by A D Davies
It’s mine.
Jules released the Sig’s magazine and popped the chambered round, tossed the gun up onto a second-floor fire escape, and charged at the bodyguard. He pulled up short of a bull-like attack, calming himself in time to prevent what was obviously a well-trained individual from countering early.
The other man had no such qualms.
He jabbed at Jules’s throat. Jules twisted away and simultaneously shoved the bodyguard off balance, then kicked the guy’s standing foot, dropping him on his backside.
The ex-military man rolled aside and drew a knife from behind his gun holster.
“What is it with you people?” the man asked.
“Me people?” Jules said.
“These objects aren’t supposed to be collected like novelty ornaments.”
“I don’t know who you think I’m with, friend. I just want what belongs to me.”
The man harboring Jules’s property relaxed momentarily. “You’re not with Valerio Conchin?”
Jules palmed one of the mini flashbangs from his belt. “I don’t know who that is.”
With a flick of his thumb, he set the smoke bomb to its shortest fuse and threw it forward. The flash of light and eruption of potassium chlorate made the guy jerk back, drop his knife, and hold his eyes. To his credit, he didn’t scream.
And with the redhead frozen in his peripheral vision, Jules moved in hard. A flat hand to the man’s throat and a heel to his jaw sent the musclehead tumbling, allowing Jules time to grip the bracelet and straighten the man’s arm, locking it in place at the joint. A simple aikido maneuver. Like so many techniques, he’d learned and mastered the art and never forgotten.
He tugged and twisted, sliding the bangle as low as the wrist, but it was stuck there.
“You won’t get it off,” the woman said, taking a single trembling step forward.
Jules maneuvered the arm around and forced his foot into the man’s shoulder blade so its owner lay face down.
“We had to use a whole a lot of olive oil just to get it on there,” the woman insisted. “And it hurt like hell.”
Jules strained, pulling up skin, causing the man on the ground to gasp in pain. “I won’t lose it now. Not when I’m so close.”
“Please,” she said. “It belongs somewhere safe. You say you’re not with Valerio. Then trust us.”
Jules twisted the object. “I’m taking it with me.”
“No. Please try to understand. If Valerio wants the Aradia bangle, we have to secure it.”
Jules slackened his grip on the stone jewelry but held his subject firmly underfoot. “What did you call it?”
The woman frowned, took one step forward. “The Aradia bangle. You say you own it, but you don’t know what it’s called?”
A hundred questions flew through his mind. Yes, he wanted it back, but that was all he knew. And he would never let it go again. It had been his before, and it was now his again.
Or, more precisely, “It was my mom’s.”
As the woman’s frown deepened at his words, Jules rolled the cotton-Lycra ski mask up over his mouth and spat on the man’s wrist, mashing the stone bangle into the saliva. The man cried out more than before as Jules wrenched at the locked joint with all his strength. The movement drew a line of blood, but that aided in slickening the surface. Jules spat again, and for just a second, the ornament appeared to glow, its flecks of green catching the streetlight.
And then it popped free.
Jules released the man’s arm and skipped away, finally in possession of the chunk of rock that had consumed the whole of his adulthood.
The whole of his adulthood so far, he reminded himself. He had plenty of life ahead of him.
The woman checked on her minder, who sat upright against the wall beneath the door light of the fried chicken place, cradling his damaged wrist. Both glared at Jules.
“Sorry, but the bracelet’s mine,” Jules said, and turned to find himself face-to-face with a third person.
“My sentiments exactly,” the man replied in a deep-throated Australian accent.
The newcomer stood at least six feet eight, almost a foot taller than Jules and twice as wide, most of it muscle. Dark-haired, he possessed a jaw the shape of a shovel. Ten local cops moved into place behind him.
“Now hand over the Aradia bangle, and Mr. Conchin promises no one else’ll get hurt.”
Chapter Two
Jules stepped back and gazed up at the shaved mountain gorilla. “Hand over the what now?”
