Wild Cards VI--Ace in the Hole

by George R. R. Martin

  The vacant hall behind the podium reverberated to a low-Richter earthquake. Outside in the basketball court the crowd was working itself into a final frenzy, with a lot of help from Hartmann’s little gnomes.

  The fools, Sara thought. Her breath ricocheted off the inside of the egret-feather mask and rattled in her ears. It’s like some kind of fairy tale: they’re about to proclaim their new king, and never suspect that behind that smiling mask he’s a demon from Hell.

  The stocky man in the blue coveralls with the NBC logo on the right breast and ROBO TEAM block-lettered across the back held up her VIP pass for her approval. It bore a fictitious name and a photograph. In the feeble light drizzling from far away, overhead, she could make out a face framed by white-blond hair. The face wasn’t hers. It was a joker face, the kind calculated to keep even the hardest-core ex–Special Forces jock in a Secret Service monkey suit from peeking beneath the mask to make sure the real thing matched the photo.

  She had read enough le Carré not to be surprised. “George Steele” was a high-ranking KGB agent, after all; he would have his resources, and it was obvious this attempt to derail Hartmann was no spur-of-the-moment affair. She nodded. He pinned the pass to the front of her white dress.

  “Now,” he said, stooping to where an NBC minicam lay tipped to its side, “are you certain you want to go through with this?”

  The minicam opened. Its printed-circuit guts had been partially scooped out to make room for a compact Heckler & Koch P7 pistol. Dim highlights perched uncertainly on black steel.

  He picked it up, pinched the slide back to examine the chamber, then jacked a round in. “You remember what I showed you? The three dots line up with the target sitting on them as if they were a table. The weapon will not fire unless you make sure to switch off the safety here at the side and squeeze the other safety at the back of the grip.”

  She nodded, impatient. “I remember. I used to shoot a .22 as a kid. Colt Woodsman. It belonged to my cousin.”

  “Nine millimeter does a fair amount of damage but has little shocking power. I suggest you keep firing until the target goes down.”

  Or until the Secret Service boys nail me. She held her hand out. He passed the pistol to her. She slipped it into her white patent-leather purse and carefully fastened the clasp.

  “World peace depends upon your going through with this,” he said.

  Her eyes found his and held them. “Avenging Andi depends on my going through with this. And Sondra Fallin, and Kahina, and Chrysalis. And me.”

  He stood facing her as if feeling he should say something and unsure of what. She stood on tiptoe, gently kissed his cheek. He turned and quickly walked away.

  She watched him go. The poor thing. He thinks he’s using me.

  Funny how naive a spymaster can be.

  The feeder hall was virtually deserted. Anyone who could possibly cram into the deep bowl of the Omni was inside cheering the conclusion of Jackson’s vice-presidential speech. Tachyon heard the sound of the crowd as a vast deep-throated roaring. A surging beast, and I’m walking in its maw, he thought.

  David had gently dressed him, but sliding that mangled arm through the sleeves of shirt and coat had drenched him in cold sweat. While David had talked them past the nurse, Tach had palmed pain killers from the evening medication tray. He had dry swallowed them in the taxi, but they hadn’t taken effect yet, and he found he could hardly stand.

  The agent on the door was eyeing the pair skeptically. The slender, dark older man, his arm tightly about the Takisian’s waist. Tach presented his press pass.

  “There’s no room in there, Doctor.” He eyed Harstein suspiciously. “Where’s your pass?”

  “I don’t have one. He’s the one who needs to get in.”

  “There are no seats available.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll stand.”

  “I can’t let you, it’s a fire hazard. Go over to the Congress Center. You can watch on the big-screen TV.”

  Tachyon fought down a wave of dizziness and nausea. Ran a hand across his clammy face, and felt the scratch of stubble against his palm.

  “Please,” he whispered, and cuddled his mutilated arm to his chest.

  “I think it would be a very good idea if you let him in,” said David softly. “How much harm can it do? He’s one small man.”

  “Yeah,” said the guard hesitantly.

  “He left the hospital just to be here for this moment. I know you’d like to help him.”

