Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  “Yeah, you’re right, Gary” he said, actually taking the gun out of Mark’s face. “We’re supposed to take good care of the little lady, after all. Not subject her to the sight of spilled brains.”

  “You can knock off the condescending sexist crap,” Carlysle said.

  Lynn laughed and tucked his piece out of sight beneath the windbreaker he was wearing today. They were driving southeast away from Leyden Square, along the Lijnbaansgracht. Trees and colorful moored houseboats ticked past.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” Mark said.

  “Jesus,” Lynn said, and turned away.

  “Go ahead,” his partner said. “You’ll have to clean it up.

  “Wait. My arm. My left arm hurts. Like, what’d you guys do —”

  He slammed his right hand against his sternum and doubled over.

  Lynn came around in his seat. “What? What the fuck?”

  “Hey!” Gary said, holding up a hand to try to keep his partner under control. “Hey, knock that shit off.”

  Mark uncurled a little. “My — my chest. Aaah!”

  “Wait!” Carlysle cried, veering a little. “You don’t understand. Nausea, pains in the arm — he’s having a heart attack, dammit!”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Agent Gary said. He pulled Mark upright.

  “Hey,” the blond agent exclaimed. “He put something in his mouth!” His hand went under his sport coat.

  Mark grabbed the coat by the collar and yanked it desperately down Agent Gary’s back to his elbows, effectively pinning his arms. He changed.

  The blond agent cried out in surprised fear as Mark’s skinny body expanded, filling the slope-roofed rear of the Citroën. Helen Carlysle looked up to her rearview, saw an immense gray-skinned man crushing Gary against the side of the car, and crashed into a Daihatsu parked facing the canal.

  The gray man reared up, crashing up through the tinted-glass fastback. He climbed out of the now-stationary car with a squeal of tearing metal, dragging the terrified Gary with him.

  Lynn had his Scorpion out and leveled across the back of the passenger seat. Carlysle knocked its barrel up in the air. “Don’t shoot! You’ll hit Hamilton!”

  The gray man was backing away, dragging the agent with him as a bullet shield. He was big and muscular in a furniture-mover way. His skin was shiny. He wore what looked like gray Speedo racing trunks. His nose and ears were small, and there was no hair visible anywhere on his face or body.

  Spitting curses like a cat in a sack, Lynn pulled the lever on his door, kicked it open when it balked. He jumped out on the sidewalk with his Scorpion up in a two-handed Weaver stance.

  His partner recovered his senses enough to scream, “Don’t shoot!”

  Realizing that the dark-haired agent was going to shoot anyway, the gray-skinned man turned and lunged for the canal, still holding onto Gary’s coat. The seams gave way, leaving the agent standing there in just the sleeves as his erstwhile captor, still clutching the jacket’s torso, turned and launched himself in a racing dive.

  As he did, he shifted again. What hit the greasy green surface of the Lijnbaan canal was the sleek, gray form of a Tursiops truncatus.

  The passengers of a red-and-white canal tour boat crowded against its glass wall to point and mouth at the spectacle of the dolphin streaking past with a vest of some sort draped over its rostrum. Then they tumbled over each other as bullets from Lynn’s machine pistol stippled the water’s surface like hail.

  The Scorpion ran dry. For a moment Saxon stood on the brick embankment, yanking the trigger so furiously that the weapon bobbed in his hands, as if he were a kid pretending to fire a toy gun. Its pilot hugging the deck beside his passengers, the tour boat ran into a moored houseboat with a bump and grinding crunch.

  Gary Hamilton was wandering in a tight if irregular little circle. A trail of blood ran down the side of his broad, square face from a cut in his forehead. He made small gestures with his hands and talked to himself.

  Helen Carlysle was out of the car, showy vast cape swirling about her, staring in white-faced fury at the front bumper of the Citroën, which was well and truly locked with the yellow Japanese compact.

  A black Mercedes glided to a halt behind the Citroën. The driver opened his door and stood up behind it. J. Robert Belew regarded Carlysle through Ray-Ban aviator shades.

  “Another screw-up,” he said. Mistral threw her hands up from her sides.

