Then he barks something urgently over his shoulder to the clerk and motions the clerk to come, come, come, and when the clerk turns to go upstairs and retrieve a few things, Shaban barks again, no time, just come, and the clerk abandons his thought and follows us outside. And I hurry them both to the minivan parked halfway up on the curb, where I slide the side door open and they climb inside.
And after they climb in and I slide the door shut and I get into the driver’s seat, the second clerk appears up the block, turning a corner on his way to the mosque, and he stops in the street, sees the two of them being hurried into the van by me, and the second clerk startles, like he fears maybe they’re being arrested or kidnapped or worse. And the second clerk shouts something, and Shaban, inside the van, shouts something to me and slaps at the window from the inside, and the first clerk beside him reaches for the door, and slides it open again and we’re already moving but the first clerk jumps free, to run and warn his fellow clerk, to gather him up, but it’s too late, because I’ve jammed the gas and swerved into a wild U-turn into the center of Atlantic and turned the van the wrong way down a one-way side street, because there’s no more time, and I jack the gas and we’ve left the two clerks behind, there’s no time, there’s no time, and we’re gone, we’re gone, and Shaban looks back out of the gaping side door and shouts something but we have to leave them now, leave them in the street, and in the end, I can only take one.
Just one.
Just Shaban.
Just the target.
We drive quietly for a moment down a derelict block, side door still hanging wide-open, past dead brownstones, the two of us weirdly silent, like we’re in the first leg of some long dreary road trip we’re both dreading.
And then behind us we hear the first thump and then a great whoosh and the van jolts forward and we jolt forward too, straining against our seat belts, and Shaban won’t look behind but just slides the door quickly closed, but I can see it, behind us, this fiery tongue licking Atlantic Avenue clean, I can see it all behind us brightly in the rearview mirror of the van.
And then the next three copters follow.
Fire sidewinders into slumping tenements.
Each missile sinks into brick with a fiery orange blossom. The tired buildings sag and shudder, then buckle in a brick-dust cloud.
And in this loud crush of rubble, a billowing red cloud rises, and the rotors of the four copters suck up the red dust and send it swirling skyward, wild red dervishes loosed as the copters sweep low and speed down the block, skirting the avenue, their landing rails kissing asphalt and their up-tilted rotors thundering and swallowing any frail human sounds that aren’t already buried under the rumble of the blocks’ collapse.
Choppers sweep the street.
Then circle back.
Coming round for a second pass.
Sidewinders loosed with a finger-pull, once, twice, payloads sent spiraling, trailing corkscrew tails of smoke.
Hitting home.
And the four choppers unload the last of their munitions into what’s left of Atlantic Avenue, a once-dead street that tried to rise, but which now slumps in a last sigh of fire and smoke like a gravely wounded dragon, found sleeping in its cave and slain for good.
I just drive.
Leave the carnage behind us. Playing out in the rearview.
The Atlantic Avenue sweep. The second one.
First one ended in riots.
Second one ended in fire.
Both end in rubble.
And we drive.
41.
I take Shaban the long way round to Hoboken. Figure I can hide him there for now.
Hope they’ll think they killed him, at least for a little while.
That’s the upside of rubble.
Hides its secrets for weeks.
Persephone’s gone once we get back to my apartment, of course. I knew she wouldn’t be there but it still stings. Place is empty, save for two more bodies, Puchs and Luckner, to go with the two Pushbroom stiffs. All left behind for the host to take care of, which I do.
Bodies, I can deal with.
Dead ones, anyway.
Live bodies I’ve been having some trouble with lately.
Shaban told me too. The whole story. In the van.
While we were driving.
We didn’t take the Holland Tunnel. Holland’s closed again now, maybe for good. They’re all closed, all the tunnels and bridges, no one gets into the city and no one gets out. It’s all over the news. Mayor declared a lockdown in the chaos right after Bellarmine was killed. Called in the National Guard. Shutting everything down. Sealing the city off.
Shaban and I barely made it over the Verrazano Bridge in south Brooklyn before the soldiers closed that too. Hobbled minivan covered in spray paint, Shaban ducking down to the floorboards in the back, inching past a roadblock that was only just being set up. Some peach-fuzzed private, no older than eighteen, stopped us and cupped his hands on the window but couldn’t see inside for all the graffiti, and the line of traffic behind us was honking and cursing, also eager to leave before the lockdown, so he waved us past.
After all, we were heading out of the city anyway, so why worry about us?
Honestly, it was just the confusion that saved us.
As we inched in traffic past cops arguing over conflicting commands. Past soldiers hastily assembling barricades. Past superiors shouting instructions at grunts. All of them still waiting for final orders that weren’t coming. Sorting through the confusion. Still struggling, while chaos spread.
Chaos.
Just like Boonce promised.
Though if we’d arrived ten minutes later, we would have been caught in the teeth of the siege, and Shaban would now be in prison or dead and who knows where I’d be.
But we didn’t, and we weren’t, and we slipped away.
And we drove.
