A/N: Time for some two-fisted action! Or: hanging out on rooftops with Bryce.

Chapter 26:

Bryce knuckled his back and shielded his eyes from looking directly into the sunset. Just lugging the portable telephone Tesla had built him was trouble enough, despite the padded straps built into the box-like knapsack, he didn't much relish the though of climbing the drainage pipes up to the roof. He shook his head and scanned the street again. This was no time to let himself get distracted.

He skulked in the mouth of an alley across the street from his target building for a few minutes after the sun disappeared, watching the movements of what were obviously sentries. That was a change from the last time, he thought with a grimace, wondering if he should call the mission off for the night. Bryce slumped against the wall, letting the stonework take some of the weight from his huge boxy pack for a while as he thought things through. The buildings in the area were mostly of dressed stone, and though well-maintained, traced their origins back into the early parts of the previous century, at the very least. They were shorter by several stories than many of the buildings in the surrounding areas, and unless Bryce missed his guess, all of the older buildings were Ring holdings, not just the building Roan had identified two days previously as a Ring safe house.

That made his mission tricky, but not impossible. He slipped into his pocket for a folded copy of Tesla's photograph, taking a brief glance in the little light that remained to make sure he had oriented himself correctly. It wouldn't do to climb the wrong building, no, it wouldn't do at all. There was one building in the cluster of buildings, almost a compound, though there was no exterior wall to speak of, and one building alone which had a roof that was close enough to set up his 'portable' telephone. Bryce's current position in the mouth of the alley had gone unremarked, thankfully, and he had a basic grasp on the sentries' patrol patterns.

He'd have preferred a more thorough knowledge, given that if he was spotted, they weren't likely to ask him in for coffee and biscuits. Bryce supposed it was technically possible, just very unlikely. He shook his head at the extraneous thought and strode out of the alley. His eyes scanned back and forth for any sentries he hadn't spotted, especially on the rooftops. He imagined that his bootheels echoed on the pavement, but it was just nerves. The sound of his footsteps carried to Bryce's ear, but beyond that, only a handful of feet, and he'd timed his movements to be sure there were no roving sentries within a dozen paces, and those looking the wrong way anyway.

He made it to his target building without any problem, but almost immediately noticed a complication. There weren't any drainpipes, at least none he could see. The roof he'd climbed to the night before had them, but he couldn't climb that one for this particular mission. The private phone line was the entire point. Bryce's heart raced in his chest, and he could fool himself that he could hear his blood rushing through his head. He was in enemy territory now. The handful of buildings all backed onto a smallish courtyard, complete with a fountain which made a distracting splashing sound off in the distance. There were shrubs dotting the neatly trimmed grass, and— he couldn't be sure in the early dark before moonrise— a tidy little herb garden. He hadn't spotted that the night before, probably a line of sight issue.

Bryce barely faltered a step when he failed to find a good place to climb his chosen building, instead he walked on, coming straight up to the fountain, scanning the bright windows of the nearby Ring buildings, if that's indeed what they were. His skin itched along the back of his neck and his forearms as if someone was watching him, and Bryce kept going, then made a turn around the fountain. His eyes searched for the unseen watcher, but he couldn't place the sensation. He didn't dare sit at one of the stone carved benches near the fountain, but he paused to study his building from the new angle, and finally felt his customary grin slide into place. It wouldn't be as easy as the drainpipe had been—and his pack had weighed considerably less with the lightweight camera on his back— but he could do it.

He continued his brief walk through the courtyard, coming up to the closest wall of the building, and looked up. He could see the wire slanting across the courtyard and running alongside this particular building's roof above his head. The stones were wide-set, with large gaps between where some of the mortar had crumbled away over the decades. He fit his fingers into one of the gaps gingerly and nodded in satisfaction. Bryce reached up and began the ascent. Despite the burning in his shoulders and back that started almost as soon as he began, he made good time, and collapsed thankfully onto his belly on the roofing tiles.

