Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle Read Online Free PDF

as the suppressed rounds swatted into it. Then a brief scrape on the rock above and afterward, silence.
    With difficulty the wounded man reattached his radio’s earpiece, then felt for the control switch. A dull hiss issued from the earpiece. Whoever it was at the top hadn’t even touched his radio, that was strange. The first law of armed assault was to take out your enemy’s communications. Something else was wrong. The line was simply dead. He cycled through the other dozen channels fruitlessly, receiving only snatches of static. Damn storm. He closed his eyes as dizziness and nausea washed over him, then forced them open again when the sensation doubled.
    The sky above was a whirling, nightmarish kaleidoscope of lambent energy. Strange how the lightning was unaccompanied by any thunder, he thought, then grimaced at his own obvious delirium. Still, odd. He’d expect thunder to roll down from all sides of the long valley.
    Straining, he managed to unsnap a vest pocket and retrieve his night vision monocular. There were no signs of his companion watchers at their posts in either field to the right or left. Nothing. The guard swore softly as his spyglass fell from nerveless fingers. Everything he looked at was framed by a swimming, brown-black haze. He didn’t even have the strength to shout a warning he knew at such distance would be futile. The castle lights below gleamed bravely against the black night; innocent, unaware. The last lingering image in the guard’s field of vision was a group of dark figures rising up slowly out of the field near the castle wall, stark and jagged against the light.
     
     

The Banked Light

    Paris, France
    6 PM

    Jack looked up suddenly from the café table as wind shook the panes of glass a few feet from his head. The gusting beyond the glass transferred a portion of the night’s chill into him, etched an icy sharpness down his spine. It was only a matter of minutes before the storm would decide to begin in earnest, gashing down through the City of Light, carving at it with knives of lightning and rain.
    Twilight always took too long in Paris. If he took the time, Jack could actually see darkness creep out from the heads of the alleys down Montmartre, could watch the shadows steal out from behind the statuary in the Luxembourg Gardens, could glance up in time to grasp the gathering gloom underneath the cornices and balustrades. Jack didn’t have to look at the sky to feel the skein of dusk draw over the city at the approach of night, the approach of the storm, but he could, if he took the time. Twilight always took too long in Paris.
    The table before him was littered with a dozen tightly-bound manuscripts, sheaves of a hundred and twenty words apiece baled with bright, heavy cardstock covers and filled with sparse, widely-spaced type. The white spaces between the lines seemed enormous and stark to Jack, too empty. He shook his head and closed the screenplay, turning once again to contemplate the hurtling, intransigent approach of night.
    He sat there at the window, pensive and unconsoled, feeling a thousand dark eyes upon him. He’d dressed carefully, in what he’d come to consider his armor against the night. Jeans and a loose sweater always allowed him to move quickly if circumstance demanded, and he didn’t feel so much like a ridiculous American. You could always tell the American tourists in Paris, if not by their baseball caps and ill-fitting pants, then in their guarded, slightly self-conscious gait, as if they were inwardly cradling some fragile bits and pieces of home. Almost all of his countrymen he’d met on their first visit to Paris showed the same inconsequential discomforts. They always looked distracted; they always spoke just too loudly, and they always ordered too much food.
    It wasn’t a matter of pride, but Jack could silently acknowledge the fact that he’d never needed such personal reassurances. It used to privately please him that he found himself