Aces Abroad wc-4

by George R. R. Martin

  "Come now, Gimli," said a gritty baritone voice in accented but clear English. "Why not have the mask off? The whole world will know us soon enough."

  "Oh, all right," Gimli said. Puppetman could taste his resentment without having to reach. Tom Miller was having to share stage with someone, and he didn't like it. Little bubbles of interest began to well up through the seethe of Hartmann's incipient panic.

  Hartmann heard the scrape of feet on bare floor. Someone fumbled briefly, cursed, and then he caught his breath involuntarily as the tape was unwound, pulling reluctantly away from his hair and skin.

  The first thing he saw was Gimli's face. It still looked like a bagful of rotten apples. The look of exultation didn't improve it any. Hartmann pushed his gaze past the dwarf to the rest of the room.

  It was a shitty little tenement, like shitty little tenements pretty much everywhere in the world. The wooden floor was stained and the striped wallpaper had patches of damp like a workman's armpits. From the general scatter of crunchy and crinkly trash underfoot, Hartmann guessed the place was derelict. Still, a lightbulb glared in a busted-globe fixture overhead, and he felt a radiator drumming out too much heat the way every radiator in Germany did until it came down June.

  For all he knew he could be in the Eastern sector, which was a hell of a cheery thought. On the other hand, he'd been in German homes before. This one smelled wrong, somehow.

  There were three other overt jokers in the room, one swathed from head to feet in a dusty-looking cowled robe, one covered with yellowish chitin dotted with tiny red pimples, a third the furry one he'd seen next to the van. The three young nats in Hartmann's field of vision looked offensively normal by comparison.

  His power felt others behind him. That was strange. He wasn't usually able to taste another's emotions, unless that one was broadcasting strongly, or was a puppet. He sensed a peculiar squirming in the power inside him.

  He glanced back. Two more back there, nats to the eye, though the scrawny youth leaning on the stained wall next to the radiator had an odd look to him. A man in his mid-thirties sat next to him in a gaudy plastic chair with his hands in the pockets of an overcoat. Hartmann thought the older man was subconsciously straining away from the younger; when their eyes met he caught a quick impression of sadness.

  That's odd, he thought. Maybe tension had heightened his normal perceptions; maybe he was imagining things. But something was coming off that kid as he grinned at Hartmann, something that prickled all around the edges of his awareness. Again he had that evasive feeling from Puppetman.

  A shoe crunched debris. He turned, found himself looking up at an enormous nat dressed in suit coat and trousers of an odd tan-green, almost military. The man had no tie; his shirt collar hung unbuttoned around a thick neck, open to a spray of grizzled blond chest hair. Big hands rested on his hips with the coattails swept up behind, like something out of a little theater production of Inherit the Wind. His long hair lay combed back from a high forehead.

  He smiled. He had one of those rugged ugly faces women fall for and men believe.

  "A very great pleasure to meet you, Senator." It was the rolling sea swell of the voice he'd heard urge Gimli to remove his blindfold.

  "You have the advantage."

  "That's true. Oh, but I daresay my name won't be unfamiliar to you. I am Wolfgang Prahler."

  Behind Hartmann someone tsked in exasperation. Prahler frowned, then laughed. "Ah, now, Comrade Molniya, do I break security? Well, did we not agree that we must come out into the light of day to accomplish a task so important?" Like many educated Berliners he spoke English with a pronouncedly British cast. From behind, Puppetman felt a flicker of agitation at the name Molniya. It was Russian. It meant lightning; the Soviets had a series of communications satellites by that name.

  "What exactly is going on here?" Hartmann demanded. His heart lurched at the words. He didn't mean to take that tone with cold-blooded killers who had him altogether at their mercy. But Puppetman, coming suddenly into arrogance, had taken the bit in his teeth. "Couldn't you wait until the Aide et Amitie banquet to make my acquaintance?"

  Prahler's laugh resonated up from deep in his chest. "Very good. But have you not figured it out? It was never intended you should reach the banquet, Senator. You were, as you Americans say, set up."

