At 7:00 AM, at the very moment when Malik and I are ready for breakfast, someone knocks on the door. Malik looks through the little window, then opens the door a crack to peek out, but he doesn't see anything.
"Over here!"
Malik looks down: "Identifiably, who are you?"
I solve the riddle: "They are our back-up. Let them in."
Six midgets hobble inside, drag seats from the kitchen, and help us make the breakfast disappear before Malik can say: "Politely, wouldn't you just introduce yourself?"
One of the midgets replies, with his mouth full: "If you're so polite, why don't you start by setting a good example?"
I interrupt: "We're losing time here, precious time, and we are wasting our aggression on the wrong people. Bandits: this is Malik. Malik: these are the Bandits; the one with the leather cap is Randall, the one with the glasses is Strutter, the one with the beard is Vermin, the one with the hat is Wally, the one with the Viking helmet is Og, and the one with the R2-D2 is Fidgit."
"What's an R2-D2?", Malik asks.
"You'll see it when you're in trouble.", Fidgit answers.
"It's our main weapon.", Strutter explains.
"No, it's not. Our main weapon is fear.", Og interrupts.
"Isn't our main weapon surprise?", Wally asks, surprised.
"Our main weapon is surprise; it's fear and surprise. But the R2-D2 is what causes the fear and surprise.", Randall says.
I explain the Bandits to Malik: "Khalid El Bullít hides in the medieval castle. We can't wait until he comes out, so we go in. He has twenty armed men to protect him, so we'll need help. We can't expect him to be friendly and cooperative, so no more Mr Nice Guy: we go armed and dangerous. The Bandits are the best army money can hire at such short notice."
Malik objects: "But… They are midgets!"
"Napoleon conquered the world, and he was only a gnat's cock taller than I am.", Wally says between two bites of a sandwich.
"Don't judge a man on the size of his dick, but on the size of his heart, Malik.", Strutter says while slurping a steaming hot cup of tea.
"If we were judged on the size of our dicks, I would be a much bigger man than you.", Vermin says, chewing two sausages at once.
Randall hits Vermin on the back of his head: "Shut up. We're eating."
"Randall is right. We should make a plan.", I suggest.
"Getting more bread, that sounds like a plan.", Wally suggests.
"And more coffee." - "And some cheese." - "How about eggs and bacon?" - "Good plan. Take care of it, boys."
The Bandits disappear into the kitchen and return with their hands full: "A bit of booty bait to bite." - "Most important meal of the day." - "Take your filthy fingers out of the butter, Vermin."
When everyone's seated, I try to continue where I was before the interruption: "We should make a plan."
"Who the hell are you to tell us what to do?", Og says.
"I'm the one who's paying."
"Okay." - "Fair enough." - "What do you want us to do?"
Randall shakes his head: "We told you: we don't work with a leader. So you better do what I say and make a plan."
I take a map of the castle and put it on the table, between the butter, marmalade and cheese: "The walls are too high and the windows are too small. There are only two ways in: the front door and the sewers."
"No shit.", Vermin says.
Strutter corrects him: "Don't swear."
"I mean: I'm not going to crawl through any sewer.", Vermin explains. The others all agree.
I try to concentrate: "The front door is 500-year-old oak with steel coating. It survived the attack of 28.000 trained troops of the Ottoman Empire during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, so it will stay where it is, even if we use dynamite. How are we going to open that door?"
Wally is the one with the brilliant ideas: "We dress up Malik as a postman. He rings twice, they open the door, he shoots all the guards, and we go in."
Malik objects: "I can't do that!"
"You're the only one tall enough to look like a postman. Sami here is a foreigner, they would suspect him as soon as—"
"I mean, I can't shoot all the guards.", Malik says, desperately.
"It's easy. You take a gun, aim, and pull the trigger- Do it fast, or they will shoot you.", Wally explains.
"He can take you in his bag and show you: the guards would laugh themselves to death.", Vermin says.
"He can take YOU in his bag and show you: the guards will bore themselves to death.", Wally says.
"He means he can't shoot them because he doesn't have a gun.", Strutter says.
