by Leo Champion
Not idiot dilettantes, middle-class children who thought that strumming bad sitar ballads about oppression was the same as a blow against it.
Not drunken industrials, blue-collar cogs who'd finally become aware that they were no more than abused cogs, less-educated but no less fucked over than he was, but who saw revolution as no more than a loud excuse to rowdily do what they'd have done anyway.
So far, he was disappointed. The drunken industrials weren't here - this, as much a coffee shop as a bar, on Eighth and 143rd, wasn't their kind of place - but the other types were. A less-than-skilled harpist and a drummer were making loud, electrically-amplified noise at the other end of the room, while a poet declaimed meaningless noise about the ‘corporate industrial system.’
Whatever the hell that was. All Ferrer knew was that he'd been screwed. Hard. Once too many times. The corporations, with Washington's full legal backing, had ripped him off. A patent, his patent, stolen. Millions for them, nothing for him, despite clear paperwork.
Not the first time, the second. The first, he'd accepted it for the sake of his employers; a stable job for Federal Electric was worth something, right? He'd swallowed it, accepted the bonus, despite the fact that the work had been done on his own time in his own shop using his own tools, and allowed them to take the application. They'd fired him three months later anyhow.
The second time, he'd been much more careful about filing patents and paperwork. And they'd ripped him off anyway, blatantly.
“It’ll cost you five thousand dollars to hire lawyers to contest it,” one of FE's lawyers had said. “You don't have five thousand dollars. You won't find it easily. They won't win in any case. Thanks for the designs.”
Ferrer's fist clenched, hard, at the memory.
I'll stomp those bastards. I will teach them. Once was enough. Twice is more than enough. I'll see their high-rises burn around their ears. I'll see their high-rise offices and their whole fucking system burn around their fucking thieving ears.
“Mister?” It was one of the waitresses.
“Yes?” Ferrer said.
“They want you in back. Joe Ferrer, right?”
“That's me.”
“I bring you another drink? Going to be closed room, they say.”
“Triple Scotch. I'll wait.”
The waitress gave him what might have been a Look; you're too old to be in a place like this, perhaps, because Ferrer was forty-two and not many others in here were above thirty. Or perhaps it was just the hard alcohol; most of the others were smoking marijuana or chewing khat, with beer the heaviest drink in general circulation.
When she came back, Ferrer gave her a buck and headed into the rear of the place.
“You here to meet - you're Mr. Ferrer?” asked a young man with streaked black-and-white hair.
“That's me.”
“Up those stairs, first on the left.”
Ferrer followed the directions, up a tight staircase. The walls had been pencilled-on with crazy triangular and square designs, triple-thick charcoal lines added here and there for emphasis.
It's not engineering. Maybe it's some fucked-up kind of art. Hell if I know.
Ferrer had been hanging around beatie and agitprop circles for far, far too long - two years was plenty long-enough in his book - to have much appreciation for that kind of rubbish. Posers, he thought they were. Posers, pseudos and wannabes the lot of you. Don't want to bring down the system. Just want to ride it, play the cute rebel over shit they - the real System, the Imperials and their Fed corporate puppets - don't give a damn about in the first place, as you all know full well.
The doorway the man had indicated led to a small room with a rectangular table and a number of chairs. A man in buckskins came in behind Ferrer. They took the last two chairs.
Ferrer glanced around. Most prominent was a tall, very lean, dark-skinned man with a flowing moustache and a big, bright ring in his right ear. He stood at the end of the table. To his right was a stocky, white-haired man in a trenchcoat.
There was a spectacled man in his late twenties with gelled black hair and shifty, darting eyes, a red-haired woman of about the same age who, as Ferrer studied her, lit a new cigarette with her old one and stubbed the old one into a clay ashtray. There was himself, and the man in buckskins, who was tall, brown-haired, well-built and about forty-five.
“Thank you for coming,” said the white-haired man. His accent had a trace of Russian in it. “My name is Nick. I'm associated with a foreign government and you wouldn't have passed our screening in the first place if you couldn't guess which. This is Theron Marko. He'll be in charge.”
