Wild Cards 14 - Marked Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  The President reached the end of the line. Gerard cupped her ear. "Whassat?"

  "What game is this?" Herzenhagen demanded. "Do it! Jump him!"

  He had spoken too loudly: the K-Mart lady was frowning at him through her bifocals. Gerard pointed at his red Legion of Honor ribbon.

  "Your laundry tag is showing, Phil."

  The President was disappearing. Herzenhagen lunged after Gerard, grabbed her lapel.

  "Jump him!" Trying to keep his voice level.

  And suddenly she wasn't Gerard at all, but a mocking Howard Hughes, grinning through his little goatee. "Wanna date with Rita Hayworth?" Hughes said.

  Herzenhagen realized who'd been behind it all. "Howard!" he screamed, and raised a fist, not really knowing what he was going to do with it....

  Something cannoned into him from behind. He stumbled and fell flat on a Navy man's grave, saw black hands close on his like steel bands, heard a voice screaming in his ear, "He's gat a gun!" Screaming over and over. He tasted autumn leaves in his mouth. He tried to struggle, but was pinned. From somewhere came the scent of gunpowder and gun oil. Felt something underneath him, a solid iron lump, and more hands closed around him, white hands this time, and as he was lifted from the earth he saw something under him, a pistol, not his pistol but another; and he stared at it in shock and looked around him for Hughes and the black man, but he couldn't see either one, and rude hands were patting him down, demanding his name. His own security, unarmed and unable to intervene under the eyes of the Secret Service, had long since faded.

  The President, down below, had already been husded into his limo and was gone.

  "Hughes," Herzenhagen said. A Secret Service man looked at him.

  "Is that your name, sir?"

  Herzenhagen straightened and realized he was in deep trouble. "I want my lawyer," he said.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Shad's nerves howled at him to stomp on the gas and get the hell away from Arlington, but the bridge across the Potomac was jammed. Instead he moved the rented limo into the queue, and waited.

  "Did you see the way I fucked with his mind?" Croyd barked. He had his little-crabcake-lady appearance again. "Man, the look on his face when I turned into Hughes!"

  "I wish you hadn't done that," Shad said. "If people were paying attention, they might figure wild cards were involved."

  "Fuck that! You think I give a damn?" He snarled at the stalled traffic ahead, leaned over Shad, hit the horn button. He looked like Marjorie Main on a rampage. "Move, you assholes!" he roared. Shad winced at the volume.

  "Let's try not to attract attention to ourselves, okay?"

  "Who gives a damn, Gravemold? Isn't that your name, asshole?" Croyd hit the horn button a few more times for emphasis, then jerked back into his own seat. Shad recalled how Croyd had attacked in the car on the night of the Governor's Island escape. The vibes were turning unpleasantly familiar.

  "Oh, yeah," Shad said. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a pill bottle. "I found these on the floor of the car. They would seem to be yours."

  "Thanks." Croyd popped the top on the bottle and swallowed a mouthful of gel caps. "Wish I had Scotch for a chaser. Nothing like a Scotch after you've killed a bunch of people."

  The last few days, Shad thought, didn't make him want to do anything other than kill his own thoughts.

  Shad had followed every detail of Herzenhagen's plot through listening devices and phone taps. He and Croyd had ample opportunity to evolve their plan.

  Gerard and her driver would be found dead, in the cemetery, in their limo, one rented by Herzenhagen. It had been an easy enough hit, Shad filling the car with darkness so that the jumper couldn't use her power. Forensics would determine that the gun was the same one that had been found under Herzenhagen when he was arrested. And Shad made sure, when he grappled with the old man on the ground, that he'd smeared the gun oil and gunpowder residue from his own hands onto those of the Shark, providing clear forensic evidence that it was Herzenhagen who had despatched the jumper and her driver.

  "We get Rudo now, right?" Croyd said.

  "As soon as he gets back to this country. In the meantime, maybe we can get some other names out of the Latchkey documents."

  Unfortunately, the documents would require careful work. There was a lot of raw material; but all the money moved only in numbered accounts and the people were referred to only by code names. It was enough to keep a team of investigators busy for weeks.

  Casaday. The General. Brandon. Names Herzenhagen had brought up on the tapes. If Shad could attach them to code names on the documents, maybe he'd have something.

