Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  Moon was sharing the sofa with Charlie Herriman and Vincent “Ratboy” Marinelli, who resembled a four-foot-tall rat with disconcertingly human-looking hands. The others, sitting silently in scattered chairs, were all jokers, all lawyers, investigators, or board members of the JADL.

  Sibyl stood before them, half-hoping the proper words would come to her, half-fearing that they wouldn’t. “You all know what happened earlier today,” she began. “My father, our leader and guiding light for so many years, gave his life in service of that which he’d always believed in: justice. I miss him already; I’ll miss him forever. But there’s one thing I know.” She paused a moment, gathering herself. “I will not let his death be in vain. I will strive with all my strength to see this case through, to prove Bradley Finn innocent and bring the conspirators to justice. Dr. Pretorius would expect no less.”

  Flipper looked up for the first time, meeting her gaze. “What do we do?”

  “First, protect Moon at all costs. She is our key witness. Moon—” She shifted her gaze to the little dog. “You must put down whatever you know, all the details of the conspiracy, who’s involved, times and dates, as complete a record of what you witnessed as you can. Your unsupported testimony alone doesn’t constitute proof of the conspiracy, but documenting what we know about it is the first and proper step toward unraveling it. But we need more proof to back it up. And to that end—”

  She turned her attention to the other occupant of the couch. “Ratboy?”

  His whiskers twitched as he turned his disconcertingly pink eyes on her.

  “You were able to get in touch with Jonathan Hive?”

  “Sure. He’s on his way in. He’ll be in touch again when he gets into the city.”

  Sibyl nodded. “Have you gotten that special equipment I enquired about?”

  “I got people working on it,” Ratboy said. “It’s not exactly shit you can pick up at the corner Radio Shack. I’ll have it by the time Bugsy shows up.”

  “Right,” Sibyl said. “We all have this other line of investigation to develop—the connection of the conspiracy to the Russian mob. I will deal with that.”

  Herriman frowned. “Sibyl—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve already documented my investigation in detail. That will be available to you if, if I don’t come back.”

  “Let me accompany—” Herriman pleaded.

  She shook her head. “You’re next in line if something happens to me, and you’re our best lawyer, our client’s best hope.” She wished that she could smile. She checked her wristwatch. “It’s just after midnight. I’d better get going.”

  Sibyl could smell the sea as she got off her café racer on a dark backstreet at two in the morning. There was no other traffic and not much in the way of lights burning over the Brighton Beach alley. She took off her helmet and stripped off her leathers, boots and all. She stood naked in the hot night air, feeling the cooling breezes wafting over her from the nearby sea. It was an almost sensual feeling that engulfed her entire body, the surface of which was one large sensory organ. All she wore were her wrist vocoder, her gorget, a small tool pouch around her slender hips, and a coil of thin silken rope looped around over her right shoulder. All five feet and nine inches of her slender frame were hairless, blue-green, and nude. Not that there was much to see: she no more had nipples, genitalia, nor bodily orifices of any sort than the Barbie doll whose proportions hers resembled. The wild card had transformed her into something more mannequin than man, most people thought when they saw her. They were wrong. She was as the Professor had made her.

  Naked and greenish-blue in the night air, Sibyl moved off into the warren of streets, the image of the map she’d memorized firmly in her mind. After a ten-minute walk through silent and sleeping streets she came to a tall brick wall, a little over two feet higher than her head and topped by shards of broken glass. Without hesitation she tossed the silken rope over the top of the wall. The rubber-tipped grappling hook caught silently against the other side and she swarmed up the wall like a blue lizard scuttling up a rock. She paused momentarily, holding herself up with one arm wrapped over the edge as she felt the shards of glass set into the wall. She cleared a space of a half foot or so, breaking them off with her bare hand. She didn’t think that the shards would pierce her flesh if she stood on them, but she didn’t want to take the chance.