Nods in the direction of the lean, dark-skinned man in black, who smiled.
Needs a dentist, was Ferrer's first thought.
If I'm taking orders from him-
Well, this was a break. No loud declamations about the system. People were getting straight down to business.
“You people have been selected,” Nick said, “because, one, you're available. Two, because you're damn good at what you do, or suited for it. Let me go around the table. Good people tend to be modest. I'll do the introductions. Does anyone have a problem?”
If anyone did, none of them said so.
“Pete Rienzi,” Nick indicated the shifty-eyed man with the spectacles. “Engineering student turned killer. Spun it as manslaughter, got lucky with the judge and only served five years. Still couldn't get a job out. You've got half a master's in electrical technology, a criminal record, and two more killings since you got out.”
“That's me,” Rienzi half-waved a hand.
“You're going to be the assistant to Joe Ferrer here. Bachelor's in engineering from Jersey Technical, master's in electrical technology from Columbia, six years at American Kinematograph Corporation and then nine at Federal Electric before they royally fucked him over; stole two patents of his, the lesser of which they've made four hundred thousand from. It's a pity it took such a fucking-over to get a corporate drone to see the light, but see the light he did. The first, we hope, of a very great number.”
Ferrer nodded firmly. Looked at Rienzi.
In this kind of thing, you have to be ready to kill, he thought. Knew that when I started to get in. He's probably as much my bodyguard, but he'd better know his work, whatever this is, or be able to learn.
“Pratt Cannon,” the man called Nick gestured at the man in buckskins. “Born in the Republic of Deseret. Did a hitch in their army, sergeant of horse cavalry, before deciding life was more fun on the other side of the mountain. Mercenary scout for Sonora, Texas, the Feds and a dozen private outfits. Killed twenty men in gunfights and dry-gulched three times that number.”
Pratt Cannon coughed loudly.
“Dry-gulching implies murder, Mr. Nick. Out where I'm from, bad manners to say that. Sort of bad manners that might get a man killed.”
A revolver – Ferrer would have sworn he hadn't seen the man move to draw it – was in his hand and leveled at the white-haired Russian.
It didn't escape Ferrer's notice - perhaps in his glance at Ferrer it had - that a flat throwing knife had materialized in Marko's hand. Unobtrusive, but Ferrer could tell from a slight tension in Marko's attitude that it was ready to fly.
“My apologies, Mr. Cannon, but we'll speak plainly here. You began duels on your terms, if that's better.”
“Good enough for now, Russki,” Cannon said, and lowered the gun.
“There are men who know the West better than Mr. Cannon,” said Nick, as though nothing had happened. “But not many of them, and not so many still alive.”
Nick gestured at the chain-smoking red-haired woman.
“Loretta McIlhan. Of St. John's, Province of Newfoundland. Joined the Imperial Army, armored branch, in `54. Served in the Low Countries, saw action there against Franco bandits, promoted to tank commander and transferred with her battalion to the Hugoton Lease. Made sergeant in `60, involuntarily discharged last year with a rank-reduction to lance-corporal.�
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“Corrupt bastards,” McIlhan said. “Generals rake it off; colonels rake it off, captains rake it off. Enlisted woman? Sergeant gets some on the side, and there's a court-martial. Like everyone doesn't do it?”
Serious people, thought Ferrer. Even if they weren't all the type he much liked.
You put aside those old bourgeois prejudices, he told himself, when the system fucked you over.
“You've been vetted hard, all four of you. You may as well know a little about your man in charge,” Nick said. “Theron Marko. Born somewhere in Franco country – we don't know whether it's France or Spain, and he doesn't know, either.”
Marko showed his broken teeth again.
“Gypsy, Romany. Travels. He's worked for us on four continents, a dozen major jobs. More have succeeded than not. He knows how to light a fire. Speaks six languages and the Imperials have twenty thousand pounds on the head of one of the people they think he was. Assassination of Victoria's eldest, that eight-year-old kid Charles, in Ireland?”
