Turn of the Cards

Chapter Eight

So much for jokers not ratting to the pigs. He’d gotten so bad on Takis that he wasn’t even much disappointed in human nature.

He looked back the way he’d been going. His two old friends from Amsterdam were just strolling into view in their pastel Mid-Eighties Casual Guy suits. “Hey, dude,” the dark one said, “what’s happening?”

And then he yelled, “Hey!” for real. It was too late.

Making the transition to one of Mark’s alter egos was like coming: the more recently it had happened in the past, the less violently it happened in the present. Back on the Rox when he had taken one of his powders for the first time in many months, he actually burst into flames, destroying the clothes he’d been wearing. This time, though, there were just a few mostly cinematic jets of fire as his molecules rearranged themselves.

“Holy shit,” said the beefier narc, suitably impressed, “it’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash!”

“It’s a gas-gas-gas,” J. J. Flash said with his patented devil’s grin. And a big blast of wind knocked him ass-over-ears into the front of a building.

“Well, shit,” he said, trying to stand. “This is getting to be a regular drag.”

The last word was sucked away by a miniature tornado, a howling vortex that buffeted him like the wings of angry eagles. J. J. sat down hard. He’d spotted her now, standing across the street in her blue-and-silver uniform with the silly-ass cape, hands on her hips, a smug smile on her ice-princess face.

He could take care of that in a hurry. He rolled a hand open and sent a nice hot spike of plasma her way. She dodged, and the striped awning of a tobacco shop that had somehow survived the current depression puffed into flame.

The wind went away. Without standing up he shot a blast between the two Greek narcs who were standing with their guns and jaws hanging slack, right at where he figured the subcompact’s gas tank to be. It blew up and sent the Greeks running.

A sound like firecrackers right over his head. Dust stung his scalp as a burst of 7.65mm gouged the front of the building. There was Agent Saxon, soloing on Scorpion again. He really seemed to love that thing.

J. J. pointed a finger at him. “You,” he said, “go away.” A line of fire leaped out. Saxon pirouetted like a bullfighter. He’s been putting in his time in the gym, anyway. J. J. thought, gotta give him that.

Saxon had not pissed J. J. Flash off enough to burn a hole right through him. Yet. The relatively cool jet caught a corner of the dodging agent’s off-white sport jacket. The polyester blazed up nicely. That gave Saxon something to think about other than endangering the public, which was all J. J. had in mind.

Wind hit J. J. like a fist, cracking his head back against the storefront. It struck again and again with a sound like a snapping spinnaker, jackhammering his ribs and face.

“I handled Fireball, J. J.,” Mistral called to him. “I can handle you.”

Rage blazed white inside him. Fireball was a serial killer Mistral had apprehended in Cincinnati, live on global TV thanks to Daddy’s infallible headline-hunting instincts. He had been thrown in J. J. Flash’s face once already this incarnation: in court in New York, when Kimberly Anne’s attorney St. John Latham had flashed pictures of one of the psychopath’s victims, an adolescent girl, horribly charred. The implication was that J. J. Flash, as one of Mark’s friends — no one but Dr. Tachyon knew, then, that the relationship was rather more intimate — might inflict such a fate on Mark’s daughter, accidentally or otherwise. The suggestion that he might harm Sprout in any way had burned like a cancer for all the months of J. J.’s captivity in the back of Mark’s mind.

Inadvertently Mistral had punched a very bad button. “Where are you, bitch?” J. J. gasped. He battled upright. The wind came back at him, pummeled him against the wall. He looked around desperately. She had to be somewhere she could see him; like most ace powers, hers were strictly line-of-sight. That meant he could see her…

There. Up the block, crouched behind a low stone wall. He gathered up the rage into a big ball of fire and just bowled it at her.

Mistral ducked. The wind stopped. The fireball hit the wall, flash-heating stones, shattering them. The wall blew up, knocking Mistral backward, stunned and bruised.

