Ark

by Charles McCarry

  CLEMENTINE’S CHAPS HAD BEAR SURROUNDED. They thought he had spotted them because he appeared to be wandering aimlessly around the city. Sooner or later, he would make a break for it. In Clementine’s view, the sooner the better.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because he’s a bother,” Clementine said. “A waste of money and manpower. An intruder, not part of the pattern. A distraction from the better things we have to do. Best to get him out of the picture this very weekend and go on with the more important matters.”

  “How do you accomplish that?”

  “We’re chewing on that problem.”

  Next day, as if on a sudden impulse, Clementine turned up at the apartment and asked me to go for a walk with her in Central Park. Not later, not tomorrow, but right now. I was surprised, because while Bear was on the loose in Manhattan, I was under strict orders to stay inside with all doors locked and alarms set.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Curiosity,” Clementine said. “The crowd grows as the afternoon goes on. Very odd, this mass walkabout. I’d like to study it at close hand.”

  “Clementine, that’s moonshine.”

  Clementine said, “I have no idea what that means. But oh, do come along. We’ll be back in no time.”

  She walked across the room and picked up my bag with my pistol inside. She was limping. I asked what the matter was.

  “It’s nothing, really, just a twinge, and anyway I have my rolling chair,” she replied.

  Clementine’s wheelchair was motorized, so I didn’t have to push it, just trot alongside as she weaved her way through the crowd. I didn’t ask for a fuller explanation. No doubt Clementine had a sound operational reason for riding around in an invalid’s chair she didn’t need. Her costume had changed slightly. She now wore a floppy blue pancake beret, cocked jauntily just above her left eyebrow. The effect was quite becoming, softening her craggy face and adding a witty touch to the self-portrait.

  Near the band shell, a mirror flashed. The pre-Clementine me would have assumed that a woman was fixing her lipstick or a kid was fooling around. The new me was instantly on the alert. I fell back a step or two. This moved me outside the range of Clementine’s peripheral vision.

  In a controlled but penetrating voice, she said, “Please remain where I can see you.” Her head moved from side to side as her eyes searched the crowd for threats. I knew exactly what she was looking for: Bear.

  She had baited the trap and I was the bait. The breath hissed from my body.

  Clementine was looking to the left when, on the right, about thirty feet away, Bear rose up out of the crowd. This bit of stage business created the illusion that he was being lifted out of the earth like a monster rising from the grave. The mundane truth was that Bear had been sitting on a bench and decided to stand up. He loomed head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. He wore aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap instead of the usual Stetson. He was dressed in coveralls, a garment he could easily strip off, getting rid of it and the bloodstains that with any luck would soon bespatter it. He was looking straight at me.

  Clementine said, “Don’t look at him, my dear. Keep on walking, dear. All will be well.”

  I did as ordered. My Heckler and Koch model P2000 SK swung from my shoulder inside its purse-holster. I knew I could not possibly fire it in this crowd without killing or wounding half a dozen people while missing Bear entirely. Bear knew this, too. He walked toward us, expressionless, the sun behind him. He was in no hurry. He knew as well as I did that escape was impossible. If I tried to hide in the crowd he would simply throw aside the people who stood between the two of us.

  Conditions for murder were perfect. He could decapitate me in seconds, throw my bloody head into the crowd like a football, and walk away. No witness was going to volunteer a description of the killer. Not in New York.

  Looking straight ahead, talking through her teeth, Clementine said to me, “Steady on! When I stand up, dive to the left. Dive. To the left.”

  Bear was now about ten feet away. He gathered himself to make a move. The wheelchair stopped. Clementine stood up. She pointed her pistol at Bear. The crowd saw the gun and parted as if someone within it had stepped on a poisonous snake. I dove to the left as instructed and landed on a prostrate man who recoiled as if I were the viper. I rolled off him onto my knees and drew my weapon. I pointed it at Bear’s huge bulk. Even though I was hyperventilating, my hands were quite steady.

  “Police!” Clementine shouted in a booming voice. “Freeze!”

