Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (44 page)

She shivered.

She knew where he drew the character from.

Before he could be typecast, Jack appeared as the comic relief character in a Kenneth Branagh film called
Storming the Castle,
and then as the romantic lead in
Xanthippe
, an independent film that had done well in broad release for reasons Mercedes never understood.

According to the bio she’d read on a fan’s website, it was around this time Jack had been taken aside by John Cusack and Kelsey Grammer, of all people, and counseled against trading his soul to Hollywood. Five of Jack’s movies released the same year; playing a young Jack Ryan in
Without Remorse,
(in her opinion, coming off more believable than Harrison Ford had as a mature Ryan—Mercedes had inherited the Tom Clancy books from her father), another Koontz miniseries and two movies opposite Bruce Willis and Daryn Tufts where all three had played wildly different characters.

Jack fit in everywhere, but managed to stand out at the same time.

His first starring role—and the last time Mercedes had seen a movie in a real theater—was in
The Walking Drum
, a historical Celtic story set around the turn of the first Millennium. Directed by Ridley Scott from an original novel by Louis L’Amour, it had been a monstrous success, one of those films to come along unexpectedly and do better business every succeeding week it stayed in theaters. Tired Hollywood had surprised everyone with
Drum
; it was widely thought that swashbuckling adventure movies were a dead franchise. It was a star-maker, a breakout. Mercedes decided she really liked it after her third screening.

During breaks in filming, Jack occasionally wrote pieces for
Premier
and
Variety
. Rumor was Jack had helped tighten
Drum
’s screenplay, and that rumor led to others, one fingering him for being the adventure novelist Fletcher Engstrom.

Mercedes had to laugh. During the brief media flurry, Engstrom himself had emerged a few days later from his apartment outside Farmington, New Mexico, blinking and looking concerned for the cameras.
Entertainment Tonight
had exposed the odd little man, a chemist by vocation, who had written a string of fair-to-decent thrillers and a few sweaty bodice rippers.

Problem was, Engstrom had been writing for years before Jack Flynn stood before a camera, and the shiny, coiffed network spokesface had a hard time drawing enough sound bites from the chubby closet-writer to fill a 2-minute segment.

Sales of Engstrom’s books rocketed, the world went on, and by the time attention turned back to Jack Flynn, he was gone. Vanished into vacation. He’d never been sought so fiercely before, and at the time his publicist explained that Flynn had simply done what he did several times a year, gotten an itch to travel and look around. His last words in front of a camera, it would turn out for several months, had been, “I think I’ll round up some old friends and hit the beach.”

The Flynn disappearance was a minor thing as far as Hollywood was concerned, and in a day was quickly swallowed up in the headlines by the outbreak of another conflict in Iran and the failed peacekeeping mission headed by the European Union.

And there was his picture, top of the web page. He’d aged well; lines appeared down either side of his face when he smiled. The sadness in his eyes could be a photographer’s trick.

There was even a quote by an actress, a glittery, fluttery thing barely out of her teens, who’d described Jack as “a man in a world full of boys. He’s got a craziness to him you wouldn’t expect.” The backstory went on to describe the shoot they’d been on together: she’d fumbled a valuable prop, some kind of antique watch, off a 30-ft pier into the South China Sea. Before the watch hit the water, Jack was in the air, diving after it. Mercedes forced her way through the puff journalism.

There was the inevitable comparison of Jack to any one of a dozen “rugged, old-fashioned movie stars. If this was the '50s, he might have changed his name to Rock. This is a man who doesn’t own a hair dryer."

Mercedes skimmed the list of Jack’s other television and movie appearances, paused for a moment over a review of his latest,
Caesar Whispered,
then stopped herself. Frowning, Mercedes pushed herself back in her chair until she could rest her feet on the keyboard, and smirked. She’d joined the ranks of wackos and weirdos who stayed up all night worshipping the virtual world, sitting in their underwear and stuffing their brains to overflowing with nonsense. Jack’s life should be his own, and she felt guilty enough for the time she’d spent ogling him across the ‘Net.

The trees outside postured in the wind, and their posing shadows swam on the walls of her office. In a few minutes the sun would be up in earnest and she’d be back to a much harder world, where she was a grownup and couldn’t pretend to be a kid in front of a movie screen, with a mouth full of popcorn and a head full of lunacy. A world, honestly, that she enjoyed more most of the time, where meaning and purpose could be found, where friendships for her were few but
real
.

“Jack,” she said, trying to force a note of disgust into her voice, and failing. “Jack,” she said again, softer, as she tossed the glass world into the air. The crystal caught the day’s first light, and sent whorls and points of brilliance through the room.

