BACK    CONTENTS

Page 21.

Jack continued telling his complex topological tale, hoping for a relief force from the university gendarmes while he continued stalling for time. The audience responded with lukewarm clapping and some restive sniggering at his jokes. The low, grudging guffaws increasingly had question marks.

Jack winced as he heard a distant crash, and a tinkle of glass. That would be his car window, dammit.

He spoke faster, while backing to the curtain again. "…The Prata Flaminia also became known as Circus Flaminius—meaning not a chariot racing track, but a loosely defined district or area. It was useless land, not only as a Tiber flood plain, but outside the safety of the Servian Wall. Nobody would dare go out there and build anything useful, so why did Flaminius buy it all up? You were a dead duck out there during a siege, like Hannibal pulled off in 212 BCE."

Jack peered outside again, and saw the fake docent using a hard object to break a second window of Ferrari. What was the man looking for? Where was the SWAT team?

"Now the fact is that we have a convergence of history here. This was the area near the Forum Boarium, or cattle market, on the river's edge—the city's initial center of power to the outside world. It was on a crucial crossing of the Tiber, where two major regional trade routes intersected. It was a market center for the region as well. North of the vegetable and cattle markets was a significant Underworld cult in the form of the Dis Pater, or Underworld Father, along with the Neolithic cult of Persephone or Proserpina (the Underworld goddess connected with the miracle of the grain, with its death and rebirth every year, She Whose Name Must Never Be Spoken)."

Jack continued, while looking at his watch. Good thing he’d brought the gun.

Looks as if I am the agent of last resort, once again.

"What it amounts to, ladies and gentlemen, is a remarkable puzzle—why this feature was important enough to preempt all other names for that region, whose most famous features included the Pantheon and the Mausoleum of Augustus..."

"Flaminius would have saved us all this hoopla, including this evening's lecture, if he'd had a little more common sense and called it something like the Forum Flaminium…"

Where is Larry the real docent? Has he called 9-1-1 yet?

Unable to stand the tension any longer, and worried about the innocent people sitting before him, Jack signaled to the English professor-moderator. "Please forgive me, but it's an emergency. I'll be back in about ten minutes or so, with profuse apologies to all. Would you be so kind as to introduce the next guest, and I'll finish up later?"

"What about the Taurilian games in that area?" a woman asked.

"Precisely. I'll be back shortly to finish my talk," Jack promised.

As the English prof started speaking, a ripple of applause flowed over the audience, much like the wind-blown wheat of the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus—King Tarquin II the Arrogant—25 centuries ago. The other speaker, an aeronautics expert with a white beard and a sheaf of notes, stepped up to talk about hydrology in the modern eco-forest, and remarkable new aircraft to maintain green spaces. Whatever.

Jack regretted the mess his talk had become, but was more concerned about the innocent people sitting around than he was about himself or his history chat.

The real docent, Larry, had securely locked it as Jack had told him to do.

Jack whirled and stepped out through the rear side entrance. It was the path Larry had taken. Jack stepped from the lecture hall into a stuffy little back corridor jammed with cardboard boxes, kitchen supplies, and various odds and ends. He knelt down and took the Walther PPK/E from his ankle holster. He wished he had his full-powered howitzer in hand. The shadowy docent-who-wasn’t had no doubt come with an industrial strength cannon, probably with a silencer on its muzzle. Logically, he would shoot Jack at fairly close range, to ensure it would be a silent and sure kill, so he could get away.

Within a minute, Jack found Larry's crumpled body on the kitchen's red tile floor. The poor fellow had taken a round point-blank in the chest—with a silencer, for sure. Larry's blood drained from the heart, down his white shirt and through his rouge jacket, and into the brass grating where usually soapy mop water went.

Jack's nerves were keyed to high alert. He could have worn a high tension warning as he listened intently. Wing Sun. Meditative listening. He did not see with his eyes but with his ears. A ticking clock here; a drippy faucet there; and a draft sighing through a cracked window.

