A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  I wasn’t overwhelmed with gratitude.

  Then he grabbed the back of my neck. Somebody else, laughing, handed him a fresh cup of beer and he shoved it up against my lips. “Trink!” A painful squeeze on my neck accompanied the command. I started to yell and got beer slopped into my mouth.

  It wasn’t even good beer. Really, I’d expected better of Germany.

  I swallowed more than I wanted to before I managed to spit the cup out, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was truly disgusting beer – warm, too – and my gag reflex came to the rescue. The Somali released me and reeled back, cursing, as I covered him with recycled beer. Unfortunately, two other men had come up behind us and they grabbed my arms. I could hear Ben shouting somewhere behind me. His shouts were interrupted by a meaty smack and a noise like someone falling into a stack of chairs.

  Oh, hell.

  Why hadn’t he raised a shield before anybody hit him?

  I guess we were both kind of distracted. I should have ignited the grabby bastards’ pants with Riemann fire instead of reverting to my childhood style and trying to drive an elbow into the pit of one guy’s stomach while I kicked backward at the other one’s shins.

  Yeah. It never worked too well on Steve and Yanni, my brothers, either. Now these guys dragged me through an open door and shoved me down towards a mattress on the floor.

  That was their mistake.

  They let go of me with that shove, and I never reached the mattress. On the way down I gasped, “Brouwer,” and the bleak little room dissolved around me. I hit the sidewalk outside the party house and scrambled to my feet.

  “I recommend you teleport again,” said Mr. M. “Back to the hotel, for instance.”

  “Can’t leave Ben.” I reached down and drew Mr. M.’s long, sinuous prosthetic snake body out of my belt loops. “Besides, don’t you want to rout the enemy?”

  He curled across my shoulders, quivering with the joy of battle. Brilliant lights popped around the doorway with deafening bangs, while I filled my hands with stars and threw them at the heads of the men in the front room. Ben was staggering to his feet; I went up the steps, leaned in through the open door and grabbed his hand. “Come on, we have to get out of here!” A humming noise told me that Mr. M. had extended his cobra hood to deploy another of his augmentations. Ben reeled slightly as the edge of one of the turtle-mage’s focused ultrasonic beams caught him. I pulled, we went down the front steps backwards, and he landed on top of me. By an admirable exercise of will power, I did not vomit again.

  By the time we were back on our feet, Mr. M.’s ultrasonic weapons had reduced most of the partiers in the front room to a state like ours – staggering and nauseated. I said, “Brouwer,” again and the sedate brown calmness of our hotel room formed around us.

  Ah, that was “our” room as in mine and Lensky’s, of course. Ben may be my best friend, but I really prefer to share a room with my husband.

  At the moment, though, what I had was Ben, Mr. M., and a desperate need for a shower and clean clothes.

  “Go to your own room.” Ben still looked slightly dazed. I gave him a light shove and handed him Mr. M. before making for the bathroom to strip off my soiled clothes.

  They didn’t go, though. I could hear them talking at cross-purposes on the other side of the door.

  “I need more flash-bangs. And grenades!” That was Mr. M., always lobbying for an increase in the military budget.

  “If Harrison wanted to meet Somalis, there are plenty in Minneapolis,” Ben groused.

  “And one of my laser turrets is bent.”

  “Why did we have to come all the way to Germany?”

  “Ben, you know why,” I yelled while waiting for the water to warm up. “He isn’t looking for Somalis, he’s looking for the terrorists who organized the bombing.”

  “Fine, based on tonight’s events I’m betting on that Somali group. What are they called? Al Sha- something?”

  “Me too, but I’ll go back around dawn and plant some bugs. Then we can find out for sure.”

  “You’re not going back to that house!”

  The water had gone from frigid to temperate. That might be the best I was going to get. I jumped in the shower and yelled, “Can’t hear you when the water’s running!” before shutting the stall door and getting down to the serious business of removing beer and worse substances.

