Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters
Thank you emptyvoices. I appreciate your help! I'm going on vacation Wednesday, so it'll be a couple of weeks before I have another chapter up.
Chapter 8
The damage the LuxAtlantic sustained in Jackson's spectacularly staged disaster six months ago was extensive, but it was beautifully contained to the top floors of the hotel. That's the marvel of plastic explosives. A team of specialists quickly certified that the rest of the hotel was structurally sound and business as usual very quickly resumed.
And so it was with Rade's beautifully restored seventeenth century château. At four a.m. on Wednesday morning, a relatively minor blast took out a portion of the back quadrant of the mansion, destroying a kitchen, solarium and morning room. The rest of the sturdy old house stood firm and solid.
Sirens wailed almost immediately, before the stunned householders could get their wits about them and begin to react. The almost instantaneous response of fire and police personnel was less attributable to what is no doubt an admirable emergency services system in Prague than it was to Jackson Rippner, who placed a call to them a full ten minutes before the blast.
An eerie silence within the house followed the explosion, but within moments, angry shouting erupted from upstairs and down, the dogs started up a frenzied clamor, and of course, there were the sirens.
Amidst this chaos, Jackson and I crept out of the rose colored bedroom, followed the hallway away from the front stairs, and descended a small stairwell to a basement exit in a wing opposite the damaged one. Once outside, Jackson took my hand and we ran across a dark lawn toward a brilliantly lit outbuilding the size of a small airplane hangar. We halted in the shadows and watched while a guard, khaki uniformed and holding an automatic rifle across his chest, paced nervously in front of the building.
Jackson left the shadows, walked up to the man and spoke to him urgently in Russian. He gestured back toward the house and moved steadily in the other direction, toward the barn sized doors fronting the building. The guard seemed torn, no doubt wanting to rush toward the drama unfolding on the other end of the house where even now smoke billowed and flames licked around the pink brick, but also understandably wary of angering Rade Vaschenko by leaving his post. Professional integrity (or perhaps self preservation) won out. The guard pointed the rifle at Jackson. He was, however, unaware of my presence.
"Now would be good," Jackson sang out in English, right in the middle of a spate of Russian words, and then went back to arguing with the guard.
I came out of the shadows, walked up behind the guard, unseen, and applied a two-pronged device to his left shoulder. He dropped to the ground, twitched briefly, and was still.
"Good job, Leese." Jackson said. "I'm glad that worked. I wasn't sure the battery in that thing was any good."
As it turns out, earlier that evening while I was touring the industrial region of Prague, Jackson was a busy man. He and Katya must have parted company fairly early on because Jackson managed to scope out the security systems, set up the C4 in the kitchen, and round up any number of useful items, including the Taser I'd just made use of. I'm not sure how he managed all of this, actually, given the high level of security in that house. He declined explaining it to me.
Now, with the confidence of a suburban homeowner, he keyed numbers into a security panel beside the doors of the huge shed. They rumbled open, revealing a fleet of vehicles. Besides the Hummer and the Porsche, I counted four Suburbans and six compact cars with taxi lights on their roofs.
Jackson aimed a keyless remote in the general direction of the cars, saying, "This has to work on one of these."
A chirp and flashing lights on the Porsche proved it did.
And so we swept out of the garage, down the lighted circular drive, past a cluster of excited Russians, past the two dogs, held at bay by a small dark haired woman, and past firefighters disembarking from a rumbling, red ladder truck. The gates leading out were open, but another khaki clad guard stood sentry. As we neared, he raised his rifle. Suspicion was cast already; Rade knew we were responsible.
"Get down." Jackson accelerated, shifted, and shot through the gates. Ducking is not an easy thing to do in a Porsche, but when the back windshield shattered, I made myself as small as I could.
A yellow ambulance van passed, coming through the parkland area, and as we flew through the final set of gates out onto the street, a oncoming police car braked into a u-turn and followed us. Fortunately, the economy-sized patrol car was no match for the Porsche; Jackson outpaced him immediately and lost him in a maze of suburban streets.