Nick gestured his head at Marko.
“His work.”
“Rifle at two thousand yards,” Cannon muttered, impressedly.
“Eighteen fifty,” Marko said. “Give or take a little.”
“Knows his way around a knife, too,” said Nick. “Demonstrate?”
“White blotch on the door,” Marko said.
Ferrer turned around. So did the others. The paint-blotch in question was maybe an inch at its longest dimension.
“Bracket it at two inches,” Marko said. “Learn.”
A knife whick-th'ed into the door about two inches – no, said Ferrer's engineer's mind, exactly two inches – above the blotch, burying itself a half-inch into the door. The bare hilt was still quivering when a second hit at the blotch's right, then a third below it, then one to the left.
Marko was smiling. A fifth knife was in his hand.
“I'm in charge,” he said. “Let's not forget that, aye? I'm the one running things, after Mr. Nick and his friends.”
Even Cannon seemed to be impressed.
“You are here,” Nick said, “to meet each other. You'll be working under Marko, with his direction. You four are all skilled in your areas. You know specific jobs, fields, capabilities. Not one of you would be here if you had not been vetted to the best of the Okhrana's considerable ability. Marko here knows the big picture.”
“What is the big picture?” asked Rienzi. “You got us here. What are we going to do?”
Marko shrugged.
“Nothing substantial. Nick told me on the way. We're going to destroy the core of Imperial power and end the miserable pretense of Fed authority on the continent.”
“Another Southron rebellion?”
“More than that,” Nick said. “Considerably more than that. You'll be operating primarily in the west. The specific details will come later. Federals will die. Imperials will die. Does any of you, despite our screening, have a problem with this concept? Or with doing the killing yourselves?”
It felt to Ferrer as though Nick were looking at him in particular. That impulse made him speak up. He banged his fist on the table for emphasis.
“Never killed anyone but, fuck it, I'm ready to,” he snarled. “It's a corrupt system of thieves, and they need nothing else than to be fucking brought down like they were in `89!”
“At this point,” Nick said, “you can walk out and forget this took place. This isn't the wading pool, this is the deep water. You'll be dealing with MI-7, Foreign Service, Federal Internal Security and others. This is not the wading pool. Speak up and get out, if you're going to.”
“I wouldn't have come here in the first place if I thought it was going to be a fucking wading pool,” said McIlhan.
Cannon growled an agreement. After a second, so did Rienzi and Ferrer.
“Good. I'll leave you to Marko, then.”
Nick turned to go.
“Wait,” said Marko. “I won't be long.”
He turned to the others.
“We're going to destroy Federal power on the continent,” Marko said, “by destroying the most critical of its props. We're going to destroy Imperial power globally, by destroying one of its props. Or clearing the road for its destruction, which is the same thing. There's going to be fire and a lot of it, my friends. We're going to have a good time with the burning and the exploding, and there'll be enough for us all to partake in. There's the five of us, and I look forward to furthering my acquaintance with you at Jewell's at four tomorrow. There's the ones we'll work with and you'll direct. There's the tools we'll be using - it's fun to use tools, you know, almost as much fun as it is to destroy them.”
Marko laughed.
“This is big. Mr. Krusch– oh, I'm sorry, Nick - explained it to me on the way here. We have support at the very highest level and we'll be working with people at the very highest level. You should all four of yourselves congratulate yourself for having been selected. If Nick calls on you, he speaks with my name. I'll see the four of you when I said. Be packed and ready to travel.”
There were a few murmurs. Rienzi began to raise a hand.
“Questions will be answered at the next one,” Marko laughed. “Not tonight, my young friend. Tonight, you will head out separately while I head home with Mr. Nick, to establish further channels. He knows how to contact you, and you should acknowledge those contacts as well. The plan is set, but it is in flux. As any good plan should be! Now go; go drink, and smoke; chew, imbibe, and inhale!”
