Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump

by George R. R. Martin

  Zoe nodded. She caught a glimpse of what Rudo had been; his authority, his sense of command, permeated this young body he wore.

  "Perhaps you would share my accomodations in the Land Rover," Rudo said. "Unless you prefer to ride in the bed of the truck with the other women, of course."

  "Thank you," Zoe said.

  "Such a tense little Egyptian," Rudo said. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. "But so lovely."

  She kept her eyes downcast. Azma's lectures had taught her not to make eye contact with men, and this time it made sense. Maybe he wouldn't see that she really wanted to spit in his face. The hood made that idea impractical, anyway.

  Ruao frowned at her. "You're off duty. Get some sleep. We will all be busy tonight."

  Get some sleep, right. Zoe went to the stifling confinement of the women's tent and stretched out on her kilim in the close, fly-buzzing heat. Beads of sweat formed under her breasts and rolled down her sides. They felt like ants walking on her skin. She sat up, picked up her water jug and poured it over her hair, letting the water soak into the black cotton robe that was her required off-duty garb.

  It helped. The brown-black shade of the tent became a moonscape and, dreaming, she flew between ivory minarets that sang with the clear, soprano voices of a boy's choir. They chanted the Faure requiem, unspeakable sorrow.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Jay Ackroyd shoved the bear under his jacket and peered around the back of the empty hutch. A detachment of small brown men with big black guns was crossing the open square in the center of the camp. The field was a sea of brown muck, and the men made sucking sounds with their boots as they marched. Jay pulled his head back, held his breath, and tried not to drown in his own perspiration. He waited until the Karens were past, took another quick peek, and slid quietly back into the bush.

  Beyond the camp was nothing but roots and rocks and stinging flies and a hell of a lot more mud. Every step plunged him ankle deep in thick sucking muck that squished between his bare toes. He'd lost his right shoe near the perimeter going in, with no way to retrieve it except by hand, a process about as attractive as bobbing for turds, and likely to attract the attention of the Black Karens. It made more sense to abandon the other shoe, so he had.

  More small brown men with more big black guns were patrolling the narrow rutted track that passed for a road. Jay managed to sneak past the first sentry, who was taking a dump behind the burnt-out shell of an overturned jeep. He never saw the second until a rifle was shoved in his face and the man started screaming at him in Burmese. He popped him off in mid-scream. By then the first guy was pulling up his pants and reaching for his gun, so Jay had to pop him away too. "Shit," he groused, shaking his head as he jogged down the road. He was getting rusty at this stuff.

  The cave was a good mile and a half from the Black Karen camp. Two more small brown men with guns were outside, but these two were Belew's small brown men. Cambodians. "Hey, didn't I see you guys in The Killing Fields?" Jay had asked when Belew had first produced them. The Cambodians had just looked at him with flat, hard eyes, the same way they looked at him now as he came staggering out of the bush with his legs caked in mud halfway to the knee.

  Finn was inside the cave, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar horse blanket that Belew had had made up for him. Where J. Bob got these things Jay would never know. Finn's dye job had aged badly, turning his mane a splotchy green. Against the back wall, three Black Karen captives had been neatly trussed and gagged and propped up against the rock.

  Wordlessly, Finn handed Jay a canteen, Jay took a long swallow of lukewarm water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, "Jesus, it's so fucking hot out there even the bugs are sweating." He gestured toward the three captives in the back of the cave. "Our guests give you any trouble?"

  Finn shook his head. "The first one screamed a bit. The other two were pretty docile. I tied them up as soon as they appeared. You get into the laboratory okay?"

  "Piece of cake. Skulking was my major in detective school." Jay sat on a rock to scrape mud out from between his toes. "I'm getting sloppy, though. Too much desk work. They kept spotting me, it was embarrassing. The Karens are going to come up about a dozen short when they do roll call tonight. Aside from Moe, Larry, and Curly here, I popped them all to Freakers. Waived the cover charge and everything, they ought to be grateful. Where's Belew?"

  "One of his Cambodians found something," Finn said. "He went to take a look. Did you find anything in the lab?"

