Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  He glanced at his watch. It was a throwaway digital with a plastic band he’d picked up at a vendor’s cart over by the Pnyx. It had a garish image of a little redheaded guy in a red-and-orange jogging suit leaping skyward on a blast of flame. It was from Taiwan, and was of course unlicensed. Mark smiled to himself; he got a kick out of it. It was the first watch he’d ever worn in his adult life, so it might as well be a souvenir of sorts.

  Time to meet a man. He stood up. His joints made rippling cracks, as if they were on ratchets. The satyrs watched him with secret grins. He gave them a thumbs-up and headed off to the northwest.

  Mark Meadows once went through a period of intense fascination with ancient Greece — this was during early pubescence, when his hormone — driven interest had been captured by visions of babe goddesses and nymphs in gauzy robes. He still remembered how shocked he was to discover, mainly between the lines, that a good many of those squeezes of old Zeus that astronomers were always naming moons of Jupiter after had been little boys.

  Aside from that, he recalled that after the Persians trashed Athens in 479 or so, the city had been rebuilt without any kind of plan. Most of the city these days was Apartment Bloc Generic, and the national government was giving its seat in the Syntagma district in the New Town a bulldozer makeover to bring it more in line with what a capital of the European Community should look like — Mark had the impression sometimes that this whole Unification trip was really just Mickey D’s writ even larger. But here in the Plaka the streets of old Athens were still narrow, twisty, and, given the way the Greeks drove, perilous.

  As evidence a big lorry with streaked white sides bearing lettering that was all Greek to him had come popping out of a side street and mashed one of those little slab-sided European subcompacts that look as if they’re built around a skateboard. The respective drivers were standing in a pothole waving arms and mustaches at one another. Mark squeezed the vial he had palmed a little tighter, sidestepped the argument, and sidled through the crowd that had gathered in hopes the two would come to blows.

  Here on the backside of the Acropolis where the tourists seldom went the buildings seemed to lean in various directions without being visibly off-true. Mark wondered if that were another example of the subtle architectural tricks the Greeks had used building the Parthenon, up on top of the hill. Façades were stucco that was showing a tendency to flake off in huge sheets and had probably been gaudy before it faded. The sky overhead was crisscrossed with clotheslines fluttering with laundry like those strings of plastic pennants that used to festoon gas stations along old Route 66 in the sixties — the early sixties, which were really just a continuation of the fifties. Immense chrome Japanese ghetto blasters vibrated on every third windowsill, further endangering the stucco with earsplitting noise that sounded like a cross between rap and belly-dance music. The occasional shop-front was boarded and graffitied; Greece was suffering another economic downturn, which Mark suspected had lasted since Alexander’s daddy, Philip, blew into town. Even the people who weren’t fighting seemed to communicate at the top of their lungs.

  He marveled at just how skuzzy it could be right up against your marvels-of-the-ancient-world. But you didn’t go looking to score drugs in the ritzier parts of town unless you happened to belong there. Since Mark didn’t look like Anthony Quinn, he manifestly did not.

  He looked around for his contact man, a gangly joker kid with green-seaweed hair and teeth even worse than the Greek norm. Jokers were generically less likely to blow you up to the authorities, no matter where you were. It wasn’t certain, but scoring proscribed pharmaceuticals was a percentage game.

  He took for granted that the odds were going to catch up with him fairly soon. From years of listening to counterculture scuttlebutt he knew that a favorite game of your petty dealers and pushers and hustlers in Third World countries — which Greece to all intents was — was to turn over the occasional foreigner. It kept the cops happy and bought a little leeway, without pissing off the local talent, the people you had to live with — and, more to the point, who knew where you slept.

  The nature of his purchases was odd enough to be worth a little extra slack. He wasn’t primarily interested in any of the local drugs of choice, not the ancient Mediterranean standby hash or grass, not smack — a favorite with your seagoing trade and not coke, still in demand by European and American tourists. He was shopping more for psychedelics. In a Med port as ancient and wicked as Athens, or anyway the appendix Piraeus, you could find anything, including acid and psilocybin. But it took time, and money, and made you conspicuous. Mark could not afford much of any of that.

