by Victor Milán
Timur had chosen to rise early, to slip away before the usual crowd of favor-seekers and hangers-on were abroad. That seemed to include Jacqui, who was nowhere visible, which was fine with Eddie. Eddie had left Shih snoring gently in his blankets after a Sky-Blue Wolf rousted him out; she could catch up later.
On the other unfortunate hand, up ahead Francis Marron stood waiting beside a beefy Liga Karakoram four-wheeler with the top off and the windscreen down. He was staring out west, where the mesa country, mauve and gray-green and dingy yellow with incipient dawn, flattened toward the Qizil Qum, as if he saw something marvelous among the shadows.
Timur stopped just short of Marron's earshot. "I want you to take your lagun up north. There's a caravan hunter team operating beyond Turkestan town."
Eddie looked to Marron, back at Timur. He pressed his lips to a thin line. Naturally insubordinate as he was, he wasn't quite up to saying bullshit to Timur this morning.
Timur laid a hand on his shoulder. "Don't worry for me. Nothing will happen between here and Tashkent."
"I don't like it. He's a killer."
"He is harmless. He is... disturbed. He was badly treated back in America, after he left here. He is trying to find himself again."
"You're liable to find him with his hands around your throat. He was ready enough to wax Acevedo down in Costa Rica, and he wasn't even nuts then."
"Eddie, i know that you are my chief bodyguard. But if something befalls me as a consequence of my own action, the fault is entirely mine, and not yours. Now, go."
Eddie started to turn, found he couldn't let it go. "But your life—you belong to Turkestan."
"That's an illusion. Should I start thinking that, you would be amazed how soon it would turn itself around in my mind so that Turkestan belonged to me. Great outrages are only committed by men who know beyond question that what they are doing is right. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot—each believed he was just what this bad old world needed." Timur turned toward the truck. "Your friend Dr. Shih helped me articulate this. I had realized it for quite a long time, but I feared to admit it to myself."
My friend? What does he know about that? Eddie started after.
"Our lives belong only to us, Eddie-jaan."
Eddie stopped, dropped his chin to his chest. "My life belongs to you," he said, little-boy sullen.
Timur spun with a Sourish of his headcloth tail. His eyes flashed like obsidian knives. "Are you still looking for a father?"
Eddie sidled away, not meeting his eyes. Timur stepped close to him, invading his space.
"You are still txying to please your father," he said in a low, tense tone. "Aren't you? Look at me."
Eddie nodded. His angry words to Arbatov, denying his father, had been no more than the outburst of a hurt and angry adolescent. A child telling a parent, / hate you.
"Your father divorced your mother because a man could not hope to rise in the Party while married to a Jew. Is that someone to admire? To please?"
Eddie thrust out his lower lip rebelliously. Timur dropped his voice till it almost vanished in the current of the wind.
"How do you think the Americans caught you in Germany, Alyosha? They turned your father; his price for immunity from prosecution was to turn over one of GRU's most successful moles: you. Of course, it was all engineered by the KGB, who promptly redoubled him. Pavel fl'ich Gorsunov would not betray his Party."
"You're lying," Eddie said. But he knew it was the denial that was a lie, even as he spoke it.
Timur's eyes didn't flicker. "Turkestan needs no father, Eddie. Neither do you. Grow up. Take the rest of your life and make of it what you choose. Not what others choose for you."
Eddie stood there so filled with things to say that his chest was constricted, as if by an asthma attack. Then he threw his arms around Timur, hugged him so hard the older man's back made crackling sounds.
"I'll never see you again," he said. His eyes were streaming.
He turned and went away from Timur then. With all the strength he had, he made himself walk, not run.
"I love the sunset," Timur said. "Of all times of the day, it is my favorite. The light turns eveiything strange and wonderful, and the peace of evening settles in."
Timur, driving the Karakoram himself, had parked on the crest of a ridge southwest of Tashkent. The western sky was an eerily luminous pale blue, that bore the same relationship to the normal sky blue as a corpse's complexion does to that of a living man. Lower down it darkened into striations of yellow, then orange, then finally red.