  Sirens were beginning to burble in the background.

  “Tell Crockett and Tubbs to hustle their hinder parts into the car. If the Dutch pin this one on them, George Bush himself won’t be able to get ’em out of stir in this millennium.

  “Oh — from now on you can consider this a Langley operation. And that’s official.”

  It was a little suburb strung along the Amstel River somewhere south of town. Mark sat on the grassy banks with his knees up and his head down and spent some quality time just dripping and breathing.

  After a phase-shift between one of his “friends” — the ace personas his color-coded powders summoned — and plain-vanilla Mark, his thoughts tended to fragment like a frightened school of fish. It took time for them to coalesce.

  Why did I come to this hot, heavy world? was his first coherent thought. On Takis I was a hero, a prince. I had Tis, and safety, and Roxalana.

  But Sprout wasn’t on Takis. Even if she didn’t seem a whole lot closer, right this minute.

  He picked up the do-it-yourself vest Aquarius’s ace strength had made out of Agent Gary’s coat. He wasn’t at all sure why the shape-changer had hung on to it; usually Aquarius felt total disdain for material things, particularly manmade ones.

  In his dolphin form Aquarius wasn’t fully human in intelligence, in any sense of the word; the processing power of his brain was largely used up by the environmental interface, hearing and taste and sonar-sense, the orientation of self in four dimensions: up/down, left/right, forward/back, flow. Dolphin-Aquarius was a more truly alien creature than any Takisian. At two removes from baseline Mark, as it were, it was difficult to discern his motives. It was tough enough making sense of his memories, incredibly sensual and rich but incomprehensible, like watching a Kurosawa film in Japanese.

  Mark suspected the reason Aquarius had hung on to the jacket during his high-speed swim through the canals of Amsterdam to the river was that the thing was stuck on his snout.

  There was nothing in the outer pockets but two rubbers and a pair of sodden ticket stubs to WWF wrestling in Madison Square Garden. The inside breast pocket rang all the bells. There was a passport in the name of Hamilton, Gary A.; a case of business cards, soaked beyond recovers identifying Hamilton as a marketing associate for Pepsico — weren’t they big Nixon contributors, way back when? — and a billfold.

  Mark opened the billfold. There was two hundred and twenty-three dollars cash, Hamilton’s Ohio driver’s license — he’d been born in Youngstown in 1963 — and one American Express Gold Card.

  Mark ran his tongue slowly over his lips, which felt dry in spite of his having just climbed out of the river. He was aware that he’d lit the FREE GAME light on the pinball machine.

  Everything depended on how he played this one. His life, his freedom, his chance of seeing Sprout again. Everything.

  He buttoned the wallet carefully in the back pocket of his khaki pants, walked to the quiet, tree-shaded street, and stuck out his thumb.

  “This is Captain Leeuwebek,” the overhead speaker announced. “We will shortly be landing at Rome International Airport. The sun is shining, and the temperature is a pleasant twenty-one degrees. We will be remaining on the ground for forty-five minutes for routine maintenance before continuing on to Beirut. If you choose to leave the aircraft, please make sure the placard that reads, ’Occupied,’ is displayed on your seat. Thank you for flying KLM.”

  The tall man seated over the wing of the big Airbus accepted a final complimentary glass of orange juice from the strikingly pretty Indonesian flight
attendant. She let her eyes linger on him before traveling on. Like most humans, she had a fascination for the different, and he certainly qualified. He was at least half a meter taller than she was, for one thing, his unbelievably long frame encased in an obviously expensive three-piece suit, navy with an old-gold pinstripe. His features had that exotic Northern European sharpness; his hair was yellow, gathered into a neat little upwardly mobile ponytail at the nape of his neck. Most of all she liked his eyes; they were the blue of the noon sky over the Savu Sea, and they danced with what seemed genuine pleasure behind the thick round lenses of his glasses.

  He was obviously a wealthy and important man. Perhaps he was a Wall Street stockbroker who would soon be indicted for a crime. She didn’t quite understand the current American fascination for turning their most successful citizens into criminals while sympathizing publicly with those who refused to work; it smacked to her of certain religious practices on some of the wilder headhunter islands back home. Oh, well; Westerners were all crazy. But at least this one was cute.