Next came the technically difficult part. He slung his pack off and turned it around, crouching near the edge of the roof. Tesla had left him written instructions as well as the verbal ones, but he remembered Tesla's lecture well enough that he could have recited it to himself as he worked. Most of the telephone was boxy, where Tesla had fabricated a makeshift case for the works inside it, but there was the recognizable handset, and a pair of trailing wires with wicked looking clamps of some kind on the ends. These, Bryce leaned over the edge of the roof and clipped gingerly onto the phone line where it ran beneath him along the roofline.

Then it was simply a matter of slithering up the incline of the roof to where he'd left the phone, removing the wax cylinder from its safety case and setting up the needle to record. Bryce fished a notepad and pen out of his jacket pocket as well for a backup. Last, was the damn waiting. It was probably going to be hours before anyone called. His stomach grumbled, and Bryce let out an exaggerated sigh.

Surprisingly enough, it was less than a single hour, before someone in the complex received a call, and he tensed in anticipation. "What have you gotten me mixed up in, Shaw!" A somewhat familiar voice demanded without any warning.

"Beg your pardon?" Came the reply.

"I just spoke to my son," the first voice said. "And he gave me an earful. Claimed I'd somehow helped kill his father in law! That isn't what I signed up for, Mr. Shaw."

"Senator, please. You must understand," Shaw said. "Our enterprises demand the highest secrecy. If there is a threat to that secrecy we must and do act decisively. Along those lines, Senator, if you've been discussing out business with your son without letting us vet him first..."

"Don't change the subject on me, you snake," the senator growled, and Bryce placed the voice just as he confirmed his suspicions. "Stephen Bartowski was a man of science, and a friend. If that was you and yours, I don't care who you answer to in your organization, you'll answer to me for it as well."

"It was Roark, acting without orders," Shaw said, oily smooth. Butter wouldn't melt on his tongue, Bryce guessed. "You know how he could get, Senator Woodcombe."

"In point of fact, I don't. And I don't intend to. I wash my hands of this entire affair," Woodcombe said, and hung up. Shaw stayed on the disconnected line, and there were a series of odd clicks on the line. Bryce realized after a moment, that there was some kind of switch being thrown, and then a new voice came onto the telephone line.

Bryce blinked in shock. Not even a brief conversation with an operator, just a new voice on the other end of the line. The Ring had somehow figured a way to bypass switchboards entirely. But then, if it was they're own private phone network, there couldn't be too many people using it, switching operations might be simple enough to be automated.

"Yes?"

"What the hell is going on in Louisiana," Shaw demanded of the new voice. "I thought your man had the Bartowski situation in hand."

"Vincent has the boy," the new voice claimed. "We've cornered the market on oracles. Beyond that, what is there to handle?"

"Woodcombe's son married the Bartowski girl, if you recall," Shaw said. "The son told her enough that the Senator is pulling his support from the plan."

The new voice cursed. "Can we still go forward?"

Shaw paused in thought. "Yes. The device is shipping to Fort Knox tonight, and there are teams in place at the other targets awaiting word for the go-ahead." The device, Bryce mused, could that be Tesla's earthquake machine? And then everything—or at least enough—clicked into place for him. The gold depository, earthquake gun, seeing the future. They just wanted him out of the way so he couldn't warn the guards at the fort. It was a robbery, and probably a stock swindle in the bargain, but not a plot to seize control of the government. Bryce let out a sigh of disgust. His father had died over this? Raw greed? "Bollocks," he grunted, and the line went silent.

"Did you just say something?" Shaw said after the pause.

Bryce blinked and held the handset away from his face for a moment, staring at the oddly shaped contraption again. A standard telephone handset was a tiny electric speaker, so that the person on the other end's voice responses could be transferred down the line to the man with the handset. Bryce wasn't up to date on the specifics of how that worked, but he knew enough that most handsets only had one opening where a person's voice was supposed to come out, but... this one had a pair of speakers, and now that he looked at the wire again, there were two of those as well, wrapped around each other. It was a receiver and a transmitter, he suddenly guessed. Tesla just couldn't leave well enough alone, could he? Always had to 'improve' things. "double bollocks," he said, and then winced at his foolishness. They'd have heard that as well.