  "Drawn to the bait and trapped," said a slight redheaded woman who wore a black turtleneck and jeans. "Set cheese for a rat; set a fine banquet to catch a fine lord."

  "Rats and lords," a voice repeated. "A fine rat. A fine lord." It giggled. It was a male voice, cracked and adolescent: the leather boy. Hartmann felt a tickle run along the cord of his scrotum like the fingers of a whore. No doubt about it. He was getting emotion from him like static on a line. A hint of something potent-something terrible. For once Puppetman felt no desire to probe further.

  He feared this one. More than the others, Prahler, these casual youths with guns. Even Gimli.

  "You went to all this trouble to help Gimli here settle an old, imaginary score?" he made himself say. "That's generous of you."

  "We're doing this for the revolution," said a youthful nat with a blond flattop and a heat-lamp tan and the air of having worked hard to memorize the line. His turtleneck and jeans were molded around an athlete's figure. He stood by the wall caressing the muzzle brake of a Soviet assault rifle grounded by his foot.

  "You're of no significance, Senator," the woman said. She flipped her square-cut bangs off her forehead. "Simply a tool. What your naive egotism tells you notwithstanding."

  "Who the hell are you people?"

  "We bear the sacred name of the Red Army Fraction," she told him. She hovered over a stocky youngster who sat cross-legged fiddling with a radio perched on a warped wooden nightstand. He wouldn't meet Hartmann's eyes.

  "Comrade Wolf gave it to us," the blond boy said. "He used to hang out with Baader and Meinhof and them. They used to be close like this." He held up a clenched fist.

  Hartmann sucked in his lips. Since the terrorist wars had gotten underway for true in the early Seventies, it wasn't uncommon for radical attorneys to come to involve themselves selves directly in the activities of those they represented in court, especially in Germany and Italy. Apparently, if what the kid said was true, Prahler had been a leader in the Baader-Meinhof group and the RAF all along, without the authorities ever getting wind of the fact.

  Hartmann looked at Tom Miller. "I'll rephrase my question. How did you get mixed up in this, Gimli?"

  "We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, Senator."

  The dwarf smirked at him. Puppetman felt an urge to crush that smug face, to tear out the dwarf's guts and throttle him with them. The frustration was physical torment.

  Sweat crawled down Hartmann's forehead like a centipede. His emotions were oddly distinct from Puppetman's. His other self whipsawed from rage to fear. What he mostly felt now was tired and annoyed.

  And sad. Poor Ronnie. He meant so well. He tried so hard.

  The redhead suddenly slapped the seated man on the shoulder. "You idiot, Wilfried, there it was! You went past it." He mumbled apology and dialed back.

  "-captured by the Red Army Fraction, acting in concert with comrades from the jokers for a just Society who have fled persecution in Amerika." It was Comrade Wolf's voice, pouring like liquid amber from the cheap little radio. "The terms of his release are these: release of the Palestinian freedom fighter al-Muezzin. An airliner with sufficient fuel to take al-Muezzin to a country in the liberated Third World. Immunity from prosecution for members of this action team. We demand that the Jetboy memorial be torn down and in its place a facility built to provide shelter and medical attention to joker victims of Amerikan intolerance. And finally, just to poke the capitalist swine where it most hurts them, ten million dollars cash, which will be used to aid victims of Amerikan aggression in Central Amerika."

  "If these terms are not met by ten o'clock tonight, Berlin time, Senator Gregg Hartmann
will be executed."

  "We return you now to regularly scheduled programming."

  "We have to do something." Hiram Worchester tangled his fingers in his beard and gazed out the window at the patchy Berlin sky.

  Digger Downs turned over a card. Trey of clubs. He grimaced.

  Billy Ray paced the carpet of Hiram's suite like a tyrannosaurus with an itch. "If I'd been there, this shit would never have happened," he said, and aimed a green glare at Mordecai Jones.

  The Hammer sat on the sofa. It was oak and flowered upholstery, and like many of the hotel's furnishings had survived the war. Fortunately they'd built stout furniture back in the 1890s.

  Jones made a dirty-gearbox noise toward the center of him and stared at his big hands, which he was working into tangles between his knees.

