Aces Abroad wc-4

by George R. R. Martin

  The assault rifle ran dry. The sudden silence was thunderous. Puppetman's fingers were clenched on the padded handle of the door as Moller's mindscream jolted into him like speed hitting the main line. He gasped, at the hot mad pleasure of it, at the cold rush of his own fear.

  "Hande hoch!" shouted a figure beside the van that had boxed them from behind. "Hands up!"

  Mordecai Jones put a big hand on Hartmann's shoulder and pushed him to the floor. He clambered over him, careful not to squash him, put his weight against the door. Metal wailed and it came away with him as Blum, more conventional, pulled the lever on his own door to disengage the latching mechanism, twisted, and shouldered it open. He brought his MP5K up with his left hand clutching the vestigial foregrip, aimed the stubby machine pistol back around the frame as Hartmann yelled, "Don't shoot!"

  The Hammer was racing toward the telephone van. The terrorist who'd shot Moller pointed his weapon at him, pumped his finger on the empty weapon's trigger in a comic pantomime of panic. Jones backhanded him gently. He sailed backward to rebound off the front of a building and land in a heap on the sidewalk.

  The moment hung in air like a suspended chord. Jones squatted, got his hands under the phone van's frame. He strained, straightened. The van came up with him. Its driver screamed in terror. The Hammer shifted his grip and pressed the vehicle over his head as if it were a not-particularly-heavy barbell.

  A burst of gunfire stuttered from the second van. Bullets shredded open the back of Jones's coat. He teetered, almost lost it, swung in a ponderous circle with the van still balanced above his head. Then several terrorists fired at once. He grimaced and fell backward.

  The van landed right on top of him.

  The limo driver had his door open and a little black P7 in his hand. As the Hammer fell, Blum blazed a quick burst at the van behind. A man ducked back as 9mm bullets punched neat holes in thin metal-a joker, Hartmann realized. What the hell's going on here?

  He ducked his head below window level and grabbed at Blum's coattail. He felt the vehicle shudder on its suspension as bullets struck it. The driver gasped and slumped out of the car. Hartmann heard somebody yelling in English to cease fire. He shouted for Blum to quit shooting.

  The policeman turned toward him. "Yes, sir," he said. Then a burst punched through his opened door and sugared the glass in the window and threw him against the senator.

  Ronnie was plastered against the back of the driver's seat. "Oh, God," he moaned. "Oh, dear God!" He jumped out the door the Hammer had torn from its hinges and ran, with papers scattered from his briefcase swooping around him like seagulls.

  The terrorist Mordecai Jones had brushed aside had recovered enough to come to one knee and stuff another magazine into his AKM. He brought it to his shoulder and emptied it at the senator's aide in a juddering burst. A scream and mist of blood sprayed from Ronnie's mouth. He fell and skidded.

  Hartmann huddled on the floor in fugue, half-terrified, half orgasmic. Blum was dying, holding on to Hartmann's arm, the holes in his chest sucking like lamia mouths, his life-force surging into the senator like arrhythmic surf.

  "I'm hurt," the policeman said. "Oh, mama, mama please-" He died. Hartmann jerked like a harpooned seal as the last of the man's life gushed into him.

  Out by the street Hartmann's young aide was dragging himself along with his arms, glasses askew, leaving a snail-trail of blood on the sidewalk. The slightly built terrorist who had shot him ambled up, stuffing a third magazine into his weapon. He positioned himself in front of the wounded man.

  Ronnie blinked up at him. Disjointedly Hartmann remembered he was desperately nearsighted, virtually blind without his glasses.

  "Please," Ronnie said, and blood rolled from his mouth. "Please."

  "Have a Negerkuss," the terrorist said, and fired a single shot into his forehead.

  "Dear God," Hartmann said. A shadow fell across him, heavy as a corpse. He looked up with inhuman eyes at a figure black against the gray-cloud sky beyond. A hand gripped him by the arm, electricity blasted through him, and consciousness exploded in ozone convulsion.

  Substantial again, Mackie bounced to his feet and tore off his ski mask. "You shot at me! You could have killed me," he shrieked at Anneke. His face was almost black.

  She laughed at him.

  The world seemed to come on to Mackie in Kodachrome colors. He started for her, hand beginning to buzz, when a commotion behind him brought his head around.

