John Hawks: The Golden City

“You do what you want, Linden. I’ve got my own objectives.”

Linden waited a few seconds, as if he wanted to confirm what he had just heard, and then seemed to shut down one of the compartments in his mind. He flicked his fingers and that was it. Hollis left the room.

Feeling conscious of the hidden rifle, he turned right onto Ludgate Hill and took the first left onto Limeburner Lane. The Evergreen Foundation occupied a large glass-and-steel building about a hundred yards down the street. Black support beams and black granite panels framed the building’s tinted windows. From a distance, it looked as if a massive vertical grid had been dropped into the middle of London.

The building was guarded by an armed security staff. Pretending to be a bicycle messenger, Hollis had entered the building a few days ago and asked for directions. Anyone visiting the Foundation had to pass through a short “L” shaped corridor made of green glass which allowed a backscatter x-ray machine to look beneath their clothes.

A Victorian-era office building was on the other side of street. An international architectural firm was the sole tenant and photographs of buildings in Dubai and Saudi Arabia had been placed in the ground floor window. Hollis had studied the photographs and decided that the architects had simply taken the designs for a prison and had added palm trees, fountains and a pool.

He rang the doorbell at the architectural firm and waited to see if anybody would come to the door. When no one responded, he stood directly in front of the entrance door and unbuttoned his overcoat. A crowbar hung from a cord around his neck. He forced the edge of the bar between the door and the lock and then pushed sideways with all his strength. The screws holding the drop-bolt lock were ripped away and the door popped open.

When Hollis got inside the building, he took a steel wedge out of his pocket and kicked it into the crack beneath the door, jamming it shut. He decided to avoid the elevator and climbed the emergency stairs to the top floor. Inside the men’s room, a short wall ladder led to a Plexiglas skylight in the ceiling. Hollis pushed back the latch with one hand and was on the roof seconds later.

The cold night air touched his skin and he could hear the distant sound of a bus moving up the street. Slipping a little on the wet roof slates, Hollis reached the iron railing at the edge of the roof. He sat down and opened the case.

The Lee-Enfield was a long, heavy rifle that had been modified to shoot 7.62 mm cartridges. Hollis pulled the bolt handle straight back and then shoved an ammunition clip into the receiver in front of the trigger guard. When he pushed the bolt forward and down, a cartridge was forced into the firing chamber. Hollis felt like he had become part of the weapon: locked, loaded and ready to fire. Peering through the scope, he saw two bisecting lines that met in the center of the door across the street.

His hatred of the Tabula was powerful, sustained emotion-unlike anything he had ever experienced in the past. After he buried Vicki on the island, he had covered her grave with a pile of large gray stones. Sometimes it felt as if one of those stones had been absorbed by his body.

He waited for a target, not knowing what to expect. A few minutes later, a Land Rover pulled up in front of the Foundation building and two people got out. Hollis raised the rifle and peered through the sight at a bald man in his sixties and a young woman wearing a fawn-colored overcoat. As they stood on the sidewalk and gave instructions to the driver, a blond man carrying a briefcase strolled down the street and joined them. The blond man said something and the young woman laughed as the Land Rover left the curb.

Hollis aimed his rifle at the blond man’s head. A gust of wind made Hollis shiver and he realized that his face was covered with sweat. Calm down , he told himself. Breathe slowly . Then he pulled the trigger.

He expected a loud noise and recoil, but nothing happened. Without taking his eye from the scope, Hollis moved the rifle bolt. The unfired cartridge was forced out, and a new round entered the firing chamber. Once again, he pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. Time itself had vanished, and the only reality was the present moment: the rifle and the blond man’s head held within the circle of the scope. Move the bolt again. Snap. Click. Nothing.

The third cartridge fell beside his right foot. It bounced off the roof and hit the sidewalk below. No one heard the sound. The three targets had already climbed up the stairs and were entering the building.

Hollis heard footsteps on the roof and twisted around. Linden was ten feet behind him, looking down at the street. The French Harlequin was wearing a black wool overcoat. With his broad shoulders, shaved head and blunt nose, he looked like a mechanical creation built to resemble a human being.

“There’s nothing wrong with the rifle,” Linden said. “I told Winston to give you dead bullets.”

“If you didn’t want me to use this weapon, then why did you let me come here?”

“You had some sort of plan. I wanted to see what would happen.” Linden nodded in the general direction of the Foundation building. “Now I know.”

“You’ve killed a lot of people, Linden. So don’t tell me this is wrong.”

Linden shoved his hands into the outer pockets of the overcoat and his right foot slid a few inches forward. Hollis knew if was impossible to stop the Frenchman from drawing and firing a handgun. A minute ago, Hollis had been a human being with a name and a past. Now he was simply a target.

“Harlequins are not terrorists or assassins, Mr. Wilson. Our only obligation is to defend the Travelers.”

“Why should you care what I do with my life?”

“Your actions will only bring unwanted attention to the Traveler and I cannot allow that. This means you have two options. You can leave Great Britain or…”

The threat was unspoken, but the message was clear. A bullet from Linden’s gun would push Hollis over the railing. Within his mind, Hollis saw his body falling, a flurry of arms and legs and then stillness. After the police photographed his body, he would be scooped off the pavement, tagged and discarded like a piece of trash. The vision didn’t frighten him, but it didn’t soothe his anger. If he died, then his memory of Vicki would die with him. She would perish a second time.

“And what is your response?” Linden asked.

“I’ll-I’ll go away.”

Linden turned his back and disappeared through the open skylight. And Hollis was alone again, still clutching the useless weapon.

The next morning, Hollis woke up in his rented room on Camden High Street. He felt like the last man alive as he started his daily routine: two hundred push-ups and an equal number of sit-ups on the stained rug, followed by a series of martial arts exercises. When his T-shirt was soaked with sweat, he took a shower and cooked a pot of oatmeal on the hot plate near the bathroom sink. After cleaning up and leaving no visible sign of his presence, he went downstairs.

Only a few people were out, mostly shopkeepers receiving morning deliveries and sweeping their little patches of sidewalk. Hollis strolled up the High Street, crossed Regent’s Canal and entered the maze of shops and food stands that occupied the area around Camden Lock. It was Saturday-which meant the market would start to get crowded around ten or eleven o’clock. People would come to the market to get tribal tattoos while their friends bought black leather pants and Tibetan prayer bowls.

The “catacombs” were a system of tunnels built beneath the elevated railway tracks that ran through the market. In the nineteenth century, the tunnels had been used as stables for canal horses, but now this underground area was occupied by stores and artists’ studios. Halfway down one of the tunnels, Hollis found Winston Abosa’s drum shop. The West African was standing at a back table in the main room, pouring some evaporated milk into a large cup of coffee.