  "Lab stuff," Jay said. "Computers, test tubes, little brown guys in white coats. No Meadows and no Casaday, but they were here all right. I looked for steel drums labelled BLACK TRUMP and revealing notebooks full of plans for genocide and world domination, but I couldn't find any. I was looking for that scanning tunneling microscope too until I realized that I wouldn't know a scanning tunneling microscope from a Cuisinart."

  "Then how do you know that Meadows was here?" Finn asked.

  "I found this in an empty hutch." Jay pulled the bear out and handed it to Finn. It was pink plush, with button eyes; a child's stuffed toy.

  The centaur physician looked at the plush toy in confusion. "What is this supposed to mean?"

  "It means that Sprout Meadows was here until very recently, Doctor," J. Bob Belew said. Neither Jay nor Finn had heard him enter the cave, but there he was, looking impossibly crisp and cool in starched khaki, high leather boots, and a phojournalist's vest, like he'd just stepped out of the centerfold in Soldier of Fortune. Jay had to repress a sudden urge to shove him down in the mud.

  Belew took the bear from Finn, and for a moment there was genuine emotion in those cool, gray eyes. Then he blinked, and just like that he was all business again. "Undoubtedly they moved out in some haste and certain nonessentials were left behind."

  "Yeah, that's how I figured it," Jay said. "Where were you?"

  "We found a body," Belew said. "A joker."

  His words hit Jay like a physical blow. There had been no word from Jerry or Sascha since they'd decided to go off and play Rambo. Jay half-rose from the rock where he was seated. Finn threw him a glance and shuffled his feet anxiously. Jay tried to find the question, but his throat had gone very dry. "Was it ..."

  "Not one of your friends, Ackroyd," Belew said. "One of mine. His name was Lou Inmon.

  "Black Trump?" Finn's voice was anxious.

  "No, Doctor. The instruments of death were more traditional. He was tortured. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Another debt to Casaday's account." Belew's eyes went to the captives in the back of the cave. "What do we have here?"

  "Two lab technicians and a cook," Jay said. "I figured maybe they could be persuaded to tell us where Casaday moved his circus."

  Belew looked them over thoughtfully, playing with his mustache. Finally he said, "Remove the gags."

  Finn trotted oack to the Karens and pulled the cloth from their mouths, one, two, three. Belew stood in front of them. "Do any of you speak English?" Moe looked at the dirt. Larry shook his head. Curly pretended not to hear. Belew tried French. Nothing. Belew said something curt and cold in a language Jay did not recognize. The three men stared at him sullenly.

  "Swell," Jay said. "We got See-No-Sharks, Hear-No-Sharks, and Speak-No-Sharks." He thought for a moment. "J. Bob, tell them that if they cooperate, they'll win a free trip to New York City. Times Square, Yankee Stadium, the Empire State Building. They'll all be eating hot dogs and driving cabs inside three weeks."

  "Is that a bribe or a threat?" Finn wanted to know.

  Belew ignored the exchange. "Doctor, ask the guards to step inside for a moment."

  Finn looked at Jay, who shrugged, went out of the cave, and came back a moment later with the two Cambodians. The captives stared at them anxiously. Belew rattled off a long speech in Burmese or Chinese or Vietnamese or some such language. The only part of it that Jay recognized was Khmer Rouge, but the Black Karens seemed to understan
d well enough. Their faces grew anxious.

  Then Belew snapped an order and the Cambodians took a step toward the captives, and Moe looked over wildly at Jay and said, "New York New York. Tell everything."

  Jay grinned and made a gun with his fingers. "We're listening."

  "Green card?" Moe added hopefully.

  "Don't push it," Belew said sternly, and the cook began to sing.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  The voices in her dream turned to howling winds. She woke choking, the air in the tent thick with powdery ocher dust. Zoe wrapped her hood around her face and helped strike the tent in the spring's first real sandstorm.

  "The simoom!" a voice called out. Camels screamed outrage and tried to stay curled up on the sand. Goats bleated, unhappy about the wind and even more unhappy about being driven anywhere in it. Zoe fought her way toward an empty space the wind scoured in the air. She saw a woman's hand in deft motion, tying a styrofoam cooler to a camel's back.