  Sibyl hauled herself up to the top of the wall, switched the grappling hook to the other side, and let herself down quickly and silently, feeling the rough surface of the stone wall rub pleasingly over the surface of her body. The rope came down with a simple flick of the wrist, and she coiled it up and left it at the base of the wall to use again when she exited.

  She looked quickly around. She couldn’t see in the dark, of course, but her other sensory apparatus, the fabric that wrapped around her entire body, was much more sensitive than any sense possessed by any human. She was inside the walled-in backyard of a large house at the far end of the swath of well-kept lawn. She could hear the guard dogs that roamed the backyard at night. If she was silent, she wouldn’t draw their attention. Sibyl had no scent for them to pick up.

  She moved quickly and quietly over the newly cut grass on naked feet, passing by a tennis court, a rather large swimming pool, and finally a meticulous garden, running mainly to roses and other flowering shrubs, sectioned off by looping dirt pathways. Statuary that looked to be of Greek or Roman origin stood and sat or reclined in various niches or atop marble plinths, all in surprisingly good taste. It was rather impressive, if one was impressed by that sort of thing. Stone images of ancient dead men actually meant little to her, but she could appreciate the—What do the Chinese call it? The feng shui.

  She arrived at the back door of the imposing mansion, but moved over to the closed French windows beside it and took a glass cutter from her pouch. It was a moment’s work to cut out an oval that allowed her entry. She paused for a moment before going in and stared hard, reaching into her mind to activate a deeper level of seeing than that she usually employed. In a moment she saw them, the crisscrossing laser scanner lines that indicated the motion detector that protected the interior of the house. Carefully she stepped inside and, with a contortionist’s grace, moved silently over, under, and past them all.

  As she advanced deeper into the dark house she could feel unseen waves of infrared radiation strike her as the second line of defense, passive infrared scanners keyed to human skin temperature, kicked in. She passed through them undetected like a ghost, fascinated by the riches each room held. Paintings, statuary, ancient rugs and tapestries and museum-level artifacts from many cultures and time periods—it could have been overwhelming even for her, if she wasn’t completely focused on the task at hand.

  She followed the floor plan that Ratboy had found on some clearly restricted website (whether governmental or illicit, she didn’t know) to the proper staircase and silently went up it, down the heavily carpeted wall to the bedroom, three doors down and to the left. The door was closed but not locked.

  The bedroom itself was crowded with amazing objets d’art, like the rest of the house. There was a cabinet against one wall that held a small collection of what had to be Fabergé eggs. The paintings on the wall were all jaw-clenched aristocrats that she didn’t recognize but looked rather Russian to her. Czars, perhaps?

  The bed lay against the far wall. The nightstand beside it held the last security device—an intercom unit—and a golden, intricately engraved tray that held a finely cut crystalline decanter filled with a brownish-gold liquid. No doubt some fabulously expensive liquor. She leaned over and did not turn off the intercom, but turned the volume knob so low that it would pick up only the loudest scream.

  She turned to the massive four-poster bed, carved from dark wood—teak? Sibyl wondered—where slept Ivan Grekov, the head of the Russian Mafia in New York City.

  Thankfully, he was alone. Sibyl had been worried about that.

  She watched him sleep for a moment. He
was an old man, thick through the shoulders and chest, but no taller than she was herself. Probably a little shorter. His lined face was slack in repose, his white hair was cut short. His equally white mustache was too big for his face.

  He slept peacefully for a man whose nickname was Ivan the Terrible, a man who had committed every imaginable crime, either by his own hand or in his own name. The man who had killed my father. He snored, quietly. A little bit of drool ran from the corner of his half-open mouth, down his chin.

  When she could no longer bear the sight of him she said, “Hello, Grekov,” in a normal conversational tone.

  Instantly the old man’s eyes opened wide. The fear on his face turned almost into puzzlement. “What is this dream I am having, of naked beautiful blue angel?”

  “It’s not a dream. I’m not an angel.”

  Grekov squinted as if to see her better in the darkened room. He made no effort to move. “Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  “The answers to a couple of questions.” She moved closer, so that she loomed over the bed, touching the mattress with her knees.