"Search the compound," the nameless voice said, "You're compromised. Don't let them escape. Who knows how long they've been listening."

Bryce tossed the handset down to the roof tiles and dug the half-used wax cylinder out of its cradle. The needle dug a furrow in the wax and he winced, but he got the thing put away in the case at his belt that Tesla had provided, without any further damage, though he fumbled the clasp. He shoved his notepad back into its pocket in his coat and rose to a crouch, making his way stoop-shouldered back toward where he'd climbed the wall to the roof. It would be folly to try to climb back the way he'd come, Bryce realized and stopped, torn. He scanned around, hoping for some other way down to present itself. Shouting was coming from the building across the courtyard, and he could trace the phone wire from his perch on the roof over to where it entered the far building. This Shaw must have been in that building. Bryce cursed silently, but it didn't help him see a way out of the trap.

He pulled his revolver from a coat pocket, a small weapon, only .36 caliber, and designed for concealability more than anything. Still, it had six shots, and he might soon find himself needing them all. "Up there!" a voice shouted from the courtyard below, and Bryce flinched, dropping to his belly on the roof tiles. A bullet buzzed through the space his head had been an instant earlier. Good shooting, in the dark, an absent part of him mused.

He could hear boots on paving stones, and then shouts from the building below him. If there was a way up from inside, soon men would be flooding the rooftop. The roof Bryce occupied was a lower level of a split-roof, with windows behind him that were dark, and he hadn't bothered about them before. There was a small chimney only a dozen feet to Bryce's left, and he made for it, then cursed and started back for the bulky telephone. But now, he could see the bobbing, flickering glow of lanterns as men came into the upper floor of the building. Bryce collapsed back to his belly and turned, somehow managing to hook the telephone apparatus with a boot and bring it scraping over the roof tiles to him. He winced at the sound it made, but he couldn't think of anything else to do. If it was out in the open like that when men hit the rooftop, it would give him away.

He hauled himself forward, keeping low so that he wouldn't be outlined for whoever was still below in the courtyard and tucked himself behind the chimney just as a man appeared in one of the windows. Bryce held his breath and clutched his pocket-revolver in close, a two-handed grip for better accuracy.

The man caught his foot on the sill and tumbled, the lantern spilling from his hands and sending a wild gyration of light behind it. There was a second man at the window, gun drawn and scanning the roof. Bryce could see the man's eyes widening... what had he seen? The fallen lantern hadn't shattered, instead it rolled down the slight angle of the roof and illuminated the chimney from the side. Bryce cursed to see his shadow playing out on the white wall of a building across the courtyard.

In a rage he scooped up Tesla's 'portable' phone and flung it one handed at the first, fallen man, who was just rising to his knees. Bryce didn't know where he found the strength, but for the surge of anger at himself for his foolish expletive on the phone, he'd be safe and gone by now.

The man on the roof with him caught the boxy contraption right in the breadbox, loosing his wind in a great rush, and collapsing backward to the roof with a crash of breaking tiles. He was dazed, and no longer paying attention, the slope of the roof causing him to roll lengthwise toward the edge. The man tried to scream, when he realized he couldn't stop, but he first had to draw breath, and dazed as he was, it was a wasted effort. He pitched over the edge before he got more than an anemic bellow out of his mouth, which cut off when he hit the stone two stories down.

Bryce grinned and shot blind around the chimney, hoping to keep the man in the window in cover so that he could close, perhaps leap through the window himself. It was only a handful of yards across the sloping roof. But as he stood, his foot slipped. The tiles broken by the first man had started something akin to an avalanche, the whole roof was moving, and Bryce fell on his ass, and nearly rolled off as the first unfortunate had.