"He can take one of our guns. Fidgit can give him the R2-D2.", Randall suggests.
Malik takes his hands out of his hair and explains: "Peacefully, I'm not going with you. I'm a poet. Poets don't storm castles and don't shoot guards. I'm a lover, not a fighter."
I give Malik a confident smile: "You are part of the team, Malik. You come with us. We are facing twenty armed men. We'll need all the help we can get. And at the end of the trip, in the highest room of the highest tower, Khalid El Bullít will be waiting for you. We want to make him feel hopeless, powerless, senseless, without his protection and his men. We want him to know that Good always wins over Evil. As he's Evil, we want you, Good, to face him at his final moment, to present him the choice between eternal jail and a quick suicide by jumping out of the window. That's our plan."
The Bandits are excited: "Good plan." - "Great plan." - "Fantastic plan." - "Is this all the bread there is?"
I take a marker and cross a room on the left wing of the castle: "This here is the electronic heart of the castle's protection. Getting in is just our first step. When we control this room, we can open and shut doors, activate or deactivate traps, and make sure the alarm doesn't wake all the guards."
"Wake the guards?" - "Do you plan to go in at night?" - "Night shift means we'll charge a double fee."
"The guards sleep during the day. Crime is a nocturnal activity. Those criminals have picked the job because they are lazy, so they can sleep all day long. Don't you read books? Real criminals spend every night drinking, drugging themselves, entertaining themselves, beating up honest people and kissing beautiful women. After so much work, it takes a lot of sleep to get in shape for the next night of sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll. We go in now, in the morning, at the moment they least expect it. All we need is a plan to open the door and control the control room. Is that so difficult? I thought you were professionals. Amateurs don't get paid, you know…."
The six stand up as one man, form two lines of three, salute and say: "Sir, yes, Sir." - "We are professionals, Sir." - "You can count on us, Sir."
"And what about the plan?", I ask.
Randall says: "Don't worry, Sir. We do stunts like this every day. We have one plan that never fails."
"And that is?"
"We improvise."
* * *
"Please, open the door for a little old lady. Can you spare a small contribution to small crime, Sir?"
Fidgit, dressed in a long crimson skirt and a short coat in the same colour, is hardly visible under the strawberry-blond wig and the big, red hat with the feather (he said it belonged to Captain «Mad Dog» Morgan, a notorious buccaneer from the 17th century, and has been in his family for ages, but Randall whispered he found it in a nun's monastery, between the costumes the sisters used for the play «A Rope for the Pope»). He rattles with the brass canister and shows a friendly smile for sympathy.
A face, half visible behind the crack in the door, says: "Go play with yourself, Missy. We don't have time for this."
"Just a small contribution, Sir. Some bullets for a .22 would be very welcome. Don't you have for us some unused plans to rob a piggy bank? Small criminality is suffering bad times, you know. If you help us, perhaps we might be able to help you later. How did you start yourself, Sir? You needed a little support when you stole your sister's sweets, didn't you? She's such a sweet, sweet thing, your sister."
The big man now opens the door completely and asks, suspiciously: "Did my sister send you?"
"No, Sir. Your sister was very satisfied when I left her last night. She said the rumours were true, about the little criminals having the biggest dicks." With his army boots, he kicks the heavyweight in the nuts as hard as he can, turns, lifts his skirt, and runs away.
Fidgit's little legs are no match for the heavy criminal's big steps. He grabs Fidgit by the neck of his red coat, lifts him with one hand, and tells him, with Fidgit dangling before his face: "And what is your little dick going to do now?"
Fidgit is not impressed. He sends a friendly smile and answers: "Fire the R2-D2, of course."
The eyebrows of the heavy criminal raise above his hairline: "What's an R2-D2?"
