Suicide Kings wc-20

by George R. R. Martin

  Wally’s heart hammered away at the bars of its iron cage. It felt like forever before the tightness in his throat receded enough for him to speak. He struggled to form a coherent thought. “Where the heck did you come from?” he managed.

  The girl didn’t answer. If she heard him at all she showed no sign of it. All she did was stare at him with those cold, cold eyes. She didn’t even blink.

  “Holy cow, kid. You scared the stuffing out of me.” Wally regained his feet. He took a step forward. She backed up. “Are you lost?” Another step. The girl backed up again, receding into the jungle. “Hungry?”

  The last thing he noticed before she disappeared completely was that her feet didn’t touch the ground.

  Wally’s appetite had fled. Like the rest of him wanted to do. He abandoned thoughts of lunch. Instead he picked up his gear and forced himself to walk back to the boat rather than run. The itch between his shoulder blades was painful now, like a hot nail in the back.

  He put miles and miles between himself and the little girl before nightfall made it impossible to go any farther. And even though he knew it was silly, he was careful to pitch his tent on the opposite side of the river from where he’d stopped for lunch. He forced himself to eat, even though his appetite hadn’t returned.

  Wally tossed and turned in his sleeping bag for what felt like hours. When he did manage to drift off, dark and disturbing dreams haunted him. He slept fitfully.

  He snapped wide awake just before dawn, after a particularly vivid dream about somebody trying to slit his throat. But he was all alone in the jungle.

  Mackenzie District

  Northwest Territory, Canada

  “You’re losing it, man,” the hippie asshole said. Behind the thick round lenses of his specs his eyes wavered like blue drops of ink refusing to quite dissolve in water. Tom longed to punch in that weak face, oddly ascetic as it was, with the gaunt cheeks and wispy goatee and an air of general sadness that infuriated him the more. “You can’t hide from it much longer.”

  He and the other floated in a sort of fluffy Void in which only they had color and form. “So what? So fucking what? You think you can take your body back? That shit’s gone forever, Meadows. If I lose it we all die.”

  “If that’s so,” his enemy-the only thing he feared-said calmly, “that wouldn’t be so bad. Because you’re losing control of your power, too.”

  He laughed. “I’m the most powerful ace on fucking Earth. Who’s going to do anything to me?”

  “It’s not what others do to you. It’s what you do to the world. The whole human race. You’re turning into an extinction-level threat.”

  He laughed again, a bit more wildly. “If I wipe out humanity, who the fuck’ll miss us? All your hippie friends these days say humanity’s a plague.”

  “What about the oppressed?” his gentle inquisitor said doggedly. “What about your Revolution?”

  “Hey, maybe I fulfill the historic process by ending history. Shit happens, man.”

  “But if people make shit happen,” Meadows said, “others can stop them doing it.”

  “Ha! You and what army?”

  Tom became aware of shapes seeming to swim around them. His eyes couldn’t resolve them as anything more than vaguely human-shaped blurs of color: grey; an orange that flickered like the reflections of flames; a disc half moon-silver and half black, with S-curved demarcation; a black infinitely deep, shot through with tiny parti-color points of light that did not illuminate the darkness.

  “You forget whose friends they were to start with,” Mark said.

  “They’re mine now. You got nothing, you weak, lame puke. You are nothing. And I’m tired of your shit.” With a force of will Tom drove himself upward and out.

  Abruptly he was sitting upright in a bed, cold air pricking his skin where sheets and layers of heavy blankets had fallen away. A faint smoke smell and heat of banked coals emanated from the fireplace. Big snowflakes beat like giant moths against the window of the cabin in the Arctic pine forests of Mackenzie District in Canada’s Northwest Territory, almost as remote as the mid-Pacific.

  He had come alone. He needed to try to get his head straight. Sun Heilian was starting to look at him funny. She was too damned smart, that woman. She’s just a woman, a voice told him. The world’s half full of them.

  Tom shook his head and rubbed his face, where for some reason beard bristles never grew. “She loves Sprout,” he said, “she loves me .” And he thought, Who’s laughing? Who’s that I hear? And inside him was colder than outside the log walls of the cabin.