  The door opened and Peregrine flew into the room. Figuratively, at least, her wings jittering on her back. She wore a loose' velour blouse and jeans that muted the advanced state of her pregnancy.

  "I just heard on the radio-isn't it terrible?" Then she stopped and stared at the Hammer. "Mordecai-what on earth are you doing here?"

  "Just like you, Ms. Peregrine. Won't let me out."

  "But why aren't you in the hospital? The reports said you were terribly injured."

  "Just shot a little." He slapped his gut. "Got me a pretty tough hide, kind of like that Kevlar stuff you read about in Popular Science."

  Downs turned up a new card. Red eight. "Shit," he muttered.

  "But a van fell on you," Peregrine said.

  "Yeah, but see, I got these funky heavy metals replacing the calcium in my bones, so they're like stronger and more flexible and all, and my innards and whatnot are a lot sturdier than most folks'. And I heal mighty fast-don't even get sick-since I turned up my ace. I'm a pretty durable sort of dude."

  "Then why'd you let them get away?" Bill Ray challenged, almost shouting. "Goddamn, the senator was your responsibility. You could've kicked some ass."

  "To tell you the entire truth, Mr. Ray, it hurt like a sonofabitch. I wasn't good for much for a while there." The Mister came out differently than Ms. had. Billy Ray cocked his head and looked hard at him. Jones ignored him. "Lay off him, Billy," said Carnifex's partner, Lady Black, who sat to one side with her long legs crossed at the ankles before her.

  Peregrine came and touched Mordecai on the shoulder. "It must have been awful. I'm surprised they let you out of the hospital."

  "They didn't," Downs said, splitting open the deck in his left hand to catch a peek inside. "He released himself. Smashed right through the wall. The public health people are kind of pissed about it."

  Jones looked down at the floor. "Don't like doctors," he muttered.

  Peregrine looked around. "Where's Sara? The poor thing. This must be hell for her."

  "They let her go over to the crisis control center in City Hall. No other reporter from the tour. Just her." Downs made a face and went back to his solitaire game.

  "Sara took over a statement from Mr. Jones about what he saw and heard during the abduction," Lady Black said. "He didn't give one before he left the hospital." After the accident that triggered his wild card virus, Jones had been held by the Oklahoma Department of Public Health as a lab specimen, a virtual prisoner. The experience had given him an almost pathological fear of medical science and all its appurtenances.

  "Funny damn thing," Jones said, shaking his head. "I was lying there trying to breathe with this fu-with this van on my chest, and I keep hearing all these people yelling at each other. Like little kids fightin' on a playground."

  Hiram turned from the window. The rings that had been sinking in around his eyes since the tour began were even more pronounced. "I understand," he said, bringing his hands up cupped before his chest. They were dainty hands, and fit oddly with his bulk. " I understand what's happening here. This has been a blow to all of us. Senator Hartmann isn't just the last best hope for jokers to get a fair shake-and maybe aces too, with this crazy Barnett fellow on the loosehe's our friend. We're trying to soften the blow by talking around the subject. But it wont do. We have to do something."

  "That's what I say." Billy Ray slammed a fist into his palm. "Let's kick butts and take names!"

  "Whose butt?" Lady Black asked tiredly. "Whose name?"

  "That sawed-off little bastard Gimli for starters. We should have grabbed him when he was dicking around New York last summer-"

  "Where are you going to find him?"

  He flung out his arm. "Hell, that's why we ought to be looking for him, instead of sitting here on our duffs wringing our hands and saying how sorry we are the fucking senator's gone."

  "There are ten thousand cops out there combing the streets," Lady Black said. "You think we'll find him quicker?"

  "But what can we do, Hiram?" Peregrine asked. Her face was pale, and the skin stretched tight over her cheekbones. "I feel so helpless." Her wings opened slightly, then folded again.

  Hiram's little pink tongue dabbed his lips. "Peri, I wish I knew. Surely there must be something-"

  "They mentioned ransom," Digger Downs said.

  Hiram punched his palm twice in unconscious imitation of Carnifex. "That's it. That's it! Maybe we can raise enough money to buy him back."

