“I did,” Eason said in halting French. “I heard a growl, then something… I think it was that creature at the river… it came from the bushes, and leaped on Hafiz. It was only a moment, and then it was gone into the bushes over there, and Hafiz…”
“Leucrotta,” Waikili whispered. Eason was staring at the body from his stretcher, his tail thrashing wetly.
Jerusha glanced at the undergrowth around them. She could see nothing, not in the gloom. The noises and calls of the night denizens mocked her. “All right,” she said. “All of you, go to the others. Two of you get Eason’s stretcher. Tell them to make a fire-now. Cesar, go with them.”
“What about you, Bibbi Jerusha?”
“I’ll be along in a moment. Go- quickly. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.” She hoped it was a promise she could keep.
They obeyed, hurrying away in Naadir’s glow as Jerusha crouched down next to the body of Hafiz. She shivered. “You can’t do this,” she said in French to the darkness. “I won’t let you do this. I’ll stop you.”
She heard laughter answer her from the gathering darkness: a boy’s laughter, a child’s. Jerusha shivered again.
Standing, she scattered seeds around the body, and covered Hafiz in a blanket of cool green before hurrying to join her charges.
Sofiensaal Concert Hall
Vienna, Austria
A section of the pitched roof of the Sofiensaal collapsed with a rumble as Tom showed himself on the rounded top of the old concert hall’s facade. He felt the heat of flames at his back. They silhouetted him nicely against the night sky. But the whole thing was liable to cave at any minute. Better make this quick, he thought.
“Listen up,” he shouted down to the media crowding the surprisingly narrow street, east of Vienna’s center. He knew they had shotgun mikes trained on him.
The Vienna cops in riot armor who competed with the journalists for space were pointing things at him, too. Most of those weren’t microphones, though. The street pulsated with red and blue lights. “I’m the Radical. I’m here to bring an international assassin and war criminal to justice.” Somebody started bellowing German at him through a bullhorn. He ignored it. “I want Noel Matthews. This was the last place he performed. From here on I’m going to lay waste to any place that limey bastard does his fake magic. And that’s just the beginning.”
He gave that no time to sink in: thanks to decadent capitalist-consumerist technology the whole world could watch the speech to its black heart’s content. Instead he raised a hand to torch the most obvious SWAT-type van, just for punctuation.
Nothing happened.
What seemed like a hundred cops opened up from below. The muzzle flares were like photoflashes at a Superbowl halftime. Tom went to light speed, emerged in orbit.
On one side, infinite night chilled him. On the other he felt the searing heat of the sun, which had already brought dawn to Western Europe.
He flashed back down, emerging a couple thousand feet above the blazing hall, intending to hover while he worked out what happened.
But he didn’t hover. He dropped like a brick.
“Tough luck, schmuck,” a voice said in his head in a distinct New York accent. “You won’t use me to do your dirty work anymore, you genocidal commie creep. I’m outta here.”
As the heat rose and roared at him Tom spotted a patch of darkness to the east, just this side of the Danube.
To orbit, down.
It was a park. He collapsed on a cast-bench. He panted with reaction. A few blocks away flames danced in the sky. “That was JJ Flash, man,” said the hated voice in his head. “You just lost him. For good. Why don’t you save yourself some grief and pack it in?”
“Fuck you, you hippie piece of shit. You think you’ve won? Do you?” A geyser of yellow flame shot up as the Sofiensaal roof went. “I was gonna give people a chance to give up that shit Matthews. But now I’m going straight to Plan B.” Without even rising from the bench Tom held out a hand. Bricks exploded from the row house across the street as the glare of a sunbeam played across it.
So it began.
26
Monday,
December 21
Ellen Allworth’s Apartment
Manhattan, New York
Bugsy put some bacon on to fry, and started the coffeemaker. The little kitchen radio was turned to an NPR station and he turned it on to drown out the sighs from the living room.