"Yes," Marron said. "It's very beautiful." He had been staring as though hypnotized at a blunt little darkling beetle with a slate-and-white-striped carapace, scurrying along the flank of a miniature hill of dust that had accrued around the base of a clump of camel's-hair. When Timur spoke, he raised his eyes to the west.
He had always loved nature, but in a very conventional, Sierra Club poster way, taking in grand vistas like a wide-angle lens. After prison he found himself more oriented to the particular. Like the crawling bug, spilling microcosmic landslides away from his six milling feet, or the way the wind stirred the fringe of Timur's headcloth below his right eye. To try to absorb the world of light and air a quantum at a time was impractical, he knew. But he also knew he would not have time to take it all, no matter how big the bites. So he preferred quality over quantity, and was content.
"It soothes me," Timur said, he looked at Marron. "And you, my friend? What of your troubled spirit? Does anything ease it?"
Marron put his hands up to grip the padded dash. A muscle stood out in his cheek, a tooth-grinder's diamond.
"The face on the television keeps telling me to kill you," he said.
"Is that what you were sent here to do?"
"Yes."
"Do you want to kill me?"
Tears ran down Marron's face. "No. You're the only thing I have left. The only good thing in my world."
"Do you want to help me, Francis?"
Marron nodded convulsively.
"Prison was very hard for you, wasn't it?"
".. .yes..."
"When you were there, you wanted nothing so much as to get out."
Nod.
Timur nodded slowly. "I feel sometimes as if I am in prison. I am in the midst of a wilderness of howling, where every path I see leads to death and devastation for millions of innocents. My pride and anger brought me here, and I don't know how to escape."
He looked at Marron. The American was crying, sobs shaking his stiffly braced body like temblors. He made no noise.
"I know my confinement is as nothing compared to yours," Timur said softly. "But I am not as strong as you; I cannot bear it much longer."
He turned in his seat and stared at Marron until the American's bloodshot eyes met his. "I want to be free of my prison, Francis. But I cannot leave on my own."
"I—" Marron sniffed. "Am I your friend, Timur?"
Timur laid a hand on his arm. "You are my true friend, Francis. Whatever happens. Shall we drive on?"
Jacqui Gendron swept into camp a little after 2000, with a tired and bitchy Tewfik and a couple of surly Sky-Blue Wolves for retinue. Outside Tashkent, Timur was using a gigantic tent that had once served outdoor festivals—it was of course owned by Khaalis's yurt—with a much smaller residential tent at the rear. As she marched to the entrance of the living quarters, a piece of shadow detached itself and approached.
The young Wolves growled and unslung their weapons. After spending a travel day with Jacqui, they hoped they could kill something. But the figure that materialized out of the black belonged to yet another of the bizarre foreigners with whom it amused their master to surround himself.
She looked him over with a practiced, professional eye; reading desperate men was one of her major stocks in trade. In the darkness her slight smile was invisible.
"You're looking for a story?" he asked. His voice was cracked like an old painting.
"Always," she said coolly.
"Tomorrow," he said, "you'll have one." He turned away and the night absorbed him.
Timur was sitting cross-legged at work with his notebook computer when she came in upon him. She rushed over to him, knelt beside him, and flung her arms around him.
"Oh, darling, you should not have slipped away like that! I have been so concerned."
She raised up the lower hem of his facecloth and kissed him on the lips.
Kneeling like a samurai to seppuku, Francis Marron opens the cover of his notebook computer. He turns it on, activates the satellite link. By default it shows an English-language newsfeed from South America.
The world is full of rioting. He feels violence and anger wash over his face like waves of heat. The fury of it makes him blink.
When he opens his eyes, his old friend is there.
"We know a secret, Francis, you and I. Don't we? We know you're going to choke. You don't have the stones to do Timur. You couldn't do Acevedo either. That's why the original Swinging Richard had to zatz the little spic—but he was still willing to let his old buddy, old pal take all the credit."