  He had also had to blow a major piece of his dwindling roll on fine pharmaceutical scales. The Greek heat was not on the prod for drug labs in any extreme way; home-brewing synthetic dope was not yet a popular local pastime, what with the natural product so readily available. But the requisite equipment wasn’t easy to find, even in an age in which the digital revolution had made even precision scientific measuring equipment comparatively cheap and available. It was another datum, another mote of dust on a pile that would eventually bury him unless he moved quickly enough.

  A young woman attracted his attention, one of your occasional Grecian redheads, small and pretty, whose lethal Mediterranean Fat and Mustache Chromosome hadn’t kicked in yet. She reminded him of some of the women he had seen on Takis. She had such a sweet look that he doubted she actually knew what the English word SEX NINJA written in cursive glitter on the front of her T-shirt meant. He caught her eye, smiled, and nodded.

  She smiled back behind her big round shades. Then her jaw dropped, and she moved quickly away.

  Uh-oh, said one of the many voices available at the back of Mark’s head. He turned.

  The two debaters at the accident had opened a door of the squashed subcompact and were taking out Uzis. Their differences seemed to have resolved themselves.

  Chapter Eight

  So much for jokers not ratting to the pigs. He’d gotten so bad on Takis that he wasn’t even much disappointed in human nature.

  He looked back the way he’d been going. His two old friends from Amsterdam were just strolling into view in their pastel Mid-Eighties Casual Guy suits. “Hey, dude,” the dark one said, “what’s happening?”

  And then he yelled, “Hey!” for real. It was too late.

  Making the transition to one of Mark’s alter egos was like coming: the more recently it had happened in the past, the less violently it happened in the present. Back on the Rox when he had taken one of his powders for the first time in many months, he actually burst into flames, destroying the clothes he’d been wearing. This time, though, there were just a few mostly cinematic jets of fire as his molecules rearranged themselves.

  “Holy shit,” said the beefier narc, suitably impressed, “it’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash!”

  “It’s a gas-gas-gas,” J. J. Flash said with his patented devil’s grin. And a big blast of wind knocked him ass-over-ears into the front of a building.

  “Well, shit,” he said, trying to stand. “This is getting to be a regular drag.”

  The last word was sucked away by a miniature tornado, a howling vortex that buffeted him like the wings of angry eagles. J. J. sat down hard. He’d spotted her now, standing across the street in her blue-and-silver uniform with the silly-ass cape, hands on her hips, a smug smile on her ice-princess face.

  He could take care of that in a hurry. He rolled a hand open and sent a nice hot spike of plasma her way. She dodged, and the striped awning of a tobacco shop that had somehow survived the current depression puffed into flame.

  The wind went away. Without standing up he shot a blast between the two Greek narcs who were standing with their guns and jaws hanging slack, right at where he figured the subcompact’s gas tank to be. It blew up and sent the Greeks running.

  A sound like firecrackers right over his head. Dust stung his scalp as a burst of 7.65mm gouged the front of the building. There was Agent Saxon, so
loing on Scorpion again. He really seemed to love that thing.

  J. J. pointed a finger at him. “You,” he said, “go away.” A line of fire leaped out. Saxon pirouetted like a bullfighter. He’s been putting in his time in the gym, anyway. J. J. thought, gotta give him that.

  Saxon had not pissed J. J. Flash off enough to burn a hole right through him. Yet. The relatively cool jet caught a corner of the dodging agent’s off-white sport jacket. The polyester blazed up nicely. That gave Saxon something to think about other than endangering the public, which was all J. J. had in mind.

  Wind hit J. J. like a fist, cracking his head back against the storefront. It struck again and again with a sound like a snapping spinnaker, jackhammering his ribs and face.

  “I handled Fireball, J. J.,” Mistral called to him. “I can handle you.”