  Grekov stared at her with a certain wonder in his eyes. “You have my full attention.”

  “Why are you working with those bastards who killed the president?”

  “Ah.” Grekov shrugged. “Is just business. They needed some extra guns. They paid well. They suggested that a new administration might not be so … concerned … with our activities.”

  “Is that so?” Sibyl threw one leg upon the bed. The sheets were satin. She could feel them cool against her skin. Grekov stiffened for a moment, but he relaxed when he realized that she was simply straddling him. He looked at her, more curious than anything.

  “What’s the name of the man who shot my father?”

  “Your … father?”

  She nodded, leaning over him, putting her chest against his. “Dr. Pretorius.”

  “Ha. I—you must be the one they call Ice Blue Sibyl.”

  She nodded again, stooping, bringing her lips very close to his.

  “Why should I tell you that, pretty lady?”

  She looked down at him for what seemed like a very long time, her expression, as always, unmoving. Finally she said, “It does not matter. The gunman just pulled a trigger. You’re the one who really killed him.” She pressed her lips to Grekov’s.

  For a moment he kissed her, his lips moving against hers, his tongue probing her unopened mouth. He started to move against her, trying to push up, but she’d locked her legs around his hips, her arms around his neck.

  “You … you have no mouth,” Grekov stammered. “What are you?”

  A good question, Sibyl thought. “Not a joker, if that’s what you are thinking. I have no memory of a previous life before the virus. I think I’m—some kind of animated doll. A toy.”

  “But how—”

  “I remember my creator. The Professor, he called himself. A fussy man, funny, secretive. He wore a sky-blue tuxedo to Hiram Worchester’s Aces High parties, in the old days. I remember the smell of his pipe. And dolls and little robots on the shelves, with empty eyes. They creeped me out. Some of them … came alive. The Professor was a genius of sorts. Touched by the wild card. I was his crowning achievement, and he used his ace to give me life. Then—then I found him on the floor of his workshop, dead. It took me almost a week to realize that’s why he didn’t pay any more attention to me. I was that innocent, that ignorant. That’s when I wandered out, on my own in Jokertown. The time between the Professor’s death and when Dr. Pretorius found me … I never talk about that time. Pretorius saved me. Made me his ward, his assistant. The Professor was my creator, but Dr. Pretorius was my father. And you killed him. For money. But I am my father’s daughter.”

  Grekov tried to turn his head away, he tried to buck her off, but she held on grimly.

  “Your lips,” he mumbled. “So cold. So … cold.”

  Ice Blue Sibyl leaned close and kissed him once again. This time she held the kiss, even as he squirmed and bucked beneath her. She sucked all the heat out of him and radiated it away, through her flesh, out into the room behind her. He fought her, once almost managing to roll off the bed, but she retained her relentless grip, continued her relentless draining of every degree of heat out of Ivan Grekov’s body.

  After five minutes he stopped moving, but she continued at it, draining the heat out of him and dispersing it all around them into the room. After ten minutes, she stopped and took her lips from him and pulled away, releasing him.

  He was frozen solid, along with his silken pajamas and satin sheet, and probably a couple inches of the mattress on which he lay. On his face was a look of unbelieving terror.

  “That’s for killing my father,” Ice Blue Sibyl said. That wasn’t the only reason she did it. With Grekov dead that took the Russians out of the picture. His death would throw the Brighton Beach boys into chaos as they clawed one another for supremacy. She’d removed them from the equation. Now they could concentrate solely on Justice and the other core conspirators within SCARE.

  She looked over at the nightstand and took the decanter by the neck and swiftly smashed it down on Grekov’s head. Both the decanter and his head shattered into little pieces.

  Let them figure that out when they find the body, Sibyl thought.

  She left the mansion, wondering if she’d also left behind the veneer of humanity it had taken her thirty years to acquire.