  “Oh, all right. What the hell. Go on in.”

  Tachyon squeezed Harstein’s shoulder hard with his left hand. “David, don’t disappear again.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  8:00 P.M.

  Spector was sweating buckets. Getting onto the podium had been no problem. Making himself stay there was. The convention hall was huge, much bigger than he’d imagined, seeing it on TV. Thousands of people, millions if you counted the TV audience, would be looking in his direction. He peered at the lighted network booths and strained to see if he could recognize Connie Chung, or Dan Rather, or what’s-his-name from CNN. It kept his mind occupied enough to keep his feet planted on the stage.

  Jesse Jackson was speaking, his powerful voice rising and falling in his usual Southern preacher style. Jackson’s nomination as VP was obviously the price Hartmann had paid to get him to drop out of the presidential contest.

  Spector couldn’t see any way to get at Hartmann while he was on stage. Better to wait until he was escorting the senator back to his hotel and let him have it then. He could run off to telephone an ambulance and slip away. Everyone would be too caught up in the moment to miss him. Then it would be back to Jersey and a little peace and quiet.

  He just had to bide his time.

  “It was all my idea. People are saying the campaign came up with it, but the whole thing was my call.” Jack gave a theatrical sigh. “I was wrong, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  The newscasters were filling time with celebrity interviews. Below the CBS skybooth, the convention was humming, awaiting the candidate. Half of them seemed to be masked.

  Jack smiled ruefully into Walter Cronkite’s crinkled eyes. “It all seemed to fit together. All the wild card violence—and remember, I was attacked twice myself—it all seemed aimed at hindering Senator Hartmann’s candidacy and promoting the Reverend Barnett’s. When I saw Barnett personally, I saw how charismatic he is. With people like the Nur al-Allah in the world—remember, he’s another charismatic religious leader who happens to be a wild card—I just jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

  “So you are satisfied that there are no wild cards in the Barnett camp?”

  Jack offered a practiced, cynical smile. “If they’re there, they’re well-hidden.” He laughed, disingenuous. “They’d have to be, Walter.”

  Behind Cronkite a couple dozen video monitors showed the cameras panning the convention. People waved signs, danced, laughed behind their masks. Sweating men in headphones busied themselves over consoles.

  Cronkite seemed in an easy, conversational mood, hardly the hard-ass reporter right now. Still, his question stung. “Do you think you should apologize to the Barnett campaign?”

  Jack gave another patent smile. “I already have, Walter. I delivered a personal apology to Fleur van Renssaeler yesterday afternoon.” He tightened the smile, looked into the camera. Take that, Fleur, he thought.

  “So how do you feel now that Gregg Hartmann has finally won the nomination?”

  Jack stared into the camera and felt his smile freeze. “I think,” he said carefully, “that I messed up a few too many times to feel happy with much of anything, Walter.”

  Cronkite put an over-the-audio speaker in his ear, listened for a moment, then looked up and said, “I understand the candidate is about to speak. Thank you, Jack, and we’ll switch now to Dan Rather and Bob Scheiffer.”

  The red light on the camera went off. The crowd was roaring, cheering, on their feet.
/>   Jack wished with all his heart that he could cheer with them.

  For a long moment Tachyon was disoriented. Then he spotted the California banner, and he knew where he was. The speakers podium thrust like the prow of a ship into the crowded hall. On its various tiers and levels stood the great and powerful.

  Clawlike, his hand closed on a man’s shoulder, and he forced the reporter aside.

  “Hey, asshole! Watch out.”

  “Move,” Tach snarled, and pushed past him. Deeper into the crowd. Searching for a clear view.

  “… THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES…” The words finally penetrated Tachyon’s haze. “… GREGG HARTMANN!”

  The fifteen thousand people in the Omni erupted. The band blared out “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Cheers, screams, whistles. Balloons floated down to be batted aside by wildly swinging Hartmann signs. Tachyon shuddered under the assault of sound and the proximity of so many people.