  "Can I help?" Zoe asked.

  The woman kept working and did not answer.

  "Over here, Egypt!" Rudo appeared, a white-skinned ghost wearing a white suit and a totally out-of-place pith helmet swathed in what looked like mosquito netting. He grabbed Zoe and pulled her toward the lee side of a bulky Land Rover. Zoe dragged her pack behind her, the kilim wrapped around her clean suit, her gold jewelry, and the precious locator under the seam of a red leather jewelry case. She tossed the pack through the opened door and climbed in after it.

  The driver, a turbaned man Zoe hadn't seen before, nodded to Rudo and closed the partition between his seat and the passenger section of the car, leaving Rudo and Zoe in an enclosure of leather and burled wood - unexpected luxury. The driver gunned the motor and eased the heavy vehicle out into the swirling sand.

  "This storm is good," Rudo said. "We will leave no tracks, and our change of location will be hidden from the satellite eyes. Until the wind dies down only, but the camp that appears in the morning will not look like the camp we are now leaving."

  If only she could get him to tell her what she needed to know, she could be out of here, back in Jerusalem. She had to get him to talk. He'd said he was lonely. His young body would have needs. Hateful though he was, she had to charm him. "I understand so little of - our work here," she said.

  "Knowledge can be dangerous. No matter. You would not be here if your hatred of the wild card had not driven you to seek us out."

  That, in a twisted way, was true. Zoe tried to look like an admiring junior on her first date with a football hero. He was a pretty boy.

  "This, ah, cleansing agent whose replication I am trying to oversee, against all odds in these primitive conditions, my hope that humanity can become free of the suffering caused by this hideous alien disease - I have been a prisoner of my obsession for years. Granted, Jerusalem's small, pathetic jokertown is not where the agent should be released," Rudo said. "So, well, I will have faith in the epidemiology of world travel. And even here, my goal will be accomplished."

  "The righteous overcome adversity," Zoe said. She looked down at her hands, tightly folded in her lap, and prayed that what she had just said was true. But who was righteous?

  He frowned, and the frown was a terrible thing, a disapproval that made her tremble. A man with the authority lent by many years of power looked at her through a youth's pale eyes. Zoe wondered if the vacated body Rudo wore still had memories, hopes, a capacity for outrage. No. The boy who had lived behind those eyes was gone forever.

  "You grew up in New York," Pan Rudo said. "You are a twentieth century woman. Why do you quote platitudes?"

  "When in Rome ..."

  "Ah. But in this little space, so safe from prying eyes, you do not need to do that, Zoe."

  Oddly enough, she did feel some of the tension leaving her shoulders. "Thank you. I really mean that. It's difficult, acting like a nonperson. I miss - New York."

  "I miss access to a good research laboratory. I am not a virologist. Zahid works, but he is a frail reed, his knowledge barely adequate. This is such a tricky business, he tells me, working with this fragile virus. It resists multiplication to quantities that will be sufficient to the task."

  "So that's what you're doing," Zoe said. "I really know so little about virology." Yikes, did that sound stupid! "I wanted to go on with my studies - biochem, virology. But my brothers' schooling took precedence." Her mythical brothers. Two? Three? She didn't remember how many she was supposed to have. Not a good direction to let this conversation drift, no.

  Rudo smiled and patted her hand. "I have become a student in the field. Would you like to hear me recite my lessons? There is no pleasure greater than an interested listener. And we will be on this journey until nearly dawn."

  The driver fought the wheel of the Land Rover and they lurched steeply down some unseen dune. The wind ground sand against the doors.

  "Your - obsession - is to relieve suffering?"

  "Ah. Yes."

  "But the Black Trump will kill whoever gets it. At least that's what the lab workers say."

  "They talk too much. The Black Trump will kill, yes, but there is no other answer. You think of the dying, but that is the softness of women. I do not hold it against you. Zoe, I have studied the workings of the human psyche for years. The healthy have courage. Ask any healthy human, like yourself, whether they would sacrifice themselves to avoid spreading a hideous plague to their loved ones, and they will say 'Yes!' With courage, with conviction! But with illness, with contamination, the psyche changes. The organism loses its higher functions, its courage, in a drive toward survival. The sick are sheep, animals who bleat and follow any leader."

