Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle Read Online Free PDF Page A

the lowest bidder,” he muttered.
    Above, the clouds were suddenly backlit by a series of staccato flashes. Misshapen shadows played weirdly along the watcher’s peripheral vision. The forest was silent, almost holding its breath.
    The radio clicked a few moments later, the transmission relayed automatically to the earpiece of the watcher on the rock. “Balmoral security detail 1, all clear. Logged at four o’clock.”
    The crackling reply came from the duty officer at the nearby Royal Navy base. “You blokes better get out your slickers, looks to be a real howler tonight. Weatherscouts missed this one, eh?”
    “Thanks for the heads-up, chief. So much for a quiet night in bonny Scotland, lads.”
    The radio went silent.
    Wind rushed suddenly through the upswept branches of the conifers behind and to the sides of him, a many-surfaced ripple. Storms often came pushing down the slopes of the Lochnagar mountains, casting up huge waves and angry surf against the shores of Loch Muich. Not a fit night to be about.
    Reaching back underneath the tarpaulin, the watcher extracted a neatly folded rain cloth, allowing it to unravel down the cliff face before pulling it on, then paused. Idiot. Rebuckle your weapons over the rain gear, couldn’t you remember the first lesson of all-weather training?
    He released the catches on his vest, then quickly slid out of it. The first few troublesome winds racing before the approaching squall caught the rain slicker as he bent for it, catching its hood and billowing the entire affair out above his head. This is not exactly what I needed tonight. He set his rifle down and forced both arms up through the slicker. Finally.
    Without warning, the slicker was jerked halfway from his arms as a jagged triangle of holes suddenly punched themselves through the back of the hood. The guard sensed more than heard the furtive movement from the treeline at his back as he clumsily scrabbled for his weapon. He felt himself struck as if by blows from a savage, invisible opponent.
    Then the nerves all along his left side lit up with searing pain, and before he could scream he felt himself dashed from his perch on the rock. Down he went, tumbling headfirst in a miniature avalanche toward the talus below. He knew, even as he fell toward death, that at least one bullet had entered his body through the chinks created in his body armor when he had raised his arms up through the rain slicker. His free arm gyrated wildly, hampered on the nearly sheer slope by the unbuckled vest.
    Just as his body cleared an overhang his groping hand managed to find a space–some sort of uneven crevice in the rock. Without thinking he wedged as much of his arm as he could into the crack as he slid over it, then choked in white agony as the tendons and bones in his elbow wrenched and separated. He writhed against the pain, twisting completely out of the heavy vest and rain gear. Before he could scream he slammed into the mossy wall, the impact flush on his shoulder blades, driving the breath from his lungs.
    He dangled there for a long moment, gagging silently through the crashing waves of pain, wondering what kept him from completely passing out. His right heel somehow found support against a knob of rock.
    The guard allowed his head to sag forward an inch, until he could see his gear at the bottom of the ridge. The vest and jacket were almost invisible where they had landed, splayed against a clump of the long grass, blood-red in the feeble light. He strained against the night and against the numbing agony, but heard nothing. Only the low, wordless whisper of the chill breeze off the North Sea fifty kilometers away.
    The sky above the stepped gables and turrets of the white granite castle suddenly flared a harsh greenish-blue, backlighting the cloudbank strangely. From the promontory above the guard came a quick half-dozen chuffs like the sound made by a metal brush against a piece of finished lumber, and the pile of gear below jumped