  Mark Meadows looked quickly away from the flight attendant — you weren’t supposed to call them “stewardesses” anymore, and he tried to be scrupulous about that sort of thing — so she wouldn’t think he was forward. If she had told him pointblank what was on her mind, he would have thought she was trying to humor him, for some unknowable reason.

  He sipped his juice and watched the greasy yellow River Tiber wheel below. Beirut was the place for him; he was sure of it. American influence had waned substantially there the last twenty years. Though the Nur al-Allah fanatics had been making their presence known of late, it was still a favorite holiday resort for most of Europe and indeed the world. Surely the premier party city of Africa would be a tolerant place, the sort of place a lone American fugitive could drop quietly from view.

  Also, Lebanon had the laxest entry controls in the Med. The passport photo of young Agent Hamilton didn’t resemble Mark at all, but he figured all blond European types would look alike to Lebanese Customs. And no official body anywhere in the world looked too hard at a man in a suit and tie. Lucky Mark still remembered how to knot one.

  The wheels touched down with a bump and a squeal. Mark looked around eagerly in hopes of seeing ruins or rustic Italian peasants or something, but like all airports Rome was built in an area that was predominantly flat and open. Off in the distance he did see some hills clustered thickly with houses, some of which may have been villas or may have been big blocks of cardboard government housing; you couldn’t tell, through the thick ground-hugging layer of heatwave-stirred petrochemicals.

  The Airbus slowed and began to taxi toward the terminal. About two hundred meters shy of it the airplane stopped. The chief attendant came on the P.A. to announce that there would be a slight delay for the preceding flight to clear the gate.

  Mark’s eyelids began to gain weight as if Hiram Worchester were playing games with them. His chin dropped toward the knot of his tie.

  A change in the timbre of the conversation around him brought him abruptly back to himself. He blinked around, momentarily disoriented, and happened to look out the window two seats to his right.

  A little utility car pulling a baggage trailer was just coming to a stop forty meters from the plane. There was no baggage on the cart, but there were half a dozen men, who began to spill off before the vehicle fully stopped. They wore the white jumpsuits and earmuff-style hearing protectors common to airport ground crew the world over. But even Mark, naïve as he was, knew that the stubby little submachine guns with fore-and-aft pistol grips were not standard aircraft maintenance equipment.

  He unfastened his seatbelt, stood, and walked deliberately back toward the bathroom.

  When the Rome police department’s elite antiterrorist unit kicked in the door five minutes later, there was nobody inside.

  Chapter Six

  Lynn Saxon stormed from the bathroom as though washed out by the thunderous noise of the toilet flushing. “I can’t believe these Roman weenies let him slip through their fingers.”

  Gary Hamilton looked up from his Smith & Wesson FBI-special 10mm, which he had disassembled for cleaning on a copy of L’Osservatore Romano Belew had picked up at the airport. “What do you expect? They’re Italians.”

  Helen Carlysle stood outside the open sliding door by the balcony’s wrought-iron rail watching the sun dissolve into the brown, toxic cloud that squatted over the Roman hills like a Japanese movie monster. Her hips were canted, her wrists crossed meditatively at the small of her back. The muggy air that crowded in past her like kids back from school and billowed the skirt of her lightweight dusty blue-and-gray dress smelled of diesel fumes, cooling asphalt, and garlic fried in olive oil.

  “He’s an ace, after all,” she said, glancing back. “We didn’t do such a hot job holding on to him either.”

  “Big of you to admit it,” said Belew. He had his shoes off and his feet up on the bed. His hands were clasped behind his close-cropped head, and his eyes were closed; everyone had assumed he was asleep.

  “Let’s see you do better, big fella,” Saxon said. He sat down on a chair beside the table on which his partner worked, his butt barely seeming to touch the fabric, as if he were about to bounce right up again. He brushed his right nostril rapidly with his thumb, dropped his hand to his lap to tap his thigh with restless fingers.

