Amnesty

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  “And she lit it all up because?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” asked Lillian. “If you wanted to eliminate two problems at a stroke?”

  “She wanted me out of the race, all right. But nobody was sniffing around about a drug deal. And anyway—” Saeger inclined her head toward Daoud, “—I’m asking him.”

  Pausing before he answered, Daoud put one finger on the edge of the table in a splintered chip some more restless person would have picked at. “My direct supervisor at Cross-Costa is—was—Aristide Makricosta. Who had some personal stake in the tribunals Frye proposed. He used the leverage he had, and she was not pleased.”

  “That poxy rotten sculler.” Saeger’s laugh sounded like a blow to the gut. “I ought to ring up Horkova right now, tell her to scratch him at the border and toss him back to the hounds.”

  “What?” asked Lillian. “What border? Who’s Horkova?”

  Saeger raised an eyebrow. “You really didn’t know?” Then, to Daoud, “She didn’t know?”

  Lillian turned to him, beseeching.

  “Magnusson told me where to find Ms. Saeger,” said Daoud. “Aristide wanted to speak with her. About … you know.”

  She hadn’t, but it was coming together. Saeger had been Catwalk, an ally to Tatien separatists. If one needed to get out of Gedda, it was the closest international border. Battlefield chaos made it easy to disappear.

  “I almost told you,” said Daoud. “But you said you didn’t—”

  “Want to know. I don’t.” She closed her eyes briefly, swallowed past the tightness of her throat. “It’s safer for everyone if we don’t mention it again.”

  “So let’s talk about what you came to say, instead.” Saeger crossed her arms. “I think it’s flimsy.”

  “It’s sensational,” said Lillian, clawing her way back to the line. “And more importantly, it’s the best thing you’ve got. With Cyril gone, Frye is scrambling for something to sell to voters. This is your chance to slip in and steal the show.”

  “You told anyone else?” This was aimed at both of them. “Anybody else know anything about it? Your husband, maybe? Ain’t he a pen-fencer?”

  Guilt made sweat prickle on her palms. “My husband is an arts and culture editor. It isn’t exactly his beat.”

  “There is a journalist,” said Daoud, words dropping like stones, one at a time. “A radio anchor, with FWAC. Aristide spoke to him, but then the explosion happened, and … things changed.”

  “He never ran it. Because, like I said, it’s flimsy.”

  “Never ran it as a bulletin,” said Lillian, unfurling her strategy now that all the pieces were in place. “There’s not enough evidence for that. But might he run it as an exclusive interview with a former employee of Cross-Costa? Someone who could read those papers and tell us what kind of lies they tell? Someone who could turn those papers over to the police, upon request, and cooperate with any resulting investigation?”

  The irritation on Saeger’s face faltered, and then crumbled into curiosity. Lillian had lined up this shot and sunk the ball, neat as billiards.

  She should have felt victorious. Instead she felt only gratitude and terror.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  By the time he dragged into the dusty waiting room, sometime after a breakfast he hadn’t eaten, Cyril was inclined to be uncharitable. But even in a good mood he’d have said it: rural little Tarbycliff Station wasn’t exactly Bythesea.

  So why did he feel like his heart was being squeezed for oil? Like he’d jammed his finger in a socket? Like he was sitting on a pipe bomb waiting for the fuse to run down?

  False papers. Early morning train. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done this before.

  He wished he had never done this before.

  Aristide was loitering down the road. He had booked his ticket in advance, for Erikh Prosser, and now Cyril had to do the same for Ambrose Adam Wallis. Their ostensible final destination was in Ibet—a through-trip, with only a stop at the Tatien border for customs and document checks. No visas necessary in advance, as long as they didn’t leave the train.

  As Cyril understood it, they would be leaving the train at some point, though Aristide had been hazy about details.

  Now he faced the ticket counter on his own and had to swallow past a dry mouth and aching throat, heartbeat hammering against his sternum.

  Calm down. Nothing gives a lie away like fear.