He smiles. His eyeteeth are prominent and pointed. "That's the most important thing in life, isn't it, dude? Knowing who your real friends are?"
A shudder wracked Marron. When it was gone, a newsreader's face, unfashionably haggard, was saying, "—repeating the top story of the hour: at a Moscow press conference acting Secretary of State Vorov'yev has just announced that President Fyodorin has been taken into custody by elements of the League and Russian Republican Armed Forces..."
It was nothing to him. He stretched his fingers with a ripple of popping joints, and began to type a message.
Chapter FORTY-TWO
Half an hour before dawn Eddie snapped upright out of a fitful sleep and said, "Bullshit."
"Your pardon, Eddie-khan?" asked Yoldash from beside a dried-sheepshit fire.
Eddie stood up and started buckling on his web belt. "He said I'm my own man," he said to no one in particular. "Well, okay. Okay. I'm gonna start doing things my own way."
Yoldash sat with his head tipped to the side, a respectful look on his young, imperfectly bearded face. Eddie was completely mad, of course, but that did not diminish his standing as a hero. Just like old Aliyev's songs: real heroes were always pretty wacky.
Eddie tugged the mag out off the butt of his Glock, scoped it quickly. Standard party mix: ,40-caliber safety slugs and silver-tips. He rammed it back home.
"Tell the Singer he's in charge till I get back. I'm going into Tashkent. Personal business."
Through a morning whose heat was a razor's kiss, the vertis came in low, hugging the serrations of the red and khaki land, their polymerized graphite bellies brushing camel-hair on the hogsbacks. They came in fast, their black polymer propellers, hooked like cat's claws, pulling them through the air at three hundred fifty miles an hour. The pilots were good, fighting ground turbulence at a speed at which terrain features were past almost as soon as they were perceived, and an altitude at which the slightest miscalculation would drive you haifway through a ridge.
There were four of them, covert-missions penetrator models jointly designed by the French, the Argentineans, and the Iraqis. They were quiet, cool, and next to invisible on radar. The pilots were British, American, and Israeli. Lest the brittle League budget should be strained in these high-risk times, the United States was picking up the tab for all of it.
And all they asked was one single ride-along. Hell, it was more return than they usually got for military aid.
The great festival tent bubble with people and happy noises. Wearing a white headcloth and his customary Western suit sans tie, Timur sat on a rug on a low platform before the multitude, hearing petitions, dispensing arbitration. A few blue skullcaps hung around the edges, playing with their weapons slings and glowering.
He seems to be in an excellent frame of mind this morning, thought Dr. Shih Tai-Yu, sitting discreetly to one side as befit a foreign observer. His sayings were more by nature of advice than judgment; he arbitrated rather than decreed. The amazing thing was that no one seemed dissatisfied. He was either wonderfully wise or a wonderful charlatan. Considering what Eddie had told her, Shih thought he was probably both.
Eddie... It had hurt her to awaken to find herself alone yesterday morning. You should have expected nothing else, she told herself sternly. He was an American soldier of fortune—not to mention a League spy. How could she be anything but a random conquest to him? She had never held the interest of a man for long anyway.
Jacqui Gendron was also on hand, in a holding pattern off to one side of the dais, murmuring comments for her throat mike and badgering her cameraman, Tewfik, who was reducing the proceedings to data. She looked unusually sharp and vital this morning, as if she'd been drawn with more attention to detail than normal.
Shih wondered why Jacqui was expending such concentration on routine palace doings. The outer world was falling in pieces, and while Turkestan was a central cause or at least catalyst, at the moment most folk had more pressing concerns than how Timur handled bean-patch property disputes.
Into the audience tent came Francis Marron. He stood for a moment with the morning sun haloing around him, resplendent in a white linen suit and standing taller than Shih had seen him before. He surveyed the scene, seemed to sigh, and made his way forward through the throng. Insistent as they were on crowding as close to Timur as possible, the petitioners flowed away from him.
Seeing him, Timur brightened. He rose, held out his arms as if welcoming a brother.