Fidgit explains: "The 2's are, in writing, signs for a quadratic equation. It would be better to refer to the weapon as the R2D2. The R stands for Rabble and the D stands for Dabble. So an R2-D2 is, in fact, a bunch of little guys that…"
The bunch of little guys makes any further explanation unnecessary. They pull on the ropes. The loops tighten on the big man's ankles. Fidgit closes the open mouth of the surprised felon with a kick of his boot and lets himself drop out of the coat on the floor of the bridge. Then the rabble pulls harder, so the big man falls and disappears off the bridge, to dabble in the cold water below. The professional Bandits don't waste time. They run to the door, enter, and throw a few capsules of OC-V 340 (a.k.a. Tumble Tornado, a strong and fast working sleeping gas) into the cabin next to the door. The two guards are completely surprised and snore before they hit the ground. Wally and Og, holding their breath, tie their wrists and ankles together with strong plastic tyraps and throw some more capsules of Tumble Tornado into the room before they close the door.
I'm already ahead, with Strutter, Randall, and Malik, running towards the control room. Randall is the best shot. He took out the two cameras outside the front door, each with a single shot, and now he kills the view of the camera that covers the corridor to the control room, with one shot too.
We expected to find at least three men in the control room. We expected the door to be locked. We expected the alarm to go off at the moment we came into action. We expected these criminals to be a whole more alert than they are. The door to the control room is open and the only man inside is sipping coffee and reading the newspaper (interesting stories, all about his closest friends and the work they've done lately). When he sees us rushing in through the door, he opens his mouth to scream, but Strutter shoots three balls of paint into his throat before he can make a sound, and Randall blinds him with one red ball of paint right between his eyes.
We're all heavily armed, but we use paintball guns, of course. Every criminal in this castle has at least two parents, and perhaps also brothers, sisters, a wife, and children who love him. I've stopped being Mr Nice Guy, but still: we're Good and they're Evil. The difference lies in the way we fight, right?
Strutter climbs on the seat behind the panel, notices Og and Vermin on screen three, in front of a closed door in the right wing, which he opens by the push of a button: "Don't forget to close the door behind you, Randall. If someone passes the corridor we've just crossed, I won't see him coming."
Silently, we clean up the left wing of the building, leaving a trail of sleeping, tied criminals. At the end of the corridor, we meet Og and Vermin, just before the eastern stairway to the second floor, the upper castle.
"Seven guards out.", Vermin reports.
"We've silenced six, plus the three at the door and the one in the control room. It makes seventeen."
Wally's voice cracks through the microphone in our ears: "We've cleared the courtyard. Three guards down. We enter the western stairway. How are you?"
"Our seventeen plus your three makes twenty. Khalid must feel pretty safe upstairs. We're going in.", I answer.
Randall goes first. When he reaches the end of the stairway, Og follows. A gesture later, Og goes right, Randall goes left, and Malik, Vermin and I climb the stairs. Malik pants like a panther in too tight panties.
"You should work harder on your condition.", I suggest.
"Unconditionally, it's not my condition. My condition is fine. It's the height. There's less oxygen at these altitudes."
This fortress was built by the Maltese Knights, the Order of Saint John. They built a corridor around the main building, which is crossed by two corridors in the form of the Maltese Cross. At the crossroads is the only entrance to the tower, where we expect to find Khalid. But before we're there, we'll have to check every room on both sides of this corridor first.
"Strutter. Report.", I whisper.
"All clear."
We go in. We work quickly, silently and organized. Malik opens the door and moves away, Vermin and I go inside, where Vermin covers the open side and I take the side behind the door. When the room is empty, we leave and return to Malik, who covers our backs in the corridor. Then we take the next room, on the other side.
Some rooms are used as storerooms or bedrooms, but most rooms are empty. Slowly, we move towards the centre, where the entrance to the tower is. Three more doors. Open. Left. Right. Clear. Back. Room two. Open. Right. Left. Clear. Back.
"What are you doing here?"
Two metres of ruthless rage steps out of the last room. With his bald head and his dark-blue tailored suit, he looks like Dwayne Johnson's big brother, although the friendly smile that made Dwayne «the Rock» famous was not inherited by the rest of his family. I'm completely surprised. He's much bigger than I am, at least twice as heavy, he has done far more work-out with ponderous weights, the muscles of his index finger are thicker than my biceps, he's probably a Kung Fu master who can handle fighting sticks and throw eight-pointed metal stars into the eye of a fly from a mile away, weapons he has probably hidden everywhere under his clothes, and above all he's trained to turn his left shoe into a deadly weapon when necessary, which isn't necessary at all because with his right hand he lifts a loaded Beretta while with his left hand, he closes the zipper of his trousers.