"We've got to ditch the Porsche," Jackson said. "Like now."
"Why?"
"You mean besides looking a little suspicious driving a Porsche with a back window missing?" We soared through a yellow traffic light. "The GPS system - Rade knows where we are. He'll mobilize his taxi fleet. Did you know those guys are all trained guerilla fighters? He hires guys who went to terrorist school to drive his taxis."
We were in the downtown area now. Dawn had not yet broken and there were few cars on the streets this early. We left the Porsche parked by a meter and took off on foot. A taxi approached and slowed. Jackson wrapped his arms around me; I snuggled up closely. The taxi drove on, but we kept up the subterfuge of amorous lovers, with Jackson throwing in a drunken stagger every now and then.
We found a subway station; learned the trains didn't start running for another half hour. We walked for half an hour; came back as the sky was beginning to lighten in the east. Took a red line train two stops south; walked through a residential district of older homes. Some were well cared for; some spoke of careless living, with untended lawns and peeling paint.
Jackson seemed sure of our direction and three blocks later, we walked up the front steps of an aged stone house with a red roof. Jackson had a key to deadbolt on the front door and we entered the narrow hallway of what had once been a large one-family dwelling more recently subdivided into multiple apartments. A flight of stairs and another deadbolt key took us to a small, sparsely furnished apartment.
"This is your place?" I asked. A large table lamp cast a warm glow over a narrow bed, a shabby easy chair and a threadbare sofa. A small TV sat atop a small dresser and padlocked storage cabinets were built into one of the walls. A tiny kitchen and a smaller bath opened off of the combination bed/living room.
"Temporarily." Jackson dropped into the easy chair, kicked his feet out in front of him, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "It's not up to my usual standards, but it suited my needs."
"Then you knew this was going to happen."
"No. I knew it might happen. I was here last week. I took precautions. Renting this room was one of them."
"So now what?" I paced over to a window and looked through dusty mini blinds down at the street below. As I watched, two guys in jeans and t-shirts emerged from the house below, wheeling bicycles toward the street. Students, I was guessing, by their backpacks.
"Rest. Take a nap, Leese. You've been up all night."
"Rest?" It was not even six in the morning yet. I'd operated in panic mode throughout the night, I was still wearing the same basic black dress I'd put on for Rade's cookout yesterday evening, and my adrenaline remained in overdrive. "How can you rest?"
"I can't. I've got work to do." He opened his eyes, forced himself out of the chair, and unlocked one of the cabinets, taking out a laptop identical to the one he'd had to leave behind when we fled. "But you should. I need my zip drive first, though."
I dug through my purse and unearthed the zip drive. "My cell phone's missing."
"I used it to detonate the C4." He carried the laptop into the kitchen and set it atop a chrome sided kitchenette table. I followed him.
"Did we kill anyone, Jackson?" My part in the bombing lay heavy on my heart. I'd wanted desperately to get away from Rade Vaschenko, but I was well aware of the risks involved in making that happen.
"No. As I told you before, it's highly unlikely anyone was in that part of the house at that time of the morning."
I wandered back into the main room; paced a bit; sat down finally on the lumpy tweed sofa. My mind raced. I saw images from the blast - a burned out shell where the kitchen had been, the guard on the ground. I remembered the group of people on the front lawn. I focused on them and tried unsuccessfully to pull up faces. I remembered Katya, though, with the dogs. My eyes felt heavy now and my body felt weighted. My thoughts started to drift. Maybe I would just rest my eyes for a moment or two…
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I awoke to full daylight streaming through the mini blinds. I was lying prone on the couch with a pillow under my head and a blanket tucked around me. For a while I was content to lie still and luxuriate in the perfect stillness, the peculiar sense of safety and sanctuary I felt in this shabby room. I felt like I could sleep a full eight hours more, but I dared not. With reluctance, I rose from the sofa.
Jackson was gone from the apartment. Cool, sweet air blew in on a gentle breeze from a raised window in the kitchen and anchored to the table next to the laptop was a note written on a paper towel that said 'gone for food'.