More gunfire, again badly aimed. J. J. jumped into the air. Agent Hamilton had his partner on the cobblestones rolled up in his coat; Saxon was only smoldering a little, though he was bitching loud enough that you’d think he had third-degree burns over half his body. More Greeks with guns had appeared on the scene, or at least revealed themselves. One of them was just nerving himself enough to spray the sky with bullets.

“Everywhere I go, people shoot at me,” J. J. complained to the air. “I could get a complex.”

Instead he split, streaking off up the flank of the big hill. At the top he swung low, scattering Nips with Nikons, and then fancied he could hear the shutters clicking like a cicada chorus behind him. He gave a rebel yell for the benefit of those with camcorders.

He’d always wanted to fly slalom through the pillars of the Parthenon. At least it felt as if he’d always wanted to, like a lot of his whims. Instead a big wind hit him from behind and somersaulted him into the frieze, second centaur to the left.

“Ow! Fuck.” He plummeted toward the cracked marble steps, recovered just in time, darted into the ruined temple, cracking his hip on some scaffolding and toppling a hapless laborer off his platform.

“Be sure and sue the United States government,” he called back over his shoulder as he flew between colonnade and interior wall. Talking felt like driving nails through the right side of his ribs. He wondered if he’d cracked some.

Mistral appeared, flying parallel to Flash outside the Parthenon with her arms outstretched like some goddam little girl playing airplane. Her cape billowed like a parachute. A side-blast of wind slammed him up against the wall. He fell to the floor, rolled. He was a small and acrobatic man, but he made a poor landing.

He did manage to get to his feet rapidly and fire a jet of flame at his tormentor. She dodged, laughing, dropped to the block-littered ground.

Mistral gestured. J. J. Flash ducked behind a pillar. She laughed again, high and clear and malicious as a glass razor.

A wind began to blow through the Parthenon. Yellow film wrappers skittered over the blocks. J. J. leaned out and shot a blast down at her from his palm.

It veered away from Mistral, dissipated in the air. J. J. blinked. He’d been known to miss, but he’d never had his fire-blasts wander off course on their own.

He fired again. The same thing happened. Mistral showed her teeth in a grin. The bitch was deflecting his fire-blasts with her damned winds.

The wind began to blow again along the colonnade, rising abruptly to a howling gale. J. J. dug his fingers into the pillar’s fluting. He shot fire, hoping Mistral couldn’t parry and keep up the hurricane at the same time.

She ducked. Flame splashed a toppled segment of column. The ancient stone discolored, took on a different texture. He recalled that heat damaged marble, degraded it into plain old limestone or something — Mark would know. Great. All I need. I’m going to get “defacing ancient monuments” added to my rap sheet.

A solid-seeming blast hit him in the face, threw him back into the inner wall. The transverse wind started again, and this time it picked him up and rolled him along like a tumbleweed.

As he bounced between pillars and wall, it occurred to him he wasn’t making a very good showing. J. J. Flash was not a male chauvinist, but the thought of this spoiled super-WASP ace-baby ingénue kicking his butt was way too much to take.

Mistral’s wind blew him right out the end of the colonnade and into space. Still ballistic in his fetal curl, he jetted flame at her. Mistral yelped, a musical sound. The wind stopped. J. J. extended and took off, banking to put the mass of the ancient pile between him and her. He flew low, dabbing with the back of a finger at the blood-trail streaming from his nose, ignoring shouts and pointing from the ground. Under most circumstances he’d showboat a little for onlookers this appreciative, maybe summon up a flame guitar, a Fender o’ Fire, and pretend to play it, always a crowd-pleaser.

Right now he had other things to worry about, more pressing even than image … a downdraft forced him low, and he had to concentrate all his energy on quick, evasive flight to keep from going into the dome of an old Orthodox church. A quick glance back: Mistral, flying after him, overtaking him gradually. With her gaudy getup, he realized, he was in danger of being totally upstaged.

