Transition

by Ethan Arkwright

  ‘Shit, you sound uncharacteristically serious,’ Jonathan said, trying to make light of the situation. If Conor was freaked out – things were really serious.

  ‘Hell, yeah,’ Conor continued. ‘I think anyone you ask to help you in here is putting themselves in jeopardy.’

  ‘Look,’ Jonathan said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on either, and the last thing I want to do is drag more friends into danger. But I need answers, and if I can’t go internal within the company ... then I’m fast running out of options.’

  There was a deep sigh down the phone from Conor. Jonathan could feel panic welling up in his stomach. With the Mentalist removed from the resource list, he was down to Conor and Harry. Harry he still didn’t trust. If he lost Conor, he literally had no idea what he would do next.

  ‘I need to call you back,’ Jonathan said, checking his watch. He hung up and put the call through again as fast as he could, though his mind was a blank of confusion.

  ‘Right,’ Conor said as soon as he answered the phone. ‘Had a thought: there may be two people who can help. External people.’

  Jonathan perked up and quickly re-engaged his brain. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. You ever heard of two men called “The Dichotomy”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I came to know of them working on a project in the Algerian compound. It’s a symbiotic relationship – a classic living together of two dissimilar organisms for the purpose of monetary mutualism. One is as an Arab. The other is an Israeli. Basically, through each other, each side does business with the other’s people. The Israeli is the contact for the Arab to do well out of the Likud party, while the Arab is the contact for the Israeli for the important Hactum tribes and, of course, the house of Saud.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes, they’re just ahead of the rest of their region in moving past religion to get things done. They’re incredibly well-connected in the oil industry. There isn’t much that goes down without these two having either a finger in it or at least an idea of it. Whatever’s going down with you is related to what you uncovered. What you don’t know is who’s behind it. These two could help, if you offer to trade them some information on what you found. They could possibly shed some insight into who might be behind it. Heard the other day from another project that they’re currently in Madrid. They’ll be easy to find. They always take two rooms in the top floor of the best hotel. That’s about all I can suggest to help you for now. Look I’m going to have to go. Let me know how you get on.’

  The line clicked dead.

  Jonathan replaced the receiver.

  ‘Great,’ he said to the payphone, before turning back to Julie on the wall.

  Her hair was fluttering in the onshore breeze, and Jonathan took a moment to realize that she looked quite lovely in the morning sunshine. The sea glittered out behind her, and when she smiled, a feeling always welled up inside him that everything was going to be okay.

  ‘Good news?’ she asked as she hopped off the wall and skipped towards him.

  ‘Uh, kind of. Nothing new. Got a lead towards some people who may be able to help. We have to go to Madrid.’

  ‘Madrid? Okay, I’m fine with that. Madrid is nice this time of year.’

  She hooked her arm through his and started pulling him up the path.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got time to see the abbey before we go,’ Julie said.

  ‘Um, I’m not sure if we have the time. I’m not comfortable staying in one place for more than an hour.’

  ‘Aaah.’ Julie smiled again, and playfully poked him in the ribs. ‘But this is a big place, and since we’re in France – we always have time.’

  The pace quickened as she pulled at his arm with gusto, and they headed upwards on the winding cobblestone path.

  Not sure if the people chasing us are French though, Jonathan thought to himself.

  The dark figure in a black trench coat had been eyeing the crowd for forty minutes by the stone entrance to the complex, searching for his prey, all to no avail.

  From the time their car had arrived to the time he had arrived and set up station by the one route in and out, it had been over an hour. That meant they were not simply popping in for breakfast and quickly driving on. They were stupidly having a look around, like every other tourist.

  He cast his hawk-eyes over the rising paths, walls and buildings, all the way up to the abbey at the summit. Two people could easily spend all day in here.

  The best killers in the world were naturally instilled with the patience of mountains. It was a basic hallmark of a great hunter. He could easily wait here all day and night for his prey to appear.

  His employer, however, wanted an update at midday.

  Departing from protocol, he decided to go after them. If they had gone up to the abbey and he moved now, either he would see them on a path a few levels ahead if they were still going up, or they would walk smack into death coming down.

  If the worst happened and they somehow got by him, it was not the end of the world. Even if they drove off, he could soon pick up the trail again. He levered himself off the wall he was leaning against and descended into the moving crowd.

  No one touched him as he moved through the tourist mass. Mothers instinctively pulled young children closer as he went by.

  He checked his weapons under the black coat and picked up his pace.

  The large hands were itching to kill someone.

  Jonathan felt no more relaxed after a walk through the cool and peaceful air of the abbey. His mind was still on the phone calls and their next move. Still, it was a nice distraction that had given him time to think about the trip to Madrid while also spending time with Julie. He appreciated her efforts to try to bring his state of mind to a calmer place.

  ‘I’m glad we did that. Thank you for pulling me up here,’ he said, as they started the curving walk back down to the bottom.