  And he really wanted to spend some time off the street anyway. Keep to himself, lose his prison self, find someone else to be.

  Croyd's voice rapped out like shotgun pellets landing on a roof. "Hell with that, Gravemold. Hell with that. We fly to Kirghizia and scrag the bastard. Nothing easier." Croyd put a paternal hand on Shad's shoulder. "Stick with Croyd and his moral guidance, kid. I'll steer ya right." He laughed. "I called you Gravemold, didn't I? For some reason I can't get that name out of my mind."

  Sit back, Shad thought, and let nature take its course.

  Not everyone in the government was a Shark, and likewise the media. Shad hoped that enough furor had been created to generate any number of investigations. With luck Peggy Durand would turn state's witness. And if the investigations seemed to be dying down, Shad could start mailing the tapes he'd made, Herzenhagen and Durand and Hughes and the others. Or copies of the documents they'd taken from Latchkey.

  Maybe Shad wouldn't have to do anything more except help Croyd take out Rudo. He owed Croyd that at least - and he owed Rudo, too, as far as that went.

  "Kirghizia," Croyd said. "Lovely name." He opened his mouth as if to yawn, then shut it abruptly. "And you think we should look at documents when Rudo's on the loose?"

  "Okay," Shad said. "Kirghizia it is."

  "Documents. A lot you know about documents." Croyd gave a grin. "I know something you don't know." He reached for the pill bottie again, popped the lid, swallowed another couple gel tabs. "Off-the-street crap," he muttered. "This shit's gotta be cut with something. The only speed you get on the street nowadays is smuggled up from Mexico or crystal meth people make in garbage cans. Not like when the pharmaceutical companies - "

  "What is it, Croyd?" Shad asked.

  Croyd smiled expansively, stretched, stopped another yawn. "I remember the good old days of speed. You could get anything - Black Beauties, desoxyn in all those pretty colors ..."

  "What is it you know," Shad spelled out, "about the documents that I don't know?"

  Croyd chuckled. "Oh. Your old buddy Hartmann."

  "What about him? Did you find something that said what he was up to?"

  "See, there was this log of the jumps they were doing, and I kind of paged through it. Started with putting Mistral back into her body just after the Rox, and then going on to ..."

  He yawned.

  "Going on to what?" Shad said. An ominous warning was sounding in his nerves.

  "Going on to Hartmann. They jumped him." Croyd laughed lazily. "You got the wrong guy. It was your buddy Battle you killed."

  "You bastard!" Shad pounded the steering wheel while Croyd laughed on. The horn went off again. Shad clamped his hands on the wheel and spoke through clenched teeth. "You didn't tell me?"

  "I didn't want you running back up to New York when we were having such fun here in DC."

  "So what happened to Hartmann? They killed him, right?"

  "No. They jumped him into this puny little joker body, looked like a chrome yellow cartoon character, and he escaped." Croyd yawned and closed his eyes. "The Sharks are supposed to shoot him on sight. There's a description in the book." He tapped his jacket. "Got it right here. I'll show it to you," he yawned again, "once we get to Kirghizia."

  "I don't think we're going to Kirghizia, Croyd."

  "Oh yeah?" Croyd licked his lips and pillowed his hea
d against the headrest. "Why's that?"

  "Because of the drugs you've been taking."

  "Heh. I'm a pro, man. Don't wony. My liver is safe."

  "It isn't your liver I'm talking about. It's the fact that I emptied the crystal meth out of those capsules of yours and filled them with Dalmane."

  Croyd dragged his eyes open. "That's a tranquilizer!"

  "Yep."

  "You ..." he yawned again, "bastard!"

  "Word, man."

  Croyd was asleep. Shad dragged the documents out of Croyd's jacket, read furiously as the traffic inched its way toward Washington. Then he began to laugh.

  Gregg Hartmann was stuck in the body of a three-foot-tall joker with bad eyesight and the voice of a ruptured countertenor. Puppetman's powers had to have died with Hartmann's original body. Every Shark in the world had orders to kill Hartmann on sight. And since Shad had just killed the last jumper on the planet, Hartmann was going to stay in the joker body for the rest of his life.

  If you could call it living.

