For an hour under the beating midday sun, those self-same narrow alleys of the Casbah stopped being cool shady veins between the tall buildings, and were inflamed into blazing, surging, fiery rivers of heat. Stall vendors put up awnings to shield them and their customers from the glare, but that only trapped the warm air and made the atmosphere close and muggy and suffocating. Most people would be indoors, waiting for the spate to abate, but those whose business meant that they had to be out and about just had to wade through the stifling, sweaty soup and console themselves that it was will of Allah to send his people trials.
Sometimes, it was also the will of Allah to send his people relief, as a reward for their faithfulness. One would be shuffling along, his soles burning from the heat of the paving-stones underfoot, when a breath of wind would kiss his brow, and a flutter of a shadow would give momentary relief to his stinging, squinting eyes. He would raise his head to give thanks for that mark of favour, but the angel who imparted the gift would already be gone.
Monty sprinted on air. Tightrope walkers were also-rans with an entire cable to support them – Monty danced on the slightest threads, giving each sill and crack and gutter, each indentation between bricks, each toe-hold and nail-grip the barest brush, as insubstantial and fleeting as something borne by the wind.
It wasn't anything so facile as flight. Flight was an easy, lazy thing, languidly gliding on soothing thermals, but as Monty bounded and twisted between walls people flashed underneath her as a churning blur of colour which foamed and spumed like a torrent that would dash her to pieces should she fall into it. Every step had to be exactly placed, every muscle tensed to propel the correct force, but in order to maintain her momentum from bound to bound there was no opportunity to rest and consider each move; adrenalin burned in her limbs hotter than any oil. It was a hurtling, bombing course, a horizontal free-fall... and there was nothing more exhilarating.
Someone – even though this memory was clearly imprinted, she still could not for the life of her remember who – had laughed at her for this, calling it a conceit, a self-important inflation of what could charitably be called vandalism and trespass. Freerunning wasn't athletic skill, it wasn't gymnastic poise, it wasn't piercing observation and it certainly wasn't flight. It was falling, one drawn-out tripping stumble that might flap and flail some distance in a desperate, drunken attempt to regain balance, but would only end with a smack into the ground.
Again, Monty couldn't explain why – she was confident enough in herself to usually be able to laugh off such petty, small-minded griping – but those particular words at that particular time from that particular person had hurt her, with an ache reached into her soul. A pain that deep could only be soothed by a spiritual salve – Monty took consolation from the thought that falling on her feet so often was a miracle from God.
Always cresting an arc, the shining Bailey's Bead of a solar corona.
Always one step from Heaven.
Monty braked in a skipping, skidding streak along a ledge before finally coming to rest against a building's cornice. At her speed, anyone else would have snapped his wrists or dislocated his shoulder, but with her enhanced cyborg physiology it was of no more consequence to Monty than a bruise.
Thirty feet beneath her an old man snoozed his siesta in a porch. Thirty feet above her a hired gun's gaze swam through the sweat dripping into his eyes and the heat-haze fuming off of the buildings as he scanned the surrounding rooftops. Thirty feet across from her, hooking around the corner, was a row of Arab window-arches, with a line of closed French shutters.
Hakim and his cohorts were safe from above and below, perhaps – but not between.
Bassam heard a whiplash-crack of splintering wood. Instinctively his head turned to the sound, and he saw a neat, round hole punched through one of the shutters, and then the small, round grenade that the light from the hole framed like a halo, frozen in an instant of flight, and then his life ended in a flash.
Farag heard a whiplash-crack of splintering wood. His experience as a soldier immediately processed it as a gunshot and he flung himself forward onto the floor, going prone underneath the bullets that would be raking through the windows. It only presented an uninterrupted facing to the grenade, and shrapnel from the blast shredded every inch of his body.
Hakim heard a whiplash-crack of splintering wood. His bodyguard jumped into his view of the room, his form... streaking as it was buffeted by the blizzard of whirling metal, before the hammerblow of a concussive wave picked up the ragged doll and flung it against Hakim, slamming them both into the wall with a winding impact. As the remains of Hakim's bodyguard slithered down his front, a pistoning fist punched out of the smoke and through Hakim's chest, pinning him there for later collection.
Khalil heard a whiplash-crack of splintering wood. The world suddenly corkscrewed around him as Bilal flipped his commander over the back of the couch, and then a wave of hot gore and scathing gristle swept over him as Bilal followed, in a different way. The sting of the heat spurring him to action, Khalil immediately pounced back over the crumbling couch, his throat clenched shut in a tight scream of soundless rage and tugging his pistol from his accursed impractical jacket. He was confronted by a demon, a black shadow, a cinder burnt to the colour of death by the unbearable light flaring around it from the smashed shutters that the messenger had descended through.