  A moment later the hot water came on, full force. I screamed, groped for the faucet, and adjusted the spray just in time to avoid getting scalded. Thereafter I concentrated on using the hotel’s generous supplies of shampoo, conditioner, body scrub and lotion. Arguing with Ben could wait; washing that party right out of my hair was serious business.

  In some respects Eden’s Paradise Inn outclassed this big Frankfurt hotel. There was plenty of scented stuff to splash on myself, but nothing to wrap up in afterwards except a thin white towel that was, frankly, not as big as it might have been. Even I found it difficult to pull the skimpy towel around myself and tuck in the ends. Oh well, at least this time I would have clean clothes to change into.

  When I stepped out of the shower, Ben was gone. In his place was my husband, looking less than thrilled to see me.

  “Oh! I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”

  Lensky sighed. “Thalia. Do you try to phrase things in the way that makes you look most guilty, or do the words just pop out of your mouth like that?”

  “Must be Door No. 2,” I said cheerfully, “because I certainly don’t feel guilty.” On the contrary, I felt extremely chipper. That shower had been my Ruby Ridge – no, my Rubicon. If that’s what I mean? Neatly dividing my evening. On the pre-shower side there’d been the attempted-rape party, bad beer, and Ben blathering on about Somalis. Post-shower, I’d replaced the refugee party house with a nice clean hotel room and Ben with Lensky. Things were looking up all over, seemed to me.

  Lensky sighed again, even more deeply. “Did you set this up just to test my trust in you?”

  “Set what up?”

  “Come on, you can’t be that oblivious to the way it looks!”

  A very narrow ray of light began to dawn, and I suspected I was not going to like what it illuminated. “Brad, are you suffering from your thing about me and Ben again? And what set you off this time?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I come back to the hotel early, leaving Steve and his old boss to their reunion. When I walk into our hotel room, who should be there but your buddy Ben, looking the worse for wear and smelling of cheap beer.”

  “Well, that’s not my fault. I told him to go back to his own room, but he wanted to stay and argue about Somalis.”

  “Wait, it gets even worse. After Ben jumps six inches and vanishes, leaving nothing behind but the memory of his shifty expression, I discover that my wife is here too. Only she is stark naked.”

  “You expect me to shower in my clothes?”

  “No, but you might think twice about stripping down and jumping in the shower when the only other person in the hotel room is the man you’re not married to.”

  “That’s imprecise,” I pointed out. “There are actually quite a lot of men I’m not married to.”

  “Stop interrupting, I’m not done yet. When my blushing bride comes out, wearing nothing but an overabundance of floral perfumes and the skimpiest towel ever manufactured – are you sure that thing isn’t an oversized washcloth? — her surprise at seeing me instead of Ben is abundantly clear. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back so soon,’” he quoted through clenched teeth. “Good of you to admit it! Were you planning to entertain Ben in your present costume?”

  Okay, now I could see clearly, and I was right: I didn’t like the view. Were we doomed to keep having this fight forever? Damn the man.

  “You sick, paranoid son of a bitch! I wasn’t expecting to see anybody in this room, I just wanted to grab some clean clothes. Don’t you ever wait to find out what’s happening before jumping to conclusions?” For punctuation, I threw my hairbrush at him.
It hit a framed picture of the Brandenburg Gate.

  “Not when the conclusions might as well be painted on the wall in letters a foot high!”

  There was a half-full water glass on the table. This time I had better aim, but the man caught it. At least his shirt got wet. “For a professional collector of information, you suck at interpreting it! If you couldn’t trust me any better than that, why did you marry me?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder that myself!”

  Ohhh! That was unforgiveable – and I was running out of things to throw. Even the lamp was bolted to the bedside table. I tried to hit him, but he intercepted my fist without even blinking. And, of course, the towel fell off. I tried to jerk free of his grasp to retrieve it, but he put his free hand on my waist and pulled me to him.

  “Let me go, dammit! I’ve been mauled enough tonight!”