  Shad tossed the documents on Croyd's lap and laughed. The Sharks had done Shad's job for him, had engineered a vengeance on Hartmann that was better than anything Shad could ever have done.

  And if Hartmann the joker ever surfaced, maybe Shad could contrive a few additional disappointments for him. Just to remind him of who he was, and what he'd done, and what he'd deserved.

  Yeah, he thought. Just like he'd said all along.

  Let nature take its course.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Black Trump.

  The word repeated itself in Herzenhagen's mind. Something to concentrate on as he sat on his bunk and watched the shadows of the bars form patterns on his cell wall.

  Black Trump.

  Herzenhagen wasn't talking, even to his own lawyer, would let the man fight the accusations without his help. Because sooner or later the Shark mission would be fulfilled, and then it didn't matter what happened to Herzenhagen.

  Black Trump.

  Only a matter of time.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Between the idea

  And the reality

  Between the motion

  And the Act

  Falls the Shadow.

  - T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

  The Color of His Skin

  Part 6

  Gregg waited a week. That wasn't really his intention: it was his body's fault.

  He had to molt.

  Only a few hours after he'd decided to call Rudo, he had a sudden, instinctive urge to find a private, dark place. Not long after he'd pulled aside a loose grating and slithered down into the New York sewer system, pieces of skin had begun the long, slow process of peeling away. Molting felt like having the worst sunburn in the world. Every moment of it was agony: scraping against the rough stone walls to help the skin loosen, the raw new layers burning for hours until they hardened, more layers sloughing off in long streamers.

  Afterward, he didn't look or feel any different except that his vision was a little better and he was ravenously hungry.

  He ate a manhole cover for breakfast.

  It wasn't fair, Gregg decided. It wasn't fair at all.

  It took a while to dig up the necessary humility to beg for change, but it got easier each time he tried. When he had a few quarters clutched in his front legs, Gregg went looking for a phone he could reach. It took half an hour or more to find one of the old-fashioned booths with a seat he could use as a perch. He dropped a quarter in and held the receiver up to the clown nose that served as one of his ears. That left the other end dangling several inches from his mouth. He dialed Pan Rudo's private extension at WHO. Pan had a habit of working late - he hoped tonight wouldn't be an exception.

  When he heard the receiver click and Rudo's cautious "Hello?", Gregg moved the phone to his mouth.

  "Don't say anything," he said. "This is Gregg Hartmann. That's right. By now your goons must have told you that I got away after you jumped me out of my body." Gregg heard a faint tinny squawking and quickly moved the phone back to his ear.

  "... are you talking about? How did you get this number? You - "

  Back to his mouth. "No need to get so shrill, Pan. That's not like you. You gave me the number back in January at the van Renssaeler New Years party - on the embossed private card you use for your personal contacts. I am Hartmann. When you came over to my office the last time, you were wearing your double-breasted Italian suit - the blue one - and a floral tie. I told you I was sending you an invoice for the work I did on the Senate WHO funding - $35,900, it was. Your secretary's name is Dianne, mine is Jo Ann."

  More squawking. Back to the ear.

  "... do you want?"

  "I want a body. A nice normal one. And you'll get it for me. I still have the evidence, Pan, and now I have more. See you soon."

  Gregg hung up on Rudo's protest.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Rudo's limousine pulled up in front of the UN plaza while the sun was still hidden behind the Manhattan skyscrapers. The driver got out and opened the door for Rudo while a tall, muscular black man got out of the other side: Rudo's security chief, General MacArthur Johnson. Gregg moved from where he'd been pretending to look at the landscaping by the street and hurried toward them on his six legs. Johnson spotted him before he was halfway there. Johnson's right hand disappeared beneath his jacket, and Gregg called out loudly in his cartoon character voice: "Pan! Sorry I'm late for our appointment, but it's hell getting a cab when you look like this."

  Rudo swiveled around awkwardly, nearly stumbling. "And you're usually so graceful," Gregg tsked softly. "Sorry I startled you, but I'm not exactly responsible for my appearance, remember?"

  Ruao's pinched features contracted even more. "Just come with me and shut up," he said.