  He had to be the man in his altered passport. Just as he’d been Ambrose van Weill on the way over, so he had to be Ambrose Adam Wallis on his way out. And Adam—he went by Adam, yes—wasn’t worried about being waylaid on his way out of the country.

  Sweat made the handle of his suitcase slippery.

  Space and time telescoped as he approached the ticket booth. He forced air into his lungs like a bellows. He had traversed minefields in Liso’s monsoon season, crawled belly-down through flooded trenches, laid spike traps for the encroaching republican army. For Queen’s sake, he had killed the regionalist government. Or at least plunged a knife in. This was just one train ticket.

  Just one ticket, on which hung a thousand hopes that had already been thwarted once, twice, three times.

  “Good morning,” said the clerk, stifling a yawn.

  “Morning.” He searched for his Enselmese accent: a flattening of the vowels, a dizzy tip between the back of the throat and the tongue on the teeth. Not unlike the way northern Tatiens spoke Geddan. He thought briefly of Vasily Memmediv, and let the immediacy of that anger anchor him in the present time and place. “The six forty-three to West Ballye. Just third class, please.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll need to see your passport.”

  His hand would not shake. It couldn’t. He smiled and reached into his jacket, producing the rippled mess of Adam’s official identification.

  She remained unfazed until she opened it, revealing smeary ink, illegible.

  “Sir,” she said.

  “I know. I was drinking, on the train down from—” shits on shits, some Enselmese town, let it come to him before the pause grew obvious, “—Angbrouk, and it got a little rowdy. It’s been causing me problems ever since. I’ll apply for a new one as soon as I’m home.”

  “And that’ll be when?”

  Holy stones, this would never end. He wished great ill on Aristide and his unsteady hands, and recanted in the next instant. Neither of them could afford ill-wishes now. “Perhaps a week or so?” He shrugged. “I’m visiting friends.”

  “In Ibet?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what were you doing in Gedda, before?”

  “A wedding,” he said. “My sister’s.”

  Suspicion colored her expression and he felt one foot sink into the grave. “Seems a little late to be planning an international trip, especially given the terrain you’ll be traveling through.”

  “I heard the Tatien border isn’t such a fuss,” he said. “Just a quick checkpoint.”

  She raised her eyebrows eloquently at that.

  “My friends came down all right for the wedding,” he said, settling deeper into his character’s tale. “They told me I wouldn’t have any trouble getting through.”

  “If you’re lucky,” she said, glancing down at his illegible passport.

  He could feel the few people in the waiting room beginning to stir, to stare and make whispered commentary. He had hoped to do this without causing a scene.

  “Ma’am,” he said, injecting it with an icy courtesy that would have made his sister proud. “I hardly think it’s your concern.”

  The words didn’t even shake on their way out. He was beyond that, floating just over his own right shoulder watching a stranger’s drama play out.

  Inside the ticket booth, suspicion became anger on the woman’s face. And then, finally, it sank into irritated resignation. She stamped something illegible across his ticket and shoved it through the window with his passport. “As long as you’re not my problem anymore.�
�

  He barely made it to a seat—his knees had turned to gelatin and his bowels to water. Cold sweat soaked his shirt beneath his sweater. In warmer weather he would have been scratched.

  After a bare few minutes of reprieve, the bell above the station door rang. Cyril looked up and saw Aristide approaching the ticket counter, rucksack over one shoulder. He had to look down again before his face gave them both away.

  * * *

  The train ground to a stop in the midst of razor wire, sandbags, and corrugated metal. Palpable tension crept through the cars. Aristide looked up from his battered paperback—Return to Wolf’s Neck, which someone had left lying in the waiting room at Tarbycliff—and caught Cyril glancing in his direction.

  He returned to his book without acknowledging the eye contact. Julian and Maurice had just met for the first time since university. He was trying to remember who they were, and why he should care, when the door at one end of the car slid open to reveal a pair of Tatien border guards, the collars of their sheepskin coats turned up against the cold. One held a submachine gun low across her stomach. The other led her down the row, confronting each passenger with an ominous, “Papers, please.”

