Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (41 page)

Abruptly, all the lights went out.

Solomon acknowledged the burgeoning power under his feet, nodded mentally at the raw energy surging up from the infernal depths under the Tower. The panel before him glowed brightly, bathing him in multicolored light from its many digital dials and esoteric displays.

He’d set the elephant gun down, so as to be able to switch hands occasionally on the circuit breaker. Actually, he doubted that was its true function, as a great deal of energy seemed to be passing into the electronics above his head no matter how hard he pressed the lever down.

An ominous snapping filled the air, accompanied by a deep hum from the machinery above. He felt it through his entire body. A rivulet of perspiration ran down the middle of Solomon’s back, and he looked back over his shoulder at the city, then started in dark shock.

In a growing radius from the Tower, lights were going out. Whole apartment buildings, extinguished. Colonnades of streetlamps supporting a contiguous arch of light, doused. Commercial billboards, traffic lights, neon and fluorescents; all smothered. The flat circle of inky black lay relieved only by the headlights of vehicles moving on the streets. It spread uniformly, distorted temporarily by the angling line of the Thames, then assumed congruity again. Moving along pathways of electric cables, Solomon supposed.

The purring drone increased sharply in volume. Solomon nearly lost his grip on the lever, then slapped both hands down over it.

The sky was incredible. He was high enough to actually see mist and vapor slide together in the clouds. The luminosity had become more defined, drawing shapes fantastic in the sinuous, piling billows. Forks of electricity played crosswise in the air above, and Solomon looked up to see the clouds press together, forming whorls and creases not unlike the fingerprint of a transcendent finger, attached to a larger almighty hand.

“‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’” he said again. “‘It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”

A bright filigree of blue energy danced over everything in his field of vision. Solomon took another deep breath and smiled, calmly, placidly holding the lever in place. “‘And for all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down in things.’”

Raw electricity began to play over the black surface of the disk above. Below, a piercing wail that was almost human. The chaos and havoc of Raines’ weapon stormed up at him.

Another suited man crouched at the end of the hanger, squinting in the cold wind. Before Steve could train his weapon on him, he jerked and folded straight down, a marionette with cut strings.

Alonzo limped-ran into the hangar, gripping a smoking pistol. Jack dodged out from behind a stack of drywall bags. They had the great beast roughly surrounded. Steve, the closest, ran and took up a position in front of the helicopter. He and Alonzo were firing steadily, scattering sparks off the gray fuselage.

The blades above were merely another shadow now, the hanger a black hurricane tunnel. The Sikorsky wavered on its landing gear. Turbines roared, and the massive helicopter began to ease forward towards the open doors.

Jack yelled something to them but the rotors sliced and tore the words even as they left his throat. He didn’t appear to have a weapon. The machine cleared the floor fully and began to gather speed. Its gaping entrance would slide right past him.

Steve assumed a classic Weaver stance, firing directly at the pilot, but the bulletproof glass sent his rounds screaming away from the ‘copter. White streaks appeared where the glass compressed under each bullet.

Alonzo, grimacing and holding his side, scooped up a ten-pound bag of drywall mix and hefted it into one of the turbines as it advanced past him. He was blown from his feet as the turbine exploded, billowing black smoke and pale white powder.

The Sikorsky cleared the rollback doors. Alonzo watched it drop-jerk down and to the left, losing power on the side of the damaged turbine. He swore and pumped the air triumphantly. “See how far they get on one engine! Suppose we can leave it up to His Majesty’s Royal Air Force, eh Jack?” He looked across the hanger to where his friend stood scant seconds before. “Jack?”

“Jack?”

He slammed Raines up against a flight seat, then stumbled as the floor of the Sikorsky jerked down and to left. Miklos lashed out with a kick, missed, and struggled to bring his weapon to bear. As he moved forward, Jack dove underneath him, then came up behind before his opponent could get a steady foothold to turn about. Gripping the hands that held the machine pistol, Jack heaved the gun back into Miklos’ stomach. Fire blossomed out into the helicopter, spilling into the cockpit and rebounding bullets off the dark green steel.

Miklos dropped the gun and twisted, smashing Jack with an elbow and a fist simultaneously. Jack spun along with him, snarling with pain even as he locked Miklos’ arms with his own and threw the man headlong into the rear portion of the transport deck.

Jack spared a glance to where Raines crouched, and saw to his dismay that the older man held a pistol in his free hand. Miklos came in again, palms darting. Jack kicked the MAC-10 out the door and raised his own hands to defend himself.

The pilot made an odd gurgling sound from the cockpit. The three in the midsection turned enough to see the uniformed man slump against his smashed and sparking controls.

Alonzo and Steve watched the helicopter’s flashing lights descend into the darkness below, then slide off rapidly to the side until they vanished around a corner of the building.

The sky around them was a frozen maelstrom of pigments. Alonzo had never seen such radiant crimsons and tints of pearl-touched indigo in his life.

A humming buzz pervaded the room. He realized it had always been present, but now suddenly surged into a throbbing, resonant tone, and the lights came back on. They were weak, fluctuating sparks.

The floor on which the two men stood began to shake.

The air around them began to take on a strange hue.

“We’ve got to try to make it to the elevator!” Alonzo shouted.

Steve shook his head. “In an earthquake? Deathtrap.” He seemed strangely shaken, and blinked his eyes repeatedly. He glanced apprehensively about at the trembling building. “We’ll never make it down that way.”

Alonzo began to wish
he’d
been on the helicopter. “Then what–“

”Wait!” Steve lurched toward his concealed equipment. “The spare parachutes!”