  Bear put his head down and charged, uttering a primal howl so loud that it must have peeled the skin off his throat. He took one giant step and lifted the opposite leg to take another. At that precise instant, a circular whirling thing like a fisherman’s net appeared above his head. It fell onto him. It enveloped him. Two men dashed out of the mob and pulled the net tight. Bear was trapped inside it, as closely wrapped as a mummy. He shouted in rage and struggled mightily, but his arms were bound to his sides and his ankles were tied together. He was still on his feet. The net men gave him a violent push. He fell over backward. Two other men, who were standing behind him, caught him before he hit the ground. Another pair of watchers, each wielding a syringe, injected him in either arm with something that knocked him out almost immediately. The final two chaps in my protection detail pushed Clementine’s wheelchair against the back of Bear’s knees. His huge body slumped into the chair. They propped up his legs and wheeled him away at a run, with two other men running interference, parting the crowd.

  Clementine was now displaying a large gold badge.

  “It’s all over, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “Move along now.”

  Someone said, “What’d the guy do?”

  Clementine, holstering her weapon, ignored him.

  To me, she shouted, “Let’s go, sergeant!”

  On the way back to my apartment, Clementine talked nonstop on her cell phone, so I was unable to ask questions. As soon as we arrived—or to be more accurate, as soon as she had checked out every nook and cranny of the place to make sure no villains were present—I offered her a nice cup of tea.

  “How very kind,” Clementine said. “Would you mind awfully if I made the tea?”

  “I’d be delighted. I have some cookies. Shall I put them out?”

  Clementine said that that would be lovely. She put the teakettle on the burner, and the instant the water boiled she warmed the pot, measured the tea, and let it steep for the precise amount of time required. Then she poured.

  “Lovely cookies,” she said.

  “Wonderful tea,” said I.

  Clementine beamed. She was truly happy. I was happy for her. Her operation had gone like clockwork. I didn’t doubt her competence—how could I after what I had just seen?—but knew that the capture of Bear might have gone less well. I didn’t doubt for a moment that if things had gone wrong—say, the net had gone awry—she would have pumped ten rounds into Bear’s torso, ejected the magazine, loaded another into the gun, and fired two rounds into his skull—unless he killed her with his bare hands while she was reloading.

  And now that she had captured the monster, what was she going to do with him?

  “That thing your men used to immobilize Bear,” I said. “What was it?”

  “As you saw, it’s a net,” Clementine replied. “It doesn’t merely entangle, it entraps. It was designed as a humane way to subdue a violent subject who might also be insane. Bleeding hearts don’t much care for it because they don’t understand its underlying ethical principle, but as you saw, it’s quite effective.”

  I said, “Obviously. I never imagined that Bear could be subdued.”

  Clementine sipped her tea and made no comment. Plainly, she had never doubted that anyone, no matter how fearsome, was unsubduable.

  I asked her what would happen to Bear now.

  “There are a number of options,” Clementine said.

  “Such as?”

  “We might do the Fren
ch thing and drop him off a bridge in dark of night, still wrapped up in his net,” Clementine said. “Or give him a stern talking-to and send him back to Texas.”

  “Not the latter, if you don’t mind.”

  “I was joking. But his situation will be explained to him.”

  I said, “You’re not concerned about legal difficulties?”

  “Of what kind?”

  “A case could be made that he was kidnapped.”

  “Quite so,” Clementine said. “But Mulligan is not the most credible of accusers. He intended to commit murder. He came all the way from Texas to New York on at least two occasions, with murder as his purpose.”

  “He had every right to be in New York.”

  Clementine’s eyebrows rose. She placed her empty cup in its saucer and put the cup and saucer down on the table. The look she gave me was alight with false good humor.

  She said, “My dear child, you are the most determined devil’s advocate I have ever encountered. What do you recommend doing with this psychopath?”

  “Let me put it this way,” I replied. “I wish your men had missed with the net.”

  “Really? May I ask why?”

  “So that I could have had the pleasure of watching you shoot Bear ten times in the heart, then twice in the head.”