Marron raised his right hand. It held a small black pistol. He fired three times, deliberately, while every other being in the tent turned to ice. Whether all or any shots hit, Shih could not actually see, but Timur dropped to his knees, arms still outspread.
He raised his head as Matron stepped up to the platform. Holding his right arm stiff before him, the American shot Timur through the forehead.
Gunfire crashed as the Sons of the Sky-Blue Wolf, coming out of their shock fugue, unlimbered weapons and flared off at Marron. The American stood upright, almost at attention, swaying slightly as red splotches blossomed on his white suit like all the roses of Gulistan.
For a moment bright flashes filled the tent as the Wolves kept their trigger fingers clenched. Without consciously moving, Shih found herself lying on her belly, yelling, "Stop! Stop! Cease firing!" in Uzbek and Russian.
The spasm of firing stopped. Shih felt the air throb with moans and screams as the crowd surged forward toward its fallen hero.
Crouched by the side of the platform, Jacqui felt her heart, balloon-sized in her chest and thumping like a gas-powered village water pump. She wanted to pump her fist like an American sports fan. The instant she laid eyes on Marron she had given the word, and by prearrangement gone live via satellite. Every viewer of TeleFrance and its subscribers had seen everything.
It was the diadem of her career.
Add to the stunning live coverage of the assassination of the world's most controversial leader the one-hour special report she would broadcast at one tomorrow morning—prime time in EuroCom—called Timur: the Man Behind the Mask, revealing for the first time both his face and the thunderbolt of his past....
She noticed Tewfik flat on his belly beside her. She suppressed her mike with her thumb. "Tewfik! Tewfik, you coward, stand up! We're missing the action."
He didn't respond. The fool's nerve had finally broken. Not in a compassionate frame of mind, Jacqui seized the short black hair on top of Tewfik's head and pulled it up to look him in the eye.
And eye was what he had—the right, which had been pressed to the viewfinder of his videocam. A Blue Wolf bullet had gone in the other one. Thank God he got most of it, she thought.
The Tashkent camp had the aura of desertion, like a boomtown gone bust. Eddie slowed the little Liga scout car way down, looking warily around him as he nosed among the tents that sprouted from the desert like Cubist flowers after a spring rai
n. The usual prohibitions against motor vehicles was in effect, but fuck that noise: there were no traffic cops around here.
There should've been somebody. Eddie made a note to chew the ass off the Turkmen he'd left in charge of security while he and 23 were off playing Boy Scout on the Syr Dar'ya.
It was not entirely strange that there should be fewer people than usual around. After Timur made one of his flying moves to the new HQ, it generally took a few days for the whole menagerie of hangers-on to catch up. But nobody?
Eddie knew with painful clarity that he was being stupid. The smart play would be to poke around until he turned up someone, anyone from the Turkestani Defense Forces, then move in by the numbers. He was acting like your standard Hollywood cop, charging into a possible confrontation without calling for backup.
Fuck that noise too. Timur might be in danger. He put the hammer down, sprayed sand and pebbles across the tent fronts.
Timur's camp-meeting tent stood at the eastern edge of a plaza. Its side belled and collapsed forlornly like the sails of a drifting ship, and its flaps snapped in the wind. There was nobody in sight, not even the ubiquitous Sky-Blue Wolf sentries under Eddie's nominal command.
He brought the car to a swerving stop before the big tent, jumped out, and dashed for the entrance, so hyped that he went down when his feet hit the ground and had to scramble to get upright.
The smell that greeted him at the door knocked a measure of sanity back into him. Stale and sweet, oh yeah. He stopped, took a deep breath—through his mouth—glanced at the car several meters away. He had been so out of control that he'd left his nifty-drifty MRS assault rifle propped against the passenger seat. No time for it now: either seconds counted, or nothing counted.
He drew his Glock, went in fast, into a crouch and side-scuttling right, arms braced into a firing triangle, ready to engage any target.
There was none. There was nothing but bodies lying in that graceless unheeding way of the dead beneath a buzzing smog of flies.
The inner walls looked as if someone had thrown buckets of red paint on them.