  They entered the UN building. Rudo spoke with the guards and signed Gregg in for a visitor's pass before taking the elevators to the WHO floor. They didn't talk. Rudo left Johnson outside his office with his secretary, Dianne. He shut the door and turned to face Gregg. Rudo seemed uneasy and out of sorts. He sat in the chair behind his desk like a kid in his parent's office, uselessly straightening the calendar pad and toying with the Mont Blanc fountain pen on the leather-encased blotter. His eyes kept darting about nervously. He didn't seem comfortable at all, like a person in unfamiliar surroundings.

  It hit Gregg suddenly. He's not Rudo. He's someone else. Rudo's been jumped, too. The implications staggered Gregg. The Sharks had a tame jumper - which meant that Rudo, Faneuil, Durand, Battle, Herzenhagen, all of them, could be safely ensconced in shiny new bodies. Safe.

  "Oh my God," Gregg said.

  "Not quite," said a voice. "But I did come for vengeance. A nice look, don't you think?"

  Rudo was staring in fascinated horror at something behind Gregg. Gregg pivoted on his hindmost legs to see a shape coalesce out of air. Humanoid, it never seemed to quite reach solidity. Gregg could see the striped wallpaper of the office through it. "I'm Croyd, Pan," the ghostly apparition said in a cheery voice. "Just so you know."

  "Croyd?" the false Pan managed to sputter.

  "Yep. Amazing what a little nap will do for you, ain't it? Pan, I should have killed you long ago."

  Gregg was never quite sure what happened then.

  Croyd was whistling softly as he seemed to shape something in his hands, as if he were using the air in the room like clay. The outlines of the shape were suddenly visible: a long, tapering spear. "Crude, but effective," Croyd said.

  And Croyd's arm flashed. The weapon flew unerringly toward Pan, who was rising from his seat. The spear tore through the man's chest as if Rudo were no more substantial than paper, and then seemed to explode. Gregg saw the man's back rip open. A gout of blood spattered the wall behind Rudo as if someone had thrown a bucket of red paint mixed with raw hamburger.

  "Very effective, in fact," Croyd observed.

  "But I'm not ..." Rudo screamed, but the scream quickly became a gurgle as blood frothed over
his lips. "I'm not - " he said again, and keeled over on top of the desk, his mouth still open in the protest. The Mont Blanc went clattering to the floor.

  "You're right. You're not anymore," the ghost of Croyd said, and chuckled. He waved to Gregg almost cheerily and disappeared in a roll of soft thunder.

  It had taken perhaps fifteen seconds. The door burst open and Johnson rushed in, gun in hand. He looked at the carnage, at Rudo's body.

  At Gregg. "You son of a bitch," Johnson said.

  "No!" Gregg screeched. "I didn't do it!"

  He moved at the same time, and Johnson's first shot grazed one of his legs. That was all that was needed. Gregg felt the sudden blinding panic, and Johnson dropped into slow motion. Gregg's joker body streaked for the door, turned left, and nearly left skid marks on the walls and ceiling as he half-ran, half bounced up and over Johnson. He landed on Rudo's body, legs pumping and skidding momentarily in the blood, then he was moving again. Johnson was trying to track Gregg for another shot, but he was hopelessly behind.

  Out the damn DOOR! Gregg willed the body, and nearly ran down Dianne as he scurried from the room. The outer door was open now, with people running toward the commotion, but he couldn't make himself move in the right direction. He was all around Dianne's area: over the desk, tangling his multiple feet in the computer wires and taking the equipment over with him. The monitor shattered as he sped up and around the walls as if they were a racecourse specifically designed for him. Another shot tore great chunks of plaster from the wall in front of him and Gregg did an involuntary and impossible 90° turn as onlookers screamed and hit the floor. The DOOR! He felt like he was starting to get some control of this flight reflex, but it still took two circuits of the room before he managed to make the left turn out into the hallway. He heard Johnson shouting behind him and alarms going off.

  He headed for the stairs.

  And hit the door like a rushing bull. The door was harder than his head. He bounced. Johnson was pounding down the hall toward him, still bellowing and waving the gun. Office workers were scattering in his wake - under desks, behind chairs and filing cabinets. Gregg jumped for the handle and slipped off. Panicked now, he thought desperately of the garbage can he'd had for supper, remembered the saliva flowing and the pressure building and building -