by David Stone
Fyke’s monitor beeped. His heart rate had spiked to over 100.
“What’s the matter, Ray? Should I get Miss Lopez?”
Fyke shook his head, his eyes closed.
“Guam? We’re going to Guam?”
“Yes.”
“Military?”
“Yes.”
“Mikey, they’re gonna rip me apart.”
Dalton, who knew exactly what Fyke meant, was silent. Fyke opened his eyes and looked across at Dalton, a wild glitter in his watery blue eyes.
“You know what I mean. I went dark, took a lot of stuff with me. In my head. They’re gonna want to know what I told the gooks. And I don’t even know what I told the gooks. Before they cut me. After that, I didn’t care what they did. No. Don’t say it. Lyin’ to a sick friend is a mortal sin. Thing is, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to know in the first place. Mikey, I don’t wanna go to Guam. Can you fix it so I don’t?”
“Ray, look at you. You need serious medical help. You need it stateside. Yeah, they’ll debrief you. That’ll be tough. But, in the meantime, you have to get stitched together. Healed—”
Fyke’s chest heaved under the sheets.
Dalton realized he was laughing.
“You don’t get healed from what the gooks did to me. I told you. They cut me. They fed my dick to a dog. Never liked those goddam Dobermans.”
“Ray, listen to me, nobody fed your dick to a dog.”
Fyke tried to sit up, fell back, his face bright red, his breathing shallow.
“I saw it done, Mikey. They used clamps to hold my eyes open. Cut my tackle off with a pair of shears!”
“They didn’t cut your dick off, Ray.”
“Did too, Mikey. I checked, and it was gone.”
Dalton stood up, walked over to the bed.
“Ray, can you sit up?”
“No. Leave me be. I’m not lookin’. I know the little soldier is AWOL.”
“I heard your dick was pitiful tiny. You might have missed it.”
Fyke gave him a sideways look.
“Who told you my dick was pitiful tiny?”
“When they buried Gordie Hughson in Arlington. You had your full Black Watch on. Your kilt blew up. Everybody in the Honor Guard saw it.”
“Shrinkage! That was shrinkage. It was the eighth of December! And there was a stone-cold wind, ripping in straight off the Potomac”
“Okay. Let’s find out. Can you sit up?”
A silence while Fyke thought that over
“I can if we do it slow.”
Dalton—slowly—gently—raised Fyke up into as much of a sitting position as he could stand. Pain was coming off the man like heat off a radiator, but he didn’t make a sound. Dalton pulled the sheet down all the way to the foot of the bed. Fyke had his eyes closed.
He was also holding his breath.
“Open your eyes, Ray.”
Fyke shook his head.
“No.”
“They drugged you, Ray. Gave you acid. Fucked with your head. Open your eyes.”
Fyke slowly opened one eye, looked down at his belly. Exhaled. The expression on his face would have been funny if Dalton hadn’t been so distracted by the damage that had been done to Fyke’s entire torso; he looked like a side of raw beef. Fyke opened his other eye, stared down for a time.
Then Dalton lowered him back.
Fyke was quiet for a while.
“Man. I could have sworn.”
“You’re all there, Fyke. For what it’s worth.”
“Everything’s the wrong color. Have I got gangrene?”
“You never kicked a man in the balls before?”
“Of course. But I never checked on his fooking pigmentation afterward. And you’re an unsympathetic git, Mikey. Always was.”
“I missed you too.”
They sat for a time in amiable silence. Whatever had been done to Fyke had not changed the essential man. He was still there. Fyke pressed a button that pumped up the morphine drip a notch. Gradually, his heart rate slowed down to a steady 75.
Time passed.
“Mikey . . . ?”
“Ray?”
“I’m not going to Guam.”
“No choice, Ray.”
“No. I’m not going to let the Meat Hook lads roast me over a pit at Anderson Field. I’ve had enough of being beat up. You got any money, Mikey?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Ill-gotten, I don’t doubt. Can you get me into a private hospital?”