  His aching eyes focused on the podium. Gregg grinning, waving, linking hands with Jackson. Ellen, wan and drawn in a wheelchair at his side, smiling. Suddenly what had been only a peripheral bit of information penetrated. Eighty percent of the people in the Omni wore masks. What had been a merely hopeless task had now become impossible. There was no way by ships or stars that he could locate James Spector in time to prevent the killing.

  He wept while all around him the crowd screamed.

  “… the next president of the United States, Gregg Hartmann!”

  The crowd went wild out in the Omni. Green-and-gold Hartmann signs waved back and forth as the band played. The nets on the ceiling rained balloons down on the cheering delegates.

  Puppetman was nearly in orgasm. The pent-up emotions of the long week were being released in one huge celebration, and the sheer tidal force of it was staggering. Gregg took off his clown’s mask and stepped forward onto the speaker’s platform, raising his arms in victory; they shouted back to him fiercely, the noise almost deafening. He had to shout to Jesse to come forward with him. They clasped hands, raised them waving to the people, and the cheering redoubled, drowning out the band, making the Omni shake with the thunderous acclamation.

  It was glorious. It was ecstasy.

  The ovation went on for long minutes. Gregg waved, raised his hands, nodded. He saw Jack Braun up in the CBS booth with Cronkite, pointed and smiled, giving him a thumbs-up salute. He kissed Ellen, in a wheelchair at the rear of the podium. He grinned at Devaughn, at Logan, at everyone. Behind their masks, he knew they were all smiling back at him.

  We did it! The power in him was drunk with the adulation. It’s all ours, everything.

  Gregg could only grin helplessly in agreement.

  All ours.

  When they finally quieted slightly, he stepped to the podium. He looked up at the packed stands, at the shoulder-to-shoulder mob on the floor. Many of them were in masks, joining with those on the platform.

  “Thank you, every last one of you,” he said huskily, and they roared again. He raised his hands; the cheering softened. It felt good, being able to do that.

  “This has been the hardest struggle of my life,” he continued. “But Ellen and I never gave up hope. We trusted in the judgment of all of you out there, and you haven’t let us down.”

  The chant was sweeping across the convention floor: “Hartmann! Hartmann!” A wave, a torrent, it swept them all up. “Hartmann! Hartmann!” Gregg shook his head in feigned modesty, letting it all wash over him and grinning down at them.

  “Hartmann! Hartmann!”

  And the grin suddenly went frozen on his face.

  Somehow, Mackie was down there in the front ranks of the crowd, grinning like all the rest, a hunchbacked boy-man dressed all in black and leather. A chill rattled down Gregg’s spine.

  It’s okay, Puppetman murmured inside his head. It’s okay. I can control him. But Gregg shivered, and when he leaned toward the microphones again, his voice had lost some of its enthusiasm.

  Forging across the floor between delirious delegates in white plastic straw-like hats with HARTMANN emblazoned on them, Mackie felt as if he were made of air. He never felt any different when he went insubstantial—phased out—but if he did this was how he might feel. As if he was just going to diffuse like a cloud at any moment.

  He hadn’t slept last night, wedged in between a pair of stinking winos on the bus from the New York Port Authority. The business-suit pervo, with a taste for the slightly bizarre, who’d picked him up in Times Square had obviously realized the kind of love he was looking for was expensive to come by in the age of AIDS hysteria; he was carrying quite a roll of cash in his pocket. Even after Mackie had peeled away the bloodstained hundred on the outside there was more than enough for a plane ticket. But he hadn’t dared take a plane. They might be watching the airports for him; he’d let himself be seen three times now.

  Der Mann would be very disappointed.

  He was up there on the podium now. A tropism of love and contrition drew Mackie to him. He was not supposed to approach Hartmann in public. He would not. He just needed the nearness of him.

  He pushed out from under the array of press boxes, hanging over the packed court like the Death Star. Eel-like he flowed between shouting men with strained shirt buttons and fat women in pastel dresses, every face shining with sweat and grease and greed for the spoils of the love feast of capitalism. The spectacle would have disgusted and intimidated him had he any room in his mind for thoughts that weren’t of Hartmann. Of love and duty and failure.