  19

  Monday,

  December 14

  Helsinki, Finland

  “I don’t really want to be crawling through a computer screen in the security office,” Jaako Kuusi, aka Broadcast, mumbled around a mouthful of creamed herring.

  Noel placed a spoonful of caviar, some chopped egg, and chopped onion on a cracker. “Well, how else can we do it?” He took a bite and the sharp taste of fish and salt brought an explosion of saliva to the back of his mouth.

  “There’s a guy in the States. I kept track of computer aces for our service.”

  Noel nodded. Jaako did occasional freelance work for the Finnish secret service, and he and Noel had crossed paths a few times. “And what does he do?”

  A gull appeared out of the fog and snow, and dove past the window of the Helsinki restaurant. Its raucous cries grated like rusty hinges. “The Signal on Port 950.”

  “That’s nice, what the hell does that mean?”

  Jaako shook his head. “That’s his name, his handle, not his power. But it suggests his power.”

  “Would you get to the point?”

  “You sound just like Niemi,” Jaako complained, referring to the head of the Finnish secret service.

  “You don’t have to be insulting. Niemi is a nasty piece of work.” Noel dished up more caviar.

  “And Flint was such an angel?” Jaako asked. “I think you have to be a perfect shit to run one of these agencies.”

  “I’d agree with that,” Noel said.

  “So, why pull this heist on the Nshombos? Why not get them hauled up in front of the Hague? Rumor has it you put Flint there.” Noel just smiled, and Jaako looked disappointed. “Oh, come on, give me something?”

  “No.” Noel paused for a sip of vodka. “Now tell me about the Signal. What’s his power and why do we need it?”

  “The guy can project his consciousness into any computer on the Internet that is listening on Port 950. When he’s inhabiting a computer, he can use it like any user-copy files, send jobs to a printer, connect to another computer. But here’s what’s useful for us. He can also use any peripheral devices as if he were the interface software.”

  Noel slowly set down his glass. “He can control the security devices in the vault.”

  Jaako formed a gun with his fingers, pointed it at Noel, and pretended to pull the trigger. “Bingo.”

  “Yes, we definitely need him,” Noel said.

  “Which brings us back to me avoiding that whole security office issue. If you can find the guy-he’s a total recluse-you need to convince him to let me into his space so I can enter the vault from his computer screen in the United States.”

  “And if I can’t find him or convince him?”

  “I won’t join your party.”

  “I’ll find him.” Noel paused for a moment, then added softly, “Do I need to remind you not to mention this little endeavor to anyone?”

  “I won’t. A chance for a couple of mil. Mum’s the word.” He made a zipping motion across his lips.

  “Yes, and just to assure your silence…” Noel slid an eight-by-ten envelope across the table.

  Jaako opened it, pulled out the photos, blanched, and quickly shoved them back into the envelope.

  Noel knew what they contained. A particularly horrible variety of child pornography, and he’d downloaded them from Jaako’s computer.

  “How did you get these?”
Jaako demanded. He tried to sound threatening, but it came out breathless.

  “I stole your computer. And I’ll deliver it to Niemi if you don’t play nice.”

  “You’re a bastard. Talk about Niemi or Flint. You could be running one of these agencies.”

  “And you’re a pervert, but I’m going to make you a rich pervert.” Noel stood, threw down money, and walked out into the Finnish blizzard.

  Saigon, Vietnam

  Bugsy pressed the cell phone against his ear. The rumble of traffic was almost enough to drown out Barbara Baden’s voice.

  “No,” Bugsy said. “I’m in the middle of this thing for Lohengrin.”

  “You’ll need to take a break from it,” Babel said. “Jayewardene wants as many members of the Committee as possible to be at the conference for security detail. I’ve arranged a private flight for you. How soon can you be at Ho Chi Minh Airport?”