“I’ll stay with you, Ray, all the way to—”
Cora. On a gurney, in Florence.
Fyke was shaking his head.
“They won’t let you. Soon as we get to Guam, they’ll peel you off, and down the rabbit hole I go. Have you got a pistol, then?”
“For what?”
“So I can shoot myself.”
“With those mitts on? Not bloody likely.”
Fyke raised his hands, stared at the mass of bandages, put his head back on the pillow, blowing air out through pursed lips.
“Christ. I’m a wreck, ain’t I?”
“You are, Ray. You are.”
“Will you shoot me, then? Give me the misery cord, like a good Christian lad? Let me go to my God like a soldier.”
“Nope. Won’t shoot you myself. Sorry.”
“Heartless bastard. Would you give a dyin’ man a cigarette, then?”
“You’re not dying.”
“I am too. Death is in this room, Mikey. I can smell it.”
“No it isn’t. Your bedpan needs changing”
“Well, give us a smoke, then!”
“Don’t have any.”
“You’re a lyin’ Sassenach dog. I can smell them on you.”
“I’ll give you one when we get to the airport.”
Silence, then, and Fyke’s cardiac monitor beeping solemnly. His numbers dropped gradually to 67, and looked like they’d stay there. Fyke was SAS, and there is no one in the modern world remotely like the SAS. He was a tenth-century man. Dalton thought he would have been right at home in a Viking longboat, looting monasteries and chasing green-eyed girls up and down the stones of Skellig Michael.
“Ray, can I ask you a question?”
“Fire away.”
“Why’d you go dark?”
Something filled the room then, an invisible presence, a force. It felt like grief and bitter shame. Dalton waited it out. Fyke would tell him or not.
“Not now, Mikey. There’s a good lad.”
Dalton let it go. They’d get it out of him in Guam, one way or another.
“Okay. Subject dropped. You need some more morphine, Ray?”
Fyke shook his head. Another silence while each man dealt with his private horrors. Dalton knew he couldn’t leave Ray Fyke to be put to the Question in some soundproof cell at Anderson AFB, but he also knew he couldn’t save him from it either. And Cora was waiting in Florence.
“Mikey . . . I never sunk that ship. I’m not wearing that tag, not for love nor money. I did my duty. I’m a drinker, but I’m not a drunk.”
“Then what happened to it?”
“They fooking took it, didn’t they? Right by the Kepulauan Lingga Lightship. Middle of a storm. Butchered everybody. Dyaks and Malays did it, and they did it for those bloody Serbs.”
“Serbs? What Serbs?”
“Majiic. Vigo Majiic and his boys. Some other hatchet-faced hard-ass, with a prissy little goatee, had an MP5, looked like he was running the show too. The Serbs took my ship, Mikey. You know we saw enough of those bastards when we were in Pristina. Organized. Cold. Took my ship, killed my crew. Poor old Wang. Last I saw of her, I’m clinging to a speedboat in the middle of the South China Sea. Do you believe me, Mikey?”
Dalton spent a while thinking about Serbian mobsters like Branco Gospic and Stefan Groz and celebrity assassins like Kiki Lujac, and how often he and his friends were colliding with Serbo-Croatian thugs these days, in Venice and Florence and on tankers in the South Chi
na Sea. The rectangle of barred sunlight had moved across the bed and now lay partly across Fyke’s face. His eyes were open, and they glittered in the light like shards of blue glass. “Yes,” said Dalton, finally. “I believe you.”
“Good. Thank you for that. So the question before us, Mikey?”
“Yes?”
“What the hell are we gonna do about it?”
