Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  He turned to look at me, smiling grimly. The grease had filled in crevices in his skin, accentuated the stubble on his face. He sucked in his cheeks so that his features were sunken, the bones of his jaw in sharp relief. I gasped as he bugged his eyes out, one of them slowly twisting away.

  “Jesus Christ, Halton. More of your goddamned nanos?”

  “No,” he said. “Just good muscle control. What do you think?”

  You ever see that 1931 classic black-and-white where Dr. Jekyll starts grimacing and turns into Mr. Hyde right before your very eyes without the aid of high-tech FX? What Fredric March did for Hyde, Halton was doing for Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. Halton’s own mother wouldn’t have recognized him, even if he’d had one.

  I glanced at the soldier casually sauntering up to the window of the car three ahead of us. We didn’t have a lot of time.

  “Lovely.” I shuddered. I wasn’t going to be able to do likewise; my membership at the local health club didn’t include facial aerobics. “You got a fake mustache in your pocket for me?”

  “Get in the back seat.”

  I crawled over the back, and crouched down. There was no blanket or tarp, nothing to hide under. “Great idea,” I said. “Now what?”

  “Lift up on the seat. It comes up.”

  I did, and was surprised to find he was right. “How’d you know that? Never mind…” Get it out of books.

  The space underneath was for storing tools and oil cans, a round indentation showing where the spare tire took up the back end of the little trunk behind me. I rifled quickly through the assorted junk, but there still was nothing I could use to hide under. I risked looking over the front seat toward the soldier strolling up to the car in front of us, before dubiously eyeing the filthy small space.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” I started tossing everything out of the storage space onto the floorboards of the back seat, and tried crawling in. It was not made to accommodate human bodies, and I was no contortionist anyway. There was no way I could shut the seat completely over me, no matter which way I scrunched.

  Halton had turned the music back on and was already rolling the window down on the car. “What is happening?” he demanded in loud Markundi over the wailing song, his peasant’s accent the right mix of respect and aggravation. “Why have you stopped everyone?”

  I couldn’t see more than a thin line of light through the crack between the storage space and the seat. I held my breath, not trusting myself to make a sound. Which was just as well, since the exhaust fumes seemed to collect in the small nook and I was in imminent threat of asphyxiation.

  “We’re looking for a dangerous criminal,” I heard the soldier saying. “An American spy who tried to assassinate His Excellency.”

  “Allah preserve him!” Halton breathed fervently.

  “Turn that crap down,” the soldier demanded with the contemptuous tone of a superior to an inferior, “and let me see your license.”

  Oh, shit. I heard Halton scrabbling around in the glove box, and the rustle of papers.

  “This is only the registration,” the soldier said.

  “But this is me. Look here, here is my name, Salim Fareed—it says so right there.” Halton was jabbing at the paper. Thwack, thwack. “See here?” Thwack.

  “You need a license,” the soldier insisted.

  “A license, a registration, they are the same, only pieces of paper. Why do you need my license when you can see with your own eyes this is my registration?”

  “Show me your identification,” the soldier persisted, his tone growing angry.

  “All right, here. Does this not also say I am Salim Fareed?” There was more rustling of paper, a long silence.

  “Where are you going?” The soldier sounded less antagonistic.

  “To my sister’s house in Zaqihab,” Halton answered promptly, his voice quavering slightly with anxiety tinged with injured pride. “It is not far. I did not think I’d need papers just to go so little distance to see my sister.” Halton sounded like a querulous, stubborn peasant whose honor had been wounded. No doubt the exact impression he was trying to give the soldier. “I don’t know anything about American spies. I am an honest man. You can search my car, then, for your American spy, if you must…”

  Christ, Halton, don’t overdo it!

  “Look there, you can see I am a respectable mechanic. Look at my tools. I must take all my tools and extra oil to help my nephew rebuild an engine. Look here, see—look at these cans of oil.” The springs in the front seat were squeaking as Halton turned toward the back where I was hiding. No doubt he was waving a hand toward the jumble of cans I’d tossed out onto the floorboards. I willed myself to shrink, regretting my earlier wish to be taller, as Halton babbled on. “He says it is a cracked block, I know about cracked blocks on engines because I am a good mechanic, that is a very difficult job, a cracked block…” He was starting to sound slightly hysterical.