I made up my mind quickly. I picked up my purse and walked out the door.
Outside, I looked up and down the street but saw no sign of Jackson. I set off in the direction we had come several hours earlier. Pedestrian traffic was light. Ahead of me, an older woman wearing a winter coat and a headscarf pushed a shopping cart and I met two girls I guessed to be in their early twenties on bicycles going the opposite direction.
Two blocks down, I turned a corner halfway to the train station and came face to face with Jackson. He was toting two paper grocery sacks and his eyes turned glacial when he saw me.
"You leaving me, Lisa?"
"You don't need me anymore," I said. "I'd say your deal with Rade has pretty much fallen through. It's time for me to go home."
"So you're going to what, just catch the next train to the nearest police station and hope you don't pass any cab drivers along the way?"
"That's pretty much it," I said.
He shifted the bags to one arm. "You need to rethink that plan, Leese. Walk back to the house with me. There's something you need to see."
"I don't think so." I started to edge past him. "I'm going n- yeow!"
He'd grabbed my elbow and pressed down hard. "Don't make a scene," he said in a low voice. "You don't want anyone to notice us and remember. You can't afford that. Not if you want to live."
"You know what? I'm just really tired of all these threats and-- that hurts! Let go of my arm!"
"I'm not talking about me now, Lisa. Or Rade. Just …. trust me. I know how hard that is for you, but try it. Just this once. Go back to the house with me. If you still want to go after you've seen what I have to show you, I won't stop you."
I thought about what he said. Part of me wanted to keep walking, all the way to the subway station. Something else – intuition maybe – urged me to listen to Jackson.
"All right," I said.
Together we walked back to the small apartment where Jackson showed me, on the laptop screen, a sketch of a woman who looked a lot like me. "This is on the web page for one of Prague's daily newspapers," he explained. "The explosion at the mansion is big news right now. Headline news. Now no one died in the blast – just as I promised you - but police want to question a man and a woman seen fleeing the scene (that would be you and me, Lisa) about the death of a security guard. Apparently he was shot outside the garage by the 'suspects' during a daring getaway attempt in the owner's personal vehicle."
"I didn't shoot him! I used a Taser!" One would think that after everything I'd been through I would be incapable by now of feeling further shock or outrage. One would be wrong. "We don't even have a gun! At least I don't. Do you have one, Jackson? Did you shoot him?"
"Did you see me shoot anybody? I was with you the whole time. You know I didn't!" Jackson slammed the laptop shut. "Rade probably killed that guard for letting us get away."
"So now I'm wanted by the police? For murder? Does Rade own the police force, too?"
"No, not all of them. Maybe a few. You need to chill, Leese. We'll figure something out."
I was way beyond chill range. "You, Jackson. Not 'we'. You got me into this; you get me out. That's what you do, isn't it? You fix things. Fix this, Jackson!"
"Then don't fuckin' run from me again, Lisa!" He advanced on me suddenly, his hands shoulder high, giving me little shoves. He backed me up to the wall. I couldn't think why I'd ever thought his eyes were cold; right now, they blazed. "If you want me to save your life."
"Why would you even bother?" I fired back. "You want me dead anyway, don't you? You've been threatening me for days!"
"Newsflash, Leese." With deceptive languor he reached for the neckline of my dress, stretched it down below my scar. He traced it with his thumb, his eyes never leaving mine. I gasped; tried to push him away. He grabbed my wrists, returned them to my side. Then cupped my face; leaned in closer. "If I wanted you dead, you wouldn't be here now."
He kissed me.
I kissed him back. Wrapped my hands behind his neck, twined my fingers in his hair and kissed him back. Ages later, but way too soon, he pulled away, gently unwound my hands from his neck and gave them back to me.
"I won't do that again," he said. "Unless you tell me that's what you want. I want more than kisses from you. I want you naked in that bed with me. But that has to be your choice."
Jackson walked away from me then, went back and started unloading groceries. I felt a wretched sense of loss and a profound sense of relief.