“… Simon and this is NPR’s Morning Edition. Vienna is in flames this morning, victim of an attack by an ace believed to be Tom Weathers, also known as the Radical. Reports say that the destruction has resulted in at lest twenty dead and over two hundred injured.”
Bugsy leaned against the counter, listening with a sense of profound dread in his gut. This was getting out of control.
“The Radical is also believed responsible for the destruction at the Louvre Museum in Paris, where a peace conference between the Caliphate and the People’s Paradise of Africa ended in a bloodbath
…”
He turned off the radio. The bacon popped and splattered. The coffee machine gurgled like someone strangling a cat. The telephone shrilled. This was just not starting off to be a good day.
When, after the fourth ring, it became clear that Ellen didn’t care if the telephone rotted in hell, Bugsy found one of the handsets by the toaster and answered.
“Is this Bugsy?”
“Most days. Who’s this?”
“It’s Billy.”
“Billy?”
“Your translator? From Saigon?”
The dead chimp.
“Oh, yeah. Hey. Billy. What’s… what’s up?”
“I’m going to be in New York next month. I was thinking you could show me where a joker could see a little action, you know what I mean?”
Yes, Bugsy thought, you mean that you still think I’m a joker. Prick. “Hey, yeah. Well, we should check on my schedule. I can maybe
…”
“And I got something to trade.”
“Trade?”
“You help me out, introduce me to the local girls like your woman? You know, who don’t mind that a guy’s got a few differences? And I can tell you who your guy was hanging with before he came to ’Nam.”
“My guy?”
“Meadows. I’ve been rooting through the archives, you know. Just to see? And turns out, he was buddies with a guy right there in New York.”
“You got a name?”
“I do.”
There was a long silence.
“Do we have a deal?” Billy asked.
“Of course we do, man,” Bugsy said. “Us jokers have to stick together, right?”
At the far end of the line, Billy laughed like someone kicking an accordion to death. Bugsy found a pen and copied down everything the translator said. He thanked him. They hung up.
Ellen looked up as he walked back in the room. “Yeah?” she said.
“Yeah. I need to find someone who’ll sleep with a zombie chimp.”
“Anything else?” Ellen asked. “Cure for cancer? Ten million tax-free American dollars?”
“An address for a guy named Jay Ackroyd,” Bugsy said.
Ellen frowned. “You mean Popinjay?” she asked.
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Jerusha had no idea how far they’d come or how far they had yet to go. She had no way to gauge that. She kept hoping that over the next ridge she’d see the blue line of Lake Tanganyika, but it never appeared. There was only the next ridge, and the next, and the one after that, an eternity of them growing increasingly hazy and blue with distance.
Rusty, why did we do this? Why aren’t you here with me?
There was no answer to that, either. She looked back westward, deep into the heart of the PPA, and she wondered where he was and what was happening to him. She prayed that he was still alive, still safe. She prayed that one day they would see each other again. That was all that kept her feet moving
.
That, and fear.
Waikili, when she asked if they were still being hunted, nodded fiercely. “He’s out there, Bibbi. Leucrotta. He thinks it’s a game. He laughs, him and the other one, the hungry one. They think it’s funny how scared you are.”
Leucrotta struck again during the day’s march, as they pushed slowly through a thicket of thornbushes with long, black needles. Naadir, the girl with glowing skin, was snatched away suddenly at midday, a trail of blood leading off into the thornbushes. She’d been one of the four children carrying Eason’s stretcher, lagging behind the main group with their burden. “There was a blur and roar, and she was gone…” the other three children said. They were sobbing and crying, and no one wanted to pick up Eason’s stretcher again. “We need to leave him, Bibbi Jerusha,” Idihi, one of the boys, said. “To carry him is too dangerous now.” He glanced at the other joker children who were being carried. “Maybe them, too. We could all move faster.”
