Fourth Bear (47 page)

“You’re a cookie.”

“So?” asked the Gingerbreadman, intrigued by Jack’s sudden confidence. “What are you up to, Spratt?”

“This.”

He aimed the gun, not at the Gingerbreadman but at the fire-control system on the ceiling above them. The well-placed shot blew off the sprinkler head, and a stream of water descended onto them both. The Gingerbreadman frowned and looked at the water pouring off himself, tiny particles of gingerbread already being washed off and falling to the floor at his feet. Cookies soften because…
they absorb water.
He made for the door. The other sprinklers in the room, sensing the drop in pressure, fired simultaneously, spraying the room with even more water. The Gingerbreadman tripped over a table in his haste to escape, and another jet of water caught him on the legs. They softened and buckled under him. He got to his feet and reached the door just as the sprinklers fired in the atrium; there was no escape from the deluge.

“Quick thinking, Spratt!” he shouted, turning back as the water continued to gush down upon both of them, larger pieces of gingerbread now falling from his body as the moisture started to soften up his cookieish tissues. He studied one of his hands with interest as a chunk of gingerbread dropped off.

“They designed me as the perfect warrior,” he announced with a wry smile, “only with one fatal flaw—I can’t get wet. I’m dying, Jack.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Now, that’s not nice,” replied the Gingerbreadman reproachfully as an icing button dropped to the floor with a damp
plop.
He looked around and tried to pick up the shotgun, but his hands collapsed into mush around the weapon.

“Rats,” he muttered. “Well, no matter.”

He walked slowly toward Jack, who scrambled backward and threw his gun at the brown figure.

“Congratulations,” said the Gingerbreadman slowly, as larger pieces of gingerbread started to slough off his body in the never-ending stream of water. “I underestimated you.”

“I get that a lot.”

“Really? D’you know, in a way I’m almost glad it was you. I’d have liked to have been your friend. Perhaps that’s why I could never kill you—until now.”

The Gingerbreadman lunged at Jack, slipped on the wet floor and collapsed into a puddle of water. Jack ran quickly around to the other side of the room as the Ginja tried to get up and fell over again as his foot came off. But he wasn’t giving up, trying desperately to crawl in Jack’s direction using arms that disintegrated into pulp as he grappled with the slippery floor. He stared at Jack, his crumpled features registering annoyance that he’d failed rather than any sort of fear over his demise. An arm gave way, and he collapsed facedown into the pool of water. When he lifted himself again, he was without a face. His cherry eyes, red icing nose and licorice mouth had fallen into the large brown mass of sodden gingerbread that had gathered beneath him. He flailed around wildly as Jack looked on, the water running off Jack’s hair and down his neck causing him nothing worse than mild discomfort. The Gingerbreadman, now blind and mute and without any limbs, thrashed uselessly about in the center of the room.

Within minutes it was all over. The most notorious and violent multiple murderer the nation had seen was nothing more than a soggy lump on the floor. Jack walked over and cautiously kicked one of the grapefruit-size glacé cherry eyes that only ten minutes before had flashed such evil confidence. Abruptly, the downpour stopped. The water ran off the tables, mixing and swirling around the brown stain in the middle of the floor. Jack paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, then splashed through the puddle and out the door and made his way back to the tank in the center of the atrium. Mary was still very much in danger, and if he could rescue her and secure McGuffin and the Alpha-Pickle, all might still be well. His phone rang, and he dug it out of his pocket. It was Briggs.

“You can arrest me later,” Jack snapped. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

“I may not arrest you at all,” replied Briggs. “I’ve just been talking to Vinnie Craps, Bartholomew and Ursula Bruin.”

“She can talk?”

“She can
write.
And she’s indicated a few very interesting facts about Demetrios that need closer scrutiny. Plus, Mr. Fuchsia’s neighbors have positively identified Agent Danvers as one of the Men in Green who were there this morning.”

Jack suddenly felt a huge weight begin to lift from his shoulders. For the first time that day, he had the feeling that everything might just possibly come out all right. As he began to breathe more easily, there was a thud of mortar fire, and he turned. Several parachute flares arced gracefully into the night sky and ignited above the theme park, illuminating the pockmarked landscape in a harsh white light. He turned back to his cell phone.

“The Gingerbreadman and Bisky-Batt are dead, sir, the cookie by me and Horace by Demetrios. I’m at SommeWorld. The fourth bear, McGuffin and Danvers are here, and I believe that Mary is in very grave danger. If you want to arrest me, you can—but please,
after
Mary is safe.”

There was a pause.

“Hold firm, Jack, I’m sending everything I have.”

Jack paused for a moment in thought then ran to the costume store. He returned to the turnstiles, used a fire ax on a large glass door and stepped into the cool night and the jagged, unnatural landscape of the park. The star shells drifted down, their bright white light trailing long streams of smoke in the clear sky. Then a single faint
whompa
pierced the quiet. A barrage was about to begin, and Mary was probably right in the center of it.

Jack ran down one of the supply roads as the steady
crump, crump, crump
of the barrage began to fill the air. The parachute flares faded and died, and the park was plunged into inky blackness. Jack stopped. He could hear the barrage building up, but the smoke had cleared and the night was pitch-black—he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. There was another thud of mortars as more star shells flew into the air, and with a crackle the parachute flares once more illuminated the landscape. Suddenly Jack jumped out of his skin—Danvers was not more then six feet from him, and she looked as startled as he was. He didn’t pause for a second—he planted a fist on her chin. She went down with a thump, and he relieved her of her pistol as she lay dazed on the ground. She had a pair of cuffs, so he dragged her to a nearby Model T and clipped her to a wheel spoke.

“I’m National Security!” she yelled as she regained what little sense she possessed. “I’ll have your head on a platter for this!”