  "Ten million's a lot of bread," Mordecai said.

  "That's just a bargaining position," Hiram said, sweeping aside objections with his small hands. "Surely we can work them down."

  "What about their demands this terrorist dude be released? We can't do nothing about that."

  "Money talks,"-Downs said. "Nobody walks."

  "Inelegantly put," Hiram said, beginning to drift here and there like an ungainly cloud, "but correct. Surely if we can scrape together sufficient funds, they'll leap at our offer."

  "Now, wait a minute-" Carnifex began.

  "I'm a man of not inconsiderable means," Hiram said, scooping up a handful of mints from a silver salver in passing. " I can contribute a fair amount-"

  "I have money," Peregrine said excitedly. "I'll help." Mordecai frowned. "I'm not crazy about politicians, but shoot, I feel I lost the man and shit. Count me in, for what it's worth."

  "Hold on, dammit!" Billy Ray said. "President Reagan has already announced there will be no negotiating with these terrorists."

  "Maybe he'll go for it if we throw in a Bible and a mess of rocket launchers," Mordecai said.

  Hiram elevated his chin. "We're private citizens, Mr. Ray. We can do as we please."

  "We'll by God see-"

  The door opened. Xavier Desmond walked in. " I couldn't bear to sit alone any longer," he said. "I'm so worried-my God, Mordecai, what are you doing here?"

  "Never mind that, Des," Hiram said. "We've got a plan."

  The man from the Federal Criminal Office tapped his pack of cigarettes on the edge of the desk in the crisis center in City Hall, shook out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. "What on earth were you thinking of, permitting that to go over the air without consulting me!" He made no move to light the cigarette. He had a young man's face with an old man's wrinkles, and lynx yellow eyes. His ears stuck out.

  "Herr Neumann," the mayor's representative said, trapping the phone receiver between his shoulder and a couple of chins and getting it quite sweaty, "here in Berlin our reflex is to shy away from censorship. We had enough of that in the bad old days, na ja?"

  " I don't mean that. How are we to control this situation if we're not even informed when steps like this are taken?" He leaned back and stroked a finger down one of the furrows that bracketed his mouth. "This could turn into Munich all' over again."

  Tachyon studied the digital clock built into the high heel of one of the pair of boots he'd bought on the Ku'damn the day before. Aside from the clocks he was in full seventeenthcentury regalia. This tour was a political stunt, he thought. But still, we might have accomplished some good. Is this how it's going to end?

  "Who is this al-Muezzin?" he asked.

  "Daoud Hassani is his name.
He's an ace who can destroy things with his voice, rather like your own late ace Howler," Neumann said. If he noticed Tachyon's wince he gave no sign. "He's from Palestine. He's one of Nur al-Allah's people, works out of Syria. He claimed responsibility for the downing of that El Al jetliner at Orly last June."

  "I'm afraid we've heard far from the last of the Light of Allah," Tachyon said. Neumann nodded grimly. Since the tour had left Syria, there had been three dozen bombings worldwide in retribution for its "treacherous attack" on the ace prophet.

  If only that wretched woman had finished the job, Tach thought. He was careful not to speak it aloud, These Earthers could be sensitive about such things.

  Sweat ran down the side of his neck and into the lace collar of his blouse. The radiator hummed and groaned with heat. I wish they were less sensitive to cold. Why do these Germans insist on making their hot planet so much hotter? The door opened. Clamor spilled in from the international press corps crammed into the corridor outside. A political aide slipped inside and whispered to the mayor's man. The mayor's man petulantly slammed down his phone.

  "Ms. Morgenstern has come from the Kempinski," he announced.

  "Bring her in at once," Tachyon said.

  The mayor's man jutted his underlip, which gleamed wet in the fluorescents. "Impossible. She's a member of the press, and we have excluded the press from this room for the duration."

  Tachyon looked at the man down the length of his fine, straight nose. "I demand that Ms. Morgenstern be admitted at once," he said in that tone of voice reserved on Takis for grooms who tread on freshly polished boots and serving maids who spill soup on heads of allied Psi Lord houses who are guesting in the manor.