The 13 th tribe

[37]

Jagger stood, sweeping Tyler up with him. He carried his son to the bush and held him up so he could brush his fingers along the tips of the dangling stems. Then he set the boy down and playfully stepped on one of his bare feet with one of his own.

Tyler pulled his foot out and laid it on Jagger’s. “Do you ever wish you’d lost a leg instead of an arm?”

“You know,” Jagger said, “I do. I think it would be easier to adjust to.”

“But then you couldn’t run so good, and wouldn’t it be hard walking around the dig and chasing bad guys?”

Jagger nodded. “I guess-”

An explosion boomed through the compound-a loud concussion, repeated in diminishing echoes as it bounced off the stone walls, followed by the sharp clatter of debris striking hard surfaces, raining down on roofs and walkways.

Tyler jumped, and Jagger instinctively wrapped himself over his son. Gripping Tyler’s head with his arm, he looked around. The explosion had come from the other side of the monastery, near the front gate. The basilica blocked his view of the sky in that direction, but he imagined a cloud worthy of the sound: smoke and dust billowing up, drifting away. And then a light fog did reach him, coming from the alley between the basilica and the north wall. Smoky, with the bitter odor of burning plastic.

“Dad?”

“It’s okay, Ty. Shhh.”

Someone was coming for the stranger. He could be wrong, but he doubted it, and he didn’t have time to consider any other possibilities. He had assumed the man was holed up in the monks’ quarters in the Southwest Range Building. If so, the attackers would cross through the entire complex, passing between Jagger and Tyler’s position and their apartment; he couldn’t send Tyler there. He glanced up at the top of the wall holding the burning bush. It was too high to push the boy up there.

“Come here,” he said and led Tyler to the corner formed by the rounded wall and the chapel. “Sit.” He eased him down, then went back to the overhanging bush. He pulled a folding knife from his pocket, opened it, and clapped RoboHand’s hooks onto the handle.

The sound of running footsteps bounced off the walls. Lights came on in windows overhead. Deep in the compound, someone yelled in a foreign language.

Jagger jumped up, grabbed a handful of stems, and pulled them down. He reached high to get into the leafy branches and hacked them off the bush. He did it a second time and brought the cluster of foliage to Tyler. “Hold these in front of you,” he whispered. “Don’t let them shake. Stay here till I get back, you hear? Don’t move.”

“Dad, what’s happening?” Tyler said in a small voice. “I’m scared.”

“Everything’s going to be fine. Just stay here and don’t move.”

Someone screamed, and Tyler gasped.

Jagger reached around and squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Shhh. Be brave, son.” He moved to the stairs where they’d left their shoes and looked back. Tyler was in shadow, but the reflected glow of the bulb that illuminated the bush caught his trembling hands and the vibrating tips of the branches. Jagger would have broken the bulb, but it was twenty feet overhead. The best camouflage was anything that broke up the shape of a human body, and the branches at least did that.

He rushed up the stairs.