28
The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
Nikki Turrin had been summoned to the AD of RA’s office. Mr. Oakland had relayed the summons but, being a vengeful little prick, had not told her the reasons for it. So Nikki was following Mr. Oakland’s busy, beige-clad, oversized rear down a long and Berbercarpeted corridor past rows and rows of closed doors and through the kind of portentous hush that filled the upper levels of the NSA like incense from a requiem Mass. Nikki had her heart in her throat, and her chest was tight with anxiety, but she was not so distracted that she did not notice that Mr. Oakland’s bubbly butt looked like two suckling pigs wrestling in a sack, and that when he walked he took tiny stutter steps instead of the easy, loping stride of an actual human, and his beige Dockers were just a hair too short and he was wearing white ribbed athletic socks and a pair of brand-new Bass Weejuns with double-thick rubber soles to give him some height, and his jacket was a bilious orange-plaid number that may have actually been cut from the kind of bedspread you’d find in a cheap motel in Bakersfield, if she’d ever been in a cheap motel in Bakersfield, wherever Bakersfield was.
California, she decided, as Mr. Oakland’s clenching butt cheeks signaled a rubbery screeching halt outside the double-wide doors that led into the outer offices of the AD of RA himself.
Mr. Oakland turned and looked up at Nikki, his blue eyes bright with envy and malice, his round red mouth puckered tight.
“You’ll be going in alone, Miss Turrin.”
“You’re not coming?”
Mr. Oakland checked his watch, blinked up at her.
“No. I have a prior meeting. Memo me on what’s said.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, looking past him at the doors with a weight in her heart. She refrained from asking him what the hell she had done. Mr. Oakland stepped around her without another word and scurried off in the direction of the elevator bank, fat little legs pumping. He reminded Nikki of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. She reached out and pushed against the door and stepped into a plain, spartan-looking anteroom with a secretary’s desk, behind which sat, as one would expect, a secretary. She looked up at Nikki as she came into the room, a plain, spartan-looking older woman with shining silver hair swept up behind and sterling silver reading glasses set low on an aristocratic nose. She had a good, strong face and warm gray eyes, and she studied Nikki over her reading glasses, her mouth shaping into a sympathetic smile.
“I’m Alice Chandler. You’re Nikki Turrin?”
“Yes. I’m here to see the—”
“Have you ever met him?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“Have you seen a picture of him?”
Nikki looked a little puzzled. Miss Chandler shook her head.
“He’s scarred, Miss Turrin. It gives some people a start. It’s okay to start, Miss Turrin. I just thought I’d warn you. You can go in now. Would you like some coffee?”
“I’d love some.”
“Black?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Go along now. I’ll be right in.”
Nikki gathered herself and walked through the half-open doorway behind Miss Chandler’s desk and found herself in a shaft of strong sunlight that was pouring in through the slatted blinds of the AD of RA’s office. The room was simple and unadorned, but there was a U.S. flag on a staff in the corner—the military kind, with the gold thread trim—bare wooden floors, and a long, low wooden desk, behind which a large, heavy-framed man in a blue suit and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar sat in a swivel chair, staring back at her. He got up as she came into the room, stepping into the shaft of light as he came around the side of his desk with his hand out. Nikki did not start. She took his hand as he introduced himself—his name was vaguely Western, but she only heard his title, the AD of RA, because she was trying to cope with his facial scarring, and that took up a lot of her mental energy. The AD of RA did not seem to notice. By now, he was used to it.
He pulled a chair around and patted the frame.
“Sit down, Miss Turrin. Thanks for coming.”
Nikki sat.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Oakland—”
“Screw him. He tried to cut you out of this.”
“He . . . I . . .”
The AD of RA laughed; a short, rasping cough.
“You’re the one who pulled this video off YouTube, right?”
“Yes.”
“Took it to Oakland? Who promptly cut you out of the loop.”
“Yes. He did. It was okay. The video seemed to call for something.”
“Yes. It did. We’ve been all over it, and it’s got us worried. Has that pompous dickhead told you anything more about it?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. At least the little shit knows the fucking rules. Sorry. Excuse that. We’re giving you a clearance to Indigo, Miss Turrin.”
“Indigo?”
“Yes. We’ve been over your file, and there’s no reason why we can’t bring you into this. Every reason why we should.”
“I’m . . . honored, sir. May I ask what this is?”
“Consider yourself sworn, Miss Turrin. May I call you Nikki?”
“Please.”
