Alpha

by Greg Rucka

  Which means approaching that car is out of the question, at least for the moment.

  “Black, clear,” Cardboard says in his ear.

  “The fuck are you doing?” Bell has to turn to a building face, keeping his voice low.

  “Black is clear,” Cardboard repeats, the hint of his Alabama drawl stronger on the last word. “South of the square is clear. And as we were positioned Red and Green, then your overwatch on that vehicle, Warlock, we must deduce, is on White.”

  Bell looks to the south side of the square, then the west, then the east. Colors are direction: White north, Black south, Red and Green for east and west respectively. Nowhere does he see Bone, Chaindragger, or Cardboard, but that’s not a surprise; no more of a surprise than the fact that none of the squad has done as ordered. Bell shakes his head slightly, then realizes the building he’s sheltering in front of is on the White side, the north side, of the square. If there’s overwatch on the VBIED, it’s going to be in here.

  “Guess I better take a look inside,” he says.

  “I guess you’d better,” Bonebreaker says, and Bell can swear to God the man’s trying not to laugh at him. “Unless you want someone to come hold your hand, Top?”

  “Think I’ve got this—”

  “Target, target, target,” Chaindragger hisses, cutting in. “Approaching Green, say again, I have eyes on target.”

  He showers after her. She lives light, the bathroom uncluttered, only essentials, and apparently makeup consists of an eyeliner and a lipstick, both courtesy of Burt’s Bees. When he’s dressed, she takes his hand, and they walk together to the Bean along streets that are just beginning to stir. Her hand is warm and slight, and his feels big around it, and when they turn the corner onto Broadway she leans her head against his shoulder, squeezes his upper arm through the overshirt he’s wearing. Fourth of July bunting and American flags still hang from houses. Bell looks back, can see the stacks of two cruise ships in the port. It’s early enough that the onslaught has yet to begin.

  They separate entering the Bean, she disappearing behind the counter into the back to emerge half a minute later tying a barista’s apron around her middle. There’s a scattering of local color present, and Bell earns a nod from one or two, recognition. He’s been around just long enough that the outsider edge is beginning to dull, but still, he’s viewed as transient. She pulls him a double espresso, puts a blueberry muffin on a chipped plate for him, brushes the back of his hand with hers as he takes them. Bell moves to a table with a view of the window. There’s a copy of the Skagway News on a chair, and he takes it up, reads while listening to the growing murmur of conversation around him. Outside, the first tourists have penetrated this far, peering into windows as if visiting a zoo.

  He finishes his breakfast and she slips out from behind the counter, bringing him a new cup, fresh coffee this time, and takes the empty espresso away. Fingertips brush the back of his neck as he turns, and when he swings his head to follow her, she’s looking back at him, the mirthful grin, full of promise for tonight. He can’t help grinning in response, then turns back to the paper, catches sight of a man he knows too well through the window, on the opposite side of the street, moving among the clots of tourists.

  He folds his newspaper, sips his coffee, watches this man he knows step inside. Watches him stop at the counter, talk to her. A coffee to go. He exits again with paper cup in hand, turning right, past the window once more, then out of sight.

  For a moment, Bell seriously considers not moving, and the thought surprises him. He likes Skagway, he likes this girl, this place, mucking through the woods and fly fishing, the thought of the solitary, silent winters, and, he realizes, there would be worse places to live and die. But he no sooner thinks it than he knows it’s not home, though he’s damned if he knows what or where home is anymore.

  He takes his coffee with him as he steps outside.

  She watches him go, wonders why he didn’t say good-bye.

  * * *

  “Board, Bone,” Bell says. “Clear White.”

  Both men come back, roger that. Bell can hear each of them moving even in the brief instant they radio their confirmations.

  “Chain, where?”

  “On Green, crossing Red. I’m parallel, ten meters.”

  “Give him room to breathe.”

  “On it.”