A flashing roundhouse-kick swept the bones in Khalil's hand to powder and sent his pistol sliding into the slaughter – then it flicked upward, caught him under the chin and snapped his neck clean back. The last thing Khalil saw before he died was a ceiling stained with blood-spray, and he could not see Jannah through the gashes that the grenade had torn in it.
Monty had barely exhaled when the doors to the room fell open – damaged by the grenade, and finally done in by a heavy shove – and two guards wielding automatic rifles burst into the room. They didn't come in firing for fear of hitting their comrades, and what prevented them from letting rip once they saw the fatal carnage was Monty holding up Hakim before them. Drenched in gore from top to toe and with a gaping cavity gouged out of his chest, it was immediately obvious to the guards that their commander was dead – but that moment's hesitation whilst they assimilated the fact was all that Monty needed.
Two hard, sharp reports barked out from her pistol. The two guards slumped down, twisting weirdly gracefully as the bullets flashed through their necks and neatly severed their spinal cords. The room had been defaced by enough butchery – there was barely a spoonful of blood spilt between the two new corpses.
Throwing down the soft, glozing sack of Hakim's body, Monty looked through the open doorway. A long, finely-decorated corridor stretched beyond it – Monty could not espy any reinforcements arriving, but by flicking her head and manually fine-tuning her sensitive ears she could hear feet shuffling about – setting themselves in concealment around a landing, preparing to catch the assassin in crossfire when he sought escape, rather than blindly funnelling themselves into a shooting gallery. The late Hakim had ably trained a professional outfit... not that it would do them any good.
Monty unclipped her second grenade from her webbing-belt and pitched it down the entire length of the corridor almost at a rate of a bullet itself. A dull, muffled thud was followed by a shrill, distended scream – sufficient to keep their heads down long enough for Monty to rearrange the faces of her victims into adequate consistency for identifying photographs from her mini-camera. Peculiarly, though, even though pretty much the entire Janes' catalogue had been taught to her under hypnosis, the rifles that the guards had been carrying were a strange, novel configuration that she could not recognise.
That was an interesting titbit that she could chew on in the debriefing. Her main task completed, Monty holstered her pistol and slipped her camera back into its side-pouch, before splashing across the floor (she frowned at that – it would wreak havoc with her shoes' grip) back to the shutter that she had jumped through...
...and into a hailstorm of lead.
Chattering fire from two weapons on the rooftop of the building across the gap slashed the air around her, chipped away at the window-arch and cut into her body. Having already shifted into combat mode, though, pain-suppressing memes were already baffling Monty's brain and she did not even feel the impacts except as matter-of-fact registries of structural damage in her subconscious. She focused on the wall in front of her, her mind whirling with computer-speed to trace a route that would bear her weight from loose brick to roof-edge, and she cleared the gap with a hop before skittering up the wall like a scalded spider.
Ahmed leaned forward over the roof edge as he rammed a fresh magazine home. He had seen the assailant vanish from the window – had he fallen back inside or down into the street? The heady tang of cordite swept up into his brain and brought a smile across his face – barely a minute had passed since the first blast, and if the attacker was leaving so quickly he must have been driven out and thwarted. There'd be bonuses in this!
Ahmed only realised that he was no longer holding his assault rifle as someone tumbled him over the precipice and down to a flesh-pulping five-storey drop.
As Monty adjusted her grip on her new acquisition – a common FN FAL, this time – the other roof guard tried to swing his own weapon round to bear, his eyes goggling in frantic panic. There was no half-second breathing-space necessary for finesse this time, so Monty put the rifle against her shoulder and, her cybernetic body holding her rigid, gave her adversary the entire magazine.
Hakim had equipped both his men and his mercenaries well, and the roof guard was protected by stout body armour that fully resisted ten shots.
The other twenty ripped through it and puréed his torso.
Monty threw down her spent weapon, but no sooner had she done so than the zing and sting of further incoming fire buzzed around her from the target building that she had just departed. Her sensitive hearing could almost mentally trace the paths of the bullets creasing the air around her – too well, in fact, as their rapid passage whipping past Monty spun her whirling moment of dizzying vertigo, leaving her addled and allowing a bullet to solidly bury itself in the meat of her arm.