“You’ll have to get in line.”

“YOU WON’T MAKE IT TO COURT, SPRATT!” yelled Danvers as Jack ran off into the park, the recent rain making the ground slippery. Ahead of him a support trench zigzagged down the hill, the detritus of war all around him. The propane burners had just been ignited, and the park was now aglow with flames that eerily illuminated the plumes of earth that were being blown skyward by the air mortars as the barrage increased in intensity. The Somme offensive had begun—but with only a couple of participants and this time, hoped Jack, without any loss of life. He took a left turn toward a forward observation post as several machine guns started to rattle somewhere ahead of him. He popped his head up in the OP and borrowed a pair of field binoculars that were lying on the firestep. He trained the glasses on the lines opposite and could see the plumes of soil lift large sections of the barbed-wire emplacements into the air. He stopped. In the middle of this no-man’s-land was an abandoned artillery piece and cuffed to it, being plastered by dirt and debris as air mortars detonated nearby, was Mary.

Jack ran as he had never run before. He slid into craters, pulled himself over barbed wire and climbed past piles of rubble toward the artillery barrage, the buried mortars blasting and churning the ground, each
whompa
unleashing up to a half ton of earth and throwing it fifty feet into the air. Jack didn’t stop when he reached the wall of destruction; he just carried straight on into it.

Mary was not in what you might call “a calm frame of mind.” The barrage had started a full thousand yards away and had slowly moved toward her, gaining in strength as it came. She had attempted to beat the handcuffs off her with a shell casing but without luck. The barrage moved closer and intensified around her, the harsh pressure waves making her feel nauseous and disoriented. A small charge detonated six feet away and blew her jacket and shoes clean off. Then, as the barrage seemed to reach a point at which every different explosion had merged into one huge directionless noise that reverberated around her, a corridor suddenly opened up in the curtain of flying soil, and a man dressed in torn clothes and covered in mud ran into the maelstrom and fell to the ground near her. Almost instantly the bombardment pulled back from where they were, and within a radius of ten feet, all was calm. Jack produced a set of clippers he had taken from a raiding-party kit and snipped the chains on her handcuffs.

“Can you walk?”

She nodded, and he led her into the bombardment, which seemed to part as they moved through it. By the light of the star shells and the flames, Mary could see the artillery piece that she had been handcuffed to only a moment earlier being tossed skyward as an almighty concussion lifted it clear of the ground.

“What the hell…?” screamed Mary, but Jack didn’t answer. Wherever they walked, the bombardment subsided. It was like moving through a crowd that respectfully parted to let you go in any direction. Jack led her back across no-man’s-land, and within a few minutes they were safely back on the support road—and Danvers, who glared sullenly at them as they walked past.

“How the hell did we manage that?” asked Mary, panting with exertion and fear. “Not be killed by the barrage, I mean?”

He pulled out of his pocket one of the safety-proximity alerts that Haig had shown them the first time they’d visited. They could have stood in the barrage all night, and not one mortar would have hit them.

“Where’s Demetrios?”

“What?” asked Mary, temporarily deafened by the barrage.

“WHERE’S DEMETRIOS?”

She pointed up to the control room, and they both ran back toward the building, just in time to see a figure dash into the visitors’ center clutching a black leather briefcase. The profile was unmistakable.

“DEMETRIOS!!!” yelled Jack.

The bear couldn’t hear him; Jack couldn’t even hear himself. He yelled at Mary to try to find McGuffin and stop the bombardment, then ran in the direction the head of NS-4 had taken. The bear was not out of shape and made far better speed on all fours than Jack could do on two. Jack only caught up with him at the parking lot, and only then because Mr. Demetrios had stopped. It was not difficult to see why. In the parking lot and facing the Small Olympian Bear was perhaps the biggest armada of police cars that Jack had ever seen. Briggs had outdone himself. There was
everything.
It looked like a field full of twinkling blue lights. Two police helicopters hovered overhead, their powerful search beams centered on the small bear. Abruptly, the barrage stopped. A silence descended on the scene. Jack’s ears were ringing, and he still shouted, even though it was hardly necessary.

“Demetrios!”

The small bear turned.

“You’re under arrest, bear—for murder.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I do. On the ground.”

“You can’t arrest me.”

“I can.”

“
You can’t!”

“He’s right, Jack.”

It was Briggs, and he approached the two of them cautiously.

“He’s NS-4, Jack, and outside our jurisdiction. We have to get a warrant from the Home Secretary. The Chief Constable is on the phone to her at the moment, but the case is taking some explaining. Don’t worry, though. We’ll still have him. Once you write your report, he’ll be inside quicker than you can say ‘corrupt civil servant.’"

The bear looked at Jack. He had been surprised himself at the turn of events.

“Let him go now and you’ll not see him again!” Jack shouted to Briggs. “Contained in that briefcase are the details of a technology that will grant him asylum in any nation he chooses!”

“The law is the law, Jack,” insisted Briggs. “We can’t touch him.”

Jack’s shoulder’s slumped, and Demetrios grinned.

“Like he said, Jack, You can’t arrest me. I’ll be on my way with my property.” He patted the briefcase and adjusted his tie. “Bad luck, Inspector. I guess I’ll see you about.” He looked around for transport. “And do you know,” he added, “I think I’ll even borrow your car.”

“Be my guest.”

Demetrios smiled again, but it was a smile of relief. The probable course of events that Jack had outlined was pretty near the truth. He would be out of England in less than an hour, and he could then pick a country at leisure in which to instigate phase two of his plan. He jumped into Jack’s Allegro and threw the briefcase on the passenger seat. He started the car and drove slowly toward the gates of the theme park, the assembled officers moving aside to let him pass.