  He dropped his hands and stepped back. “So Ben was coming on to you.”

  “He was not. Never has, never will. And you are a damned fool!”

  “Not,” he said between his teeth, “fool enough to let the best thing in my life slip away without even putting up a fight. I’m the man you did marry, remember? Or do I need to refresh your memory?”

  “Put it down to youthful folly,” I said, my own teeth gritted now. “I’ll be only too happy to give you your freedom.”

  “That’s not what I want from you, and you know it. Thalia… doesn’t it ever occur to you that Ben might get the wrong idea when you’re so casual with him?”

  I relaxed slightly. “No. Honestly, Ben’s quite harmless.”

  “I understand he cut quite a swathe through the girls before he settled down with Annelise.”

  “Yes, but not with me. Ben and I do math together, not silly flirtation games.”

  Lensky looked as though I’d just slapped his face – which might have been a risk a couple of minutes ago, but not now. “I can’t do math with you.”

  Oh, right. Another perennial sore point with no basis in reality. He wasn’t a mathematician. That was fine with me, but he was insecure about it.

  I moved forward and put my hands on his shoulders. “Oddly enough, mathematics is not anywhere near the top of my list of things I’d like to do with you.”

  He put his own hands on my waist. “Oh? Well, I can think of some alternatives…”

  I would like to make it clear, right now, that I do not approve of settling a fight by jumping into bed. Sex should be a matter of mutual consent, mutual respect, and… and… well, anyway. Certain of Brad’s qualities commanded respect regardless of how furious I might have been at him to begin with.

  Passion, for example. Focus. And let’s not forget stamina.

  By the time the non-verbal part of the debate was over, I was feeling much too good to stay mad.

  “Brad?” I said when my breathing was more or less back to normal.

  “Mmm?”

  “You didn’t really think that Ben and I…?”

  “I guess not. It just, just scares me whenever I think that you might trade me in for a mathematician.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  He chuckled. “You displayed a very reassuring degree of enthusiasm just now. Especially when you did that thing where you —”

  “Yes, well, never mind that now.” I could feel the blush rising to my cheeks.

  “Mind? It’ll be among my most cherished memories of all time. The way you—"

  “If you don’t shut up,” I threatened, “I’ll never do it again.”

  “Bet I can change your mind about that.”

  “Oh, stop gloating and tell me you’re over your thing about Ben!”

  Lensky put his hands behind his head and stretched out on the bed. I tried not to drool. All that toned flesh and taut muscle, unwrapped just for me; it was amazing I could keep my head well enough to carry on a conversation. “I suppose so. It’s just – look, you do keep appearing in juxtaposition with Ben, water, and inadequate clothing. Happens every few months. And when you say stuff like, ‘I didn’t expect you back so soon,’ what construction do you expect me to put on that statement in those circumstances?”

  “That I didn’t expect you back so soon, and that the circumstances have a perfectly innocent explanation which you would have heard already if you hadn’t staged that paranoid freak-out.”

  “So? Explain it to me now.”

  I didn’t get more than halfway through describing the party before Lensky started to get agitated again. He really doesn’t like it when I do even slightly risky things without clearing it with him, and I have to admit that this excursion had gone some way past ‘slightly risky.’ All the same, I hadn’t been as helpless as the nice German girls our hosts were probably used to—

  “Girls who, unlike you, had better sense than to go to a party in a house full of African and Arab migrants,” Lensky interrupted. “Don’t you know what’s happened to Germany’s rape statistics since they opened their borders to the Middle East and Africa?”

  “How would I? Unlike you, I don’t read Interpol crime statistics for fun. Nobody told me!”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “Yes, and Ben and I got out of the situation unharmed and I won’t repeat that mistake.”

  “So you’re not going to teleport in there later to place bugs for Harrison?”

  “Well… Ben and I are the only ones who can do that.”

  “Fine. Let Ben do it. You stay out of it.”