Thankfully he still had his wits about him, and he spread his arms and legs, but still he was sliding along with a fair amount of the roof toward the edge. He tried to shove himself backward with his feet on the tiles, but his kicks just sent the tiles forward under him, hastening the slip of the roof. He cursed as he went over the edge, but a glint of metal where he'd cut the rubber insulation from the telephone wire caught his eye and Bryce lunged for it even as his legs fell out from under him. The wire hit him in the armpit, and if not for his coat, might have bit through his skin. For a long moment he bobbed on the wire, feet dangling. There were half a dozen men in the small courtyard, pointing upward with revolvers, and Bryce thought he was dead.

Then, the cable snapped, and Bryce grabbed at it in desperation. He let out a warbling, ululating yell of exhilaration as he swung across the courtyard on the Ring's own private phone cable. Of course, he hadn't spotted the window at that point. Bryce smashed through in a fountain of broken glass and wooden framework, letting go of the cable and rolling as he landed. The courtyard was narrow enough that his flight hadn't ended with him in the fountain, but instead inside the very building in which Shaw had been making his telephone calls. Bryce shook his head and surveyed his surroundings. A bedchamber of some kind, he saw.

A woman, dark of hair, had the sheets pulled up to her chin. Bryce grinned, brushing glass off his shoulder as he got to his feet. "Sorry for the intrusion, Miss," he said. A gunshot broke some of the glass that Bryce hadn't cleared from the frame. He flinched, but the bullet embedded itself harmlessly in a wall. And then came a shout.

"Hold your fire, you dogs," Bryce recognized it as Shaw's voice. "That's my Eve's bedchamber."

Bryce blinked and his eyes swivelled back to the woman in the bed of their own accord. She had a tiny double barreled derringer in her hand, pointed at his head. He cursed and ducked toward the door. A bullet buzzed past his ear, and the second threw up splinters ahead of him when he faltered. He very nearly threw a shot in her direction in retaliation, but thought better of it, crashing into the door with his shoulder and smashing it from its hinges.

He stumbled into a well-appointed hallway, with an alcove holding a bust of some famous personage a few feet to his right. At the end of the hallway, a man with a pistol stared at him in shock. The other man had his pistol in hand, but pointed at the ground, it began to rise. Bryce was faster, and squeezed off two shots before the man could properly take aim. His first shot went wide, blasting hole in a painting of a rural scene of some kind. The impact knocked the frame off the wall onto the—he supposed—Ring agent. His second shot was better aimed, and took the other man in the center of his chest, just as the man finally brought his pistol to bear. The painting falling on him, and Bryce's second shot, sent his adversary's bullet into the center of the forehead of the stone man to his right. There was shouting from that end of the hallway; likely it lead to the courtyard and more enemies. Bryce ran blindly in the other direction, coming almost at once to the foot of a staircase.

He cursed and took the stairs three at a time, legs pumping and lungs heaving like a bellows. A bullet zipped by behind him to send up splinters from the railing. As he made the top of the stairs, he spotted two men coming his way down the second floor hallway. Bryce held his pistol out in front of him and fanned the hammer back, blasting out four shots in quick succession. It was a desperate move, and only the first bullet found a target, spinning the closest man sidelong into his companion and tangling them both up. Bryce charged ahead, kicking the pistol from the second man's grip as he struggled with his mortally wounded compatriot, then landing a blow to the man's chin with his fist.

The momentum of his charge lent a power to the punch Bryce hadn't expected, and the man fell unconscious to the fine carpet. They had just come out of a doorway and on instinct, Bryce scooped up one of the men's fallen pistols and ducked through the doorway into a study of some kind. He slammed the door shut behind him with his shoulder and scanned the room. There were bookshelves lining the walls and a heavy mahogany desk with a pair of chairs in front of it. Bryce darted across and grabbed one of the chairs, spun it around and wedged it under the doorknob to keep out his pursuers. It was far from a perfect solution, so he stuck his shoulder into the side of the closest bookshelf and tumbled it down across the doorway as well.