  The dwarf had grabbed Ulrich's rifle by the still-hot muzzle brake and spun him round, echoing Mackie's theme, with variations. "You stupid bastard, you could have killed him!" he screamed. "You could have offed the fucking senator!" Ulrich had fired the final burst that downed the cop in the back of the limousine. Weight lifter though he was, he was only just hanging on to his piece against the dwarf°s surprising strength. The two were orbiting each other out there on the street, spitting at one another like cats.

  Mackie had to laugh.

  Then Molniya was beside him, touching his shoulder with a gloved hand. "Let it go. We have to move quickly." Mackie arched like a cat to meet the touch. Comrade Molniya was worried he was still mad at Anneke for shooting at him and then laughing about it.

  But that was forgotten. Anneke was laughing too, over the body of the man she'd just finished off, and Mackie had to laugh with her.

  IA Negerkuss," he said. "You said did he want a Negerkuss. Huh huh. That was pretty good." It meant Negro Kiss, a small chocolate-covered cake. It was especially funny since they'd told him Negro Kisses were a trademark of the group from back in the old days, back when all of them but Wolf were kids."

  It was nervous laughter, relieved laughter. He'd thought he'd lost it when the pig shot at him; he'd just seen the gun come up in time to phase out, and the anger burned black within him, the desire to make his hand vibrate till it was hard as a knife blade and drive it into that fucking cop, to make sure he felt the buzz, to feel the hot rush of blood along his arm and spraying in his face. But the bastard was dead, it was too late now…

  He'd worried again when the black man picked up the van, but then Comrade Ulrich shot him. He was strong, but he wasn't immune to bullets. Mackie liked Comrade Ulrich. He was so self-assured, so handsome and muscular. Women liked him; Anneke could hardly keep her hands off him. Mackie might have envied him, if he hadn't been an ace.

  Mackie didn't have a gun himself. He hated them, and anyway he didn't need a weapon-there wasn't any weapon better than his own body.

  The American joker called Scrape was fumbling Hartmann's limp body out of the limousine. "Is he dead?" Mackie called in German, caught up by sudden panic. The dwarf let go of Ulrich's rifle and stared wildly at the car. Ulrich almost fell over.

  Scrape looked up at Mackie, face frozen into immobility by its exoskeleton, but his lack of understanding clear from the tilt of his head. Mackie repeated the question in the halting English he'd learned from his mother before the worthless bitch had died and deserted him.

  Comrade Molniya pulled his other glove back on. He wore no mask, and now Mackie noticed he looked a little green at the sight of the blood spilled all over the street. "He's fine," he replied for Scrape. "I just shocked him unconscious. Come now, we must hurry"

  Mackie grinned and bobbed his head. He felt a certain satisfaction at Molniya's squeamishness, even though he wanted to please the Russian ace almost as much as he did his own cell leader Wolf He went to help Scrape, though he hated being so close to the joker. He feared he might touch him accidentally; the thought made his flesh crawl.

  Comrade Wolf stood by with his own unfired Kalashnikov dangling from one huge hand. "Get him in the van," he ordered. "Him too." He nodded to Comrade Wilfried, who'd stumbled from the driver's seat of the telephone van and was on his knees pitching breakfast on the wet asphalt.

  It started to rain again. Broad pools of blood on the pavement began to fray like banners whipped by the wind. In the distance sirens commenced their hair-raising chant.<
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  They put Hartmann into the second van. Scrape got behind the wheel. Molniya slid in beside him. The joker backed up onto the sidewalk, turned, and drove away.

  Mackie sat on the wheel well, drumming a heavy-metal beat on his thighs. We did it! We captured him! He could barely sit still. His penis was stiff inside his jeans.

  Out the back window he saw Ulrich spraying letters on a wall in red paint: RAE He laughed again. That would make the bourgeoisie shit their pants, that was for sure. Ten years ago those initials had been a synonym for terror in the Federal Republic. Now they would be again. It gave Mackie happy chills to think about it.

  A joker wrapped head to toe in a shabby cloak stepped up and sprayed three more letters beneath the first with a hand wrapped in bandages: JJS.

  The other van heeled way over to the side as its wheels rolled over the supine, body of the black American ace, and they were gone.