There were murmurs of agreement from within the crowd of children. Eason began to wail, thrashing in the moist canvas, but Jerusha hushed them. “We’re not leaving anyone,” she told them. “No one. We’ll moved slower if we must; we’ll stay together. Those with weapons will stay in front and behind and to the sides. But no one’s being abandoned. That’s not going to happen. Now, I need four of you to pick up Eason’s stretcher.”
Only Cesar moved. She looked around at the frightened faces. “Now!” she barked. Finally, Abagbe and two more of the older children took the other ends of the stretcher. “Good,” Jerusha said. “Let’s go.”
She stayed at the rear alongside the stretcher as they moved, looking behind frequently and fearing what she’d see there, knowing that she’d have to face their pursuer again-not a monster, but a child doing monstrous things.
She looked at the thornbushes, at the seed pods they carried.
She took several.
People’s Palace
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“And I say it must stop.” President-for-Life Dr. Kitengi Nshombo didn’t raise his voice, but it seemed to crack like a rifle shot. “This personal indulgence of yours has thrown away years of the goodwill we have worked so hard to build.”
“The French fashion magazine even canceled its photo shoot after Paris.” Alicia sniffled into a handkerchief. “I was so looking forward to that.”
Her brother gave her a grumpy look, then turned his ire back to Tom. “It was bad enough when you disrupted the peace conference with no apparent provocation: the world media now treats Siraj as a victim. But now, with you doing more damage to Vienna than World War II-”
“I’m taking the battle to the imperialists. In a way they’ve never felt it before.”
Nshombo shook his large, shiny, close-cropped head. The hair had begun to turn the color of iron. “The media have begun to paint you as a madman. And that brush stains our revolution!”
His anger turbocharged Tom’s, which already didn’t need it. “Fuck that, man!” he shouted. “Who cares what the running-dog media say? That’s a load of uptight bourgeois bullshit and you know it.”
Slowly, Nshombo blinked. “Concern for our global reputation is not bourgeois propriety. It is practicality. Purely practical! You are indulging your personal passions to the detriment of the Revolution.”
The president’s office was big and grand, with a desk as huge as his sister’s was tiny, in jet-black African ironwood with potted palms at either end. Huge gaudy African nativist paintings jostled for space with important-looking photos on the paneled walls. The Spartan Nshombo, whose only real weakness in life was the Dandie Dinmont terriers he raised, looked more out of place here than his sister would’ve in chubby leopard mode. But Alicia had insisted in taking a hand in the interior design. The office of the President-for-Life of the People’s Paradise had to look like one, she claimed.
“Now, boys,” said Alicia herself. She sat in a precariously dainty chair by one of the palms. “Please, boys. Be nice. Everyone wants to be nice, now.”
Tom didn’t want to hear it. “You’re going soft, man,” he told Nshombo. “You’ve been away from the frontline struggle too long.”
Nshombo slammed a hand down on his desk with a gunshot noise. “ This is the forefront of the real struggle, right here. I direct the Revolution. It is up to you to carry out my designs.”
“Then stand back and let me carry them out, man. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“Boys,” Alicia sobbed, wringing her hands. Her eyes, huge and soft and brown and swimming with tears behind the lenses of her bat-wing glasses, implored him. “Brother, our Tom has a real grievance against this arch-colonialist assassin, non? We should not hinder him.” The handkerchief came out and dabbed her eye.
Dr. Nshombo’s brow furrowed.
Though his eyelids rasped his eyes like files and the blood ran through his veins as if it had broken-glass edges, Tom didn’t forget what a good ally Alicia was. Quite. He turned and paced a couple of steps away from the gleaming black mass of the desk.
“Very well,” Dr. Nshombo said with a little exhalatory gust. “But you must bring this campaign to a close very soon. Or else let it go.”
“Let it go?” Tom’s eyes flashed.
Alicia stood up to lay a soft damp hand on his arm. “Tom, please.”
He nodded spastically. “All right.”
He left.