  Aristide produced his passport and ticket when asked, setting his book over one knee. The guard who’d asked for his papers scanned the photograph and information in his passport, considered Aristide’s face, and then handed the passport to his colleague. She squinted at it and then nodded.

  “Step outside,” said Papers, Please. A rustle of apprehension passed through the car. Aristide rose, put his book into his coat pocket, and shouldered his rucksack. Pointedly, he did not meet Cyril’s eyes. He hoped that Cyril wasn’t staring. Nobody else was—they didn’t want to get involved.

  Outside the train the wind across the plains hit him like a wall. Machine Gun and Papers, Please marched him toward a tin-roofed shack that didn’t look like it ought to be standing against the onslaught. Barbed wire coiled around it like malevolent briars.

  Saeger had made the call for him. They had been watching for him and waiting; this was just the next phase of the plan. That didn’t stop his nerves from stretching taut, sizzling with electricity. Things in Tatié changed depending on the wind, the time of day, the whims of heavily armed and splintering factions. Who knew what he’d really meet, despite what he’d been promised.

  Inside the shack, with the door shut, the wind became an icy thread against the back of his neck and a constant high-pitched whistle. The place was crammed with maps, a ticker-tape machine, several wireless sets, and a boxy desk at which sat a middle-aged woman, olive-skinned and silver-haired, in the same uniform as the guards who had brought Aristide from the train. A straight smoldered in the ashtray at her elbow.

  “Sergeant,” said one of the guards.

  She looked up over the steel rims of her spectacles and cased Aristide with a gaze like a strigil. He was surprised he didn’t lose any skin.

  “Thanks,” she told his minders, then picked up her straight and took a long drag. “You’re the peacock’s man, right?” Smoke plumed toward the ceiling. “Satri’s friend? Next time you see her tell her thanks. Those chain guns kept the Teezees off our asses down in Marjenek.”

  “Of course,” said Aristide, trying to fight off a coughing fit and failing. The cold had woken up the tickle in his chest, and the secondhand smoke wasn’t doing him any favors.

  “Sorry there’s not another chair,” said the sergeant. She didn’t sound it.

  He waved her off and cleared his throat, eyes streaming. “That’s quite all right. I’ll stand.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to have somebody with you? Gaffer told me two; Erikh Prosser and companion. Didn’t give a name.”

  “Ambrose Adam Wallis.”

  “Bet that’s not his real one. You two! Go and get him.”

  The guards’ salutes and heel clicks came in tandem, echoing. Aristide looked down and saw soil through a gap in the floorboards.

  An uncomfortable several minutes passed. Or, uncomfortable for Aristide. The sergeant seemed perfectly happy to ignore him. When the door opened again, the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

  Between Machine Gun and Papers, Please, Cyril looked small and wilting. Sweat shone on his face despite the bitter cold. He stumbled on the threshold.

  “Thank you, Ereni, Milosz,” said the sergeant. “That’s all.”

  Another double salute. Another ring of boots on boards. Cyril flinched. Aristide did not reach out to him, though without the guards supporting him on either side he looked liable to drop into a dead faint.

  “Welcome to Tatié, Mr. Wallis,” said the sergeant.

  Cyril glared at Aristide. “You could have rotten warned me. I thought I was going to be arrested.”

  “I told you I had it sorted. But I’ll admit I wasn’t sure how it would play out.”

  “Friends all up and down the ladder, still.” Cyril shook his head, wiped grit from his eyes. The skin of his face looked delicate with exhaustion, liable to tear.

  “Not really my friends,” said Aristide. “More friends of Vasily Memmediv. And, in a way, Cordelia.”

  “Do I want to know how that story goes?”

  “Perhaps at a later date.”

  “I hope you two weren’t going to take a train to Dastya, too,” said the sergeant. “The tracks turn into twisted metal about fifty miles outside Kareniv.”

  “Damnation,” said Aristide. “I don’t suppose it’s safe to lift a thumb?”

  She laughed. “That depends on who picks you up.” Then, checking her watch, “I’ll tell you what. There’s a supply convoy leaving Eré this evening for the front, and I’ve got a couple of messengers who are supposed to catch it. They’re due to leave town in half an hour, and I’m sure there’s some room in the back of a jeep for friends of friends.”

