Black Trump

by George R. R. Martin

  Ray's mind seemed to slow down as he swung into action. He knew that he was moving faster than any man could, but time was like liquid amber and he was an insect moving through it, seeing everything around him with total clarity and precision.

  He jumped from old Will Shakespeare's statue to the next, barely hanging on. People were just starting to look up at him, but he moved on before they could finish pointing at him.

  He flung himself off the next statue and he could see April Harvest stand and reach for the .38 that she carried holstered in the sweet hollow of her back and he almost shouted, "No! There's no shot!" because there were at least half a dozen priests between Harvest and Johnson, but he clamped his mouth shut because he didn't dare alert the Shark that they were on to him.

  Flint was a screaming whisper in Ray's ear, but he ignored him. There were no more statues to jump on and his path to the high altar was still blocked by mourners.

  He looked, figured vectors and velocity in his subconscious, then flung himself off his perch. He caught a bug-eyed bronze bust set high in a niche, prayed it would take his weight, noted the inscription "William Blake," then pushed off, extending desperately like a diver angling for the water.

  Somehow he cleared the last rank of mourners. He crashed loudly onto the cathedral's flagstone floor. Everyone looked at him, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, including General MacArthur Johnson, and then he was on the move again. Harvest's pistol cracked. Everyone panicked and started screaming, but Ray was already in the clear area before the sanctuary. He sprinted past Churchill's bier and went up the stairs to the high altar.

  Johnson lifted the decanter high to smash it down on the flagstone floor and Ray's mind went blank with panic. He dove desperately. His brain flipped back twenty years, reverting to simpler days. He wasn't a government agent anymore. He wasn't Carnifex, the name the Mechanic had hung on him during his first government mission all those years ago. He was just Billy Ray, a kid playing football for the University of Michigan and he had to get the ball, he had to catch the pass or there'd be a disaster of epic proportions. If he didn't get it they'd lose the game. There'd be no victory. There'd be no Rose Bowl, no pro contract. Hell, there'd probably be no bed full of cheerleaders after the game.

  He hurled his body lengthwise, jaw clenched, joints aching as he stretched every possible millimeter.

  The decanter crashed into his hands. A crazed light danced in Ray's eyes. He had good hands. The coach had always told him that. Real soft, good hands. They cradled the decanter and instinctively Ray curled into a ball as he crashed against the floor. It was a jarring collision, but he tucked the decanter against his stomach as he skidded, bounced down the stairs, and slammed against the base of Churchill's bier.

  Jesus Christ, Ray thought. That had to be the best catch of my career.

  He looked up. The pallbearer in the red jacket and bearskin hat was towering over him. Ray blinked sudden sweat from his eyes, and the redcoat stabbed down with the bayonet he'd had up his sleeve. He ran Ray completely through, blunting the bayonet's point on the flagstone on which Ray lay.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  They hit the first security man coming out of the tiny stairwell leading to the second story gallery. Gregg saw him first, radiating in the infrared as he stood in the shadows. The man seemed occupied by voices in his ears and the obvious ruckus on the main floor. "Hey - " Gregg said loudly, and began to run the other way. The man stared open-mouthed for a moment, then started to pursue.

  He ran directly into Bowler's rifle-butt, coming around the corner of the stairwell, and went down hard as blood sprayed from his broken nose. Bowler tskked once and fished in the unconscious man's jacket, pulling out a small handgun from a shoulder holster. He held it to the guard's head.

  Hannah jerked Bowler's hand away. "No," she said.

  Bowler looked annoyed. "If we don't, he'll wake up and report us. No one will hear the shot, not with the organ's racket."

  "Forget it," Hannah repeated, her hand still on Bowler's wrist. "He didn't do anything to us."

  "Bloody right. I knocked him cold."

  "Then leave him that way."

  Bowler snatched his hand away from Hannah. "You with your girlfriend on this?" he asked Hartmann.

  Gregg started. He'd been watching the confrontation with an odd horror. Choose, the memory of Cara's voice whispered in his mind. Choose who will die.

  Let him do it, whispered the other voice. Taste it, Feel it.

  Gregg shuddered. He reached out with the stubby hand and touched the unconscious guard. He could feel the strings. He could touch them.

  Gregg pulled his hand away again.

  "We're not Fists," he told Bowler. "We do things differently."

  "Brian was right," Bowler muttered. "The two of you are looney. Here, then," he said, reversing the handgun and giving it to Hannah. "You make your own damn decision when to use it, then. If you can."

  "You point with this end, right?" Hannah said in mock innocence.

  Bowler frowned under the growth on his head. He took a small walkie-talkie from the man's suit pocket, and stepped on it. Plastic crackled under his heel. That'll have to do, I suppose," he said. "Lead on, caterpillar."

  Fool, whispered the voice. Fool.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Ray screamed, pain and outrage combined. "Fucking Card Shark!"

  His attacker looked down, somewhat appalled. He suddenly knew that he'd made a mistake. If he'd stabbed Ray through the heart he'd have killed him instantly. Even Ray's unnatural vitality couldn't have overcome a wound like that. A gut wound, painful as it was, just pissed him off.

