“Talk over contingencies with your buddy. What if the cops charge? What if they use horses? What if someone you know but who’s not your buddy is being chased down by the cops? What if you’re trapped between two advancing lines of cops? What if you get separated or one of you is injured?...
“Someone in the overall affinity should assemble a basic medical kit—ace bandages, steristrips, extra dermaflex pads, disinfectant, etc. Again, nothing more than can be thrown away in a pinch...
“Basically, our job is to cause as much damage and chaos as possible, not necessarily to fight with the cops. It might be amusing to knock down a cop or route a squad. But if that’s what you do instead of taking out the Bank of America or blocking a street by overturning a BMW, you’re missing the point...”
When the meeting broke up, Jason stood to shake Smoke’s hand.
“Good talk,” he said. David frowned. They all trooped down the stairs from the terrace through swirling mists, past the probable agent seat-ed glumly at a table at the base of the stairs, his beer barely touched. As Lori took Greg’s arm, Smoke smirked and turned to evaporate into the night with his MDRG crew.
“Mary’s staying here for a couple of drinks,” Lori looked mischievously into Greg’s eyes, “Can you drive me home?”
The campus’s grotesque statuary seemed eerie, not funny at night. Wisps of fog wrapped about a flock of seagulls in glass and brass, changing it into a threatening fanged mass.
“I hear you and David are going to check out the Fed setup tomorrow evening in the city,” she glanced at him, excited and obviously envious.
“Yah,” Greg forced his own smile.
“Do you think that’s wise? I mean, you’re our connection to the riemanium.”
“To the man who has the riemanium,” he amended with a proper version of the story. “Besides, he’s actually Larry’s friend.”
“You know where he lives?” She was fishing.
“Oakland somewhere,” Greg evaded, “He usually shows up at Larry’s, so we don’t have a street address.”
“And no phone number because he calls Larry,” Lori finished his fiction.
“Yeah,” Greg gave Lori a suspicious look, “Why do you ask?”
“Just that, with you going to that rendezvous tomorrow, we don’t have a contact with this guy Peregrine. What if you get popped?”
“David says they can’t make it stick,” Greg shrugged, concealing his own concern, “And besides, there’s Larry. He’s actually who Peregrine knows.”
“Its like Chin said,” Lori mused, “We don’t have the riemanium, so all we’re doing is just bluffing. One communique is not going to keep up the momentum on this thing, especially if it doesn’t look cool to contact the Feds tomorrow. Would the riemanium be available for another set of photos?”
“Probably,” Greg said, inwardly groaning to think of digging up the riemanium from his meadow.
“What’d be better,” Lori’s cherubic face suddenly lit up with devilish delight, “Is if we could put together a mock bomb. Something that’d look blood real but wouldn’t really work.”
“Now there’s an idea,” Greg inwardly tensed. Having felt the need to “do more,” he now understood a little of Larry’s leeriness. Truly, they rode the tiger.
“I read once,” she continued, “That a ‘60’s magazine once published a do-it-yourself-how-to-make-an-A-bomb, from what they’d collected in the public record. Caused a real stink at the time.”
“I’m sure the Feds and the media will splash that all over, if we want that much attention,” Greg warned, back handed, “We have a couple of Feds in town already. That’ll be nothing once this idea hits.”
“From what I hear,” Lori grinned, “Most of the Feds are concentrated in the central Bay Area. Seems they’re fully convinced its a serious political grouping with the riemanium. Like the BdN.”
“Still, well have to be very careful with this one,” Greg cautioned.
They had reached his car, near a set of interlaced shredded plastic walls upon a pedestal drifted with the fog. Greg opened the door for Lori and got in to drive, reaching up to pull down the top.
“Actually, I have my car here,” Lori giggled and started to kiss him, sliding her hand to his crotch, working him up hard in a minute. He suddenly sat back down and she trailed her head to his lap. Her fingers fumbled with his zipper, then his cock. He glanced wildly about the mist shrouded parking lot as she went down on him. Jesus, he hoped no one walked by, and the thought seared up his thighs, a molten excitement. He climaxed, and she swallowed.