  “Okay, okay,” the soldier snapped, bored and irritated. He had no interest in the fine points of engine repair. “Go on through.”

  The car rumbled around me, and we lurched away. I held my breath as long as possible, until little black spots whirred around the edges of my sight. Taking a deep breath, I started coughing immediately, doing my best to stifle the sound.

  “Stay down,” I heard Halton say, and choked quietly to myself. The bumps in the road translated to bumps on my head and hips and shoulders and knees and elbows, as the loose seat rattled and banged.

  A few miles later, he gave the all-clear, and I hauled myself painfully over the front seat, sliding down to cough.

  “Next time, I drive, you hide in the back seat,” I wheezed out.

  “I wouldn’t fit,” Halton said solemnly, keeping his eyes, both of them now, looking straight ahead on the road in front of him. His face had relaxed back into his normal features.

  “Jeez, Halton.” I let it go. “What the hell did you give him for identification, anyway?”

  “A hundred-rial note.”

  I laughed.

  Halton didn’t. “It won’t keep him long,” he warned.

  “You think he believed you?”

  He shrugged.

  I rubbed my aches and stayed quiet as we drove across the desert. The cars thinned out after the roadblock. Shardamuzh was two hours from Nok Kuzlat, a few miles from the border with the only one of its neighboring countries semifriendly to Americans. Mile after mile, we squinted through the harsh sunlight and tails of dust kicked up by the vehicles occasionally passing on either side of the two-lane road.

  Desperadoes on the run, I thought. I yawned, the heat making me drowsy against my will. If this were a movie, I let my thoughts wander sleepily, this part would definitely end up on the cutting room floor. I had to fight to keep my eyes open.

  Then suddenly, an ancient rusting pickup with a kneeling camel tied to the bed of the truck drew up alongside the Volvo, the driver risking life and limb to overtake us as a large tractor-trailer coming in the opposite direction honked in protest. My hands clawed into the dashboard, and I caught a glimpse of the wild-eyed kamikaze trying to pass us. If Halton had been a true, self-respecting Khuruchabjan, he would have sped up, refusing to give an inch of road, and forced the pickup to either fall back behind us or get creamed by the semi. But Halton was a civilized driver, tapping his brakes to make room for the careening pickup wobbling beside us to cut in front.

  The pickup lurched over ahead of us at the last moment, its bumper inches away from ours. The semi’s horn blared indignantly as it passed, huge wheels churning up sand from the shoulder of the road. The pickup driver waved a defiant fist out the window, middle finger extended in the universal gesture at the semi, at us, at the world in general—who knows? Sand and pebbles pinged off our dust-coated windshield. The adrenaline had snapped me completely out of my heat lethargy.

  I stared at the camel in the pickup now in front of us as it chewed methodically, small brown eyes glaring down the sides of its bul
bous nose thrust in the air. Somehow, it reminded me of the late king. I started to giggle.

  “What?” Halton looked over at me curiously.

  “I can’t believe we got away with it,” I said lamely, not able to explain my sudden impulse to laugh.

  “We haven’t yet,” Halton said. Ever the killjoy.

  We passed several routes leading away from the main road, before finally taking one that looked about the same as the others. The green and white road signs were half-obliterated by blowing sand and rusting bullet holes made by passing shepherds for target practice. I had to trust Halton’s sense of direction. We drove over the rise of a small hill to find Shardamuzh in the distance, a squat, mud-brick town.

  As we got closer, I could see where old bomb damage had taken its toll on the village: bricks piled haphazardly at the foot of crumbling walls, empty windows and doorways. The modem bridge which once spanned the river had never been repaired after being hit by a bomb; by the extent of the damage, I’d guess a French-made Feu-du-Dieu spearhead missile. Instead, a rope suspension bridge not made for motorized vehicles hung between the pilings, being traversed by cars anyway.

