(no subject)
Who: Rick Jones, and some Bad Men.
What: HE'S RICK JONES, BITCH. He doesn't require a summary.
When: Today.
Where: An animal shed in Canakkale, Turkey.
Status/Rating: Complete narrative/R for language and violence.
Notes: I REALLY APOLOGIZE FOR THE LENGTH. AND HOW OUTRAGEOUSLY UNRESEARCHED THIS IS.
Five days.
Rick hadn't been taken captive in a while. He'd forgotten how interminable the days seemed when you were locked in a tiny shed on a backstreet of Hisarlik. Not that it was always Hisarlik; there had been that time in Prague, and the other outside of Mexico City, and of course the disaster that was Sighişoara; the point remained. He had successfully avoided capture by authorities, terrorists, overzealous cultists, neo-Nazis, and Interpol for the better part of three years; what encounters he did manage were always resolved before anyone could get an adequate look at his face or do more than fret for the treasure he ran off with. Often enough, what he stole was well high in the price range of antiquities, but not quite the cause for international concern that people seemed to tie with treasure hunting (or less than scrupulous archeaological discovery, as he preferred to term it). Not everyone could go about discovering the Ark of the Covenant or the Spear of Destiny, after all.
Apparently his streak of unimportant discoveries had come upon a bit of a hitch. Rick was fond of hitches, for the most part: you never knew where they'd take you, and he had a habit of finding the most advantageous solution to a problem. Call it luck, or perhaps some vestiges of kingly strategy, but it was rare he ended up squinting through slivers of light in a molding shed barely large enough for him to stand up in. Three of his ribs were broken from the repeated kicks to his chest and sides while he lay prone on the ground, wrist broken from the initial struggle, legs battered and bruised, hands bound behind his back in three bands of plastic ties (he had cut through the first one on a jagged shard of metal on the ground, now removed, and his captors were taking no chances this time). He could no longer see out of one eye, and had little idea how long it would take for the bruising and fractured brow bone to heal. What a story he would have to concoct for his classes on his return.
Because there was little doubt in Rick's mind that he would return. Death in a shed? Not only an impossibility, it was simply beneath him. The man was a professor, a successful treasure hunter and archeaologist, a king--no. Dying in obscruity at the hands of some overzealous freemasons off their bloody trolleys was simply out of the question.
Ah, freemasons. You knew you'd found something when they started poking around your dig site.
Ahmet was still alive, he was sure. The man had a knack for that sort of thing. When the tubby Lebanese professor had come bursting into Rick's room that morning, nattering on about thieves and police at their (admittedly stolen) dig site, Rick had suspected a little row, some forged legal papers with the authorities to prove their claim on the place, and then back to digging. It wasn't a particularly strenuous job, after all; Canakkale had only so much left of its Trojan history, and the majority of that was in museums across the globe (some found by Rick himself in the last decade). He was no Heinrich Schliemann, there was no "Priam's Treasure" to be found, and he would need quite a bit longer than three weeks to do any substantial digging as it was. Istanbul was a lark, a hope for some small bit of nothing to sell off in Berlin on his way back to the States. He and Ahmet both knew it; Erik in Dusseldorf, waiting on Rick's shipment, knew it. If he was going on a proper hunt--well he wouldn't be locked up in a sodding shed listening to the Turkish mouth-breathers of his European captors--oh yes, he spoke their German, they ought to have known if they knew who he was--discuss how best to dispose of his body.
Rick wasn't having it. The Ancient and Heroic Order of the Gordian Knot? He'd heard of them. Lot of freemason rubbish out of Munich, placing far too much importance on a single event of Alexander the Great's career. Turkey attracted its fair share of tourists looking for some vestiges of Alexander's claim on the place; mathemeticians and historians alike came searching for evidence of the famed Gordian knot, slashed in two, as legend had it, by that Macedonian conqueror. Rick had never placed much stock by the story, but if Hollywood had taugt him anything (besides the fact that it always had to be snakes), it was that freemasons placed a fair bit of stock by their legends. Hell, his father had taught him enough of that to know better than to tangle with them if he could help it.
Five days. He'd learned a fair bit of his captors in that time. They were hardly proper treasure hunters: rich sods with a story to protect, hiring out local muscle until they could reconcile their mason duties with their consciences. He had little doubt worse would happen to him if he didn't escape, if only because the Arabs took a great deal of pleasure in bringing the disrespectful Englishman to a more manageable level--namely, on his face in the dirt. But most importantly, they were not treasure hunters. They could recover little information they wanted from the things and notes of his they had taken; waving his Compendium in his face to determine why its pages were blank had only earned blood spit over the pages. Their muscle was good at exacting violence, but very poor at extracting information (not that, of course, he had any, which was what really made him laugh). Moreover, had Rick been in their position, he would not have brought the prisoner into his quarters in an attempt to tempt him with food and fineries into revealing whatever "secrets" he may or may not have uncovered; Rick wouldn't have left the prisoner's personal effects in plain sight on a couch, or talked with the Turkish men directly outside the shed where the prisoner was kept. No, Rick wouldn't have left all these open ends. Rick wouldn't have provided a route for escape.
The shorter Turk came in at sunset, like clockwork, with a bowl of badly prepared gruel. His captors were civilized men; they would not resort to treating him entirely like a dog. If he'd read their patterns right--which he had--the Turk was the only one there, his taller mate having gone inside as they switched shifts. In the small house, the two Germans would be sitting down to supper, discussing what their next course of action would be. The taller turk would assume a seat on the couch to watch the shed through the glass doors, pick up a paper, and then ignore the outside completely. The slats in the shed had provided Rick a perfect vantage point to see this last part, and he knew from discourse between the Turks what went on in the upper floors of the house. It was almost too easy.