  “Speaking of aces,” Belew said, “just what are you doing along on this expedition, Ms. Carlysle? I didn’t think the Governor had any use for aces.”

  “Fucking SCARE saddled us” Saxon began.

  “Hey, we’re not prejudiced or anything,” Hamilton said hurriedly. “The Director just believes the job can best be done by real people. I mean, normal people. I mean — oh, Jeez, Ms. Carlysle, I’m sorry.”

  “What dickwit means is that the Director thinks us nats can do the job just fine,” Saxon said sourly.

  Belew swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “I reckon I can rustle up some forms from the American embassy if you want to file a discrimination complaint against our little pal here,” he said to the woman. “They’re making insensitivity a crime, back in the world.”

  Helen turned with a tight, ironic smile. “Nobody seems to care much about insensitivity toward aces, Mr. Belew.”

  “I guess aces aren’t a fashionable minority,” he agreed, nodding affably to Hamilton, who was staring gape-mouthed at him and Helen alternately, trying to figure out if they were kidding.

  “In answer to your question, Mr. Belew, SCARE believed ace talents would come in handy in a hunt for America’s most prominent rogue ace. Director Martinez agreed. I’m a civilian contractor, much as you are yourself; my father is … was a personal acquaintance of Mr. Bennett.”

  “That’s no surprise. Old Vernon made it a point to be acquainted with everybody who turned up frequently on the CBS Evening News, with the possible exception of the Nur.”

  Her eyes flared. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I was unaware simple declarations of fact were required to mean anything, honey.” He stood up and walked over to the table where Hamilton was just fitting the slide back onto his piece.

  “You speak of insensitivity,” she said in a shaky voice. “I don’t think repeatedly throwing my father in toy face is very sensitive.”

  Hands in his pockets, he looked at her. “Don’t you think it’s time you came to terms with it?” he asked quietly.

  Color burned like slap marks on her cheeks. “What makes you think it’s any of your business —”

  “I don’t know why we had to come to this dump,” Saxon said loudly, flipping a hand at the Art Deco decor. The wallpaper was mauve above the molding. “It’s so fucking tacky, it hurts. Aren’t there any Hyatts in this town?”

  “This place has character, son,” Belew said. “There’s more to life than Big Macs and The Cosby Show.”

  He unfolded a map of the Mediterranean. “Right now we maybe ought to figure out where our
Dr. Meadows is going to be heading from here.”

  “He’s going to Beirut,” Hamilton blurted. He looked down at his hands, immediately aware he’d made a tactical mistake.

  “Yeah,” Saxon crowed. “That’s where he bought a ticket to on your credit card, Gary. He’s headed there on your passport. You’re his best friend, Gary.”

  “I think we can forget about Beirut at this point,” Belew said, picking up an ornate cigar cutter from the dresser. “At least as a near-term destination. He knows ifs blown.”

  “He didn’t realize we’d trace his route through Agent Hamilton’s credit card,” Carlysle pointed out, all business once again. “Why should he suddenly be so sophisticated as to realize we’re onto his destination?”

  “He’s a naïve son of a gun, I’ll give you that. But he’s behind the times, and as a consequence he’s still capable of doing something that’s currently out of fashion: learning.”

  “You’re sure a hell of an expert on this old fucking hippie,” Saxon said.

  “Son, I make it a point of knowing my enemy. You talk about it; it’s not just words to me. It’s kept me alive in places they’d have had your hide drying on a rock.”

  Outside, the sun had dissolved into bloody-looking drool. Saxon started to his feet, eyes crazy-mad. Hamilton got a big hand on his arm and held him in his chair by main force.

  “We’re running the problem through our computers in Washington,” Hamilton said. “We have a complete personality profile on Dr. Meadows. They’ll war-game the possibilities and give us some insight into where he’ll head from here.”

  “Fine,” Belew said. “We’ll let your pocket-protector brigade play their computer games. In the meantime, let’s try to get a handle on where our quarry is in the real world.” He snipped the end off his right forefinger.

  Saxon jerked back as blood squirted from Belew’s fingertip. The younger man’s face instantly drained of blood. “Jesus Christ!”