  ‘Of course,’ Julie replied with a glint in her eyes. ‘We French may not have the best GDP growth rates, but when you see such places as this and combine it with a nice lifestyle – who cares? Who wants to be like the Americans, always so busy working they don’t even have time to learn to dress themselves; wearing only white sneakers and high socks with shorts – urgh, such awfulness.’

  ‘Yes, I’m beginning to see your point,’ Jonathan said with a smile.

  They followed the winding downward path for a while. Eventually a slight detour opened up off one of the stairwells to a small path that opened out onto a stone viewing balcony.

  They walked to the edge of the balcony wall and looked down to see the tourist pilgrims wending their way up and down on the main path below.

  Julie turned and pulled a small, compact mirror out of her bag to begin touching up her make-up. Jonathan looked out over the sea again, and was taken with a moment of inspiration.

  This is it! he thought. When she puts that mirror away, I’m going to take her hand in mine. If that goes well, I’m going for the kiss!

  Twenty metres beneath them, on the winding path below, two darkened eyes of coal narrowed in on the two people on the viewing platform.

  This was his chance for a clean kill – both of them at once.

  He had them!

  The Tatar reached into the left side of his overcoat with his right hand and tightly gripped the butt of his modified sawn-off double-barrel shotgun.

  The weapon of choice for killing or disabling prey at this distance.

  Julie closed the compact mirror and smiled at Jonathan as her hand went to put it back in her bag. Jonathan started leaning forward for the kiss, and it was at this point that things started to happen in car-crash slow motion.

  Julie had not quite put the mirror inside the opening of her bag, and it flipped over the edge of the bag and began tumbling towards the ground. Both he and Julie saw it starting to fall at the same time. They both instinctively dived towards the ground after the mirror, trying to catch it before it shattered into a thousand shards
on the cold stone.

  It was then that the wall behind them exploded.

  Jonathan felt his cheek being cut by flying mortar, and a larger piece of stone hit him directly on the side of the head. He felt his hair start to matt with blood. Julie had a cut on her forearm. Luckily they were near the ground and facing away from the wall as some debris hit the top of the wall and the rest flew over their bent bodies. They were peppered with tiny stones, but nothing had penetrated their clothes.

  They both collapsed against the inside of the wall.

  ‘Shit!’ Jonathan exclaimed in panic. ‘Assassins!’

  ‘This way!’ Julie yelled, starting to turn.

  They crouched low and ran alongside the wall till it completed the square and returned to a walled path going upwards again.

  The Tatar was bounding up the stairs a few levels below while reloading the shotgun and pulling an Uzi from the other side of his trench coat.

  He could not believe the luck of these people!

  He was sure they hadn’t seen him. How had they managed to duck at the very moment he had fired? He had seen nothing like it in his twenty years of professional slaughter.

  There were people screaming and running everywhere before him. All the streets were narrow and packed with tourists, which hindered his progress up the steps.

  By now security guards had been called, and the first one appeared at the bottom of the steps as the Tatar reached the top of them.

  He spun round and discharged one barrel of the shotgun down the steps into the guard’s chest. He spun back and saw that the targets had disappeared from the path above.

  There were traces of blood where the first shot had hit.

  Tracking them will be easy, he thought.

  He set off at a run towards the path streaked with blood.

  Jonathan and Julie were running for their lives on a path leading upwards.

  Jonathan stole a glance behind to see if anyone was behind them yet. He prayed they weren’t because if he could see someone else, then someone else could see him – someone else happy to destroy a world heritage site in order to kill him.

  As he looked back, he saw a streak of blood on the wall behind them where Julie’s arm had grazed it. They continued running until they came to a fork where steps led downwards off their current path, while the other path continued on an upward trajectory.

  Jonathan was desperately trying to think how to get away. He was suddenly struck with an idea, and pulled Julie to a stop at the fork.

  ‘Run down the steps,’ he panted breathlessly. ‘And don’t put any blood on the walls. I’ll meet you at the bottom. Go!’ he added, giving her a gentle push.

  He continued to run up the path for about fifteen metres, smearing two patches of blood on the wall, which he wiped from the side of his head. He hoped it made it look like they were going in that direction.

  He turned to run back the way he had come.

  It was going to be tight getting back down and past the killer.

  With lengthened downhill strides he pelted back down the path and swung onto the stairs, taking them three at a time, all the while trying to be careful not to leave any more blood anywhere.

  As he reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the corner, he ran straight into the arms of Julie. She had been waiting for him.

  Another gunshot was heard higher up on the hill above them. Fearful, they instinctively hugged together tightly.

  ‘He’s still not that close,’ Jonathan said. ‘He must be shooting at people getting in his way.’

  ‘We have to get out of here!’ Julie looked panicked. Her soft brown eyes were wide with terror, and Jonathan could feel an unusual strength through her fingernails into his forearms, where she was gripping him tightly.

  Her panic focused his mind.

  ‘Listen to me, Julie,’ he said with conviction. ‘He’s looking for two of us and he’s seen the clothes we’re wearing. We’ll split up here ...’

  Her nails dug deeper into his skin.