  With her NEC laptop computer- tucked under one arm and a a bit of her cheek caught between her small side teeth, Sara strode across the lobby of the Bristol Hotel Kempinski with briskness that an outside observer would probably have taken for confidence. It was a misapprehension that had served her well in the past.

  Reflexively she ducked into the bar of Berlin's most luxurious hotel. The tour proper's long since been mined out, at least of stuff we can print, she thought, but what the heck? She felt heat in her ears at the thought that she was the star of one of the tour's choicer unprintable vignettes.

  Inside was dark, of course. All bars are the same song; the polished wood and brass and old pliable leather and elephant ears were grace notes to set apart this particular refrain. She tipped her sunglasses up on top of her nearly white hair, drawn back this afternoon in a severe ponytail, and let her eyes adjust. They always adjusted to dark more quickly than light.

  The bar wasn't crowded. A pair of waiters in arm garters and starched highboy collars worked their way among the tables as if by radar. Three Japanese businessmen sat at a table chattering and pointing at a newspaper, discussing either the exchange rates or the local tit bars, depending. In the corner Hiram was talking shop, in French of course, with the Kempinski's cordon bleu, who was shorter than he was but at least as round. The hotel chef had a tendency to flap his short arms rapidly when he spoke, which made him look like a fat baby bird that wasn't getting the hang of flight.

  Chrysalis sat. at the bar drinking in splendid isolation. There was no joker chic here. In Germany, Chrysalis found herself discreetly avoided rather than lionized.

  She caught Sara's eye and winked. In the poor light Sara only knew it because of the way Chrysalis's mascaraed eyelashes tracked across a staring eyeball. She smiled. Professional associates back home, sometime rivals in the bartering of information that was the meta-game of Jokertown, they'd grown to be friends on this trip. Sara had more in common with Debra-Jo than her nominal peers who were along.

  At least Chrysalis was dressed. She was showing a different face to Europe than she did the country she pretended wasn't her native one. Sometimes Sara envied her, secretly. People looked at her and saw a joker, an exotic, alluring and grotesque. But they didn't see her.

  "Looking for me, little lady?"

  Sara started, turned. Jack Braun sat at the end of the bar, hardly five feet from her. She hadn't noticed him. She had a tendency to edit him out; the force of him made her uncomfortable.

  "I'm going out," she said. She slapped the computer, a touch harder than necessary, so her fingers stung. "Down to the main post office to file my latest material by modem. It's the only place you can get a transatlantic connection that won't scramble all your data."

  "I'm surprised you're not off pushing cookies with Senator Gregg," he said, eyeing her cantwise from beneath bushy eyebrows.

  She felt color come to her cheeks. "Senator Hartmann attending a banquet may be a hot item for my colleagues with the celebrity-hunting glossies. But it's not exactly hard news, is it, Mr. Braun?"

  It was an open afternoon. There wasn't much hard news here, not the kind to interest readers following the WHO tour. The West German authorities had blandly assured the visitors there was no wild card problem in their country, and used the tour as a counter in whatever game they were playing with their Siamese twin to the east-that damp, dreary ceremony this morning, for instance. Of course they were right: even proportionally, the number of German wild card victims was minuscule. The most pathetic or unsightly couple of thousand were kept discreetly tucked away in state housing or clinics. Much as they'd sneered at Americans for their treatment of jokers during the Sixties and Seventies, the Germans were embarrassed by their own.

  "Depends on what gets said at the banquet, I guess. What's on your schedule after you file your piece, little lady?" He was grinning that B-movie leading-man grin at her. Golden highlights glimmered on the planes and contour edges of his face. He was flexing his muscles to bring on the glow that gave him his ace name. Irritation tightened the skin at the outskirts of her eyes. He was either coming on to her for real or teasing her. Either way she didn't like it.

  "I have work to do. And I could use a little time to catch my breath. Some of us have had a busy time on this tour." Is that really the reason you were relieved when Gregg dropped the hint that it might not be discreet to tag along to the banquet with him? she wondered. She frowned, surprised at the thought, and turned crisply away.

  Braun's big hand closed on her arm. She gasped and spun back to him, angry and starting to panic. What could she do against a man who could lift a bus? That detached observer inside her, the journalist within, reflected on the irony that Gregg, whom she'd come to hate, yes, obsessively, should be the first man in years whose touch she'd come to welcome-

  But Jack Braun was frowning past her, into the lobby of the hotel. It was filling up with purposeful, husky young men in suit coats.