Crossed the Verrazano to Staten Island, then took the long way round through south Jersey, then doubled back toward the north. Before long, we were deep into Jersey and well out of sight of the city. The towers of Manhattan are taller than any building for a hundred miles, but if you drive long enough, even they eventually drop out of sight.
Then it’s just Shaban and me out on a Sunday drive. Passing long pastoral stretches that still feel like farmland. Gas needle at one-eighth of a tank but there’s no way we’re stopping for gas.
Shaban tells me his story as we drive.
Says it softly. Starting with a confession.
I knew. What Lesser had. I knew.
Shaban is still in the backseat, while I’m up front like a chauffeur, glancing every so often in the rearview, while he sits and watches the farm fields pass.
How did you know, Shaban?
I was his roommate, after all. At Near Enemy. We shared everything. But it was more than that.
What do you mean?
I knew because I built it. At least in theory. I imagined it.
Imagined what? You’ll have to excuse me, Shaban, but I’m not an expert in IT.
He smiles. Watches more fields pass.
Please. Call me Sam.
Imagined what, Sam?
The code. That Lesser had. That Boonce used. The code that lets you live inside the limn. I wrote that code. Or, rather, I imagined that it might be possible. I wrote it, yes, but only on a blackboard. Then I erased it. I knew it was a mistake the moment it came out of the tip of the chalk. Lesser was the one who took it and tested it. Who made it real. Then Boonce took it from him.
So how does it work?
You know about the loop, yes?
Sure. The loop. People get trapped in their final moments in the limn if they’re killed out here.
Shaban starts to continue, and I can tell he is figuring out just how technical to get. So I help him out.
Just speak slowly, Sam. I’ll follow.
The theory of the loop is that your brain produces a last neural burst, right at the moment of your death. And that this burst
can accidentally persist in the limn. Become part of the code of the construct. Even if your body is buried or carted away. Your consciousness persists, perpetually experiencing that one last moment, forever.
Sure.
So that’s what I wrote on the blackboard. A question, in the form of numbers.
What was the question, Sam?
What if it wasn’t a loop?
But you’re dead out here. Your brain’s dead. Your body’s dead. You’re all dead. Just like Boonce.
Of course. But you can persist in there. In theory, anyway. And that’s all it was. A theory. I was just a brat, showing off. Then I gave that all up. But I left Lesser with the idea.
And Lesser took it.
Yes. He took it. Never tried it himself, as far as I know. I heard he got so spooked by the whole idea that he just went back to full-time hopping. He was always more comfortable doing that, just hovering unseen in other people’s dreams. Felt safer, just being someone else’s ghost. But Boonce knew Lesser had something, some new hack, but he didn’t know what, and he was determined to find out. And I knew Lesser. I knew the idea wasn’t safe with him.
Sure. But Lesser is dead now. And Boonce is dead.
Not really. Not in the limn.
How did Boonce do that? How did he tap in with no bed?
I have no idea, Spademan. I don’t know what Boonce is capable of now.
Well, at least you’re still alive, Shaban.
Yes. Thanks to you.
You’ll have to disappear, you know.
Shaban’s damaged voice barely even audible. His eyes still on the passing fields.
I know.
I’m serious, Sam. Anything you left back there, anyone, all those things are gone. Because what they think you’re responsible for? They won’t stop coming after you. You’ll have to disappear. No trace. Like Salem Shaban never existed.
I know. Don’t worry. I understand.
And you can do that?
Oh yes. I’ve done it before.
When he says this, something in his damaged, sandpaper voice starts to change. Something drops away, that coarse edge to his voice that he’d blamed on burned vocal cords. So when he speaks again, it is his same voice, but different.
Softer. Like his true voice.
Unveiled.
When he says.
It was me. Who called you.
What?
I called you. To kill Lesser. It was me. I was the one who hired you. Because I knew what he knew, and I knew he could never be trusted with it. I tried to reason with him, but he called me a fanatic. Called me worse. And I knew that, no matter what, it could never get out. Not to someone like Boonce. So I called you. To kill Lesser. I guess in the end we both failed.
But it was a woman who called me, Sam. A woman who hired me to kill Lesser.
Shaban speaks again from the backseat. That new voice. Not hindered now.
I know, Spademan. But trust me. It was me.
I look again at Shaban in the rearview, wondering what kind of game this is. Notice his wire-rimmed glasses are gone. Notice his clipped black hair, slicked back from the soft face, one cheek rippled with terrible burns. The rest of the face smooth and hairless, though. No beard. No hint of whiskers.
And then I know.
Salem Shaban never had a sister.
And Hussein el-Shaban never had a son.
Just a daughter.
As we drive, Salem Shaban tells me everything.
The rest of it.
She spills it all.
Alia Shaban was a genius programmer, a prodigy, and she was killed as a teenager in that drone strike, for all intents and purposes. Yes, she was pulled out alive, barely alive, and then she was sent to the United States, under the protection of a millionaire named Langland, and somewhere during that overseas midnight flight she was reborn as the brother she never had.