  “Nice,” I said, watching the bridge sag dangerously under the weight of an ancient two-door Skoda being pushed across by several men. “Good thing we stop here.”

  Halton asked directions to Majid’s uncle’s house, and we were directed toward the edge of town, down a dirt road, past what looked like an automobile graveyard, to a small house. Several cars in the three-sided garage were on blocks, chickens clucking and scraping the sandy oil-stained ground around the hulks. Except for the chickens, the place seemed deserted. We parked the Volvo, and Halton turned off the engine. My ears buzzed in the sudden quiet.

  A fairly new sandjeep was parked in the back, and a dark, mustachioed man leaned against it, smoking a cigarette. He looked up indifferently as we came toward him.

  “We’re looking for Salim Fareed,” Halton asked.

  The man nodded his head at the house, wordlessly.

  We thanked him and walked toward the house. It was very small, no more than a couple of rooms, and I knocked on the wooden door.

  “Come on in!” I heard someone call out cheerfully in Markundi.

  Halton stopped short as I pushed open the door.

  My eyes adjusted to the dim light to make out Cullen Laidcliff sitting in a chair at the far end of the room, grinning over the barrel of a very nasty-looking Eclipse special.

  “Don’t,” I heard someone say softly behind me, and knew that someone was holding what was probably the Eclipse’s mate to Halton’s head.

  “Hello, honey,” Laidcliff said, voice oily. “I hope you’ve been faithful…”

  TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  We’d done this routine before, in Nok Kuzlat, where Sheikh Larry’s wife wound up sprawled on a derelict café floor lit up like the lead dancer in Swan Lake. The question asked was pretty much the same as well, only this time, Laidcliff had plenty of time.

  The green-eyed, sandy-haired man held his Eclipse pressed firmly against Halton’s temple. He leaned in to breathe into the fabricant’s ear, “Next time I can’t miss, asshole,” and chuckled as if he’d said something funny. Halton didn’t react, his eyes on me.

  “How’d you find us?” I demanded, trying to keep the fear out of my voice as Laidcliff tied my hands behind my back. “How could you possibly get here ahead of us?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” Laidcliff said patiently. “You just can’t trust these sand-niggers to get anything done right, too busy raking off bribes and buggering each other. So we set up scanners to automatically trace every license plate going out of Nok Kuzlat. Ran ’em through the police computer until something popped up as a little too coincidental.” He jerked the last knot painfully tight. “Besides, a hundred rials just doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

  He was grinning as he turned me around and pushed me down into a chair. “We paid a little visit to your friend Majid, asked him a couple of questions. With a little chemical persuasion, he was more than happy to tell us anything we needed to know.”

  My stomach sank. “Is he dead?” I had to keep my voice low to stop it from quavering.

  “Not when we left,” Laidcliff said from behind me, sliding my arms down around the back of the chair and anchoring my wrists to the seat. I was staring at Halton standing motionless, the sandy-haired man keeping his grip tight, the muzzle of the gun pressed hard against the side of Halton’s head forcing it slightly to one side. “But I can’t vouch for what the Khuruchabjans will do with him.” He didn’t much care, either.

  “Once we knew where you both were headed”—he came around to kneel down to tie one of my ankles to the leg of the chair—“we just hopped on a helicopter to the Qurzon airbase, picked up a sandjeep and got here, oh, about an hour before you.” He grinned up at me. “You missed lunch.”

  “Where’s Salim Fareed?” I didn’t want any more people hurt, helpless to stop it.

  “Taking a nap.” Laidcliff nodded toward a closed door. He patted me gently on the cheek. “Don’t worry about him, sweetie. When he wakes up, he’s going to have the honor of claiming he killed two American spies. A hero of his country.” The last pat ended up a hard slap. I yelped more from surprise than pain.

  Halton didn’t blink.

  If we had been in a civilized country, Laidcliff explained, he wouldn’t have had to waste all his best pharmaceuticals on a bunch of camel jockeys. He could have made it painless and easy for me, a few questions asked under the correct dosage of gentle chemical persuasion, followed by a quick lethal shot in the arm to go flying out on. But they were all used up, all except the lethal stuff, and there wasn’t a corner Thrifty to trot down to and pick up some extra truth serum. In primitive conditions, one just has to improvise, doesn’t one? He chortled happily, enjoying himself as he tied my other ankle to the chair.