  One of them came into the bar, looked hard at Braun, consulted a piece of paper in his hand. "Herr Braun?"

  "That's me. What can I do you for?"

  "I am with the Berlin Landespolizei. I'm afraid I must ask you not to leave the hotel."

  Braun pushed his jaw forward. "And why might that be?"

  "Senator Hartmann has been kidnapped."

  Ellen Hartmann shut the door with eggshell care and turned away. The flowered vines fading in the carpet seemed to twine about her ankles as she walked back into the suite and sat down on the bed.

  Her eyes were dry. They stung, but they were dry. She smiled slightly. It was hard to let her emotions go. She had so much experience controlling her emotions for the cameras. And Gregg-

  I know what he is. But what he is is all I have.

  She picked up a handkerchief from the bedside table and methodically began to tear it to pieces.

  "Welcome to the land of the living, Senator. For the moment at least.".

  Slowly Hartmann's mind drained into consciousness. There was a tinny taste in his mouth and a singing in his ears. His right upper arm ached as if from sunburn. Someone hummed a familiar song. A radio muttered.

  His eyes opened to darkness. He felt the obligatory twinge of blindness anxiety, but something pressed his eyeballs, and from the small stinging pull at the back of his head he guessed it was taped gauze. His wrists were bound behind the back of a wooden chair.

  After the awareness of captivity, what struck hardest was the smells: sweat, grease, mildew, dust, sodden cloth, unfamliar spices; ancient urine and fresh gun oil, crowding his nostrils clear to his sinuses.

  He inventoried all these things before permitting himself to recognize the rasping voice.

  "Tom Miller," he said. " I wish I could say it's a pleasure."

  "Ah, yes, Senator. But I can." He could feel Gimli's gloating as he could smell his stinking breath-toothpaste and mouthwash belonged to the surface-worshiping nat world. " I could also say you have no idea how long I've waited for this, but of course you do. You know full well."

  "Since we know each other so well, why d
on't you undo my eyes, Tom." As he spoke he probed with his power. It had been ten years since he'd last had physical contact with the dwarf, but he didn't think the link, once created, ever decayed. Puppetman feared loss of control more than anything but discovery; and being discovered itself represented the ultimate loss of power. If he could get his hooks back into Miller's soul, Hartmann could at the very least be sure of holding down the panic that bubbled like magma low in his throat.

  "Gimli!" the dwarf shouted. His spittle sprayed Hartmann's lips and cheeks.

  Instantly Hartmann dropped the link. Puppetman reeled. For a moment he'd felt Gimli's hatred blazing like an incandescent wire. He suspects!

  Most of what he'd sensed was the hate. But beneath that, beneath the conscious surface of Gimli's mind lay awareness that there was something out of the ordinary about Gregg Hartmann, something inextricably tied to the bloody shambles of the Jokertown Riots. Gimli wasn't an ace, Hartmann was sure of that. But Gimli's natural paranoia was itself something of a sixth sense.

  For the first time in his life Puppetman faced the possibility he had lost a puppet.

  He knew he blanched, knew he flinched, but fortunately his reaction passed for squeamishness at being spat on. "Gimli," the dwarf repeated, and Hartmann sensed he was turning away. "That's my name. And the mask stays on, Senator. You know me, but the same doesn't apply to everybody here. And they'd like to keep it that way."

  "That's not going to work too well, Gimli. You think a ski mask is going to disguise a joker with a furry snout? I-that is, if anybody saw you grab me, they'll have little enough trouble identifying you and your gang."

  He was saying too much, he belatedly realized-he didn't want Miller dwelling too much on the fact that Hartmann could make him and some of his accomplices. Whatever had put him out had stirred his brains like omelette batter. -an electrical shock of some sort, he thought. Back in the Sixties he'd been a freedom rider briefly-it was an up-and-coming New Frontier sort of thing to do, and there was always the hatred, heady as wine, the possibility of lovely violence, crimson and indigo. A peckerwood state trooper had nailed him with a cattle prod during the Selma protests, which was too firsthand for his taste and sent him back north in a hurry. But it had felt like that, back in the limousine.