Riding the Centipede by John Claude Smith

Author:John Claude Smith [Smith, John Claude]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Omnium Gatherum
Published: 2015-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16 Chernobyl

Rudolf Chernobyl sat in the only chair ever to bring him comfort, in the only room ever to bring him joy, taking in another masterpiece: Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina sculpture. Bernini was a man after his own cruel heart, what with his slashing of the face of Costanza Piccolomini, a married woman he was having an affair with, because of the possibility she’d had a liaison with his brother. Just the possibility. His control of the situation and the woman was something Rudolf could appreciate on many levels.

He ran his fingers over his face, displeased with his recent meltdowns, control stumbling and seeping out of his flesh.

As with many of the classic art pieces, for the proper price they could be obtained, as long as one had the sleight-of-hand skills necessary to acquire said piece of art, while leaving a close to perfect copy in its place. A copy so perfect, it might even be better than the original. With The Rape of Proserpina, he’d commissioned a fellow freelance mercenary artist, a covert, skilled sculptor known as Templeton—another shadow dweller dealing in the black market—to create the perfect copy of Bernini’s sculpture. It was so perfect, those who dealt in the art underworld at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Italy, wondered why he didn’t just keep it and pocket the money he’d spend on obtaining the original, not that they minded his donation to their bank accounts.

Pity, he’d have thought earnest lovers of art would understand the reason why one wanted the one and only, no matter the number of copies that might be distributed throughout art galleries across the globe. To touch the marble that a great man, a great artist touched, is to be as close to a true god as Rudolf could imagine.

His purpose here was not to relish art, though.

He had a plan.

In most cases, when a snippet of self is taken and used as a homing device, Rudolf would jack in, get a location, then internally shift the homing device from the purely visual, to a topographical map of the location. A blip accompanied the process, escalating as he approached his quarry.

This time, he was not going to shift and move into hunter mode. He was going to settle in and observe everything as it happened. He was going to try and establish a link that would show him more, perhaps give him a clue as to the next stop along the precarious path. If there’s a drug being used to engineer travel, perhaps if he remained locked into the visual, he could follow along, even as the blip fell silent. Staying connected.

Perhaps he could, at the very least, get a clue to the follow-up destination, glean something from within the process, and cut out precious minutes. Put himself face-to-face as opposed to just missing his mark. After all, he had just missed Marlon Teagarden at the last stop. Under the circumstances and not one to court frustration on a regular basis, it seemed a legitimate strategy.

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