  And once a confused and frightened people had meekly marched into cattle cars, shocked and dazed by the unthinkable, trusting in the rules of civilization. They had believed in law, in decency. Never again. Since that time, no one could ever truly believe in law, or decency. Never again.

  "At such times, the courageous must act for them. It is my destiny to be one of the courageous."

  They had found a smooth track of some sort and the vehicle sped up, heading for the new camp in the night. In the murky darkness of the rocking jeep, Rudo almost glowed with purpose.

  Well, the wild card virus had spread untold suffering. Some of its victims had suicided, from pain or self-loathing, or because they couldn't live with the changes in people who had once loved them. If all the jokers and aces in the world just went to sleep, painlessly - would that be so terrible? Had it happened in the fifties, Zoe Harris would never have been born, would never have lived to become a murderer, a woman manipulated by love into a theft that could kill millions. Would Rudo's solution be so terrible? No child would fear the wild card, ever again, if he succeeded.

  "You are thinking of painful deaths, I tell you, Zoe, that need not happen. For normal humans, only a minor respiratory illness. With lots of sneezing, lots of dispersal potential, isn't that a nice touch? Once the disease is established to be universally fatal to those who are infested with the Takisian virus, then the suffering of the afflicted can be eased without guilt. I will work very hard to see that it is so."

  Cyanide and morphine? How gentle, how reasonable. Zoe wanted to believe him. He looked so innocent, so clean, a white acolyte dedicated to purity, to peace, to health. Nat or no, he had charisma.

  "How soon? When will this happen?"

  "Don't be impatient, Egypt. Do you wish to leave our company so soon? Does not the Nur pay you well?"

  Did he? Her salary didn't come to her, a mere woman. It went to her designated guardian, a fictional brother in Alexandria.

  "I am a stranger here. I - don't like the food much."

  "Mutton! My tongue is coated with the taste of mutton! And that dusty-tasting spice!"

  "Cumin. It's in everything."

  "I would give much for a good stein of dark beer."

  "It's spring. In Manhattan, there will be places serving wild strawberries. The tiny ones, red as rubies.


  Rudo licked his lips. His tongue was pointed and very pink. "With cream and a glass of May wine. Are you a gourmet, Zoe?"

  "Sometimes." As if she watched a movie, she saw a never-again Zoe from years past, her hair loose in the wind. She hustled toward an afternoon class, her tongue busy with strands of rich, dripping mozarella on a slice of New York's finest pizza, hot enough to burn her fingers.

  "We must console ourselves." Rudo reached into a pocket of his white safari suit and came out with a silver flask. Monogrammed.

  "I - I'm supposed to be a good Muslim. From Manhattan."

  "This is very good brandy." He looked almost hurt that she might refuse. "Tonight we drink. Tomorrow, Allah forgives."

  Croyd had said that.

  "Perhaps - " Perhaps she would throw up if she touched something this man's lips had touched. Remember the boy. Do this for the boy whose body this man inhabits. Do it for Jan, for Needles. Rudo unscrewed the cap, a heavy silver-shot glass lined with gold.

  "A taste." Let's get you drunk, Zoe thought. Let's find out if this young body you're wearing can hold its liquor. Let's hope not. "To success." Zoe took a sip of the aromatic stuff, smooth and good, and passed the cup back to Rudo.

  He tossed down the brandy and refilled the cap.

  Zoe sipped at her portion and frowned.

  "You don't like it?" Rudo asked.

  "A hint of bitterness. Perhaps it's the silver I taste."

  "Let me see." He took a good mouthful and rolled it on his tongue, and swallowed. "It's fine." He finished the second shot.

  "Could I have some more?" Zoe asked.

  For answer, Rudo reached forward and found a knob in the buried wood of the partition. He opened a compartment, a portable bar, complete with cut-crystal highball glasses and a selection of goodies.

  "Oh, look!" Zoe reached for a tin of salted nuts. Let's make you thirsty, yes. She pulled the tab on the nuts.

  "Here!" She fed him a salted almond and let her fingers linger on his soft lips. Again. And more cognac.