Jolted back to awareness by the impact, Monty bit back a curse – Merde! Careless! Damn careless! – and scooped up the rifle of the man she had just killed. Squirting off a moderate burst back at the other rooftop as she rose, she was surprised to see the roof guards clustering the building already in the process of diving for cover. She might be flattered, but she knew that she wasn't that imposing.
A bang of a slamming door behind her alerted her to the reason. "Police! Halt! On the ground! Now!"
There was a high-pitched edge to the voice which betrayed the speaker's terror, but pre-programmed rules of engagement rang stridently in Monty's head – except where specifically ordered by your handler, figures of official public authority are not to be harmed. Not even turning to inspect who had arrived, Monty snapped like elastic into a sprint towards the building edge. The next building along directly abutted the one on which she was standing and broken glass had been cemented to the edge in order to discourage trespassers – Monty ran through it with barely a grunt, while the policemen trying to mount chase backed off with curses of impotent frustration. More police were erupting onto every rooftop in sight, but Monty had already slid down a drainpipe to pad into the warren of the Casbah – safe from above and below.
Jethro, trundling along a road at the edge of the Casbah in a plain, unassuming grey Audi estate, driving a fair amount below the speed limit, quietly glanced at the dashboard clock. Nodding to himself, he pulled a switch which released the catch of the rear left door. It clicked shut again.
Jethro immediately whipped round to face the rear seats—
--and discovered that the pistol he would have been pointing there was no longer in his right hand, and instead was facing him.
"Take this plane straight to Luton!" Monty smiled.
Jethro flashed a toothy grin at his cyborg, before turning back to the road and smoothly accelerating to the speed limit. "There's a change at Stansted for Cuba, if you like."
With a yowl of straining, tortured revs, two police vans accelerated past the fratello's Audi and zoomed onwards, sirens blaring.
"I suppose it makes them feel important." Monty grunted.
"What are the scores for 'Day Five' anyway, Monty?" Jethro asked as he turned onto a motorway leading out of Algiers.
"After four overs, it's forty-one for six. I expended two grenades and two pistol rounds. Confirmed kills on four V.I.P.s and eight heavies - at least one more possible." Monty gasped.
"For six...?" Jethro furrowed his brow in consternation and glanced at Monty in the rear-view mirror. "God, Monty, you're hit!"
"Hoi! Eyes on the road, buddy, or have you up before a harassment tribunal when we're back in Italy!" Monty was stripping off her shirt, now stained with patches of rust-coloured dry blood. "Pity," she mused, "I liked this one.
"Three bullets to the chest, one to the abdomen and one to the arm," she changed tack to satisfy Jethro's worried expression reflected in the windscreen, "plus there's still some glass left in my foot. They're all only moderate flesh wounds, we can paint them shut with the spray and I don't feel as though it'll adversely affect my performance."
"If you want me up before a judge, Monty, two can play at that game, and I can follow correct procedure and give your performance review to the tender mercies of external examiners. I don't doubt that Leon and Adriano would have much to comment about." Jethro smiled at Monty's strangled cry. His genuine relief at her relatively light damage from a dangerous operation allowed him to relax into his usual banter - Monty's tart defiance would be completely alien to most other cyborgs, particularly the young ones, but from his years observing people Jethro understood that changing moods were an important barometer of someone's wellbeing.
Monty had lifted up the seat beside her and was rooting through the med-kit in the storage space beneath it for a synskin canister as she spoke. "Anyway, Giacomo Dante will find it difficult now to top his little exhibition in Venice – now that we've renegotiated more favourable contracts with several of his arms contacts, he'll be down to rocks and bad language by summer."
Touch plastic, Jethro thought to himself, tapping the steering wheel as a charm. His own father had lost his legs to an IRA mortar-bomb literally the day before the Ulster ceasefire – he admired Monty's simple innocence, but from his experience the world was anything but simple.
"Well, that calls for a celebration." Jethro brightened his expression. "Victory parade?"
"You might as well" Monty replied, affecting a dismissive manner. "It'll cover up the air conditioning; the drone's getting on my nerves."
Jethro tapped a button on the dashboard, and music sounded through the cabin.
"You're everywhere and nowhere, baby,
That's where you're at
Going down the bumpy hillside in your hippie hat
Flying across the country and getting fat
Saying everything is groovy
when your tires are flat"
As the voices swelled to the chorus, Jethro and Monty added their own backing, singing out,
"And it's hi-ho silver lining
Anywhere you go now, baby
I see your sun is shining but I will make a fuss"
Shirtless or not, Jethro turned back to Monty, and the fratello smiled at each other happily.
"Though it's obvious!"
THE END.