There—a man breathing not far away, waiting. The breaths were large, aroused, but contained. He was a professional assassin. He’d done this before.

Larry had not made it to the phone, which hung on the wall, looking untouched.

Jack was about to reach for it, when he spotted a faint shadow from the direction of the breathing. A long, hanging curtain blocked the narrow doorway to the pantry. There wasn't room here for a regular door to swing. A curtain was easier if you had to go in and out for cans and supplies. Someone was on the other side of that curtain, coming closer. The dirty white phone hung on the wall to the right of the door.

Pocketing his gun and ducking left of the door, Jack took a broom and knocked the receiver off the switchhook to the right.

Before the receiver could clatter to the tile floor on its long, spiraling cord, a silenced but powerful round blew through the doorway curtain. The bullet streaked through the air where Jack presumably (and stupidly) was about to call 911. Jack caught sight of a rouge-clothed arm in a docent's jacket.

Gripping the broomstick in both hands, he drove it against where he assumed the man's neck should be. The damn curtain was in both fighters' eyes for the moment, disadvantaging each man.

Jack's thrust connected, and he heard an angry groan. But the fake, the anti-Larry (or Antonio), was faster and stronger than Jack had estimated. Of course, Madame Zhang was not going to send an amateur. Jack saw stars as the man's free hand slammed against his cheek. As Jack fell back against a stainless steel sink in the kitchen, his assailant popped into view through the fluttering curtain. The man's soft shoe raked powerfully down Jack's left leg in an attempt to break the knee. Jack’s pant leg came apart at the seams.

Jack was off balance, and unable to reach in his pocket for the gun. He wrapped man and gun in the curtain's flapping folds. Regaining some of his poise, he used a little aikido to help the man accelerate on his trajectory. The assailant staggered across the kitchen, still pointing his silenced U.S. Army M9A1 Beretta. Gun and man hit the opposite wall, while Jack fumbled for his own Walther PPK/E.

Before Jack could focus, the man hit the wall, recoiled like lightning (many pushups, much sweat training for this). He landed on his back, aiming at Jack from the far kitchen wall.

Having no time to aim, Jack threw himself head-first through the door, and out of the other's line of fire. Two silenced shots splintered wood where his head had been a millisecond earlier.

Jack bumped against the wooden door frame. His gun dropped from his hand as he slipped and slithered and fell.

Another quiet bullet from the other's silencer whizzed over Jack's head, barely missing him. A ceiling light bulb in the long, narrow pantry exploded in a shower of fine glass.

Jack's gun clattered away, deep under a low shelf. He'd need that lost broom stick to fish it out. To make matters worse, Jack slipped on a wet spot next to a drain. To regain control of his vectoring, he did a head-over-heels roll, ending with a five-point landing by a shelf of canned goods—two hands, left hip, left knee, left foot. Well done, at least that, Jack thought—nothing broken or sprained, after landing on his hip, heels, and elbows.

"You speak English?" Jack asked, businesslike. He sprang to his feet.

Still wearing his curtain, the assassin came flailing through the doorway and waved his gun in search of Jack.

"Madame Zhang sends a message before I kill you. Pay-back for Yang Jun." The man pulled the cloth from his eyes.

Jack pitched an industrial-size can of tomato sauce. "Then stew on this a bit."

The man fired, hitting the can. Red sauce splattered all over the long, narrow space. The man said in a vaguely European accent, while wiping sauce from his eyes: "Enjoy yourself while you still can."

"Can it, pal." Jack scrambled to his feet, grabbing the next best thing—a 32 ounce jar of black olives. Shame to waste such fine food, his dearly departed mother's voice whispered in the back of his mind. Jack carefully spun the jar between both hands, like a basketball player aiming for a lay-up shot. He tossed the jar so that it hit the wall, a bank shot in pool, and splattered all over the man's gun, which his assailant dropped even as he rushed toward Jack.

TOP

Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.