  Clementine’s eyes brightened, as if, to her surprise, she was beginning to like me. She looked at her watch.

  She said, “I really must go. Thank you for the delicious tea.”

  I said, “You will let me know what you decide about Bear?”

  “That rather depends on what’s decided, doesn’t it?”

  “It depends on no such thing, Clementine. I do not wish to live in uncertainty.”

  She said, “Of course you don’t. I recommend you to remain inside this apartment for the time being. You won’t encounter Mulligan if you do go out, but he’s not the only madman in New York.”

  She nodded briskly. I did the same in return.

  I cleared my throat and said, “I know it’s bad form, Clementine, but I do want to thank you and your chaps for what you all did today. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”

  With a thin smile that told me she didn’t doubt my amazement for a moment, Clementine murmured, “Not at all. Truly our pleasure.”

  With a stronger smile and in a stronger voice, she added, “I’m sure the chaps would thank you for the opportunity. It’s good for them to have a bit of fun. Relieves the tedium.”

  Out she went, cell phone at her ear. There was a spring in her step.

  5

  AIRPORT SERVICE WAS RESTORED AROUND the middle of the second week. As soon as it was possible to take off, Henry called. He was terse. The car would come by for me in an hour. Bring clothes for two climates. We were going to visit a factory of Ng Fred’s in Mongolia, then make a couple of other stops. There was much to be done, and it had to be done quickly.

  In Hsi-tau, after a night’s sleep, Henry and Daeng and I boarded a small high-winged propeller plane. The pilot was Mongolian—epicanthic eyelids, leathery blank face, horseman’s physique. We flew west along the border between China and Mongolia—brown mountains dusted with snow, little brown dust storms on the floor of the desert. A sepia sun shone through a scrim of dust particles. The plane was brown, too. The instruments were labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet and the instrument panel itself was marked CCCP. Apparently the plane was Red Army surplus, therefore an antique that had been maintained by Russian mechanics. We turned north toward the mountains, into Mongolia. Suddenly the plane was being knocked around the sky by wind shear. The flimsy aircraft pitched and yawed and plunged and climbed. I am as fatalistic as the next woman, but the prospect of crashing on this moonscape and lying in the wreckage with a couple of broken bones until I died of thirst and shock made me reach for an airsickness bag. There was none.

  At last we landed bumpily in a small flat valley between two low mountains. A spring bubbled from one of the mountainsides. Its waters, the color of weak tea, flowed into a trough and then into a catch basin. I walked over and washed my face.

  Henry had vanished. The pilot, working alone, was tying down the plane, which was rocking in the wind that whistled down the narrow valley. There was absolutely no other sign of life.

  Daeng said, “Follow me, please.”

  The ground was rough. Stones rolled under my foot. I turned my ankle and gasped. Daeng, pretending not to hear, led me into a cleft in the mountainside. After only a few steps we were in darkness. Daeng produced a flashlight, and walking backward, shone it at my feet. We turned a corner. Bright lights switched on. A squat Mongolian who had been standing guard in the dark let us in. He wore night-vision goggles and carried an automatic rifle. An ornamental hatchet, ancient weapon of the horde, was tucked into his belt.

  I followed Daeng through the dazzling light down a long corridor, then down a long steel ladder to a gallery that ran along all four walls of an enormous cavern. A sphere that looked to be about a hundred feet in diameter hung from the ceiling. I recognized it from the engineers’ drawings as a component of the spaceship. Henry and Ng Fred, as tiny from the distance as toy soldiers, stood below it. We went down in an elevator and joined them. Up close, the sphere seemed enormous—much larger than I thought it would be when I saw the designs that the three engineers had shown to Henry a few months before.

  Ng Fred seemed happy enough to play tour guide. As he talked, we walked across the factory floor together. It was a long walk. The place looked to be at least a square mile in extent.

  I said, “Did you make this cavern?”

  “I wish I had,” Ng Fred said. “It’s an old mine. The Russians rebuilt it as an underground factory when they were running Mongolia. They didn’t have time to use it much before the Soviet Union fell apart. After they left it was just sitting here, so we bought it.”

