Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  “It would have been incredibly stupid for you to hold him. Look, old boy, I know—”

  The rigid control broke. “Don’t call me boy!” Siraj thrust his finger at the screen. “For two days I’ve watched Arab soldiers dying beneath the blade of a Teutonic knight. An American ace burning them in fire, another crushing them, presumably in the name of his god. These were normal men whose only offense was to serve their god …”

  And massacre jokers, Noel thought, but he kept the words behind his teeth.

  “… and follow a fool,” Siraj concluded. Bitterness hung on the words. “I would have protected those frauds, the Living Gods, and left their deluded followers in peace, but these mad children have made that impossible now.”

  Softly, Noel said, “We’re not behind the aces. In fact, I tried to stop them.”

  Siraj’s implacable expression did not change. “That doesn’t absolve you. You are still a Westerner, and one could say the worst offender. For a hundred years Britain has destroyed our governments.…”

  “What governments?” Noel drawled.

  “You have drawn countries in the sand, all in pursuit of our oil. And the UN has stood by while refugee camps have festered and children have starved. I would have done nothing for Jayewardene.”

  It left Noel breathless. He had spent years cultivating this friendship. He had killed for this man. “You’re Cambridge educated, for God’s sake, you know how the world works. This is realpolitik. We’ve given you Arabia. It’s time you remembered where your loyalties lie.”

  “I have.” A weight of decision was carried on the words. Geography, culture, and religion formed a vast chasm between them, and as if to physically drive home the gulf, Siraj took another few steps away from Noel. “For a thousand years we’ve staggered under the rule of despots. That changes now.”

  Noel gave an elaborate shrug. “I’m sure you’ll be a paragon, but reality does intrude, and here’s one for you to consider—ruling with our support would have been much better than what you’re about to attempt.”

  “Your problem, Noel, is that you don’t give a damn about anything. You never have. It’s all a game to you.”

  The words stung in a way he hadn’t expected. No, you bastard, it’s about crown and country, and doing what’s necessary to protect them both.

  Siraj said, “I’ve found my soul, and it’s Arab. A hundred million of my people are looking to me to lead them. I will deliver neither them nor their patrimony into the hands of Western imperialism and paternalism—whether it wears a corporate face or not.”

  “Listen to yourself,” Noel said. “You sound like a street Arab.”

  The slur hit home. Siraj stiffened, and Noel realized he had allowed his anger and pique to override his ability to read others and calculate every word and gesture he made. “I think you will not be leaving.” The words were forced between the Jordanian’s clenched teeth. “You will be revealed as a spy, and the courts will mete out your punishment.” Siraj raised a pudgy hand. From behind the elaborate carved wood screens four guards stepped out.

  Noel glanced out the window. The sun was down, but the last light had not yet faded from the sky. He was trapped. Twilight had robbed him of his power, and there was no escape. Two of the guards grabbed his arms. A third one stuck the barrel of a rifle in his back. The final soldier quickly lifted the Browning out of its holster. “Take him to the Kanater Mens Prison,” the prince said.

  They weren’t gentle as they bundled him into the back of a car. Noel looked back through the dust-covered back window at the receding angles of the Great Pyramid. He glanced surreptitiously down at his watch. He had at least eleven minutes until full dark when he could become Lilith. But he didn’t dare reveal her in front of the guards. He would have to wait for the cell. He resigned himself to an unpleasant hour.

  It began almost immediately when one of the guards shot Noel a grin. His front tooth, a stainless steel rod, flashed in the last spill of light over the horizon. He had noticed Noel’s glance at his wrist. He grabbed and yanked off the expensive gold Baume and Mercier watch. Next his cufflinks went, and then the small ring he wore on his little finger that served as a distraction for audiences.

  Noel realized that the soldier in the front seat was eyeing him oddly. Of course, they expect the British spy to do something, and not behave like limp prey. Yes, this is going to hurt.

  Noel lunged forward and grabbed the man’s chin in one hand, wrapped his free arm behind his head, and yanked. The stitches in his shoulder tore free. The muscles in Noel’s back burned as he braced and pulled the soldier over the backseat. The man’s flailing legs kicked the driver and sent the car careening in a mad serpentine back-and-forth across the road. Everyone was shouting. A fist took Noel in the kidney, and he gagged from the pain. The muscles in Noel’s arm tensed. A quick twist would break the neck.

  No, better not to kill one of them. I don’t want them too angry.

  Instead, he tried to claw for the soldier’s pistol, and the men on either side of him piled on. As best he could, Noel covered his head and endured the drubbing. He lost interest in the rest of the drive, and only returned to his surroundings when he was dragged across the flagstones in the courtyard of the prison. It was full dark and still very hot. Noel was so thirsty that his mouth tasted like he’d been sucking on iron filings.

  Finally they dumped him in a cell. It reeked of shit, urine, and sweat. There were no mattresses on the metal cots, just coiled steel frames. A small, ferretlike man lounged on a cot, but he scrambled to a back corner and huddled by the stainless steel and overflowing toilet as the soldiers dragged Noel in and flung him down on the concrete floor. There were a few farewell kicks, and Noel wasn’t able to turn fast enough and not take the blows on his abused gut. One boot did connect with his ribs, and he heard a crack, and pain flared.

  Transforming was not going to be fun. He eyed his fellow prisoner. And of course he couldn’t be observed.

  “Lucky for you I hurt too bad to kill you,” he said in English.

  The man grinned at him ingratiatingly. Noel groaned and got to his feet, crossed to the man, and held his breath against the stench from the toilet. He lashed out with a foot, and kicked the man in the head. Pain made him less precise. There was a chance he’d just created a breathing, shitting vegetable.

  Slowly, painfully, his body burned and shifted, flowing like hot wax. Breasts pressed tightly against the fabric of his shirt, and the pants were suddenly far too snug across his hips. Lilith’s long hair brushed at his back. Noel concentrated and teleported away.

  Captain Flint set aside the pages of Noel’s report and leaned back in the stone chair that had been carved to accommodate his massive stone body. The commander of Her Britannic Majesty’s Most Puissant Order of the Silver Helix, the ace division of British Military Intelligence, was almost eight feet tall and weighed more than three thousand pounds. He rubbed his eyes, momentarily masking the flames that formed his pupils. “Not the result we had hoped for.”

  Noel leaned forward to better hear his commander’s whispered words, so incongruous, coming from the gigantic gray stone body.

  Rains sluiced down the outside of the tall windows of this Whitehall office. It was decorated in Flint’s unique style. He made no nod to faux intellectualism. There were only a few volumes on the bookshelves. Instead the polished wood displayed a collection of British arms and armaments ranging from neolithic arrowheads to Enfield revolvers.

  “I’ve never seen you so badly misread a situation before,” Flint continued.

  “Yes, well, sorry about that.”

  “You allowed a personal relationship to interfere with your judgment.”

  “Yes, thank you, I rogered the pooch. I get that. Shall we move on? What do you want to do about Siraj?”

  “Nothing yet. Let’s observe for a little while. You’re in a unique position to do that.”

  “Yes, to think it was me—well, Bahir—that put the son of a bitch in power.�
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  “He’s still better than the Nur, or Abdul-Alim.” Flint shifted the papers and studied another section for a long moment. “Interesting that he named a caliph and didn’t take the title for himself.”

  “He’s not such a fool. He can never be sufficiently ardent for the fundamentalists, and he can wring our nuts more effectively if he’s perceived as a secularist.” Noel hesitated, and the memory of Straight Arrow’s condescension replayed for a gut-tightening instant. He knew it was childish of him, but he wanted to have one small thing about which to crow when next he met his American cousins. “Are we going to take credit for rescuing the secretary-general?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But I don’t know if I ought to let you take the bow.”

  “But you will.” Noel added just a bit of wheedle to make it less demanding.

  Flint sighed. “You got the poor bastard kidnapped in the first place. I do wish you’d stop improvising.”

  “I get results.”

  “Just not always the ones we expect.”

  “Touche. What do we do about Fortune and these baby aces?”

  Flint snapped his fingers and watched the flame dance briefly on his fingertips. “Have you any suggestions?”

  “Is this you setting up for plausible deniability, or do you honestly want my opinion?”

  “You’ve been around these children. I expect your insights are better than my own.”

  “Then let me have a presence in all camps. Bahir with Siraj. Noel can continue to liaise with the Yanks. And Lilith can join their little club. Lohengrin will forgive her if she asks prettily enough. After that I’ll just …” he flashed Flint a smile, “… improvise.”

  Flint snorted to cover his amusement. He pointedly pulled out another file. “Keep me informed,” he said, without looking up.

  Noel let his body shift. Felt the whisper of Lilith’s long hair across his hips. Soon he would measure his dark against Curveball’s gold, and find out if John Fortune really was a hero.

  He doubted it.

  Looking for Jetboy: Epilog

  Michael Cassutt

  THE LAST DAY OF American Hero begins with the phone chittering in Jamal Norwood’s apartment in Sherman Oaks. It is Eryka, the cute female production assistant who replaced John Fortune—“Hi, Stuntman! We’re picking you up at nine A.M.!”

  Jamal blinks, not sure what time it is, where he is. “I’ll be ready,” he mumbles, or something close to that.

  Showered, somewhat fed, Jamal finds himself on Moorpark Street, waiting for the American Hero Humvee. Today is to be the last challenge. Today is to be the big live broadcast. What will he be tomorrow? Winner of American Hero? A million dollars richer?

  Or the answer to the trivia question, “Whatever happened to the ace who came in second?” At this moment, he wishes the earth would open up and swallow him.

  Stuntman has had zero contact with Rosa Loteria since the penultimate vote that named them the Terrible Two. As he follows Eryka into the gym of Carpenter Avenue School, he sees Rosa arriving with her escort at the same time. She actually smiles and offers a toss of the head by way of greeting. In fact, as they find themselves waiting at the entrance, she says, “Do you have any idea what this is all about?”

  “None,” Jamal says. “Which means this is no different than any other day on this show.” And she laughs.

  Peregrine and a camera crew are in the auditorium, along with three hundred grade-school kids who go wild when the aces enter. Jamal and Rosa look at each other with what the hell? faces. “You’ve seen them for the past couple of months! Now, here they are, the two finalists for American Hero, Stuntman and Rosa Loteria!”

  And the applause grows even louder. The kids seem genuinely happy to be in the presence of real, live aces. As they climb up to the stage, Rosa says, “They must have us mixed up with the ones who went to Egypt.”

  And what appeared to be a long day looks to be even longer.

  While Jamal bounced back from the penultimate challenge, all hell had broken loose in the Middle East with the former Discards from American Hero making actual history, while Stuntman, Gardener, Jetman, Tiffani, Rosa Loteria, and the others were nothing but tabloid fodder.

  Then came the visit with Mom and Big Bill Norwood.

  His parents still lived in Baldwin Hills; not in the same house Jamal grew up in, rather, in a two-bedroom condo a few miles away. It was another dislocation that made Jamal feel as though he were visiting strangers.

  His mother fussed more than usual, proud to have a celebrity in the family. More precisely, a wild card celebrity. “It was so strange to see you … being hurt like that!” Mom had never really accepted Jamal’s wild card. “You didn’t have it as a child!” she had protested the first time he gave his parents a demonstration of Stuntman’s powers. (Okay, maybe he was showing off, leaping from the fourth-floor roof of their condo building and going splat on the parking lot below.) But Jamal’s appearance on television—the sort of thing the neighbors could see—somehow made his condition more real to her. Being an American Hero made it okay for Jamal Norwood to be an ace in his own home.

  That was Mom, of course. Big Bill Norwood was a whole different matter. When Jamal entered, Big Bill was in his easy chair, remote in hand, detached. He nodded a response to Jamal’s greeting, then let his eyes flick back toward a basketball game. (It always amazed Jamal that his father could follow four sporting events simultaneously on television, but couldn’t sustain a conversation longer than a few sentences.)