  Bugsy pressed the phone to his chest, leaned forward, and asked Billy the same question. Around them, the highway was buzzing with traffic following no recognizable traffic laws Bugsy had ever seen. Semis screamed past them at a hundred kilometers an hour. Granted that wasn’t so bad when you put it in miles per hour, but three digits still made him nervous.

  “Five hours,” the joker said with a shrug of his desiccated shoulders. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Babel must have heard, because as soon as Bugsy put the phone back to his ear, she was speaking.

  “I’ll have the flight ready for you. It will be official UN business, so you can skip all the customs and airport security.”

  The line went dead. Bugsy closed the phone. Nick, sitting beside him, raised Cameo’s eyebrows. The guy still hadn’t forgiven Bugsy for knocking the hat off on the plane into Vietnam. “Change of plans?” Nick said.

  “How would you feel about a lovely few days in Paris watching the Caliphate stall for time? Turns out there’s a peace conference that they want us to be at.”

  Billy shouted something that sounded obscene and swerved violently. The tires squealed, and the car fishtailed for a few heart-stopping seconds before shifting back into a recognizable lane. Nick looked a little pale.

  “Sounds fine, assuming we get there.”

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

  There was another blizzard in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Noel peered through the windshield of the rented car. The wipers were in a losing battle with the snow. He’d tried to teleport to the Steunenberg farm, but Google Earth had failed him. This place was so remote and the shot from the satellites so cursory that Noel had found himself standing in ankle-deep mud with a bitter wind slicing through his topcoat, surrounded by fallow fields.

  So he’d teleported to Barcelona and warmer climes, used an Internet cafe to check a location for a Hertz in Coeur d’Alene. He then teleported back to Idaho and rented a car. While he waited for a young pimple-plagued boy to bring up the car he perused through the file on his iPhone about Mollie Steunenberg, aka Tesseract.

  He skipped past the downloads of season two of American Hero. It had been painful to watch. Mollie hadn’t had a good run. Her power was formidable. Her tolerance for backstabbing limited. She’d been voted off in the fifth week, and her final confessional had been filled with anger, confusion, and a desire to get even with “the Heathers.” Noel had to do a bit of research to understand that reference, but once he did, it was just another angle to use with Ms. Steunenberg. That and her age. At seventeen she’d either be idealistic or a completely self-absorbed teenager.

  Noel made the last turn through an open gate in a long white fence, and then the house appeared out of the storm. It looked like a Norman Rockwell painting, complete with a Christmas tree twinkling in a front window and smoke pouring from the stone chimney. A big barn lay off to the left, and as Noel stepped out of the car he heard the lowing of cattle.

  Since he wanted to test her power in a real world setting rather than the artifice of American television, he locked his keys in the car.

  The brass knocker on the front door was etched with the words “Bless This House.” It was All Americana perfection. Noel considered the file he’d compiled-nuclear family, mom, dad, nine kids, eight boys and one girl, grandma and grandpa living in the house, and all of them farming the family land. Noel began to despair of ever attracting this young woman into a life of crime.

  There was the sound of many running feet, and the door was flung open to reveal a long hallway filled with a sea of young boys ranging in age from seven to seventeen. “I’m looking for Ms. Mollie Steunenberg,” Noel said. “Is she in?”

  “MOLLIE! THERE’S SOME GUY HERE FOR YOU!” one of the boys shouted.

  “HE SOUNDS LIKE A FAG!” another yelled.

  “Mollie’s got a boyfriend, and he’s a fag,” the smallest boy lisped in a singsong.

  There was a clatter of boots on the stairs at the far end of the hall. Mollie Steunenberg was short, plump, and cute, with curling red hair and a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. She had dark brown eyes and they were brimming with anger. “Shut up, you jerks.” She pushed through the gaggle of boys. Now Noel could see the family resemblance, and his flagging hopes soared. “I’m Mollie,” she said, and stood, arms akimbo, and stared challengingly up at him.

  “I’m Mr. Fontes with the Brookline Agency.” He handed over one of his fake cards. “We’re in the business of developing and utilizing wild card talents in a variety of industrial settings.” Noel had a feeling that a hardheaded farm girl from Idaho wouldn’t buy the idea a movie agent was interested in her so he’d invented Mr. Fontes and the Brookline Agency. “Your fourth-dimensional powers have some interesting applications, and we’d like to talk with you about employment.”