Has it all started to go to your head, Kitengi? All this loot and luxury? he asked himself as he stalked tall, echoing corridors. Or-wait. You’ve got Alicia’s Precious Moments ace babies now. Is it possible you think you no longer need me?
He stepped outside, gazed up at the stinging tropical sun, and cracked his knuckles. Don’t make that mistake, Comrade Nshombo. Or a hard rain is gonna fall.
Lucerne, Switzerland
“… Outfitting quite an expedition,” the clerk said in that strangely guttural yet singsongy German that was unique to Switzerland as he ran the reader across the tag on another climbing harness.
“Ya, genau,” Noel said shortly. He didn’t really want to get into a discussion of mountains he’d climbed with a garrulous rock climber. His cell phone vibrated in his coat pocket. “Entschuldigen,” he murmured to the clerk, and stepped off to the side. It was his theatrical agent, Frank Figge. “Whoever it is, tell them no,” Noel said as Frank was drawing breath for his first word, “unless they want their audience massacred when Tom Weathers shows up.”
“She said that would likely be your response,” came Frank’s strident cockney tones. “But she said to offer you greetings from one practitioner of the trade to another.”
Noel sucked in a quick breath. “Did she leave a name and number?”
“Yes. Sun Hei-lian.” Noel memorized the number as Frank rattled it off.
“Thanks, I’ll call her.”
“How does she rate, and I don’t?” Frank complained, but Noel hung up on him and dialed Sun’s number.
“What do you want? And make it quick, because I’m not giving you time to trace this call,” Noel said when she answered.
It was the mark of a professional that she didn’t demur. “I need your help dealing with Weathers.” There was no hint that she remembered or even cared that one time they had indulged a three-way with Tom Weathers while Noel was in his female form.
“You know how I deal with things,” Noel said.
“And that I will not permit,” was the cold reply. “Everyone wants him to die, but I’ve discovered something-”
“He’s not such a bad guy,” Noel said sarcastically.
“He’s mentally ill. I’m pretty sure he’s schizophrenic. There’s another personality inside him-gentle, kind-I’ve been talking to that personality. If we can bring him out-”
“Getting Weathers on a couch is going to be a little tough.”
“Yes, it offers challenges. The best place to treat him would be the Jokertown Clinic. Your
ace powers will enable me to get him there in an eyeblink. Before he can waken and… and…”
“Crush us like bugs?” Noel asked sweetly.
“It’s in your interest, too,” Sun said defensively.
“Why doesn’t your own service incapacitate Weathers and try to bring out this other personality?”
“We are rapidly approaching the point where they will decide he is too dangerous to live.”
Now that was alarming. Noel didn’t want Weathers killed yet. Not until the insane ace had taken care of the Nshombos for him. “And I take it you’d be the person to execute that order?” Noel asked.
There was a long silence, then Sun said, “And I won’t do it.” Her voice was low, passionate.
“Why not? God knows he deserves it.”
“Not if he’s sick. He should have the chance for redemption,” Sun said.
It was the last response he had expected, and he suddenly had Niobe’s voice echoing in his memory. Thousands of dead jokers, thousands of dead soldiers, a bunch of young kids with a river of blood on their hands.
But I didn’t kill them. I just killed one man. For the best of reasons. I couldn’t foresee what would happen, Noel thought.
The brutally honest part of his nature took up the debate. Some would argue that the only difference between you and Weathers is one of scale.
“Do you think that’s possible?” Noel asked, and suddenly it was terribly important to him what she said.
“Yes, yes I do.”
“You’re putting yourself at odds with your country and government,” Noel said softly.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There was again a long silence, finally she said, “I love the man he may yet become.”
Noel pulled on his lip and considered the Chinese woman. She was one of the few people Tom Weathers trusted. He realized he had solved the transfer of information problem. “I’ll help you, but I want something in return.” And he told her what he needed.
“So, yet more killing before he’s free?” Sun said bitterly.
“At least he’ll be killing people who richly deserve it, and it’s my price,” Noel answered.
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