  Bell steps out of the way of two burka-clad women walking hand in hand with their children. The noise in the square is constant—voices, livestock, vehicles, conversation and shouts, haggling and haranguing. Bone and Board pass him on either side, no one exchanging looks, and Bell picks up Chaindragger first, opposite him on the Black side, and then, a half second later, spots the target coming up to his left. The man is walking alone, indistinguishable from any other man in the market, indistinguishable from the squad, in fact. Just another tanned face in dusty clothes with a beard and ragged hair sticking out from beneath his hat. And like just about every other goddamn male over the age of ten in the region, packing an AK slung over his shoulder.

  There is nothing good about this situation, Bell thinks. They move on target and it goes wrong, the overwatch on the Benz panics. It’s all about the timing now; if Board and Bone can locate and neutralize the overwatch, if they can secure the bomb, then he’ll have a free run on the target. But if they can’t, if the target doesn’t have the common decency to remove himself to a location where he can be quietly put down, the whole thing’s a scratch.

  Bell times his approach, passes behind his target without a glance, and the man continues threading his way through the crowds. The plastic soccer ball suddenly rises, arcing through the air, and from the corner of his eye, Bell sees the target head it down, back to the cluster of kids. Laughter and approval, and for a second Bell wonders if those children would be so delighted if they knew the man who just joined their game for an instant has lost count of the men, women, and children he’s murdered.

  “White Alpha, clear,” Bone says. “Moving to Bravo.”

  First floor clear, moving to the second, and the building only offers three floors, which would make things so much easier, except it’s not the only building on that side of the square. Bell turns, following after the target, maybe eight meters between them. Chain is on his left, falling back; he’ll cut north, try to get ahead of their man.

  They’re getting closer to that Benz.

  “Bravo clear, moving to Charlie.”

  Bell is about to confirm when there’s the rip of AK fire to his right, to the White, the north, side. The crisp crack of 7.62 on full auto, then a second assault rifle joining the first, and all at once the market square bursts into an entirely different frenzy, weapons slipping from shoulders, women and children starting to scatter as voices rise from warning to hysteria. The target stops and pivots, his weapon coming up in his hands, and Bell can read his calm amid the sudden chaos, knows that in half a second, the man in front of him will read the same thing, and see him as the enemy.

  With no pause, still walking forward, Bell draws his pistol from its place at his waist and places two shots in the target, head and neck, a double-tap released without conscious thought. The target drops, deadweight, and Bell keeps moving, pistol now against his thigh. People surge on all sides, and for an instant Bell believes no one has noticed, is about to call for Bone and Board, for the Sitrep, when he finds himself staring at one of the soccer players, a boy no more than twelve, that absurd jury-rigged ball in his hands. For just that instant, they’re looking into one another’s eyes, and then Board is in his ear.

  “Clear,” he’s saying. “Had it on dial-in, we’re clear.”

  “Venus,” Bell says. “Now.”

  They all roger that, and Bell and the boy stare at each other for a half second longer, and then the boy is backing away, turning, running. Chaindragger is coming toward Bell now, and they fall in together, picking up speed, starting to hustle with the crowd, blending in. Cardboard and Bonebreaker appear, making toward the
Green side, but hold up for half a second, waiting so they can group up again. Bone takes the opportunity to look past them into the emptying square, spots the body on the ground.

  “Paid in full,” he says.

  Bell keeps moving. The flow of traffic has changed with the lack of gunfire, and now a woman screams, one of their freshly laid corpses revealed. People rush back into the square, voices rising again, confusion, consternation. They skirt the corner of the mosque, and they’re just about to turn when the pressure wave hits them, leading the blast from the Benz.

  Bell feels himself lifted from the ground, feels his legs fly out from beneath him. He lands hard, somehow on his back, head ringing and bile in his throat. He attempts to roll, can’t manage it on the first try, curses himself, and pushes again, this time making it onto his stomach. He’s been turned around, he realizes, facing the square again.

  The blessing of the blast is that it steals his hearing, and so he can’t hear the pain, only see it, but that, in its own way, makes it worse. Through dust and smoke, he can see that where the car was there is now nothing, a crater ringed in black, and all around, on every side, there is blood and meat and the dumb show of those miraculously spared blinking in their concussion-stupor. He hears a thread of someone’s keening, sees the dead. Old men and young, women and boys and girls, and there are the wounded, clutching at themselves where holes that shouldn’t be are, where limbs that once were have gone absent. Bell’s gaze falls on the boy, the plastic ball in his hand, its bottom half sheared by the blast.