  “Great. Let me get my coat.”

  “Don’t you want to talk here?”

  Mollie looked horrified. “Oh, God, no. There’s no privacy here.” She bestowed a glare on her brothers.

  “But your parents…” Noel began.

  “They’re watching Wheel of Fortune and they hate to be interrupted.”

  Wheel of Fortune. It couldn’t be more perfect.

  Once outside Noel made a production of having locked his keys in the car. “If we could get a coat hanger from the house,” he said.

  Mollie made a face. “My brothers will think you’re lame, and I’ll get even more shit from them. I can get the keys.”

  Noel watched as she focused on the car door. A small opening appeared in the metal. Mollie reached through and her hand vanished, and appeared out of the dashboard of the car. It was disturbing and rather creepy, as if her arm had bent into strange, twisted angles. But of course she was reaching through a fourth-dimensional gate. It wouldn’t be normal.

  She snagged the keys and tossed them to Noel. He allowed himself to biff the catch, and had to fish them out of the snow and mud.

  Special Camp Mulele

  Guit District, South Sudan

  The Caliphate of Arabia

  Mid-afternoon in the sudd was the hottest part of the day. Some hippos drowsed in the nearest arm of the river with just their ears and bulbous eyes and road-humped backs showing above the brown water. Even the little birds that groomed their thick hides for ticks and parasites had given up and sought shelter until the heat of day passed.

  Tom touched down on white dirt packed firm by small feet. Special Camp Mulele drowsed under open-sided tents and awnings that did little more than cut the sun’s sting. Some of the child aces sobbed quietly to themselves. A pair of the younger kids sat cross-legged playing patty-cake, one with child hands, the other with the blunt furry tips of giant spider legs. Ayiyi was an Ewe kid from Ghana’s Togo River region, west along the coast from Nigeria. His folks had moved to Lagos looking for work a year before its liberation. Only ten, he had a kid’s head sticking out of the body of a black-and-white spider with a yard-long body and an eight-foot span on his eight fuzzy legs. Like any spider, Ayiyi had humongous fangs and creepy little jointed leg-things to bring food to his
maw. But he ate with his human mouth. It was a process Tom could never bear to watch. Those nasty fangs injected a venom that immobilized its victims with sheer pain, as it liquefied them inside their own skin.

  “Listen up, kids,” Tom called in French, then repeated it in English. “We got things to do.”

  They stopped and turned to him. Some faces were sad, some horrifying. In all of them he saw a kind of hunger, avid as that of any starving man peering through the window at a plutocrat’s feast. They’re looking at me, he thought. They know I have something to give them. A purpose to their poor twisted lives. Purpose to their suffering. Is that really such a bad thing?

  “It’s time to step up and fight for the Revolution,” he said, and grinned. “We’re gonna have us some fun.”

  International House of Pancakes

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

  They found a twenty-four-hour IHOP. Noel, fearing what would pass for cuisine, satisfied himself with a cup of coffee. Mollie was tucking into Stuffed French Toast drenched with strawberry syrup and piled high with strawberries and whipped cream.

  “You know that came out of a can,” Noel said with a nod toward the whipped cream. “It has never come within even waving distance of an actual cow.”

  “It’s good.”

  Noel suddenly felt far older than thirty. He was preparing his opening statement when Mollie took it away from him. “So, is there really a Brookline Agency? ’Cause I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve been looking for some way out of here, and away from farming.”

  Noel leaned in confidentially. “No. But I’m going to found it right after the holidays. It seems to me the most logical and frankly brilliant idea.”

  “So, why did you come asking after me?”

  “Because I do want to utilize your powers. Just not as a means of securing spent nuclear fuel.”

  “Hey, now that’s a cool idea.” She took another huge bite of toast and mumbled, “Okay, but what is it you really want me to do?”

  “Help me liberate some ill-gotten gains from some very bad people.”