Alia Shaban died in the drone strike and was reborn as Salem Shaban. Langland knew, and had just enough pull to fudge the paperwork, and record-keeping back in Egypt was so chaotic that no one got too worked up if there was a gap in the official record here and there. All easily explained, and Langland stepped up as the sponsor, arranged asylum for Shaban as an extraordinary alien. This teenage boy plucked from the crisis zone. His father’s enemies now on the rise back home, looking to fill the power vacuum left behind by a missile strike.
And Alia knew too. She knew she had to disappear.
She also knew, in some part of her damaged heart, even if she hadn’t quite figured it out yet, that if she was to become the person she wanted to be in America, the leader she wanted to be, that they would never follow a woman. Especially not a teenage girl. Her experiences later only confirmed this. When Salem Shaban started his campaign to repopulate Atlantic Avenue. As the male heir, he commanded respect beyond his years.
No daughter could have led that movement.
Of course, normally someone like Salem Shaban would never even sniff a visa, but Langland moved quickly and convinced a spook named Joseph Boonce to help. Boonce, who could work back channels. Who could arrange for a military escort and a secret midnight airlift. Who worked secretly and quickly and discreetly.
Off the books.
And Shaban, Salem Shaban, the only son, the living heir, the hacker whiz, the special child, was considered enough of an asset to Boonce and his fledgling project, Near Enemy, that together he and Langland marshaled the forces to spirit this special child to the USA.
Reborn in an air transport, somewhere over the Atlantic.
In the bathroom. Looking at herself in a round, warped mirror.
Her face half-burned and scarred and bandaged anyway.
Souvenirs of the missile strike. And once she arrived in America, she knew no one would think twice to ask how she got them.
They always expect anyone from over there to arrive with scars.
And Langland was right.
Shaban was special.
A prodigy.
Chopped her hair off in that air-transport bathroom and flushed it by the handful down the toilet.
Got fitted for a tweed suit on the day that he arrived.
Baggy tweed suit. Two sizes too big.
Became a trademark.
Tweed and wire-rimmed glasses.
A shy aspect, but with a brilliance behind his eyes.
Salem Shaban.
Please, just call me Sam.
Chewed khat all the time for the pain.
Became known to his friends as Sam the Khat.
Kind of like a Cheshire cat.
Eventually everything disappeared but the smile.
By the time he met Lesser, his new roommate at Near Enemy, Salem Shaban had arrived with a reputation for brilliance, shyness, and extraordinary modesty. Never showered with the other kids. Never even spoke of sex. Very pious and never had a girlfriend that anyone could remember. Most people chalked all that up to him coming from an extremely religious household.
And there were rumors too. About a sister left behind.
A sister killed in an honor killing. By her brother.
He let those rumors go unremarked.
Sometimes rumors are useful. Keep people at a distance. From this soft-spoken boy, Salem Shaban, the one with the sandpaper voice and the hideous scars.
Hard to believe what he’d been through, everyone said.
This soft-cheeked boy with ripples of burns on his face. Who could never grow a beard. Even later when he embraced religion.
Even when he left Near Enemy to become the Moses of Atlantic Avenue.
The kind of man that other men would follow.
Later, Salem Shaban, Sam to his friends, khat addict and fledgling radical, did his best to bury the last remnants of his work at Near Enemy. Starting with the theory he’d devised, the one he scribbled on a chalkboard, then quickly erased.
The one that lets you live forever in the limn, without any body out here.
He hoped to destroy all trace of it, and
cripple the limn so it could never be used, thinking only then would he be free to leave his old life behind.
So he set out on an errand.
An errand done in disguise. Burns hidden. Voice obscured.
A black burqa was the perfect subterfuge.
Walking out in the world as a woman again. One last time.
And in her burqa she knocked on the oaken door of the Cloisters, where she would give a sect of Wakers the secrets they’d need to clear out the limn for good.
After that, there was only one last loose end.
Only one other person who knew.
So Shaban called me. Dropped the sandpaper voice.
Said a single name.
Lesser.
Hung up quickly.
Money cleared an hour later.
They’d been best friends once, so Shaban hated to make that call. But he knew that Lesser couldn’t be trusted with his secret. With his two secrets, actually.
After all, Lesser even spilled it to me, that night in Stuyvesant Town.
Not her. Not here.
All that is gone now.
Lesser is gone.
Atlantic Avenue is gone.
New York is gone, locked down, receding and vanished in our rearview.
A moment ago, Salem Shaban was sitting in the backseat of my magic wagon.
But soon, Salem Shaban will be gone too.
42.
I leave Shaban in my apartment in Hoboken and lug the bodies of Luckner and Puchs, and the two Pushbroom flunkies, out back of the building to where the minivan sits idling. Toss them all in the back, then drive the van to an out-of-the-way place I know by the waterfront, where I park it, tires half-deep in the filthy water, and torch the whole thing.
Abracadabra.
Magic wagon goes up in a flash.
Check-Off can bill me.
As for everyone else in the world who might care about four dead bodies and a bonfire, they’ve got too many other things to worry about.
Near Enemy Page 22