Rick had shifted himself, lying on his side with his head tucked down when the Turk came in and dropped the food with a water splash be Rick's face. Also routine. Rick was turned away enough that none got in his eyes. And then, the third part of the bearded man's suppertime habit, was to give his prisoner a swift kick in the side, just for good measure. Let him know who had the power.
The food was only on the floor a matter of moments. The Turk's leg came back to kick and Rick's lashed out from beneath him, a sharp boot straight forward into the man's ankle, shattering it and collapsing him in howls of pain. Rick had only moments. He leapt up, ribs throbbing, fished into the Turk's belt where he kept a short pocket knife, slid it open in one hand and slashed off the plastic bands binding his wrists. His left hand ached with the fractured bone, but he tossed the open knife into it and took the semi-automatic from inside the downed man's coat as he reached for it. No time to gag him; his partner would be coming any moment now. Rick shoved the bowl of gruel in the man's face to silence him for a few seconds, and then stowed himself just beside the doorway--just in time for the second man to kick it in, shouting in Farsi and holding his gun at the ready.
A heartbeat. Rick was behind him, gun-hand pulling the Turk's head and neck back in a choke-hold, knife pushing through denim and cotton and up into the man's side. "Stop bloody shouting everywhere," Rick hissed, twisting the blade. He was careful; the knife never touched anything vital, but it would sure hurt like hell until he could be taken to a proper hospital. The Turk made to shout again and Rick shoved the knife, pressed harder with his forearm on the man's throat. All he made was a tiny whimper.
Good.
In his jacket were a half dozen plastic ties, in case Rick got out of hand. He retrieved six and used for to bind them hand and foot, stuffed torn pieces of their robes into their mouths to keep them quiet. It was quick work, and he was frighteningly good at it. Getting out of scrapes was something Rick did, had always done. The violence of it was a secondary, unfortunate factor; but it could not be avoided. He wiped the knife cean and shoved it in his trousers, checked the magazine on the gun (half full, he wouldn't even need that), and with all the confidence of a man who hadn't just spent the last week lying in a pool of his own blood and sweat and tears, he strode out of the shed to find the shocked faces of the Germans staring back him at him.
They were only a few yards away, evidently having run out with their larger man hadn't returned with an all-clear. Their pale suits seemed stark, strange, unearthly--distinctly out of place among the weeds and dirt of the little yard behind their rented house. Their eyes were dark, hair in disarray, the blood drained from their ruddy faces. This could not be happening, it was clear. One of them was muttering to himself, shaking in place, a tiny little man shrinking in his own fear.
Rick shot them both in the leg.
It was quick work gagging them with ripped shards of their own shirts and tying them up with the remaining plastic binds, but dragging them inside the house was another matter entirely. With his ribs crying painfully for him to relent, his wrist and legs and chest on fire with pain, hauling two grown men by their collars as they kicked and screamed and whined behind their gags was not an easy task. He dropped them twice, swore at them in every language he knew, kicked one of them in the shoulder with his good leg when he wouldn't stop hyperventilating. It took almost ten minutes to get across three yards of nubby grass and melting mud-ice, but finally he managed to drop them in a dirty, bloody mess inside the glass doors, which he snapped shut with a heave of his aching chest.
"Now," he said slowly, tossing the gun onto one of the chintzy chairs the Germans had evidently purchased when they occupied the house; they watched the weapon go through the air in terror, eyes locked on it even as it sat harmless and dead several feet from Rick's hand. He limped across the room, speaking in a low, steady German drawl, for all the world a brick wall suddenly come to life. He shouldn't have been able to walk with those injuries, let alone carry on moderately pleasant conversation. The Germans merely stared, white-faced and wide eyed. One of them began crying.
"Now," Rick said again, leaning heavily against the couch. He touched his ribs tenderly, and wiped some mud from his face. "Where are my things?"
The fatter man nodded fervently towards the wooden chest at the back corner of the room. Rick limped heavily towards it--it was unlocked; their idiocy knew no bounds--and threw open the lid. Inside lay his notes, his files, his gun, the canvas-wrapped set of archeaologist's tools, his whip, beaten leather jacket, his Compendium with his own blood splatter still on the pages--and his hat. Thank God. Slowly, painfully, Rick slid into his coat, slung the gun from its shoulder holster, slipped notes and tools alike into the worn rucksack and hung it on his shoulder. The hat, oh so carefully, he placed on his head, adjusting the brim so his blackened eye wasn't readily visible until you took a good look at him. All the while the men whimpered painfully, bleeding into the pale rug. Rick lumbered off into the toilet, washed his hands and face, dusted the caked mud and dirt from his trousers, and only looked halfway like he'd tumbled out of a pig cart. It would have to do.
The crying man started hyperventilating when Rick's boots stomped heavily closer, and the archeaologist lowered himself painfully to look the man in the eye. "I don't know what the bloody fuck you lot are after aside from some mad quest to keep your masonry secrets--oh, yes, I know right well who you are--but I assure you, I've not got it. Now you're going to let walk out of this house and back to civilized life," he lashed out a calloused, grubby paw, latching onto the man's jaw with a grip too tight to be merely getting attention, "and I won't put in a call to my mates at Interpol to have your bloody arse arrested for terrorist action. All right, then?" He tapped the man's cheek with a harsh slap of skin on skin, rumbled to his feet, and with several long steady strides, he was gone.
Outside, he paid a couple local boys to go tell an adult that there were some Europeans hurt in that house down the lane, keeping his face down and moving about enough so that he would hardly be identifiable by a couple of excitable children later. No calls. Calls could be traced. Lord only knew what they'd done with his mobile phone. He paid a man driving a truck full of chickens to take him as close to Istanbul as he could get, fished his Compendium and a pen out of the rucksack and, hunching over with a caged chicken between him and the driver, began to write.