  I wasn’t okay with that proposition, because although Ben is a superb topologist, he does get rattled if things go south. Consider his failure to shield when the party started going bad. I tried to explain that to Lensky and he only got more agitated. I tried to calm him down and we got kind of sidetracked, to the point where I wound up doing that thing he liked so much again. With, all right, a certain amount of enthusiasm.

  “Told you I could change your mind about that,” he said afterwards.

  Hmm. Perhaps he was just slightly more subtle than I’d given him credit for?

  6. The Rightly Guided

  I bounced and jittered around in my seat as the plane came in to Mogadishu airport, trying to get a better look at the blue vista outside the window. “Is that the ocean?”

  “Well, duh. Mogadishu

  is a seaport, you know,” Ben said, as though anybody could be expected to know exactly where Mogadishu was.

  “So that’s the, the… Pacific Ocean?” That sounded wrong, but I couldn’t think why. It couldn’t possibly be the Atlantic, could it?

  “The Indian Ocean,” Lensky said. “Somalia is on the east coast of Africa.”

  I thought that over. “Then how come it’s not the African Ocean?”

  “It just isn’t, okay? Don’t you know any geography, Thalia?”

  “Not much. Mrs. Vasiliu.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sixth grade,” I explained. “I am lousy at drawing maps, so every time she started a geography lesson I asked her something about Romania. She got out just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and she could rant about the abuses of the Ceausescu regime for hours.”

  Lensky shook his head. “You have the craziest explanations for things. Just quit bouncing around for a few minutes, okay? Once we’re safely on the ground I’ll show you a map of the region.”

  We would probably have been more comfortable in a civilian aircraft. The only trouble is, it turns out that getting from Frankfurt to Mogadishu by commercial flights can take 40 to 50 hours, with plane changes at places like Istanbul and Djibouti. (With a menu of options like that, you really can’t blame me for being geographically confused.) Harrison had pulled strings to get Ben, Lensky and me on a military flight delivering supplies to the CIA compound in Mogadishu. The only seats were arrangements of metal tubes and webbing that folded out from the walls, and there weren’t any complimentary drinks. But it did cut our travel time down to nine hours. Lensky was very happy with the arrangement; it meant he didn’t have to negotiate with airline
security people about keeping his Glock.

  I was reasonably happy too, because Brad had actually managed to persuade Steve Harrison to return to Langley instead of looming over us and jittering all over every move we made. His arguments had been one, that if Steve had been specifically targeted by their taking his kid then he was the last person who should be exposing himself to al-Shabaab in Mogadishu; and two, that Steve needed to be back in Langley to manage the response to ransom demands, in case there were any. I think the second argument had weighed somewhat with Harrison, the first not at all. I was just glad Harrison hadn’t thought of the possibility that al-Shabaab would demand he trade himself for Sam. He would have agreed in a heartbeat.

  It was a major disappointment to learn that we weren’t going to be staying at a hotel on the beach. We weren’t even going to get out of the Green Zone.

  “I thought the Green Zone was in Baghdad,” I grumbled. Not that Baghdad would have been all bad; I was sure Mr. M. would enjoy revisiting his homeland. (Babylon is near Baghdad, right? Ben and Lensky are rapidly destroying my faith that I know any geography whatsoever.)

  “Well, there’s one here too,” Lensky said brusquely. “It was named for the one in Baghdad.”

  Who knew?

  “And can we go anywhere we like inside this Green Zone?”

  “Sure!”

  That sounded a little better. “Ok, so what are the boundaries?”

  “The airport.”

  “Right, I actually did figure out that the airport had to be inside the Green Zone. What else?”

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “The airport?”

  “Has a fortified perimeter, and you and Ben will remain inside it.”

  “Can’t we even go to this CIA compound you were talking about?”

  “Oh, sure. That’s where we’re staying. It’s inside the airport perimeter and they’ve got their own hangars, so we’ll land there and go straight to the compound.”