Still not perfect, but better. Now at any rate he could stop for a few moments and let his brain catch up, devise some sort of escape plan. It had all been instinct and luck to this point, he well knew, and if Bryce Larkin wished to get out of this place alive, now, he had to think. Not his finest point, he would be the first to admit.

He made a quick inspection of the room beyond his initial cursory glances and noticed the bulk of a telephone. Likely the same one Shaw had used mere minutes—perhaps only one, at that; it had all gone so insanely fast—earlier.

There was a small stove to the side of the heavy, carved desk, and Bryce went to it first, but found only ashes. It must have been where this Shaw disposed of incriminating documents, still, there was a faint hope there might be some for further intelligence in the desk drawers, which were of course, locked. His borrowed pistol made short work of the first lock, and he riffled through the papers inside, looking for God alone knew what. It was foolishness, part of his mind screamed at him, but another, calmer part begged to differ. He grabbed a sheaf that looked interestingly like a list of names and folded it, shoving the paper into his breast pocket on top of his notepad.

A crash came from behind him, in the direction of the door, and he whirled, but the impact hadn't moved the toppled bookshelf but an inch. A shout came for him to surrender himself, and Bryce laughed richly in response, and squeezed off a round from his new, fresh revolver. A responding fusilade bore holes in the door, and zipped past him. Bryce turned to the window and kicked it open with a crash of breaking glass.

The voice he recognized as the man Shaw bellowed for someone to cut him off in the alley, and Bryce cursed his hastiness as he stuck his head out the window. It was still clear, but that couldn't last much longer. Clear of people at any rate, but full of rubbish and debris, as were most New York alleyways. Bryce quickly made a sign of the cross, praying for a soft landing, and leaped into the rubbish heap below the window.

Whatever it was that broke his fall, it was softer than paving stones at least, and crunched and crackled under his weight. He was unhurt, and up and running a moment later. A figure popped out into the mouth of the alley ahead of him, and Bryce began to bring his pistol to bear. The voice stopped him dead in his tracks. "Larkin?" the man said, genuinely at a loss.

Bryce was no less shocked. "Barker?" he gasped.

"What the hell are you doing here?" They said as one. "I thought you'd taken Jill and left for England!" Bryce said, still smarting from that revelation of Roan's.

Barker shook his head in exasperation. "And I thought you dead," he said. "We've no time for this. Hit me, make it look good!"

"What!" Bryce said.

"I'm undercover for Her Majesty's Secret Service you twat!" Barker hissed. "Now hit me, and get out of here!"

Bryce grinned, "Careful what you wish for!" he said, and slugged Barker in the stomach, and then in the jaw. Barker slumped to the ground, still conscious, but just barely. "Want another?" Bryce inquired, quite willing to go on, if Barker was.

"Just get out of here before you die a second time," Barker managed to get out, between gasping for breath.

"Be careful yourself," Bryce said, none too believably. "I'd hate for Jill to end a widow." With that, he ran out into the street. The Ring's men were spilling out of the courtyard behind him, and he heard yet more gunfire, though none of it came close enough for him to hear the buzz of the projectiles through the air. Someone had once said 'there is no greater thrill to be fired upon with no effect,' and Bryce found it close to God's own truth as he turned a corner into another street. He kept to a run, until he found what he was looking for, and leapt into the waiting hackney coach Roan had hired in the case of trouble.

He didn't even have to tell the man where to go. In the aftermath of the firefight, his hands began to shake, and he'd split his knuckles on Barker's jaw, it looked like. Still and all, a most useful night's work. Bryce briefly considered a detour to a pub, but then, he remembered. Castle was built under such an establishment; ramshackle or no, he suspected there was whiskey enough there to get blind stinking drunk, once he'd made his report.

TO BE CONTINUED...

A/N: I know, I know... an all Bryce chapter? What was I thinking! We'll get back to Chuck's predicament next update. See you in ~7 days! I love getting feedback, so please, drop me a review if you've got the time. I promise, I won't take it personal if you just want to yell at me for no Chuck or Sarah section this chapter.