  Sibyl was back at the safe house by three thirty. All three bedrooms had been claimed by sleeping JADL staff members. The living room couch was occupied by Charlie Herriman and Vincent Marinelli, asleep. Marinelli slept in a compact ball, his naked pink tail, longer than his body, tightly wrapped around himself. Herriman slept upright on the sofa’s far end. He snored loudly. Marinelli made little squeaking sounds in his sleep, as if he was on the trail of a really big piece of cheese.

  When the doorbell rang at 4 a.m. Flipper snorted loudly, opened his eyes, and said, “Whaizzit?” Ratboy rolled to the floor, drawing a pistol he’d had in a shoulder holster.

  Sibyl, who had been sitting silently on the La-Z-Boy, said, “Easy. I don’t think the Russian mob rings doorbells when they come calling.” She went to the door and peered through the peephole. Jonathan Hive stood on the doorstep, well lit by an overhead light, accompanied by a large, burly young Black man.

  Sibyl opened the door. “Come in, Bugsy.” And added to the young man who followed him inside, “And who are you?”

  “I’m Dwight the Uber driver.”

  Sibyl looked at Bugsy. “You Ubered from Charleston to New York City?”

  Bugsy shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Um. Can you tell Mouseman to put the gun down?”

  “I’m Ratboy,” Marinelli snarled, but he lowered his weapon.

  Bugsy nodded. “And, uh, can you pay my fare? I didn’t want to use my credit card.”

  Sibyl nodded. “That’s cheap of you. But ultimately very wise.”

  She went over to the bag that lay by her recliner and took out a stack of bills. She handed it to Dwight. “That should contain, give or take, ten thousand dollars.”

  Dwight’s eyes grew wide. “Just what are you folks involved in?”

  “Nothing bad,” Sibyl said.

  “Read all about it on the Aces! website in a couple of days,” Bugsy told him.

  Dwight reached into the front pocket of his shirt and handed Bugsy his card. “Call me, anytime. You folks take care, now.” And he went back out the door, shutting it behind himself.

  Bugsy looked at Sibyl. “What now?”

  She looked from Bugsy to Flipper to Ratboy, to the other staffers who’d come out of the bedrooms, roused by the noise, and were sleepily rubbing their eyes as they staggered into the living room. “Now,” she said, “everyone goes back to sleep and gets some rest. Tomorrow, we plan. And then…”

  “And then, what?” Bugsy prompted.

  “And then,” Sibyl said, “we smash this c
onspiracy to Hell.”

  Washington, D.C., in the summertime was as hot and humid as Charleston had been, with the added factor that Sibyl, Bugsy, and Ratboy were crammed into what was ostensibly a taco truck parked in the narrow concrete canyon of G Street, hemmed in by tall buildings that allowed not a hint of a fresh breeze to stir the stifling atmosphere.

  Three JADL operatives were in the main body of the faux food truck, making and dispensing tacos, chimichangas, burritos, and chalupas. Bugsy, Ratboy, and Sibyl were in a small, self-contained, and closed-off chamber of the truck. Ratboy was working his tech, Bugsy was working his wasps, and Sibyl was the only one who wasn’t soaked in sweat. She was as cool and untouched as usual, following the bank of monitors that took up an entire wall of the cloistered corner of the truck.

  “So, what we got here,” Ratboy explained with his whiskers twitching with excitement, “is an actual electronic observation deck used to monitor SEAL teams, or Rangers, or whatever you wanna call your black ops while they’re off on their mission—”

  “I call them wasps,” Bugsy said.

  “Whatever. Each monitor is tuned to a particular operative. You hear what they hear, you see what they see, and it’s all transmitted back here”—he patted the control board with one of his disconcerting human-looking hands—“where it can be recorded or transmitted at will to any designated destination. The only wrinkle,” he added with some pride, “is that I managed to wire the new microcameras and microphones—”

  “Carried by my wasps,” Bugsy said.

  Ratboy fixed him with a pink-eyed glare. “Whatever. If it wasn’t for my tech—”

  “Shhh,” Sibyl said. “The flight is entering the building now.”

  The building she was referring to was right across the street from them: the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which contained the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office.