  Rage blazed white inside him. Fireball was a serial killer Mistral had apprehended in Cincinnati, live on global TV thanks to Daddy’s infallible headline-hunting instincts. He had been thrown in J. J. Flash’s face once already this incarnation: in court in New York, when Kimberly Anne’s attorney St. John Latham had flashed pictures of one of the psychopath’s victims, an adolescent girl, horribly charred. The implication was that J. J. Flash, as one of Mark’s friends — no one but Dr. Tachyon knew, then, that the relationship was rather more intimate — might inflict such a fate on Mark’s daughter, accidentally or otherwise. The suggestion that he might harm Sprout in any way had burned like a cancer for all the months of J. J.’s captivity in the back of Mark’s mind.

  Inadvertently Mistral had punched a very bad button. “Where are you, bitch?” J. J. gasped. He battled upright. The wind came back at him, pummeled him against the wall. He looked around desperately. She had to be somewhere she could see him; like most ace powers, hers were strictly line-of-sight. That meant he could see her…

  There. Up the block, crouched behind a low stone wall. He gathered up the rage into a big ball of fire and just bowled it at her.

  Mistral ducked. The wind stopped. The fireball hit the wall, flash-heating stones, shattering them. The wall blew up, knocking Mistral backward, stunned and bruised.

  More gunfire, again badly aimed. J. J. jumped into the air. Agent Hamilton had his partner on the cobblestones rolled up in his coat; Saxon was only smoldering a little, though he was bitching loud enough that you’d think he had third-degree burns over half his body. More Greeks with guns had appeared on the scene, or at least revealed themselves. One of them was just nerving himself enough to spray the sky with bullets.

  “Everywhere I go, people shoot at me,” J. J. complained to the air. “I could get a complex.”

  Instead he split, streaking off up the flank of the big hill. At the top he swung low, scattering Nips with Nikons, and then fancied he could hear the shutters clicking like a cicada chorus behind him. He gave a rebel yell for the benefit of those with camcorders.

  He’d always wanted to fly slalom through the pillars of the Parthenon. At least it felt as if he’d always wanted to, like a lot of his whims. Instead a big wind hit him from behind and somersaulted him into the frieze, second centaur to the left.

  “Ow! Fuck.” He plummeted toward the cracked marble steps, recovered just in time, darted into the ruined temple, cracking his hip on some scaffolding and toppling a hapless laborer off his platform.

  “Be sure and sue the United States government,” he called back over his shoulder as he flew between colonnade and interior wall. Talking felt like driving nails through the right side of his ribs. He wondered if he’d cracked some.

  Mistral appeared, flying parallel to Flash outside the Parthenon with her arms outstretched like some goddam little girl playing airplane. Her cape billowed like a parachute. A side-blast of wind slammed him up against the wall. He fell to the floor, rolled. He was a small and acrobatic man, but he made a poor landing.

  He did manage to get to his feet rapidly and fire a jet of flame at his tormentor. She dodged, laughing, dropped to the block-littered ground.

  Mistral gestured. J. J. Flash ducked behind a pillar. She laughed again, high and clear and malicious as a glass razor.

  A wind began to blow through the Parthenon. Yellow film wrappers skittered over the blocks. J. J. leaned out and shot a blast down at her from his palm.

  It veered away from Mistral, dissipated in the air. J. J. blinked. He’d been known to miss, but he’d never had his fire-blasts wander off course on their own.

  He fired again. The same thing happened. Mistral showed her teeth in a grin. The bitch was deflecting his fire-blasts with her damned winds.

  The wind began to blow again along the colonnade, rising abruptly to a howling gale. J. J. dug his fingers into the pillar’s fluting. He shot fire, hoping Mistral couldn’t parry and keep up the hurricane at the same time.

  She ducked. Flame splashed a toppled segment of column. The ancient stone discolored, took on a different texture. He recalled that heat damaged marble, degraded it into plain old limestone or something — Mark would know. Great. All I need. I’m going to get “defacing ancient monuments” added to my rap sheet.

  A solid-seeming blast hit him in the face, threw him back into the inner wall. The transverse wind started again, and this time it picked him up and rolled him along like a tumbleweed.