Marko paused.
“Because tomorrow - certainly within the week - we impale. By year's end, Imperial authority on the continent will have been spiked. Through the heart, like the parasitical vampire it is!”
He winked broadly.
“My people came from Romania; I know all about the vampires. We'll talk further tomorrow afternoon.”
He's insane, thought Ferrer, as he followed the others out and down the stairs. He's fucking insane.
But this Nick man - he'd heard rumors, here and there, of the senior Russian operative in the city, a man who matched that description. Oh, he was serious enough.
And so were the others. You could tell that easily enough. And Marko - well, insane was probably a virtue at his level. He'd killed Young Prince Charlie. He'd done - well, God knew what else. He was a serious man.
I've spent two years looking for these serious people, Ferrer thought. He downed the last of his scotch. Nihil posers and Lud pseudos won't do shit against the fucking system.
Men like this – plans like this – are what's going to bring it to its fucking knees.
“What do you think of the plan?” Kruschchev asked Marko as they walked out.
“I like it. You're serious about the backing?”
“Some equipment was brought into the country three weeks ago. It was taken, this evening, to that engineer's lodgings. Details at the highest levels are still being worked out. The Count would not have committed the resources he has, if he weren't serious. The other parties are receptive.”
“This could be fun," Marko said. "This could be fun. And the pyres... you weren't kidding.”
“It's not going to topple the Empire in itself,” Krushchev warned. “North America is the single most critical point to British influence, but they'll survive even this. In itself.”
“The Empire's big. This is a kick to its balls and no question. Might survive this in itself, but weakened is good. Weakened at this level is plenty good. They lose their basis on the continent, the Feds lose half their revenue - South rises on its own, and that's all of North America.”
“And could lead quite rapidly to their losing Canada. Even St. John's,” Krushchev said. “What do you think of the team?”
Marko thought for a moment before answering.
“Skilled. A bunch of specialists, other than that kid engineer. Sounds fitted, though. What motivates them all?”
“Pretty much what motivates you. They're pissed off. They want action and rev
enge, maybe some cash. The Rienzi kid's ambitious; he wants glory, too.”
“Plenty of that to go around when we're done,” Marko said.
They were walking, more quickly, through the dark and quiet streets of upper Manhattan, crossed 150th without incident. The houses here were dense middle-class brownstones, small apartment-buildings becoming multiple-family houses. Ten blocks further north, the multiple-families began to evolve into semi-detached townhouses. Here and there was a livery stable or garage. They passed a brightly-lit Irish bar, a neighborhood place for mid-ranking clericals and low-ranking engineers to hang out. Here and there, parked on the street, were steam-cars and electrovelos.
“Where are we going?” Marko asked.
“Somewhere you haven't been before. Our primary safe house in New York City. You've been introduced to your field team.”
“Operational control.”
“Yes. You know the basic plan and you have the essential equipment. It's time for you to meet the people who'll be guiding things on the back end. A couple of them will be going out to Dodge City on Wednesday; you'll meet them here so you can recognize them there.”
A few blocks later, Marko stopped.
“I have a bad feeling.”
“We're on the same block. Come on.”
“I have a bad feeling,” Marko repeated. He glanced at an all-night diner across the road.
“Something about that place.”
“We have security there,” Krushchev said impatiently. “Don't worry.”
“I told you I have a bad feeling,” Marko said. “Go on. I'll be waiting there.” He gestured at the mouth of an alley a few feet away. “Come back in five minutes if it's clear. If. I recommend we turn around, right now.”
“I've heard you get these nerves. What's your problem with control?”
“I don't have a problem with control,” said Marko. “We operate in a context. I'll live with that to achieve the ends. I have a problem with getting killed, and I have a bad feeling. Something's wrong.”
“That building there. Above the news-stand. That's ours,” said Kruschchev. “The lit windows. See the lower second pane, green-shaded lamp that's lit in it? Everything's fine. We're not amateurs.”