  Just like the boy.

  Board is pulling Bell to his feet, shouting at him, words dim. Bell nods, knows what he’s asking. Bone is supporting Chain, blood rushing down the side of his face in a sheet. They push off, heading for their vehicle, then for Venus and Brickyard, trying to put this all behind them.

  Knowing they never will.

  * * *

  Bell finds him two blocks down, standing at the corner, and it’d be a believable tourist act if it weren’t for the military-issue haircut and the ramrod posture. Civvies notwithstanding, you can take the man out of uniform, but some men—you will never take the uniform from the man.

  “Jad,” the man says, apparently admiring the trees.

  “Colonel,” Bell says.

  The man turns to look at him, the slight curl of a smile as he takes Bell in, then shakes his head. “You look like a pilgrim who’s lost his way, Master Sergeant.”

  Bell considers that, then finishes his coffee. There’s a garbage can at the edge of the abused lawn beside him, and he sets the empty cup atop it. “You’re here to help me find it?”

  “I’m here to offer you a job,” Colonel Daniel Ruiz tells him.

  Chapter Two

  THE EMPIRE was born from a boy, a girl, and a dog.

  This was post–Second World War, the start of the baby boom generation, and there was a market for all three, though the truth is that it was the dog who made things happen, it was Pooch who was the real hit, and Gordo and Betsy were really only along for the ride, at least at the start. But Willis Wilson, twenty-six years old and recently returned from the Western front, had just enough genius in him to market the dog with the brother-sister pair, and since you couldn’t get the one without the others, he succeeded in marketing all three at once. And market them he did, slipping between newly made Madison Avenue satin sheets with an eagerness that, to abuse the metaphor, would have made a whore blush.

  The second part of Wilson’s genius was an understanding of the incipient collector’s nature of a child’s mind. Kids collect things; they always have. From interesting pebbles to pressed flowers to bits of string to baseball cards to comics to model horses to books about dinosaurs or trains or heavy earth-moving construction machines, collecting is, perhaps, one of the means by which children come to terms with their world, one of the means by which they learn.

  And, certainly, one of the means by which they play.

  With Gordo, Betsy, and Pooch, Wilson made damn certain that there was always something else to collect. The trio were recast over and over again, thrown into new environments with new accessories, new costumes, and new narratives to support them. All but the most basic sets were marketed in limited runs, available for only a limited time. Beginning with the Cowboys and Indians Set in 1948 (with Gordo the Cowboy, Betsy the Squaw, and Pooch the Texas Ranger Dog), followed closely by the Space Explorer Set (Gordo the Space Explorer, Betsy the Space Homemaker, and Pooch the Space Dog) the same year, and then by the All Grown Up Set (Gordo the Executive, Betsy the Homemaker, and Pooch the House Dog), Wilson Toys succeeded in making, marketing, and, most important, selling toys that children wanted.

  With a vengeance.

  Gordo and Betsy’s roster of friends grew. More accessories, more toys, more play sets, and, from there, books, radio, and, inevitably, television, and the metamorphosis of Wilson Toys into Wilson Entertainment. Lovable Pooch debuted on NBC in 1958, much in the mold of other children’s television programs of the time. Gordo and Betsy presented fun and games and displayed their commitment to self-promotion before a live studio audience, with each show culminating in the debut of an all-new Pooch cartoon. The show was staggering in its mediocrity, but it exploded the popularity of the characters. A second offering followed in 1961, the hour-long variety show Gordo and Betsy’s Showcase, which introduced and furthered the adventures of Wilson Entertainment’s ever-growing cast of characters.

  By the time Gordo and Betsy’s Showcase went off the air in 1977, it had served as the gateway drug to Wilson Entertainment for three successive generations.