  ‘... just for a moment. Go and grab a hat or jacket from a shop or someone lying on the floor, so you look different from a distance. Then walk down at the same pace as the crowd. When you get to the bottom, go straight out the front door and meet me at the end of the causeway. Do you understand?’

  Julie nodded mutely and Jonathan slowly turned her around. He leaned forward till he could smell her hair.

  ‘Go!’ he whispered urgently in her ear, before giving her another soft push.

  She staggered a few steps and then set off purposefully, not looking back.

  Good girl, Jonathan thought. Hopefully this will get us out of here alive.

  He started walking to the other side of the path from Julie so that he could keep her in sight as she made her way through the crowd. As he did so, he unbuttoned and stripped off his light summer shirt. Underneath he had the typical English white T-shirt to keep him warm. The summer shirt he dumped into a nearby rubbish bin as he started walking down.

  It was still chaos on the path before him.

  As the first shot had been heard at the bottom of the citadel, people had begun fleeing upwards. Then a later shot was heard higher up, so those higher up had begun to flee downwards.

  The result was that the path, which was only ten feet wide, had become clogged with people trying to flee in both directions. They had not accounted for mass evacuations in the design of fortress citadels in the thirteenth century. The only semblance of order among the melee was that the people trying to get down were mostly on the left side of the path, while the people going up were mostly commandeering the right. Jonathan had made his way to the left and was now starting to move down with the human tide. As he did so he reached over to an American tourist heading up on the right-hand side, and whipped the Houston Astros baseball cap off his head.

  ‘Hey!’ yelled the man as he attempted to turn to retrieve his sportswear. They were already separated to a depth of four or five people from the opposite flow of the human current. Jonathan shrank down and then pulled the cap on to his head.

  Ahead, he could see Julie grab a large, round straw hat and a tourist T-shirt from a shop she was passing on the far left of the path. She pulled the T-shirt on over her existing shirt and covered her auburn hair with the hat.

  It was a good move. From a higher vantage point, from where the killer would be looking, he would not be able to discern Julie at all.

  Semi-automatic gunfire was heard coming from halfway up the hill above them, followed by an explosion. Women on the packed path screamed, and everybody started pushing.

  The urge to get out was greater than ever.

  Ahead he could see the path begin its final curve back towards the entrance courtyard. Julie’s large straw hat was bouncing along noticeably in the distance.

  It’s going to be close, thought Jonathan. If he comes back down now he could still spot us.

  Higher up the hill, the Tatar was furious. The blood trail on the wall had run out and there was no sign of the targets. He could have outrun them to this distance. They had fooled him with one of the oldest tricks in the book. They had gone down the steps at the fork.

  He set off running back down the hill and encountered small-arms fire from the two police officers stationed at the site, who were coming up the hill.

  He could see there were also security guards behind the police officers.

  It would have been easy to kill the targets higher up, lose the trench coat and weapons, and then calmly walk out as with the rest of the visitors.

  But now he had to fight his way out.

  So be it, he thought.

  He let rip with the automatic Uzi in his right hand and hurled a hand grenade with his left.

  It was at the point of the explosion that everyone on all the paths thought it better to go back down and towards the main entrance. This led to a few seconds of even more intense panic and yet more screaming, before everybody began moving in the same direction.

&n
bsp; This is great, Jonathan thought. We’re moving faster.

  He could see the entrance courtyard ahead, with Julie at the edge of it.

  The only problem was that the courtyard was rammed full of people, due to a bottleneck of several thousand tourists trying to get through a stone entrance designed for only a few.

  The scariness of the moment seemed to concentrate Jonathan’s thoughts into a pool of lucidity.

  Disaster! We’ll never get through in time. The killer must be on his way back down now. Even if he reaches the higher path, the one with a view, he could pick us off from there – if he still recognizes us. Or he may just start mowing everyone down in the hope of killing us, and clearing a path for his escape.

  Suddenly Julie’s head disappeared downwards. Jonathan’s heart jumped in his chest.

  Had she been shot? He hadn’t heard a shot close enough at the same time. Was she okay?

  No. Clever girl – she was obviously thinking of the same thing as me.

  The only way for them to get out through the stuck mass of humanity at the bottom was to go down on their hands and knees and crawl amongst people’s legs.

  It was the last place where there was space to move.

  Jonathan dived to the ground and began to crawl. He held back yelps of pain as people occasionally stood on his hands or his calf muscles.

  It didn’t matter, though; he was making progress.

  He could see a brighter shade of white as the entrance drew closer through the shortening forest of human legs.

  The Tatar emerged onto the balcony that overlooked the entrance courtyard.

  He carried a smoking pistol in each hand.

  He jumped up onto the wall and stood on the edge of it, surveying the compressed crowd below.

  His dark eyes began scanning for anyone of similar height or hair colour to the targets. He raised both guns and began spitting alternate single shots that surgically took down anyone who looked similar to the targets.

  Wild screams erupted: it was as though someone had electrified a bed of already writhing eels.

  Jonathan was close to the entrance but was getting kicked wildly as people panicked and tried to move anywhere in their trapped desperation.