“Jesus. This bimbo doesn’t give up.” He swiveled his head rapidly. He needed to scrape the wind-powered ace off his tail, and he wanted to do as little damage to the locals as possible in the process. That meant looking for a building higher than its surroundings, because flames propagate up.

There. Two-story, up on a rocky hill with not much nearby: something that looked like a graveyard out back, a road winding up to the front. The structure looked to be your basic frame and flaking white stucco, with a balcony in front and bars on the windows. There was a loading bay in back, and men were hauling something long and rolled into the back of a panel truck. Looked like a carpet.

Indeed. He streaked past the men, landed on the concrete dock. “Clear out, boys,” he commanded. “Your employer’s about to collect on his fire insurance.”

The two workmen gaped at him with total lack of comprehension. J. J. smiled, and with a quick and deliberately noisy jet of flame fused the black pebbly soil at their feet into glass. That bridged the communications gap nicely. They lit off down the hill at a dead run, knocking over little fence-picket grave markers with plywood Greek crosses and plastic flowers on them as they ran.

The second story seemed to run only along the front of the building; the back was two stories high, piled with rolled carpets. He flew up under the rafters, pulled a couple of carpets down, dropped them in front of the open bay. A palpable cloud of dust and mold blew up into his face, deceptively rich and golden in the backscatter afternoon light. J. J. felt his nose twitch. I stay here long, it’s gonna mean one major asthma attack.

He went storming into the front, screaming like a madman. Clerks in fezzes and a couple of customers browsing at carpets stacked on big tables looked up in alarm.

“Out! Out!” he screamed. “Crazy Jewboy alert! Out!

Aaauuuughhh!”

With a quick puff of flame he melted the iron bars out of the upper half of the door that separated the area behind the counter from the display floor. A second blast burned through the waist-high wooden lower half. J. J. stepped through.

Once again the language barrier had been surmounted. Customers and clerks went flying out of the building like frightened pigeons from a church, one bold soul pausing long enough to make a sign to ward the evil eye before he fled.

Working with wild energy — he had a higher metabolism than a nat, to go with his hyper disposition — J. J. began pulling carpets off the tables and dumping them on the scuffed wood floor.

After a moment he heard the expected challenge from outside: “I know you’re in there, J. J. Come out with your hands on your head.”

“With my hands on my head?” he shouted back. “What, you think I’m in here with a Saturday Night Special in an ankle holster?”

“You know what I mean, J. J. This can go easy, or it can go hard.”

He mouthed the words along with her: This can go easy, or it can go hard, “You’ve been watching too many movies, babe.” He began to strew the office area with ledger books. “This isn’t Lethal Weapon III.”

“Hear the sirens? The Greek police will be here in a few minutes. I promise you, J. J., it’ll be a lot easier on you if you come with me instead of waiting for them to take you.”

He didn’t doubt that for a minute; he bet these Athenian cops didn’t catch little red-haired Jewish boys with tight dancer’s butts any too often. He could not in any event afford to play a waiting game with her — when you only exist for an hour at a time, time is never on your side.

But he figured that the daughter of the late Vernon Carlysle, literally groomed to acehood from the cradle and at the moment trying to hold her own with a couple of jocks from DEA, would have her own brand of machismo.

“What, you need the natives to make the collar for you? Is big bad J. J. Flash, Esquire too much for the spoiled little rich girl to handle on her own? Your daddy would be so disappointed.”

The flyspecked glass and wrought-iron bars of a front window sublimated away before a roaring gout of flame. If you can’t stand the heat, babe, stay out of the kitchen!”

Silence. He stood behind the counter, drumming his fingers nervously on the top, scored in unreadable doodles by the penknives of bored clerks. That damned wind power of hers was too much for him; if she didn’t rise to his taunts, he was going to be in a cold, wet place in one hell of a hurry.