“See you,” Lori laughed, and backed out of his car.
When Greg arrived home, fog cocooned the house. The front porch light, the light in Consuello’s room off the first story in the back, and dad’s den light on the second floor formed muffled cottony clouds among the pines. As he climbed the front steps, he thought he detected the faintest glimmer from one of the basement’s pitch black windows. He hesitated, saw nothing, and continued to unlock the front door. As he stepped into the living room, over the threshold, he heard it. The sound of the hood to his lathe snapped down in the basement beneath his feet. He tried to be quiet while still preserving speed as he walked through living and dining rooms into the kitchen. He slammed the basement door open, clicked on the lights and jammed down the stairs.
The basement was empty. All the cupboard doors above and below the tool bench were wide open. A basement window above the lathe opened to the singing night.
***
Ibraham Achdoud knew he was being hunted, even as he hunted. The young man sat in a Winnebago along an Alabaster side street after midnight. The dish on top of the RV established a satellite link. The computer on the RVs kitchenette table busily scrolled automatically through AT&T/MCI/Sprint databases. The whole set up, to include Ibraham, belonged to the Ismaili Brotherhood Unreconstructed.
Ibraham, until five years before the poor son of an impoverished family of southern Lebanese peasants, had been born Shi’ite. He would have joined the Hasballah or the Islamic Brotherhood as an angry teenager, had it not been for Hassan ibn Sabah, the Old Man of the Mountain. The Master of the World. Israel still dominated a fragmented southern Lebanon, and he would have gladly martyred himself in the fight against Zionism. But the Unreconstructed Ismaili had offered him a wider vision and a greater purpose. Better to make the whole world tremble and kneel rather than just your enemy.
The storm is my doing; how can I pray that it abate?”
He had no way to know that Hassan ibn Sabah was not the original, but rather a pretender to the name. Nor could he know that the Unreconstructed Ismaili had, indeed, been reconstructed by that impersonator in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, on the tradition but not on the present practices of the Aga Kahn’s mainstream Ismailis. Ibraham’s life was now as a devotee of the Brotherhood, a fervent assassin who believed that he would go straight to paradise if he died in the service of Hassan ibn Sabah.
Hassan had been born Tawfiq Jahlil in Teheran, son of a fabulously wealthy oil family and a multibillionaire himself by inheritance, once his father died. An ardent supporter of Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution, Tawfiq left Iran after the death of his beloved Ayatollah because his ideas of spreading Islamic revolution internationally proved too radical for Khomeini’s successors. In exile, he aided, for a time, the Islamic Fundamentalists throughout the world; the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, the Palestinian Hamas Movement, etc. Wherever Islamic Fundamentalism turned revolutionary Jahlil could be found, somewhere in the background. But he wanted to do more than merely give money to other people’s movements. He believed that the “motor force” of Islamic Fundamentalism in pan-Arab politics itself required an “engine,” to give the larger historical force a clearer direction. So Tawfiq Jahlil became Hassan ibn Sabah, and the reincarnated Old Man of the Mountain set about emulating his namesake. He built impregnable private fortresses around the world, most upon precipitous mo
untain summits. He gathered to himself, first a fanatic cadre, and then a zealous army of ultra-fundamentalist Shi’i sectarians, his faithful assassins willing to follow his orders to their deaths. And, he built paradise upon an Indian Ocean island, fortified it against incursions, and prepared it with every earthly delight.
“Nothing is true; all is permitted.”
Ibraham remembered paradise. One minute he had been in Hassan’s court, an illiterate, ignorant 16-year-old boy at the foot of his intended master. As Hassan spoke of paradise, a draft of some pungent liquid passed around the circle of would-be disciples, the Master’s hybrid opiate liqueur. Ibraham gulped a fair quantity, despite its sharp taste, and the edges of his vision started to blur. The room and its people then folded into this distortion before he blacked out completely. He awoke, without any ill after effects, on a luxurious silk upholstered divan, in a jewel and gold ornamented palace appointed with mystical geometries and paintings.