  As he bounced between pillars and wall, it occurred to him he wasn’t making a very good showing. J. J. Flash was not a male chauvinist, but the thought of this spoiled super-WASP ace-baby ingénue kicking his butt was way too much to take.

  Mistral’s wind blew him right out the end of the colonnade and into space. Still ballistic in his fetal curl, he jetted flame at her. Mistral yelped, a musical sound. The wind stopped. J. J. extended and took off, banking to put the mass of the ancient pile between him and her. He flew low, dabbing with the back of a finger at the blood-trail streaming from his nose, ignoring shouts and pointing from the ground. Under most circumstances he’d showboat a little for onlookers this appreciative, maybe summon up a flame guitar, a Fender o’ Fire, and pretend to play it, always a crowd-pleaser.

  Right now he had other things to worry about, more pressing even than image … a downdraft forced him low, and he had to concentrate all his energy on quick, evasive flight to keep from going into the dome of an old Orthodox church. A quick glance back: Mistral, flying after him, overtaking him gradually. With her gaudy getup, he realized, he was in danger of being totally upstaged.

  “Jesus. This bimbo doesn’t give up.” He swiveled his head rapidly. He needed to scrape the wind-powered ace off his tail, and he wanted to do as little damage to the locals as possible in the process. That meant looking for a building higher than its surroundings, because flames propagate up.

  There. Two-story, up on a rocky hill with not much nearby: something that looked like a graveyard out back, a road winding up to the front. The structure looked to be your basic frame and flaking white stucco, with a balcony in front and bars on the windows. There was a loading bay in back, and men were hauling something long and rolled into the back of a panel truck. Looked like a carpet.

  Indeed. He streaked past the men, landed on the concrete dock. “Clear out, boys,” he commanded. “Your employer’s about to collect on his fire insurance.”

  The two workmen gaped at him with total lack of comprehension. J. J. smiled, and with a quick and deliberately noisy jet of flame fused the black pebbly soil at their feet into glass. That bridged the communications gap nicely. They lit off down the hill at a dead run, knocking over little fence-picket grave markers with plywood Greek crosses and plastic flowers on them as they ran.

  The second story seemed to run only along the front of the building; the back was two stories high, piled with rolled carpets. He flew up under the rafters, pulled a couple of carpets down, dropped them in front of the open bay. A palpable cloud of dust and mold blew up into his face, deceptively rich and golden in the backscatter afternoon light. J. J. felt his nose twitch. I stay here long, it’s gonna mean
one major asthma attack.

  He went storming into the front, screaming like a madman. Clerks in fezzes and a couple of customers browsing at carpets stacked on big tables looked up in alarm.

  “Out! Out!” he screamed. “Crazy Jewboy alert! Out!

  Aaauuuughhh!”

  With a quick puff of flame he melted the iron bars out of the upper half of the door that separated the area behind the counter from the display floor. A second blast burned through the waist-high wooden lower half. J. J. stepped through.

  Once again the language barrier had been surmounted. Customers and clerks went flying out of the building like frightened pigeons from a church, one bold soul pausing long enough to make a sign to ward the evil eye before he fled.

  Working with wild energy — he had a higher metabolism than a nat, to go with his hyper disposition — J. J. began pulling carpets off the tables and dumping them on the scuffed wood floor.

  After a moment he heard the expected challenge from outside: “I know you’re in there, J. J. Come out with your hands on your head.”

  “With my hands on my head?” he shouted back. “What, you think I’m in here with a Saturday Night Special in an ankle holster?”

  “You know what I mean, J. J. This can go easy, or it can go hard.”

  He mouthed the words along with her: This can go easy, or it can go hard, “You’ve been watching too many movies, babe.” He began to strew the office area with ledger books. “This isn’t Lethal Weapon III.”

  “Hear the sirens? The Greek police will be here in a few minutes. I promise you, J. J., it’ll be a lot easier on you if you come with me instead of waiting for them to take you.”