Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

Swing Shift

Max buckled the bungee cord to his leather cummerbund and checked it twice.

Up here at the pyramidal peak of the club called Neon Nightmare the only music from below that drifted up was the thrumming beat of the earthshaking bass.

Earplugs.

That was the next piece of equipment he needed to add to his arsenal. Tonight he’d have to work in the matrix, though.

That was the heart of his new act: movie Matrix-style leaps and capers, not to mention vertical wall walking.

The black stretch velvet cape swirled around him, obscuring the hooks and wires that made his current magic act fly.

He was like a puppet on a hundred-foot-high stage, clinging at the top of the flies to a tiny parapet at the pyramid’s peak,

waiting to take the plunge into the limelight.

At thirty-four, this was a hell of a way to go without a stunt double, but he’d been training hard to press his advantage in having breeched the Synth’s secretive walls as a whole new performing personality.

The Phantom Mage. Part Batman, part Spider-Man, part Matrix-man. What a way to reinvent his performing career, and all for the sake of espionage, not fame and fortune.

When he’d been a full-time magician, the Mystifying Max had been renowned for defying gravity.

Now, in this new act, he’d be defying both gravity and death. The gravity of death.

If it worked and his act pulled the attention of the self-absorbed party people below, he would prolong his chance of learning something solid about the sinister Synth, which might be the magicians’ version of Murder Inc.

If it didn’t work, he’d be another magician/acrobat that couldn’t, and would have to start all over again from square one to position himself inside the heart of darkness known as the Synth.

Death-defying leaps into free fall seemed the better course.

Max pulled once more on the steel hook, waiting for the pulsing drumbeats that were his curtain-raiser, and leaped into the dark noise below.

The rush of wind, his cloak billowing like wings, the stomach-churning swoop caused an adrenalin rush.

He was upside down like a bat (Count Dracula was another compelling media role model), but he forced his body to stay

loose, so he wouldn’t fight the sudden jerk at the end of his elastic tether.

He rebounded in the spotlight, the drums echoing his accelerated heartbeat. His booted feet touched one side of the pyramid, then bounced off the other, the rhythm quickening to the drumbeat until he was banging back and forth at the pyramid’s narrow apex like a human Ping-Pong ball.

The applause was deafening, even up here.

All eyes focused on him as he dropped thirty feet and began walking on air in the blinking images of strobe lights.

His hands rained glittering tubes of light on the revelers below, who donned them like Mardi Gras necklaces.

This hokey idea was a hit!

Now the audience was an eerily lit part of the show.

Max glanced to the dark tinted glass that hid the high, overlooking balconies from the dancers below.

Were the people inside impressed? Did they accept him as what he claimed to be? A performer irritated at the trend of outing time-honored magic-act trickery. An old-style magician with a bone to pick.

And a compelling illusionist in his own right.

Right.

He couldn’t help thinking how Temple would cheer him on, if she only knew. How much she hated that he’d been forced to abandon his livelihood, his art, for the shadowy world of the undercover operative.

She’d fought Molina like a tiger to defend him while he was gone, knowing nothing of the facts involved in his disappearance.

Loyalty like that was unheard of in the double-agent world of espionage. You couldn’t buy it, you couldn’t bully it. You

couldn’t live without it once you’d had it.

The hoots and whistles and the applause rang hollow, after all.

There was only one person he wanted to see him do this, now, who would bring the joy of his achievement home to him.

He could climb the interior of a modern pyramid like a human fly, but he couldn’t manage to spend the time he needed with the woman he loved.

And who still loved him. He hoped.

Chapter 31

Cheesy Decor

Temple’s spur-of-the-moment choice of an assignation site came from her utter ignorance of the inside of a Chunk-aCheez Pizza restaurant just past high noon on a Monday.

She figured it would be loud in both design elements and clientele.

She hadn’t figured on outright pandemonium. That is what one got for having a cat instead of a child. Cats liked to play couch potato. Kids liked couch destruction as play, with the sound track on movie-theater maximum high.

She wondered how she would interview Jerome in here without shouting secrets to the whole wide world of junior Spy Kids.

Through the pandemonium she at last saw Jerome scanning the continuous action reminiscent of a Jackie Chan fight scene.

He finally spotted her sitting alone at the table for four crammed against the back wall, as far from the speaker system as possible, and headed her way. That meant sidling crablike to avoid bumping into any bumptious kids, frazzled parents, crammed tables, or servers swooping huge trays of pizzas and tall plastic soft drinks over everybody’s heads.

“G-good choice.” He sat and gulped from the unclaimed water glass opposite her. “Nobody from Maylords would be caught dead here.”

He flinched when he realized how that sounded, under the circumstances. “Should we eat something so we don’t arouse suspicion?”

Temple suffocated her smile. Arousing suspicion did not seem something that came naturally to Jerome Johnson. He suffered from such a terminal case of “nice” that he was likely to vanish altogether. “I think we better order. What we do with it afterward is up to our consciences.”

“What about my conscience?” he asked, stricken.

Jeez. “I’m sure you have a very nice one, but right now I’m interested in what you have to say about Maylords. If you have reservations-”

He gazed up at the lip-pierced teen waitress who had paused by their table with pencil poised, her baby face looking both bored and impatient.

Temple decided leadership was called for here. “A cheese and tomato pizza.”

“Super, Gigantic, or the Incredible Hulk?” “Uh, what size is the ‘Incredible Hulk’?”

“Same as the Gigantic, except it has green peppers all over it.” Temple interrogated Jerome with her eyebrows.

“The last thing,” he said. Nervously.

“Drinks?” the waitress demanded.

“Water will be fine,” Temple said.

It was not fine with the waitress. She bit her collagen-plump lip, then released it so the steel ring flipped them an unfond farewell, and slouched away.

“Cheez,” Temple said, “you’d think we’d spurned their liquor license, and they don’t even sell the stuff.”

“This is perfect for security,” Jerome mouthed, leaning over the table so she could hear him.

“Glad you approve. I ordered plain so we didn’t get anything you hated.”

“I don’t hate much,” he said with a shrug.“How about Beth Blanchard?”

“She isn’t worth hating. A deeply insecure woman.”

“Nice of you to be so generous. I wouldn’t.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“Where?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he surgically removed the paper wrapper from his straw. Then rolled the thin paper into a mote the size of a spitball for Mickey Mouse. Then dropped it in the obligatory glass ashtray on the table.

“You’re a friend of Matt’s,” Temple said, remembering that much from the Maylords opening night.

Jerome shrugged. “A schoolmate, more like it.”