  “That’s all you really needed me for, wasn’t it, Laidcliff?” I said while he tightened the ropes. “Bring in one Halton Larry would trust so another could assassinate him, right?”

  Laidcliff laughed, jerking the ropes painfully taut. “Wrong, sugar,” he said, and stood up. “The original plan was exactly how we laid it out. Larry needed a watchdog, and we had a custom-made puppy wrapped up just for him. We wanted somebody stupid to bring him in. You were our man, so to speak. The only reason we needed you was to give Halton a good excuse to get close enough to the Sheikh when the time came to ‘rescue’ him.

  “If you’d just stuck to the rules, nobody would have gotten hurt. But then Halton started acting wonky, and you brought down some extra illicit baggage and were nosing around where you didn’t belong. You were so sure there was some sort of conspiracy going on, you helped stir one up on your very own. Too many things were going wrong, and that changed the whole game plan.”

  “I don’t have the microflake anymore,” I said. Not that that was going to stop him from beating the slipclip out of me.

  “That’s okay.” He grinned, and pulled the flake out of his pocket to brandish it. “I do.”

  Now I knew who had killed Somerton.

  “See, by the time old al-Hasmani gave us a call, gibbering about weird microflakes and flying tomatoes and computerized spirit messages taking over their data networks, we’d already decided we ought to get our butts over here and do something to straighten this mess out. Larry was getting a bit too uppity anyway. He somehow got himself convinced he was some kind of holy messiah about to stomp the shit out of us, so we just went to Plan B.”

  Laidcliff leaned forward, speaking in a conspiratorial stage whisper. “But you want to know something really funny? The flake’s worthless. We didn’t have to cancel the kid’s ticket after all.”

  I must have looked very bewildered and idiotic with my mouth hanging open, and Laidcliff’s delighted laughter confused me more.

  “You want to know what’s on this thing, honey?” He held it under my nose. “Garbage. The kik
es sold the ragheads a bunch of phony AI plans for infrafusion bombs that won’t work. The kid had nothing! The rest of the flake is just empty space.”

  He thought this was outrageously funny.

  Laidcliff didn’t know we’d already cracked the flake.

  Gabriel hadn’t liked the accommodations…

  It hadn’t just rewritten its own programming, it had abandoned the flake altogether. That’s why Halton couldn’t coax it back out again; it simply wasn’t there anymore. It had dumped itself wholesale into Ibrahim’s computer-bulletin network system, escaping into the electronic ethersphere to search for its Chosen One. Gabriel had almost found him, too, but Laidcliff had just assassinated the object of the AI’s fondest dreams. Gabriel was still out there, futilely looking for the Mahdi.

  And it had been the Israelis who had created Gabriel.

  Shalom, Gabriel.

  I thought that was rather humorous myself. I laughed.

  Laidcliff didn’t enjoy sharing the joke. He backhanded me. Then he got down to the rough stuff.

  “Where’s the slipclip?” Laidcliff said for the third time. I was crying. I have a tendency to do that when someone beats the shit out of me, but I don’t confuse pain with stupidity. Or bravery. I knew as well as he did that if I told him, he’d kill me, then Halton. Then anyone else he could make me name. The idea, see, was that eventually he could convince me dying would be a pleasant reward for talking. I wasn’t so sure he couldn’t, either.

  Halton hadn’t moved when Laidcliff started in. The sandy-haired man held him in a firm throat-lock, the Eclipse never moving a fraction of an inch away from Halton’s head.

  But someone else had made the mistake of thinking he could hold him like that. Maybe the man’s arm got tired. Maybe his attention wandered, distracted by the entertainment. Once, only once, as I sagged against the ropes and wept, I saw Halton go very still, radiating an aura of serene tranquillity. The next time I screamed, I heard a muffled crack, and a hiss of breath being sucked in for a curse.