“We’ve opened a file on this video, Nikki. So far we know a lot about it. Would you like me to fill you in?”
“Please.”
The AD of RA filled her in. It took about six minutes. In the middle of the story, Miss Chandler came in with a trayful of doughnuts, along with two cups of black coffee. The AD of RA never stopped the story, thanked Miss Chandler with a smile and a nod, and went back to the narrative, ending with the deaths of the three Israeli scientists on the flight from Tel Aviv. When he was done, Nikki’s chest was tight again.
“So, what do you think? What’s the first question that pops into your head?”
“The first? I guess, why post this video at all?”
“Yeah. Me too. Why is this thing on the Web in the first place? I mean, it looks like somebody poisoned the water in this pool, killing a lot of people, including this guy named Dzilbar Kerk, who has an indirect but worrisome connection to the deaths of a lot of microbiologists around the world, some of whom were working for Biopreparatin the old USSR. So, anybody has to take what happens to these people pretty seriously, because the thing sure as hell looks like a security threat, and that’s what we’re paid to look out for. What I don’t get is, why take the MPEG and throw it on the Web? Why set off all these alarms? Makes no sense, except it has to, doesn’t it? I mean, unless some unhappy underling threw it on the Web just to piss off his boss? Which, based on the video, would be suicidal. You follow?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Yeah. I figured you would. You know this stuff reasonably well?”
“The Internet? As well as most. Better than some. I grew up with it, of course, but, once I got into the Monitors, I really paid attention.”
“How do you post something on YouTube?”
“Go online, through your server; go to the website, sign up—”
“You can’t post anonymously?”
“No. You have to have an e-mail identity, and it has to be a legitimate one. It all goes through your server—AOL or EarthLink, or whatever—and, since you pay for those services, they have to know who you are. So you need an account to post, and that’s an identifier right there.”
“What about Internet cafés?”
“That’s a loophole. You could sign on to YouTube and post anything from an Internet café, except the posting would be traceable to that particular café. So you’d be vulnerable on that level.”
> “But I could travel, couldn’t I? Take a flight to East Frogfart on the Fen and find a café and post the video from there. Right?”
“Yes. You could.”
“And then the video gets picked up and reposted around the world?”
“Not necessarily. It could just sit on YouTube and get accessed. Collect hits. That’s how YouTube rates a posting. The number of hits.”
“Can YouTube ID where those hits are coming from?”
“What’s the point, sir? If your search field is in the millions, where are you? How many man-hours would we have to devote to checking every hit on this video? And why would we? We want to know where it came from, not who looked at it afterward. Right, sir?”
“Right. Good point. You have a flair for this, Nikki.”
Nikki smiled. In the sunlight, her smile was dazzling. Actually, she was dazzling, a genuine Italian stunner in the classic Sophia Loren style. Her perfume was spicy and complex, not at all floral. He figured it was probably called Ashes of Men. The AD of RA was divorced now, since his wife had found his physical and spiritual wounds impossible to bear, but Nikki was . . . well, who cared how pretty she was. The observation was totally unprofessional, anyway. How old was she? Twenty-eight max? By her terms, he was the walking dead. Not to mention being a grotesque monster. But it was a great smile. He found himself smiling back at her, or at least trying.
“Anyway, basically, as I told you, we know the video was shot in Eastern Europe, probably the Balkans. The big guy who dies in this video, Dzilbar Kerk—I think you may have heard of him?”
“Yes. I’ve seen his name on the Monitors’ List.”
“Well, then you know that Kerk is wanted by everybody, from the FBI to the Sheriff of Nottingham, so he probably had to stay close to home, and we figure home is this butt-ugly gunrunner’s palazzo in the video. So if we can find the villa, then we’re a lot closer to finding out who made the video.”
“Yes. We are.”
“So, what’s the second thing that strikes you about this video?”
“The second thing? I guess that maybe we’re seeing what we’re supposed to see and maybe not seeing what is really there.”
“Good. Great. Like what?”
“Like how do we know it’s the pool water that kills them?”
“What do you mean?”