The palace had been situated in a verdant, fragrant garden rich with roses and orange trees. Channels cut into the stone walks about the palace flowed streams of wine, milk, honey and pure water. Fountains sprayed heady wines to glint in the sun. Calm pools of clear water held zen-eyed fish serenely floating beneath lilies and lotus. Peacocks and rare parrots inhabited the grounds. Brightly colored banners and gilded pavilions played over ornate feasts and banquets on the perfumed breeze. And, he was not alone.
Houris—beautiful young girls and women—waited on his every wish, willing to fulfil his every desire. Dressed in expensive and suggestive clothes, they were stunning and voluptuous, accomplished in the arts of singing, music, dancing, and erotic pleasure. He spent five days being served delicious viands, exquisite wines, potent hashish and delirium producing opiates by lovely, one might say heavenly females who sang, played, and caressed him in maddening, intimate ways. Little wonder that Ibraham, after he was again drugged and transported out of paradise to conclude his ecstatic experience, vowed to serve Hassan ibn Sabah with his life.
“Bury everything sacred under the ruins of thrones and altars.”
He became a devotee, a fidawi, an assassin, on the promise that, if he should die on the Master’s orders, he would return straight to paradise. Hassan also promised his devotees an extended youth, while they lived, through biochemical and genetically keyed treatments. And the Brotherhood taught him to read and write, trained him in an advanced regimen of martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, and kept him well fed, clothed and sheltered for most of his young manhood. He had gladly given his soul to the Unreconstructed Ismaili, even while his current duty was not to assassinate, but rather to rob his present target. Hassan wanted to make his Ismaili a nuclear power, and so it was Ibraham’s task to track down Peregrine and recover the stolen riemanium. If he could not obtain what his master wanted, and if he could not “persuade” Peregrine to cooperate, he might have to resort to kidnapping.
So far, it proved to be an easy task. The police had the list of calls from the Diamotti safe house to various public phones for Peregrine. What he had done was to crack the master telephone databases to look for the reverse. What numbers in the Alabaster area had called the safe house in the last six months? Unconstrained by privacy ethics, and wired with the most up-to-date hacker software in an extremely powerful PC, he rifled the area prefix databases with impunity. But, as he had continued his search, little things informed him he was not alone on this trail. Opening a document, copying from it, and closing the document took seconds longer than was normal. In all probability he was involuntarily “sharing” the satellite link with someone else, someone who let him do the work in hopes of pirating the information he dug up. He had set up several data traps and catch loops, to no avail. His “silent partner” was clever. It also meant that, as soon as he had something, anything, he had to move. With any luck, he would be one step ahead of whoever hunted on his trail.
Three of the public phones in nightclubs used by Peregrine had already come up. As Ibraham poured himself more coffee, the computer chimed. An Emmett Grogan, at a private address. An apartment complex downtown, on Main. He copied down the street address, grabbed a map, and started the computer processing again. Once he located the cross streets, he tapped the rooftop dish into gyrolock mode with the satellite, and started up the RV. The link occasionally broke as he drove. The computer paused then until the dish rotated to relocate and reconnect; that was inevitable. He had to move on this now!
Clouds scudded across a gibbous moon as he eased the bulky vehicle down a dark, suburban street. He noticed the car barreling down on him from a side street, an old, large Plymouth Chrysler without lights. As he hit the brakes, the other car started an erratic veer, as if the other driver had just seen the Winnebago and was swerving to avoid it. Turn the Chrysler did, in a squeal of tires on a skid, the car’s back bumper nicking the stopped RVs front bumper on the spin. A bulky man lurched out of the car door, stumbling drunk. Ibraham cracked the side window.
“What the hell you do, driving with no lights!” Ibraham growled, avoiding the shout, hand gripping the hidden handgun mounted under the dash. “Now move it! I’m in a hurry.”
“So...s...sorry,” the man slurred, “Guess I...I had too much to drink.”