The phone rang suddenly, and she hiccuped, plucking the crystal out of the air with one hand while the other groped for the phone. “Jack?—I mean, hello?”

It was her cousin, Irene. She was hoarse, insistent. “I need you. I need what you can do. Do you feel up to a double murder?”

Epilogue Part One

Paris

4AM

Alonzo leaned his elbows against the bridge, patiently staring at the widening ripples beneath him. The Seine murmured quietly by, whispering to him in the voices of ghosts, in snatches of an old, old song he was supposed to remember. It always went like this, he reflected. Hours and hours of waiting–and for a woman, nonetheless. He slid closer to the leering statue that shared his vigil.

She would come. He suspected that she thought she loved him, and so he would wait.

The sun had yet to touch the eastern horizon when he saw Eliane stroll around the corner. She was wearing her blue cardigan and the Detroit Tigers baseball cap he’d given her. Joining him on the bridge, she snuggled close.

“Ow! Watch that rib, darling,” he murmured. “How did it go after I left yesterday? Any luck in the flower business?”

Eliane shrugged. “Enough to pay for us to see a movie tonight. Is that American-style enough for a date?” She was laughing behind her eyes, he could tell.

“Only if I buy us breakfast first! Have you ever eaten at the Jules Verne restaurant, in the Eiffel Tower?”

“Oh, non, non. C’est impossible!” She blushed. “They do not serve breakfast, and also, you need reservations for at least three months in advance.”

“Well, see, Eliane, I’ve got this friend . . .”

As they stepped off the bridge, Alonzo paused and turned one last time, looking across the Seine and up, up into the darkness gathering over the city. Against the angular line of night stood the gargoyles as they had for ages, as they would for ages to come, watching, waiting. As if ready to burst into ferocious action. One of them moved.

It was Jack.

The story continues in
Jack Be Nimble: Tyro.

Ready for more? Visit
www.BenEnglishAuthor.com
.

Acknowledgements & End Notes

Thank you for buying and reading this book. I sincerely hope you had a blast reading it & would be thrilled to hear from you about your experience! I hope you’ll consider visiting my website at www.BenEnglishAuthor.com and connecting with me through Twitter, Facebook, carrier pigeon, owl post, Patronus messenger charm, message in a bottle-tossed-in-a-wormhole, whatever. Twitter’s fine. Would be a huge honor to hear from you.

A quick note regarding the technology mentioned in the book: While the events of
JBN: Gargoyle
obviously take place a few years in the future (after the coronation of William Wales to the British throne and the peaceful democratization of Cuba, for instance.), you need to know that all the tech in the book is either real or within the easy reach of likelihood, given a year or two of applied science. I’ve worked among the mad genius-nerds of Silicon Valley long enough to experience many amazing technologies that either haven’t yet been fully developed or merely lie within reach but down the road not taken. Humans are amazing. Get this: a hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Patent Office was ready to close its doors, believing at the time that everything necessary and possible had already been invented—but look at us now. Imagine what we’ll see tomorrow.

There is a ridiculously high number of people whose efforts made this book possible, whether by offering technical advice, military information, scientific instruction, ice cream, or other manifestations of selfless love and support. So many friends read the manuscript in various forms and stages and gave suggestions and encouragement throughout the adventure of writing it. It was a wonderful avalanche. Some sort of special recognition must go to Gilen English, Eric and Sara Jensen, Terry Gorton, Mike and Debbie Schramer, Kate Piersanti, Douglas Thayer, Barbara English, Clark Seaman, Erik Swanson, Dan Brownlee, Bonnie Barnes, Kristine and John Cantillo, and Daryn Tufts. Titanic friends, every one.

Thank you!

Ben

P.S. You really should get the next book in the series,
Tyro
. Go ahead, treat yourself. Treat your friend. Treat ten friends!

Table of Contents

Jack Be Nimble

Trade Secrets

Home

An End

The Banked Light

Girl in a Berkeley Sweater

Forge

Miklos

Too Far Broken

Her Father’s Notes

Loose Ends

The Gentle Ogre

The Artful Woodsman

The Apprentice Magician

Interception

Erasure

Nimble

The Stone

Into the Woods

Chutes and Ladders

Further Up and Further In

All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men

Hradek

Lessons in Flight

Patron Saint of the Unlikely

Breaking Her Fall

Up the Beanstalk

Nyet, ya Amerikanyets

Heights

Like Shining From Shook Foil

Bright Wings

Night Run

Epilogue Part One

Acknowledgements & End Notes