Vermin warns him: "You better keep that left hand there."
The Rock lifts his left hand to take the safety off the Beretta, aiming at my eye.
Vermin already has the safety off. He plants the remainder of his paintball ammunition on the Rock's zipper. From two metres, seven coloured balls hitting the two already hanging out there, that's not how a game of nine-ball pool is usually played. The Rock rolls, both hands where it hurts. With two well-aimed capsules of sleeping gas, we put him out of his misery.
"You were supposed to cover our backs, Malik. That's a real gun with real bullets.", I say after double handcuffing Dwayne Two.
"Gigantically, I'm sorry. I was looking over your shoulder into the room you were searching."
"If you're so curious, you can search the next room by yourself.", I grunt: "You're part of a team, Malik. Others trust you with their life. You almost got us killed."
Vermin had already checked the bathroom, the last room on our corridor, as the other Bandits appear around the corner: "All clear."
"Where did he come from? There were supposed to be twenty guards, not twenty-one.", Randall wonders, pointing at the sleeping rock, sleeping like a log.
"It doesn't matter. He's feeling real shot down now and I'm getting mean. We go up. Malik goes first. Give him the R2-D2.", I say.
The R2-D2 is a coloured carton cylinder, about 1 metre high, and so thick that your thumbs and fingers don't meet when you put your hands around it.
"Manually, how do I use it?", Malik asks, nervous as a Chihuahua, entering a Paris fashion shop.
Fidgit explains: "It's like choking someone to death: you grip hard and then you turn your hands, thumbs together, like this…"
He grabs Og by the throat to demonstrate the technique, originally invented by the Yorkshire Ripper. Og's eyes turn, his tongue drops out of the left corner of his open mouth, and a gulp of red blood comes out of his throat when he falls motionless on the stone tiles.
Malik almost drops the deadly R2-D2, kneels next to the brave little man to feel his pulse, and cries: "How COULD you! He's your friend. You should PROTECT each other, not kill each other."
Og spits out the remainders of the red paintball bullet and laughs: "Ha. I got you. That was good acting, wasn't it? You really thought I was dead, didn't you?"
I put my finger on my lips to silence the troops; we have to concentrate on the final fight. We sneak inside the tower, skulk up the spiral staircase, and steal to the door. This is the moment. Randall puts his hand on the doorknob, raising his eyebrows to ask if Malik is ready, then nodding with determination, making a brief gesture sidewards with his head, instructing Malik to go in. Slowly, taking no risk the old door will make even the slightest sound, Randall opens the door at a crack. Malik takes his position, the R2-D2 in his hands, ready… no… not ready.
"Sami. Please. You do it. I can't…", he whispers.
I lift the Beretta I took from the gangster and put it between Malik's eyes: "Go!"
Now everything happens at once: Randall throws the door open, Malik stumbles in, followed by the rest of the gang, who spread out along the wall, guns pointed at the far end of the room, and Malik, with his eyes closed, twists the R2-D2 as hard as he can, until it cracks, pops, bursts, explodes, and fills the complete room with a thick blizzard of paper shreds, the perfect decoy to surprise and scare even the hardest criminal who's waiting for his enemies. We all scream as hard as we can, making the fear and surprise even bigger, hoping we can avoid Khalid from grabbing the detonator and…
The shreds still fall out of the sky like a fairy tale of Snow White, but the ugly bad wolf is not sitting in the bed, dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood while the seven white lambs… I'm mixing up literature. I'm confused. This is not going as planned. We expected to see Khalid El Bullít here. We didn't expect to see three sticks of dynamite with a lighted fuse, already short, burning up much too fast to be funny, lying in front of a colossal coloured carton container, filled with probably enough nuclear material to contaminate an entire city, probably Valletta, with: "HA! So you thought you could surprise me? HA, HA, HA!", written all over it. Our shouting goes up and with twice our entry speed, we get out. We bumble and stumble down the stairs, bouncing bowling balls on every marble step, we run through the corridor, jump the stairs down, and suddenly, we realise: "The guard. The Rock. He's still up there. We can't leave him. He will die in the explosion."