  In 1955, Wilson purchased the rights to Clip Flashman, a second-tier pulp-comics character who had enjoyed brief popularity in the late thirties and early forties as a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon knockoff. Flashman, like his more successful counterparts, traveled interstellar space with his best girl, Penny, at his side, and between repeated battles to save the universe managed to seduce just about every alien queen he came across (and there were a lot of alien queens out there who needed seducing). Promoting “American values” even as he defended the Star System Alliance, the character was seen—even at the time—as laughably simplistic and painfully derivative.

  Wilson saw the same in Clip Flashman, but he saw far greater potential, and set about revising the character in a manner that, much as he had with Gordo, Betsy, and Pooch, would enable Wilson Entertainment to exploit the franchise to its fullest. No longer was there Clip Flashman, Defender of the Star System Alliance. Now there was a comprehensive—and painfully complicated—Flashman mythology, which included a timeline that “discovered” other heroes of the same name and that recast Clip as a future iteration of a continuing and unbroken legacy of heroism. Clip was joined by Skip Flashman, Cowboy Extraordinaire; Royal Flashman, Backwoodsman and Revolutionary War Hero; Lion Flashman, Two-Fisted Adventurer; Justice Flashman, Secret Agent; Valiant Flashman, Knight of the Round Table; and, ultimately, the Flashman, Superhero.

  The combination of complex mythology and endless collectibility made the Flashman franchise an enormous and immediate success among preteen and teenage boys. It certainly didn’t hurt that in every incarnation, Flashman had at least one sexy, mysterious femme fatale to tangle with time and again. By 1960, the year before Wilson’s passing, the Flashman franchise had expanded to novels and comic books, and the first of what would be many feature films was in development.

  Upon his death, Wilson’s estate was inherited by his wife, Grace, and their two daughters. Like her husband, Grace had long since identified Disney as Wilson Entertainment’s main competitor, and while she lacked her husband’s creative spark, she more than made up for it with an almost savage business acumen. Despite the success of Pooch and his ilk, despite the continuing loyalty of the Flashman fan base, Wilson Entertainment had yet to break out of the American market, something that Grace understood as crucial to the company’s future. She wanted what she saw in Anaheim; she wanted a piece of the Disney pie, a
nd to obtain that, she needed Disney’s universal appeal.

  The problem was that Gordo and Betsy were unmistakably American, and, worse, rapidly becoming dated. Of all the Wilson Entertainment characters, including the Flashman franchise, Pooch was the only one to have made any substantial gains in the international market, primarily through animation. It didn’t take a market research team for Grace Wilson to see why: Pooch didn’t walk, didn’t talk, didn’t wear clothes. For all his lovable hijinks and overly affectionate lunacy, Pooch was, through and through, just a dog. And there are few animals as universally accepted and loved as a dog, as a quick peek over at Uncle Walt’s camp only served to emphasize.

  It took six years of development, until 1967, before Grace Wilson introduced the Flower Sisters to the world in a debut as carefully orchestrated as any Wilson Entertainment had done before or has done since. Unveiled in Wilson Entertainment’s first full-length animated film, the Flower Sisters were targeted at the audience the Flashman franchise had left behind, namely, girls. Moreover, there wasn’t a human to be found anywhere in their domain. The Flower Sisters existed in the Wild World, where anthropomorphized animals walked and talked and wore wonderful clothes. A world where Lilac, a meerkat, and Lily, a gazelle, and Lavender, a lioness, could be the best of friends, and all share the same shy devotion to the noble Prince Stripe, Tiger of the Realm.

  The movie became an instant classic. The dolls became instant bestsellers. And Grace Wilson got what she wanted.

  The Flower Sisters were big in Japan.

  * * *

  Ground was broken for the Wilson Entertainment Park and Resort—commonly called WilsonVille—in April of 1978, near Irvine, California, with construction completed in January of 1980. Previews and VIP tours ran throughout the late spring, ending with the park’s grand opening on June 4. Like everything else Wilson Entertainment had done up to that point, it was an expertly executed affair, the culmination of nearly a decade’s marketing and sales work. The park had been rated by the Orange County fire marshal for a maximum capacity of one hundred thousand people, and all passes for the grand opening had been sold two years in advance of the day.