “They give me certain . . . freedoms, and in return, I sometimes get to be the sharp end of the stick.”

  “This is what you do now?”

  “Among other things. You want to stop and get some coffee?”

  “Don’t need it. That’s another thing, how come I’m not tired?” He spoke without thinking. “I’ve been so tired, seems like years. Ever since I knew I was done with the service, I’ve been scared as hell to even wonder what I’m going to do next.”

  Jack had a funny, distant smile. “Remember Cecilia Montgomery? Remember how we felt when we were kids and we saw what happened to her? The . . . I don’t know, frustration? Makes me think what we did tonight was the right thing.”

  “Damn straight.”

  The silence held for awhile, broken only by the soft breathing of the girls in the back. The sun lurked just at the verge of the deep green countryside.

  At length, Jack spoke again.

  “You ever get the feeling that you were meant to do something extraordinary?”

  That was the word. Not “something important”, “something to make you rich”, or even “something fun.” Something extraordinary.

  At length, Alonzo said, “I can’t believe you missed those first two shots. You’re really, really bad with a handgun.”

  Jack laughed. “Maybe I didn’t really want to kill him.”

  “Maybe you really, really suck. You were standing too close.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what’s next?”

  That was the first time.

  Marduk

  Never fails to amaze how our victories as adults are determined—in frequency, strength, and amplitude—by the do-it-yourself destiny we set for ourselves as children. Gerorge Marduk marveled at this often.

  The thought overtook him whenever he bumped himself from his regular daily schedule, as if the universe were reminding him of who he was and who it intended him to be. Or as if a program constantly ran in the background of his being, a routine deep in his mental buffer set to detect any variance against personal habit and timing. Memories often trigger by a specific scent or taste, or a measure of music, but just as often came unaccompanied, and he couldn’t mentally hang it on any trigger other than a shift in his baseline Everyday.

  His typical everyday included a short nap just before midnight (the moment when the sun was as far away as possible) and then he was able to fill up the next few hours with his best work. Though tonight, Miklos and all the hilarity in Cuba had given him reason to skip the nap.

  Marduk logged out of the computer in his quarters and wriggled into the fresh clothes his secretary had laid out the night before. He’d come in while George had been on the computer, working on an aspect of the program after midnight, and left again without a word. Marduk was pleased for the conveniences provided the man, but rarely spoke with him. Didn’t require the man to act as a personal bodyguard, like Raines used Michael or the Michaels before him. Destiny determined Marduk would keep a much lower profile than Alex Raines, and he was pleased by this convenience. In addition to a secretary, there were five others who reported directly to Marduk on various aspects of the program, but he felt even less attachment to them. Certainly felt no compulsion to go around naming underlings after Catholic angels.

  The entire lab area and most of the adjoining living quarters were climate controlled. A glass walkway connected his rooms with the labs and offices. Marduk barely noted the wind-filled night beyond the glass; his attention was focused on the computer cradled carefully in the crook of his arm. Power levels in the apparatus were nowhere near what they needed to be to drive the transmitter. He considered using the computer to call the head of engineering, but no. Much better if he made a trip personally into the mountain to visit the geothermal plant. Spread the fear among the rank-and-file. Yes. He’d do that before his noon meeting with Raines.

  Alex Raines was a good man to stay close to. Things had always gone his way. It was as if ... no. Marduk was not a religious man, but the universe tended to align itself around Alex Raines. Events flowed in the direction Raines moved in, and it was easy to be captured by the momentum of the river of details and systems surging along with the tide of his will.

  And Marduk knew his place. The systems needed him. He’d run programs for Raines since they were in grade school together. Both immigrants, neither with a firm grasp of the language of their new host country, they found themselves back-to-back as children. They’d even both been diagnosed by the resident psychologist with the same (hilarious) antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders. The local cadre of playground bullies had been so delighted to find two targets as diverse and yet similar. They never tortured them apart from the other.

  The bullies never seemed like children in the eye of Marduk’s memory. None of them.

  At Raines' instruction, young Marduk hacked the school’s database of student records, specifically to find out the allergies of everyone on their list of tormentors. When the bullies collapsed a few weeks later, choking and frothing on the floor of the cafeteria, Marduk felt deep fear for the first time in his life, paralyzing, wracking fear.

  Not fear of being caught or of the consequences attached to discovery, but dread inspired by his own knowledge. Of Raines. Marduk alone could prove a connection between the deaths and Raines, and he knew there was no limit to what the other boy might do. Raines made big decisions with no failsafe or stopping point. Nothing so trite as a moral compass held him back in any way.

  Young George Marduk’s terror had been exquisite. A few patches of his hair actually turned pale over the next few weeks. Finally the day arrived young Marduk decided he could stand it no longer and would turn himself in. As he walked the long hallway toward the principal’s office, uniformed officers sprinted past, nearly knocking him down. He assumed they were police, but their equipment didn’t include guns. They turned out to be paramedics, called in to attend to the school’s psychologist. Anaphylactic shock, someone said.

  The paramedics executed their human programming perfectly, effecting their workaday miracle, but Things Afterward were Markedly Different. Evidently the psychologist had been a careless record keeper, as many of her files were missing. For instance, the diagnosis
of Marduk as a budding sociopath, along with all associated case notes, was nowhere to be found. The woman herself was in such a reduced mental state that the school had to assign another to take her place.

  The computerized selection system assigned both Marduk and Raines to a young, soft-hearted crusader, fresh from a post-grad program which espoused sharing over treatment, compassion over clinical testing. Marduk was free within a few weeks. One less headcount on the books, and Raines now had a man on the outside.

  Alex Raines and his family moved to California a few weeks later, but distance changed nothing. Marduk had been Raines’ man ever since.

  The lobby just off the entrance to the main building was done in muted colors, paneled in dark brown wood and highlighted with touches of color from the company’s approved color palette and style guide. Company branding was everywhere. Raines Capital oversaw any aspect of the corporate family which might possibly be seen by a non-employee; the marketing department’s influence reached even to the island, a place none of them even knew existed.

  The floors were darker than the walls, which contained several cunningly-placed lights. The overall effect was to draw the eye upward toward a large, divided stairway to the second and third floors, pulling the attention up even further. When the stairway split at the second floor landing, it flowed around a gigantic three-dimensional mural done in burnished steel and brass, a representation of the parent company’s logo image. The central image, the corporate icon, emerged seamlessly from the back wall, as if in the act of pulling itself from the shining steel behind it.

  Usually the corporate logo was a simple outline of a man with an arm held aloft, under the outstretched wings of a hunting falcon. Many found the falconer impressive, but Marduk favored the bird of prey. It was power and purpose and pleasure in motion. The man below was frozen, static. Left behind.

  Most people who saw the basic logo—the silhouette—assumed the man was a representation of Raines himself. Marduk knew better. Visitors to the island were brought here first, left in the room with the almost-statue of the man and the falcon. Anyone who cared to immediately saw that this representation of the company was more than a stylized logo.