Alonzo limped after him. “Steve! I broke a rib or something. I need-” He struggled for breath. A cold weariness washed over him. “I need your help.”

The entire flight crew was dead, ripped to pieces by the ricocheting eruptions of the machine pistol. Jack tried to fall away from the yawning door as he, Raines, and Miklos were thrown about inside the ‘copter like dice in a tumbler.

It dropped rapidly and sheered left, weaving unsteadily in a nearly-complete circle around the Tower. Jack was the first to recover his balance and landed a solid right fist on Raines’ jaw, then snatched up the miniature computer that slid along the floor.

Time to abandon ship.

He slid into the pilot’s chair, shoving the dead man toward the rear. Miklos dodged, seized Raines, and slammed him into an empty flight chair.

Alonzo had repeatedly shown him the rudiments of flying, though Jack had no hope of being able to pilot the machine. He could barely hear himself think over the whine and shriek of bending, buckling steel, over the hard metal groan of rivets tested to their limit. Jack found the collective without any trouble, leveling out somewhat at a hundred feet and descending above the street.

He ran his hands and eyes over the instrument panel, increasingly desperate.

The crippled, flaming Sikorsky cleared the fence surrounding Hyde Park and sheered through the top of a tree. Jack belted himself in with one hand while the other skittered over the controls. Damn, it had to be here somewhere!

Ever catlike, Miklos slipped into the co-pilot’s space. Jack saw the knife at the limit of his peripheral vision, and managed to duck down and to the left, catching three inches of steel in the thick folds of his jacket. As he dodged, his hand came in contact with a lever over a central button.

He looked down, ignoring Miklos. The helicopter began to veer right and forward, blurring the passage of scenery. Perhaps three seconds until the blades hit the ground and they pinwheeled, in fire and bloody slag, across the middle of the park.

The button was large and red. Practically a circus clown’s nose.

Miklos dropped the knife and reached for his safety belt. Raines was shouting in the background, somewhere behind them in the shattering helicopter.

“I’m sorry,” was all Jack had time to say as he punched the eject button and the ‘copter’s rotors blew off. His chair erupted through the rapidly fragmenting canopy and Jack screamed as he blew past the other two men. The world spun, and he watched the blackness of the ground rotate below, as if time was speeding up without him, then to be replaced by dim blurs that had to be stars. But he was too low.

The Sikorsky plowed into the earth, digging a furrow thirty meters long before exploding into a police shed.

He heard the parachute billow open above him, but he knew he was too low for it to do much good. Jack felt strangely disappointed. He’d always expected to see bits of his life flash before him at the end. “
Victoria
,” he began, then felt a tremendous, chilling impact, and all went black as a starless night.

Alonzo glided downward ten meters above Steve, aiming for the rooftops on the south side of Oxford Street. Above and behind him, the Tower suddenly flared a brilliant white-gold, shining through the thin silk of his parachute and painting his giant, magically suspended silhouette on the buildings and crowds below.

Far to his right, in the middle of the lightless green fields of the park, a lesser fire burned at the end of a swath of glowing metal. Flaming shreds of steel still rained on the grass.

Alonzo spiraled back over the street and came down near the gates of Hyde Park. The crowd below scattered out of his way, squinting up against the growing light.

He tried to land in a run, had to settle for a slow, injured lurch, and cursed his lost knife. Alonzo struggled with the straps of his parachute, finally surrendering to the assistance of a pair of middle-aged men in rain slickers. “I have to get into Hyde Park,” he said to a nearby policeman.

Then an explosion of light drew their attention back to the Illuminatus Tower. “Everyone get back! Back now, clear the area!” An officer on horseback was motioning for their retreat, all the while taking nervous glances over his shoulder at the building.

The light filled the sky with an incandescence as pure and strong as a single, perfect musical note.

The black water shattered upward as Jack surged to the surface, clawing for air. He was covered in mud from a skidding stop on the lake’s bottom, and water gushed from his clothes as he dragged himself onto the far bank. “Smack dab in the middle of the Serpentine,” he said, coughing.

Slowly he rolled to his back and sat up. Half a mile across the park, the brilliance at the crown of the Illuminatus Tower was just reaching full bloom. The top ten floors consumed themselves, their molecules burning into ambient light energy.

Long shadows blossomed under the noonday light from the Tower. Nearby, in a muddy groove of the river lay the conjoined co-pilot and navigator chairs, empty. There was no sign of Raines or the Albanian.

Jack opened Raines’ computer, and managed to shut down all the currently running programs. He had no idea if deactivating the miniature computer would have any effect, but he did it regardless. If Solomon had managed to curb much of the discharge, the power would most likely burn itself out before going much above the harmless visual spectrum.

Solomon.

Spreading plumes of energy raised themselves high, silently triumphant in the heavens over the Tower.

How did the rest of that go?

“‘
And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’”

Jack bowed his head and let his vision blur. His blue reflection over the calm waters of the Serpentine looked back stonily, steadily, softened by scant tears.

The very top of the tower erupted in a solid blaze of light, and Jack crawled from the cool lawn to his feet. The light was warm, soaking through his clammy clothes. After a moment more, he fished the chicklet-sized transmitter out of his front pocket and pressed it firmly. He looked up once again at the Tower. The light would burn for a long time yet.

He took a deep breath and walked toward it.

By the time Jack reached the edge of Hyde Park the streetlamps and other sources of illumination were beginning to flicker on. As he greeted Ian, Alonzo, Major Griffin, and the little princess, a gleaming Rolls Royce Phantom IV pulled up. “Right this way, if you please,” said a uniformed driver. He introduced himself as a Special Security aid to Buckingham Palace, and shooed them all inside.