  “Mom says you saw the show,” Jamal said, knowing there was no reason to postpone the inevitable conflict.

  Big Bill grunted. “Yep.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Seemed kind of dumb to me.”

  Jamal felt stung. He pointed a finger at the TV screen. “Dumber than Division III girls’ volleyball?”

  Then Big Bill did a surprising thing. He clicked off the TV and set down the remote. “Yes, your show is dumber than those girls, because no one’s setting up phony challenges to make them look like fools.”

  “You think I look like a fool?”

  “Bill.” That was Mom, using her warning voice.

  “You know what you are, Jamal.”

  That hadn’t been the end of the visit, of course. Visits with Mom and Big Bill never had dramatic endings, they always faded out like a song that goes on too long. It was one low point in a season of low points … as Jamal did, indeed, find himself being recognized… as he wished he had never signed up for the program in the first place.

  The second phase of the final challenge takes Stuntman and Rosa to the Los Angeles Police Department’s training academy for a challenge that turns out to be a photo op. Peregrine explains that this challenge is designed to show how Stuntman or Rosa—whoever wins—can relate to law enforcement. “After all,” she says, “no matter how easily you crush crime in your new city, you’re going to be dealing with cops.”

  Stuntman and Rosa, the two L.A. natives, both laugh out loud at this. “As if either of us would leave L.A.,” Rosa says.

  “As if either of us would get anything but shit from the LAPD,” Jamal says. He finds himself liking Rosa for the first time. Well, they are in this thing together.

  Here, at the Academy, at least, the aces get to be aces. Their challenge is to simply race through a modified version of the LAPD obstacle course—along with a group of LAPD rookies. Rosa is especially good at this, pulling one card after another out of her sleeve. One second she’s El Valiente, beating the department’s hand-to-hand combat instructor, the next she is La Bandera, leading her squad of rookies up the last hill. Stuntman simply has to hump it, running, climbing, and jumping like the other nats, though he is able to take a beating from the hand-to-hand instructor without breaking a sweat.

  The whole event is merely to create footage, not to prove anything. “Where the hell are we going now?” Jamal asks Eryka. He is in low-level bounceback, panting, bent over, cranky.

&n
bsp; “Network Center on Beverly. It’s the broadcast.”

  The biggest challenge of all.

  Jamal and Rosa travel in separate Humvees that are directed to different entrances. Jamal emerges, with Eryka, at the door normally used by the network staff. He sees no cameras, no fans. The parking lot is full, but the stark hallway is empty, as if quarantined. Jamal is quick-marched from a well-tit passage through one turn, then another, to cold, shadowed steps, emerging several floors down, in what would—in any city other than Los Angeles—be called a basement.

  He is left in a dressing room used by actors on the network’s soaps, complete with chairs for makeup, the usual mirrors, a decrepit couch. The only sign that anyone has been here for days, possibly weeks, is a basket of fresh goodies—more than six people could consume. Typical for television.

  Jamal has barely collapsed on the couch when he hears, “There you are!” His agent, Dyan, is in the doorway to the Green Room. A large, enthusiastic, essentially ineffective woman, she is nevertheless a welcome sight, given the circumstances. “Aren’t you excited?”

  “Trying to be.”

  Dyan tilts her head, like a schoolteacher with a mischievous student. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Where’s Rosa? What’s going on?”

  “She’s in another dressing room,” Michael Berman announces as he enters. “We thought it was better to keep you apart.”

  “Are we supposed to be fighting?”

  “It would help.” Berman’s voice is bitter, even by the standards of a network executive.

  “We’ll do what we can, Mike. What is the last challenge, anyway?”

  “If I had to give it a title, it would be ‘Facing the Music.’ “ Berman does not hide his juvenile satisfaction at this.

  Jamal looks at Dyan: no help there, none expected. “Which tells me nothing.”

  “You’ll find out everything you need to know in fifteen minutes.”

  “Too bad the challenge isn’t to rescue your ratings.”