The man crumbled sloppily to the asphalt. Fell to one knee expertly and came up with a high impact air gun. He fired it even before Ibraham saw it. An extremely fine needle primed with shellfish toxin silently slivered through the Ismaili’s right eye, and into his brain. The assassin pitched back, out of sight in the Winnebago, dead almost instantly. The assassin’s assassin jumped into the Chrysler and quickly parked it. Then he sprinted back to the RV and clambered into the driver’s seat, re-engaged the vehicle’s gears and parked it before beginning to loot.
TWENTY-SEVEN
A Spider assassinated Frederico Segura on January 27, 2007. With his death, the CT lost not only a principal “constructivist” voice but also a superb organizer. Before Oaxaca was bombed into ruins, Frederico almost single handedly put together the city’s food distribution system to end the threat of mass starvation.
Born of working class parents in industrial Mexico City on August 14, 1970, he developed the raw competence and aggressive style that were to make him one of the CTs most inspired activists in the streets of the capitol’s teeming colonias. His street “instinto” accompanied Frederico when, as a teen, he went off to the Gulf Coast to work in the oil refineries, earning him the lifelong nickname of “Noi del Petro,” oil boy, as he gradually worked down the coast to the Tehuantepec Isthmus.
Frederico joined the labor movement early, and taught himself politics from the classic texts of anarchism and socialism. Nevertheless, in his youth, he expressed admiration for both Nietzsche’s individualism and the social banditry of Pancho Villa. A little older, Frederico gained the reputation as an anarchist moderate and a superb negotiator, dealing with employers, PRI bureaucrats and politicians, even fellow Leftists without compromising his or the movement’s essential libertarian positions. Briefly forced to go underground after the 1998 protests, and then again after the 1999 General Strike, he threw himself into the movement, and into the series of meetings, propaganda and speaking tours, congresses, negotiations and strike committees leading up to the 2000 Uprisings.
He consistently favored alliances “at the base” with the socialist unions and often criticized the FAO for its lack of realism and its doctrinaire anarchism. Consequently, he was targeted for bitter attack by the militants in speeches and writing. He considered organization key to the development of a mass, united labor movement. And, he was the architect of the mutual aid agreements with San Cristobal.
During Oaxaca’s liberation, Frederico called together the food unions, the restaurant and hotel workers, and representatives of the peasant cooperatives and communal organizations in the surrounding countryside to coordinate food distribution. Communal dining halls were opened in each of the city’s neighborhoods, where as many as 250,000 people
were fed daily. Wholesale food warehouses and cooperative farmers markets were then established, which organized themselves thereafter as the Union of Industrial Food Workers. Workers ran the entire distribution network, fixed their own wages, and extended the system to the entire state of Oaxaca through the US firebomb-ing of the city.
When his family found his body, after the Subucu assassination, they gathered his affects. Besides Frederico’s union and CT cards was his San Cristobalan passport, one of the few in existence, bearing the red and black symbol now famous in the Liberated Territories.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Greg shared a meal of scrambled eggs and onions, hotcakes with maple syrup, and sausage, with his father the next morning. He mentioned nothing about the break-in to Andre. He suspected what had been the target. Greg still tried to figure out who it might have been and how they might have known. Andre went over last minute details before his trip.
“I might be getting a call or a fax from Stanton and Associates in New York. If I do, just pass it on to the office. I’ve written down my cellular number on a pad next to the phone. If anything goes wrong, or even if you’re feeling down, give me a call. I should be back Monday evening, if everything goes well.
“A lawyer, Anindo Banerjea, also might call. I promised him I’d advise him on a case he’s got pending. You can give him my cellular number.”
After the meal they parted; Andre in his car eventually for SF international, and Greg in his car for school where he hung on through his classes, fingertips clinging to the academic cliffs edge.
***
Peregrine woke to a knock on his door at 7 in the morning.
“Who is it?” he asked, door locked and his pants almost on.
“Pacific Gas and Electric,” a voice mumbled.
“What in hell do you want. I’m not dressed yet.”
“We had a report of a gas leak in this building,” the voice said, Tour neighbors on this floor called in that they smelled gas. Could you check your kitchen for me? The stove and your water heater?”
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