  The podium rose before him like a blue Rhine castle. He didn’t see the Man yet, but the man on stage was talking about him. He looked to the wings, trying to catch sight of Hartmann.

  White motion took his eye. Tiers of VIP boxes rose either side of the podium like layers of a wedding cake. A diminutive figure in a white dress was excusing its way past seated dignitaries on the level to the left of and even with the podium. It wore a flamboyant bird mask of white feathers that gleamed like silver under the lights.

  He started to think, filthy joker cunt. Then he realized what had drawn his attention.

  The way she moved. He could always recognize a person by posture, the way she carried herself, the way her limbs and body acted together. He could always pick his mother, the bitch, out of a mob of Sankt Pauli whores by her walk.

  Now he recognized Sara Morgenstern, who had greater claim on him than any woman since his mother died.

  Joyous fury bubbling within him, he began to force his way through the mob. He would not fail his man again. Or her.

  Hartmann was speaking. The crowd, chanting his name, would barely let him get a word in edgewise. Jack wandered around the CBS skybooth and tried to stay out of everyone’s way.

  The monitors showed a crowd going mad. Jack watched and wondered what he could do.

  He could tell people. But he’d had a chance just now, and he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t be the Judas Ace again. He couldn’t start a new round of persecutions.

  He reached for a cigarette, and then he saw the leather boy on one of the monitors.

  He couldn’t mistake the slight, hunchbacked figure, not even behind the mask. The puny body and arrogant, jerky walk was an unmistakable combination. “Hey!” Jack said. A surge of adrenaline almost knocked him off his feet. He jumped forward just as the freak walked off camera. “That’s the killer!” He jabbed a finger at the monitor. “Right here! Where’s that camera pointing?”

  The director looked at him with fury in his eyes. “Will you get—”

  “Call the Secret Service! That’s the chain-saw killer! He’s on the convention floor!”

  “What—”

  “Where’s that camera pointed, goddamn it?”

  “Uh—Camera Eight? That’s on the right side of the podium…”

  “Damn!” The freak was right under the candidates.

  Jack looked around frantically. The commentators, deep into their zen, had yet to hear his panicked shouts.
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br />   “Camera Eight.” This from the director. “Pan left and right. Ready Eight? Cut Eight.”

  Jack jumped up on the desk in front of Cronkite and lashed out with a foot. The safety glass on the front of the skybooth bulged outward, a network of cracks appearing around Jack’s foot. A startled Cronkite wheeled back on his desk chair, barking out oaths sea-dog style, as Jack put his foot through the safety glass, then punched out to widen the hole.

  The beams supporting the Omni Center’s ceiling were just in front and overhead. Jack jumped, caught an I-beam with both hands. He moved hand-over-hand along the beam toward the podium. This was going to take forever. He swung back, forward, pushed himself off, flew from one supporting beam to the next.

  He’d done this for years on NBC. The old Tarzan reflexes came back without thought.

  There was sudden commotion. Hartmann’s speech had been interrupted. He was too late.

  As Gregg Hartmann strode forward through torrents of applause, Sara deliberately moistened her lips. How confidently he walks. He thinks he’s a god.

  But there were no gods anymore. Just men and women, some with more power than any mortal could safely use.

  The purse fell open beneath numbed fingers as if of its own accord. She reached a gloved hand inside. The metal and checked rubber of the grip were cool fire, burning her fingers.

  “Andi,” she whispered. She drew the pistol. Letting her purse dangle from her forearm by one strap she raised the weapon both-handed.

  Mackie was practically running through the close-packed delegates, using cattle-prod buzzes of his elbows to well-padded rumps to clear a path, phasing out when he had to. He’d do Sara fucking Morgenstern on nationwide TV, fuck her right straight through the heart with his good right hand. Der Mann would be so proud.

  He felt pressure in the armpits and then his feet paddled air as he was hoisted off the floor by the collar of his leather jacket. “Not so fuckin’ fast, joker,” a voice grated in his ear.