“All right, J. J.” From the back of the building. “Just you and me. I’ll show you what this spoiled little rich girl does to male-chauvinist assholes like you.”

He turned with what he hoped was a sufficiently psycho snarl and blasted a fire-jet at her through the door. She dodged, laughing that snotty little-girl laugh.

The carpets he’d sprawled in front of the loading door caught fire. The dry wool blazed up nicely.

“You’ll have to do better than that, J. J.,” she called, tauntingly. “What was that about heat?”

“Here.” He popped around the door, blasted for the voice. She stood there in the open and didn’t even bother to move as her windblast knocked the fire-pulse aside.

“Come on, J. J.,” she urged. There were spots of color high on her cheeks, he could see even in the dust) smoky gloom. “Hit me with your best shot.”

He did, giving her two quick blasts, almost white-hot. She deflected them without effort. A buffet of wind sent him sprawling back through the narrow office into the front room.

She stalked through the door with the feral grace of a leopard. The flames behind her made the tips of her light brown hair a fiery corona like the sun at eclipse.

He felt a whirlwind surrounding him, gathering velocity. “Had enough, J. J.?” Mistral purred. “Or do I have to hurt you?”

He blasted fire at her, two-handed. She ducked behind the counter. The whirlwind continued to pick up strength; she didn’t need to see him, just the air above his head.

“Honey,” he said in a quiet voice that barely carried through the roar of flames from the warehouse area, “that partition is wood.”

Without giving her time to digest that, he stood and spread his arms. Flame sprayed from both hands. The scattered carpets exploded in fire.

The whirlwind plucked at him with afrit arms. He wrenched himself away, stumbled through the front door, turned to torch the wooden posts holding up the porch.

Yellow flames were vomiting out the front windows now. The carpet store was going up nicely.

“I’m trapped!” Mistral cried. He heard a panic crescendo in the voice. It wasn’t so superior and self-assured now.

“That’s what I meant about heat, babe,” J. J. called.

“You’re just going to leave me to burn?”

He had to hand it to her — her voice strained, but didn’t quite crack. “No. You should be able to blow out the flames, if you work hard enough.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. A white Toyota Land Cruiser with a flashing blue light on top was bouncing up the road. More police vehicles wailed behind.

“If not, help is on the way. Ciao, babe.”

Mark’s Roach Motel pen~ was near the top of a hill in a part of town he couldn’t pronounce. J. J. Flash couldn’t either. He trudged up the hill with his head down, feeling wrung out. Flying and fire-shooting really took it out of you. Also he was beat to shit. Going ’round and ’round with Mistral’s ace power made him feel as if he’d been for a blender ride.

His hour was almost up. He was starving, and when he made the transition he didn’t come with money in his pockets, otherwise it would have been souvlaki time once he ditched Mistral. Mark was going to have a king-hell case of the munchies when he got back.

The locals gave him odd looks and plenty of sea room as he passed. Everybody knew foreigners were crazy, especially Americans, but the red-and-orange jogging outfit did tend to set him even further apart. But he was a lot less conspicuous arriving on his red Adidas than he would have been if he’d flown in.

Not that it mattered. The bad guys knew Mark and his friends were in Athens now. That meant the time had come not to be in Athens anymore.

As if cued by the thought, a voice called out behind him: “Flash! J. J. Flash!”

He turned. The man who called himself Randall Bullock was walking up the street toward Mark’s pension, wearing khaki pants and an Indiana Jones leather jacket.

“Jesus Christ! Can’t you assholes give me any peace?” He chased Bullock into an ouzo stand with a roaring jet of flame from his hand and took to the air.

He had to recover the extra powders. Mark had blown almost his entire roll to stockpile them, and J. J. was not about to leave them behind.

He streaked up toward the window of his flat. The key was in the pants of his Mark-form. Somehow he wasn’t worried about getting in.

And if the local heat had the flat staked out inside … he’d just show them what heat was all about.