"Leave him. Let's go. We will all die.", Malik shouts.
"He's a human being. He has a mother who loves him. We can't leave him there.", I shout back.
The Bandits and I leave Malik behind, race up the stairs, rush through the small corridor, grab the 125 kilos of bad attitude, drag him back to the stairs, throw him down, run outside to the courtyard, and hide our backs against the thick and ancient walls of the fortress, waiting for the blow.
"This fortress survived World War II. It can handle three sticks of dynamite too.", Randall whispers.
Then the explosion follows, with the sound, the shock, and the snowflakes like the R2-D2 produced, but everything a lot bigger, louder and shocking. After the fall-out of paper shreds stops snowing down, a white carpet covers Malta Castle. The top of the tower has disappeared. The Bandits recite a few chapters of the manual «Curses for Every Occasion», which is the best therapy to recuperate from a near-death experience.
"What happened?", Malik asks.
"Khalid knew we were coming. He'd set a trap. He'd hidden a giant R2-D2 in the tower, ready to explode as we entered. Had we not been a little faster than he thought, he'd killed us all.", Randall explains.
"He's a killer." - "He's sick." - "He's obscene." - "How about honour among thieves?" - "He didn't even care about the safety of his own men." - "Criminals! All they think about is themselves." - "They should lock him in jail for this." - "Good terrorists make history, not destroy it."
"Does anybody have some water?", I ask.
"Why? Isn't Scotch whisky good enough for you?", says Vermin, opening a bottle he got from his pocket and taking a sip.
"Where did you find that?", Wally asks.
"There's a room full of food and drinks in the right wing.", Vermin explains.
Randall gives the order: "What are we waiting for? Let's go, guys."
"Wait."
They all look at me.
I say: "We have one more thing to do: we should interrogate the guard we saved, torture him until he tells us everything he knows. We have to know where we can find Khalid. That's why I needed the water. To throw into his face. To wake him up."
"We can wake him up like this…", Wally says. He slaps the Rock until he gets some colour in his face (the Rock, not Wally). The Bandits work as a team. They all help and slap until the Rock opens his eyes: "What do you want from me?"
Randall grabs the Rock at his huge chin, looks him in the eye, and says: "We want you to tell us where we can find your boss, Khalid. He left you all here to die in a huge explosion. We saved you, and all of your colleagues. And if you're a nice boy now, we'll invite you all to a few drinks, tell you some of the best jokes you've ever heard, shake hands, and then forget about the whole thing. Okay?"
"But… I don't know where Khalid is. We don't know who Khalid is either. We get orders via written messages, delivered to us by anonymous messengers at different places at irregular intervals. We get paid, we do what we're told, and that's it. He didn't even trust us with the key to the room where he stores the supplies…"
Og holds up his hand and shows a wrinkled hairpin: "Who needs a key when you can open any door with this?"
The Rock is delighted: "That's good news. I knew you were big criminals when I saw you. I don't measure a man for the size of his shoes, but for the size of his heart. Take these cuffs off of me, please. I can use a drink. I have a headache like I've been thrown off a marble stairway. It must have been one hell of a party last night. The problem is: I don't remember anything about it."
Randall takes the lead: "Just stick with us and you won't go far wrong."
The Rock and the Bandits leave the courtyard in the direction of the right wing. Malik and I leave towards the main entrance.
"Obsessionally, Khalid escaped again. What are we going to do now?", Malik asks.
"As you don't drink at all, and I prefer beer and do my drinking later in the day, we'll go find ourselves a place where we can drink a strong, black, excellent cup of Turkish coffee. Khalid is around here somewhere. He knew we were coming. He can't be far. Right now, all I need is a bit of really good thinking."