  Henry disappeared again, cell phone pressed to his ear. A gondola dangled from cables. Ng Fred, affable as ever, and I got into it and were lifted inside the sphere.

  Dozens of workers, all of them young Chinese women, clung to the sphere’s curved interior surface—installing wiring, plumbing, insulation, and other things I couldn’t identify. They wore harnesses that were suspended from long cables.

  Why women?

  “They’re just better than men at this kind of work,” Ng Fred replied. “What they’re putting together here is the most sophisticated flying machine ever assembled by human beings, but most of the work is done with bare fingers and thumbs. Men’s fingers are too big. The detail and the repetitiveness drive men crazy. But the ladies have no problems. To them it’s the same as making running shoes or sewing on buttons or assembling wristwatches. That’s the kind of work most of them used to do in other factories. They’re faster and better than machines. Don’t ask me why or get political about it. It’s just a fact of nature.”

  “Where do you find the workers?” I asked.

  “In my other factories, mostly. Some recommend their sisters or cousins.”

  “And you have enough left over to run the other factories?”

  “There are lots of sisters and cousins in China,” Ng Fred said. “For this job, we accept only very healthy women twenty-five or younger who weigh ninety pounds or less and have an IQ in the 110s. A lower score means the worker is not smart enough, a higher one that she’s too smart. If they gain five pounds, they go on a diet. If they can’t lose the weight, they’re history.”

  The women were young and lithe and agile and completely absorbed in their work. Most were too far away for me to make out their faces. Almost the only noise was the whir of power tools or the occasional tap of a hammer. There was little or no chatter. They were making steady, visible progress. Watching them was like waiting for the hand of a clock to move. Each little job had its frozen moment. Then the minute hand moved. Everything changed ever so slightly, and when the hand moved again would change once more.

  I asked Ng Fred what he was going to do with th
e sphere after the women had completed it.

  “They’ll take it apart, then put it back together again,” he said. “Then they’ll do it all over again. They’ve already done this once.”

  “Why?”

  “Training. They have to be able to assemble it with their eyes closed. It’s like a prefabricated house. Each part is numbered and is added in a predetermined sequence. Next time they’ll do it while wearing space suits. Then they’ll do that again. Finally they’ll do it for real—in orbit, in zero gravity. By that time, they should be able to do it without thinking, or almost.”

  I said, “Why use women instead of men, apart from the fact that their fingers are smaller and they’re more patient?”

  “Those factors are reason enough,” Ng Fred said. “But they weigh less than men and eat less than men, so we can lift more of them into orbit as payload and take care of them better at less expense.”

  “How many women equal how many men in ounces and pounds?”

  “Do the math. The average Chinese male at age twenty-five weighs around a hundred and thirty pounds. These women weigh ninety pounds or less. For a hundred workers, that’s a total difference between male and female of plus or minus four thousand pounds. The dividend is forty-four more women than men for the same dead weight.”

  Henry arrived from wherever he had been and listened in on the rest of Ng Fred’s lecture. Fred painted with a broad brush. First, a large space shuttle would be placed in orbit with the materials for a bare-bones sphere in its cargo bay. Fifty women would live in a second shuttle and assemble the sphere. When the sphere could support life, they would move inside it while completing its construction. The shuttle would return to Earth to pick up another load. Another sphere and another work crew would be placed in orbit nearby. The combined crew would assemble the second sphere. When that task was completed, the first crew would return to Earth. Another would take its place and continue their work, joined in time by a third crew.

  As more spheres were constructed and equipped, the number of workers would be increased because there would be living space for them in the spheres. Construction crews would be rotated. Some of them would assemble spheres. Others would load cargo. Finally, the ship would become a unity through the connection of several spheres. The propulsion system would be installed. The fusion plant would be loaded and activated. At that point, the flight crew would be ferried to the ship, along with any others who might be taking the voyage. The frozen embryos that were going to replace H. sapiens would be loaded into a sphere of their own, inside a device that would keep them alive and intact, theoretically forever, at a temperature of approximately minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit.