Tales of the Hidden World Read Online Free Page B

their advantage. Except . . . Jack spent hours, walking back and forth on the bottom of the lake, and he never found so much as a single gold coin. The only gold in those dark waters was the armor he was wearing.
    He left the dead behind and walked up out of the dark waters, and that was Jack Drood’s first mission as a field agent.
    East Berlin was the dark side of that separated city, and Jack Drood sent his car racing through the back streets, hitting the brakes at the very last minute so he could screech around corners. This was some years later, after he’d made a reputation, if not a legend, for himself. Nothing to match his brother, James, the Gray Fox, but enough that he could still rely on being given the more interesting missions.
    Jack glanced quickly at the rearview mirror. He was still being pursued by half a dozen official cars at speed. They swayed back and forth behind him as the gray anonymous men took it in turns to lean out the side windows and open fire on him. Jack grinned. They were having to go all out just to keep up over treacherously uneven roads, and even when they did manage to hit him, the bullets just bounced off his specially reinforced chassis. He felt so safe; he didn’t even bother to armor up. Just kept his head down, kept his foot down hard, and sent his car hammering through the narrow back streets and alleyways of East Berlin, heading for Checkpoint Charlie and safe passage back to civilization.
    Jack was driving one of his favorite cars, his very own lovingly restored 1933 open-topped, four-and-a-half-liter Bentley, in racing green with red leather interiors. Not exactly an inconspicuous car, for a secret agent out in the field. Just smuggling it into East Berlin had been a real pain in the ass. But when it came to holding its own in a car chase, the Bentley had no equal. Jack liked a car he could depend on. The Bentley had a bulletproof chassis and windows, hidden machine guns, front and back, and a whole bunch of other nasty little secrets tucked away about its person, which Jack had designed and installed himself.
    There was a long waiting list at Drood Hall, just to look at the specs.
    Jack sent the Bentley racing up and down the back streets and alleyways, some of them so narrow the sides of the car brushed against the cheap concrete and brickwork. Dark streets under a dark sky, no moon up above, and hardly any working streetlights. Only the Bentley’s headlights, blazing fiercely before him, showed Jack the way through East Berlin. He hung onto the steering wheel with both hands, laughing aloud as the car bounced and jumped. Nothing like a good old-fashioned hot pursuit to get the adrenaline going. He concentrated on the city map he’d memorized and sent the Bentley slamming around sudden corners, hitting the supercharger now and again, when he needed to open up a little more space between him and his pursuers. The sound of so many roaring engines in the confined spaces was almost unnaturally loud in the night, but no one looked out a window to see what was going on. Jack peered ahead into the glare of the headlights. Either the map he’d been given was wrong, or someone had been doing a lot of unauthorized building around here. A whole bunch of turnings he’d been relying on just weren’t there.
    He kept his foot down, gunning the motor. He was heading in the right direction, and that was all that mattered.
    It didn’t help that most of East Berlin looked the same. Dull, faceless, characterless buildings on every side, thrown up in a hurry to hold a subservient population in place. Hardly any lights in the windows, and no one about on the streets. Not at that hour. The only people out and about at this time of the night in East Berlin were agents like him, and the East German secret police following him. The cars behind were catching up, despite everything Jack could do to throw them off, and more and more bullets were slamming into the rear of the Bentley. Jack kept his