“The trinket.” The new man pointed at the object in Jules’s possession. “Hand it over, and you won’t be hurt.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Jules flicked and detonated two smoke bombs in quick succession. The man merely flinched and grunted. But the flinch was enough for Jules to duck out of the way and sprint back past the bookmaker’s shop.
Cops had rarely been a problem in the past, especially in developed countries, so bound up in procedure and protocol. In Britain, Jules even escaped capture once by climbing a construction site scaffold. He later learned they gave up the pursuit in case he harmed himself in fleeing. It was one reason he trained so hard at scaling buildings as quickly as possible.
As Jules leaped and gripped the first fire escape, ten cops streamed past the big guy, ignoring the two people Jules had robbed, and headed straight for him.
If they’d really been local cops, at least one should have tended to the injured man. Also, Prague cops typically carried the short-recoil CZ 75 pistol, or if they were feeling adventurous, an H&K MP7 submachine gun for major ops. These guys wielded a mishmash of weaponry, including Uzis and AK-47s. Jules couldn’t pinpoint the exact makes because he was too busy smashing a second-floor window by the time they opened fire.
Jules dived through the jagged pane just before the slugs impacted the surrounding wall. He rolled to his feet but did not stop to apologize to the elderly man and woman who sat bolt upright in their bed, instead pushing on through the door and out the cramped apartment’s exit.
The home lay above the clothes boutique, so Jules sprinted up the first staircase he came to, reasoning it must eventually come out on the roof.
Floors below, doors crashed in, voices rose, orders issued, and boots thundered on stairs.
At the top, the fourth floor, Jules found the door locked tight. Chained, in fact.
Some fire exit.
He descended to third and kicked out a window, exposing himself once again to the alley below.
As soon as he slipped out, the enormous man shouted in Czech to open fire.
Jules pushed his arm through the bangle. “You want this real bad, huh?”
Over the fire escape’s wrought iron rail, he gripped the drainpipe with his hands and knees, and monkey-climbed for three seconds—the time he estimated it would take an average ex-soldier using a black-market machine gun to draw a bead on him, then pushed away from the wall before the bullets rained in.
While the gunmen repositioned below, he snagged the lip of the roof, heaving himself up to where he’d left his backpack.
The next building was connected to this one, so by the time he retrieved his grappling hook and snatched up his bag, the fake cops had shot out the chain barring the exit and poured out.
Using the building’s air conditioning units as cover, treading carefully on the snow underfoot, Jules evaded yet more angles at which the bullets could pulverize his body, and raced toward the edge, where a huge chasm lay between this roof and the nearest safe haven. In a flat-out sprint, he ran the numbers:
Thirty-two feet, possibly 32.5.
The world’s record for long jump is an inch or so shy of 29.5 feet.
My record is 25.7 feet.
The approaching lip is two feet lower than the current one.
To reach it, after the apex of my leap, I would drop at five meters per second, which is fifteen feet...
Even at optimum reach, I’m 1.5 feet short.
And no fire esc
ape to land on below. The building is sheer.
The entire risk assessment took no longer than two seconds.
Instead of leaping to his probable death, Jules absorbed the spike of fear in his gut, controlled his breathing, and swerved left. As soon as the operatives posing as cops rounded the AC units, the lead men opened fire again.
That left Jules little choice.
Rather than take the direct route over adjacent blocks, he darted right to lose himself where more vents rose from the rooftop. The spacing and zigzag design provided no solid cover but gave no clear line of sight either; the shooters would have to get very lucky to even wing him. However, Jules was about to run out of building, and the next one ahead was over fifty feet across the boulevard.
He cursed his lax planning. Tonight’s exit routes seemed ideal because most parts of the city featured those open avenues dotted with alleys and delivery access, the buildings mostly close together, so he had not compensated for the wider streets. Hadn’t thought he’d need them. But then he’d never been ambushed by a small army before.
And that’s where he threw himself next: out into the void of the night, four stories above a road that was fifty feet wide.
Jules swung his grappling hook, snagged a thick telephone cable that spanned the street, and let himself drop, plummeting as he mentally worked out the length of the bungee cord feeding out. The metal claws slipped along the ice-coated wire, and momentum carried him onward. The slippery sensation of being out of control felt alien, but the elasticated rope stretched as it fought with gravity to stop him from hurtling into the asphalt at inhuman speed.
It reached its limit with Jules still twice his own height off the ground, but he’d decelerated to a virtual stop. He let go, and the cord snapped upward like a rubber band flicked from a thumb.
With the swing carrying him forward, he performed a midair backflip to slow himself, landed on both feet, and rolled behind a parked car.
Another bungee lost.
Gunfire erupted from the roof, peppering the vehicle, but Jules was already assessing his body again.
Slightly jarred knee.
Ankle took more impact than intended.
A 10 to 15 percent decrease in efficiency.
“I can live with that.”
He kept low, using the cars as cover, until he located an alley. As the men at ground level emerged to give chase, he ducked out of sight. The fence barring the end was no problem. He hopped it and then tuned in to his mental map of the central city blocks.
Sticking to the puddles of melted snow on the asphalt and paving slabs where he could—less of a trail that way—he turned left then right, not looking behind him at all. He only slowed momentarily to check his mom’s bracelet was still secure.
The Aradia bangle as they’d called it.
Hiking into one of Old Town’s squares, dotted with tourists catching a few final drinks under the heaters at overpriced bars, Jules peeled off his mask and reduced his speed to an amble.
Snow flurries dusted across the terra-cotta-tiled roof of a church. Jules estimated it was from around the fourteenth century. He was unsure of the clock tower opposite, but then he never researched more than he needed no matter how intriguing a place’s history; extra facts clouded his mind. Still, the snow on the medieval buildings reminded him of a fairy-tale book. Not a specific one, just the fantastical feeling of a childhood story revisited. A useless notion that he dismissed as soon as it formed.
He disengaged one arm from his backpack to appear more casual and ripped open the Velcro strap on his chest that released his torso from the blue bodysuit, leaving a maroon Breaking Bad shirt on view, with the gloves in place as he figured he could use them. He dropped the bracelet into his pack and tied the suit’s arms around his waist so he fit in with the other vacationers returning to hotels after skinfuls of beer.
Jules had played the fish-out-of-water African American student plenty of times before, though, so this wasn’t difficult to pull off.
He only needed the cover for three minutes anyway as he accessed the backyard of a disused restaurant, shut down for refurbishments before the foreign trade really picked up in May and June. The tarp came away from the stashed Suzuki GW250 with ease.
Jules donned the crash helmet and leather jacket he’d stashed there and swapped his tactile gloves for thicker, more appropriate ones. He fired up the motorcycle and eased it into the square, drawing attention from various groups of exhausted revelers as he rumbled by.
Once clear of the tourist hot spot, he gunned the engine and sped up to thirty-eight miles per hour—yeah, two below the limit—and pointed his nose north. The streets sped by, and Jules thought about the toppings he would soon choose and where to make his purchase.
Backgammon Pizza was the only real option. A small chain when he was a kid, it was now a global conglomerate to rival Pizza Hut and Dominos. It was where his parents had taken him for his fourteenth birthday, pizza from a restaurant being a true luxury in the Sibeko household. Although he’d had no clue what to order back then, he tried to look like he knew what he was doing, relishing the independence, the opportunity to choose as he wished outside the supermarket’s frozen goods aisle: pepperoni, red onions, and tuna. The waitress pulled a face but accepted the request along with his parents’ more traditional options.
None of them managed to eat their pizza that night, though. And Jules had abstained from junk food ever since.
He turned a corner, ready to accelerate up the on-ramp to the freeway out of town—or “motorway” as they called them here—but found it blocked.
Two of those bad-boy black Range Rovers stood nose to nose, and an old military-style jeep was parked beyond them, manned by two more fake cops.
They guessed my escape route.
No—there are probably more of them on the other passages out of town too.
Cop uniforms, bold enough to fire automatic weapons in public, able to block roads...
Who are these guys?
Jules screeched to a halt and spun the bike around, rear wheel smoking and screaming, and tore away from the roadblock. It broke up, and the 4x4s sped toward him.
The Suzuki was no slouch, but here, on a broad road designed to accommodate eighteen-wheelers, it gave him little advantage against the brute force of the other vehicles. If he made it to the smaller arteries returning to the city, he could lose them thanks to the bike’s superior maneuverability.
The two Range Rovers’ raw horsepower brought them level, and they raced on either side of him. He prepared to brake and branch off, but they were ready, with the pair closing in from both sides and the jeep bringing up the rear.
A limo pulled up a hundred yards ahead, lengthwise across the street. Boxing him in.
Jules opened up the throttle and shifted through the gears for maximum torque.
The limo’s rear door opened and the giant from the alleyway unfolded himself to stand tall in the road, before hustling out the redhead in the green coat. He placed a handgun at her temple.
And waited.
Unmoving.
Jules had no idea who the girl was. Not-Lori. But she sure wasn’t with the men chasing him. If he got away, they had no reason to harm her, but he’d seen people murdered before for lesser objects than the one he recovered tonight. And these guys were trying to kill him for his mom’s bracelet, after all. Something not-Lori had been in possession of until recently.
Maybe they blamed her.
Jules reduced his speed. The Range Rovers matched him, guiding him rather than pursuing, dropping back until he skidded to a stop six feet from the huge guy and his hostage.
Nobody moved.
The bike chugged idle.
A second man climbed out of the limo. Early thirties with thick blond hair and a tan suit. Tailored by the looks of it. The man’s skin appeared sallow and yellow, so Jules figured the latest arrival suffered a form of liver disease, although he appeared jovial in his walk—spry, almost skipping along.
“Hey.” Jules flipped up his visor. “You in charge?”
“You seem clever.” The yellow man wandered around the side of the limo, hands in his trouser pockets, which rode his jacket up so that it crinkled at the hem. “Which is great! Clever people tend know what I’m after. Then, after some utterly pointless macho posturing...” The guy smiled. “They give it to me.”
Jules couldn’t place the accent, almost British but not quite. He said, “I got ten other items like the bracelet. Nicer. Older. More valuable. I’ll hand ’em over at a place of your choosing. But you can’t have this.”
“See? Posturing. Pointless posturing. How sad. I thought you’d be different.” The yellow man signaled to his guy. “Horse, shoot the girl in her pretty little knee, see if that loosens up our pal here.”
Horse? Was that the Australian hulk’s name?
“Wait.” Jules removed his helmet and his pack, took off his thick riding gloves, and unlatched the backpack’s flap. Opened it. “I swear, I can get you better pieces. Nothin’ special about this. I got a sentimental attachment is all—”
“Do you think we set up all this effort because we want some random artifact? Have you mistaken me for a common grave robber in this business for the money? No. We want that specific trinket.” The yellow man clicked his fingers. “Now, please.”
The girl stared at Jules, arms rigid by her sides. Her stockinged feet extended on tiptoes to ease the pressure applied by... What was his name? Horse? The man’s fingers enveloped her whole neck without throttling her.
Jules reached into the pack and grasped his mom’s bracelet. He could virtually feel it vibrating, urging him to not let it go now they were finally reunited. His shoulder stiffened. An ache in his gut spread to his chest.
Nine years...
So close...
He locked eyes with the yellow man. “Please... there’s nothing special about this. I can—”
“Horse,” the yellow man said.
Horse pointed the gun at the woman’s knee, and Jules averted his gaze as he removed the bracelet from his pack.