  “And once we get to the front?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “You seem like a man who knows how to improvise.”

  * * *

  At nine o’clock in the evening, Lillian and Daoud sat outside the Icepick in her car, watching the door. She daren’t go into a building packed with so many hungry paperfolk and radio personalities, but in the dark, between the streetlamps, she could stay anonymous while waiting for the particular anchor she required.

  It also gave her a private moment to ask, “Do you think they’re all right?”

  Daoud shrugged, staring out the windshield. “How can I guess? They made it out of the city, I assume. And by now…” He looked at his watch and she saw him consider several ends to his sentence before discarding them and lapsing into silence.

  Kostos came out of the tower at a quarter past nine, coat open and scarf crooked. The evening was unseasonably warm. Lillian stepped out of the car and intercepted him as he crossed the street.

  “Laurie Kostos?” she asked, extending her hand as she approached. He eyed her suspiciously, but she forced the issue without letting her smile falter, and he shook.

  “I’m Lillian DePaul,” she said, once she had a grip on him. “And my associate and I—” she tilted her head back toward Daoud behind the windshield, “would like to speak with you.”

  She saw him about to ask a question, then think better of it, before he followed her back to the car.

  “Good evening, Mr. Kostos,” said Daoud, when the radio host climbed in. “I am Daoud Qassan.” They shook hands over the seat. “I work for Cross-Costa Imports, and I have a lead you may find interesting.”

  “Cross-Costa,” said Kostos. “Why is that familiar?”

  “You spoke with my … erstwhile employer, several weeks ago. Aristide Makricosta.”

  “Yeah,” said Kostos. “He wanted me to get in on some scheme of his. WCRC was moving drugs, he said. But the Catwalk blew the proof and my editor wouldn’t let me touch it.”

  Lillian turned the key in the ignition. “I thought we’d chat on the move.”

  In the rearview mirror, Kostos caught her gaze. “Nervous,�
�� he said. “I don’t blame you. I’ll wager your doorstep is three feet deep in scullers. And you come to me.”

  She half-smiled, and kept her eyes on the road. Let him think this was an offer, if it kept him listening.

  “WCRC was moving drugs,” said Daoud. “Ours. Cross-Costa’s. Lisoan poppy tar, to be exact. Frye blew the warehouse after Makricosta approached her with a mix of blackmail and bribery—there is evidence of a sizable campaign donation, you will find.”

  “But not much else,” said Kostos. “I already turned this story down.”

  “There is me,” said Daoud. “I am evidence. I am offering to go on air with you and discuss it.”

  Leather creaked. Lillian risked a glance in the rearview and saw Kostos vehemently shaking his head.

  “News,” he said. “I told Makricosta I report news, not half-cooked rumors still raw in the middle. That’s asking to get sacked.”

  “Nonsense.” Lillian flicked up the stalk to indicate and took them onto a side street that led away from the Keller Tower and its neighbors, toward the harbor, under the warmly lit windows of tenement buildings. Few people were out, despite the mild weather—winter habits, perhaps, keeping them inside.

  “Nonsense?” Kostos asked. “Who works in the wireless, here?”

  “Exactly. People like a story.” Guilt pinged off of her like hail, leaving dents. She should talk to Rinko. She would talk to Rinko. Once she had this business sorted out. “They don’t care if it’s true—this one is, by the way—they just want something to chat about on the trolley.”

  “I’m not some gossiping grandmother,” he protested. “I’m in the market for facts.”

  “But you’ve got sponsors to keep, and your current model isn’t cutting it. Marlowe Flanders has already filled the fast-talking, no-nonsense news anchor slot. You need another angle.”

  Silence told her she’d struck her mark with Flanders.

  “What about interviews?” she said. “Exclusive interviews. The kind no one else can get. People will spew all kinds of swineshit—lies, slander, rumors, libel—and all you’ve done is given them space to say it. If the story turns out to be false, nobody’s going to pin you. You’re just the platform.”