  Ray was on his feet before the Shark could jerk the bayonet free. Ray glared at him as blood ran down his legs, the bayonet poking through him like he was a beef kabob.

  He wanted to rip the son of a bitch apart with his bare hands, but his mind screamed at him to hang onto the decanter. His dilemma was solved when someone grabbed the guard from behind and jerked his head up to look at the vaulted ceiling. A strong brown hand slipped a curved knife against the guardsman's throat and blood fountained upon the abbey's floor. The Shark dropped twitching to the flagstones.

  The gurkha pallbearer was grinning at Ray. He gestured at him with his bloodstained kukri. "You one tough son of a bitch."

  "You bet," Ray grunted. He grabbed the bayonet and pulled it out through the wound, catching his breath as it came free.

  He looked around, shaking his head. It was panic and chaos combined and squared as the mourners ran around and screamed, knocking down wooden pews and trampling each other. Before the high altar the Archbishop and the other priests were staring at him, appalled by the blood and death that had entered the sacred space of their abbey, and perhaps even more frightened by the mask of pain and hate that was Ray's face.

  But Ray broke into a grin. He couldn't believe his good luck. That bastard General MacArthur Johnson was still standing near the high altar, watching. Ray turned to the gurkha and shoved the decanter at him.

  "Take this! Guard it with your life."

  The gurkha saluted and took the crystal. Ray started to turn toward the dais, but someone slammed him, hard, in the back. Ray hit Churchill's bier and the coffin shifted. There were renewed screams and moans of anguish from the onlookers as someone landed on Ray's back and a muscular arm encircled his throat. Johnson, goddamnit, Ray thought. He couldn't breathe. He stood up, bearing Johnson's weight on his back.

  "I've got you now, motherfucker," the Shark whispered in Ray's ear. His arm squeezed Ray's throat with the strength of a twenty-foot anaconda. The pain in Ray's stomach was excruciating and he couldn't breathe.

  He growled wordlessly, reaching backwards, but he couldn't get a grip on Johnson. He tore the priest's robe from the man's back, but he couldn't tear the man from his own.

  He started to stagger. He knew that if he fell he'd never get up.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  They emerged from St. Faith's chapel into th
e South Transept, down the stairs from which monks had once gone from their dormitories to the Choir for night offices. The massive Rose Window, filling the upper southern wall, threw fractured, multi-colored light down on a scene of chaos. On the high altar, Ray was fighting with Johnson; Gregg saw Harvest, the woman agent who'd been with Ray in New York, trying to push her way to the altar.

  She was a salmon swimming upstream in a human flood. Half the people were scrambling away over a tangled landscape of chairs, trying to get away from the commotion in the center of the Abbey, while others stood and stared, or shoved back at the mourners trying to get through. Other fights had erupted around the floor - security people tried vainly to regain control of the situation. From the balcony, Gregg caught a glimpse of Brian, and the leprechaun let loose a burst of automatic gunfire that sent people diving for the floor. Gregg couldn't tell what the joker was firing at, but chunks of masonry flew from the railing in front of the Fist, and Brian ducked away. The roar of voices echoed as the choir stuttered to a halt and the organ abruptly choked off in mid-chord.

  Gregg and Hannah seemed to have lost Bowler in the rush.

  Gregg could hardly see as they moved into the loud confusion. The floor was a forest of black-clad legs. He hopped up and down, trying to get a clear view. "What's going on?" he screamed at Hannah over the din. "Can you see that decanter?"

  "No!" Hannah shouted back. She pushed away a panicked lady in a hat that looked like Klaatu's ship. Gregg had given up hope of trying to fight the exiting crowd; he stayed in the lee of a statue. Across the hall, he could swear that he saw Quasiman perched on top of some unknown statesman's head. Gregg squinted, but people kept jostling him and he couldn't get a good look. "Isn't that Quasi?"

  "Where?"

  "Over ... Damn, never mind, he's gone." If Quasi had been there, he'd vanished already. "We really have a great bunch of allies."

  "I thought ... Oh, shit!"

  "What?" Gregg asked.

  "Horvath," Hannah said. "I'm certain I just saw him, coming down from the altar and moving this way, but I've lost him again. Ray's fighting Johnson on the altar." Hannah righted one of the chairs, jumping up on it to see above the people spilling past them. "There's Horvath! Some short guy in a weird uniform had the decanter, and he just gave it to Horvath. He's on the other side of the transept, staying near the wall." Hannah leaped down again. "Gregg, Horvath's carrying that decanter like it's the damn Holy Grail. It's got to be the virus."

  She started after Horvath, pushing into the crowd. A man yelled at her, pushing back, and Hannah went sprawling onto the floor in front of Gregg. Gregg could feel her confusion as she scrambled out of the way of the fleeing crowd and got to her feet again. "Got to get him, get the virus ..." she said, preparing to throw herself back into the whirl of people. Gunfire went off again, on the other side of the Church. People started screaming and pushing harder for the exits.

  "Kick me," Gregg said.

  "What?"

  "Kick me."

  Hannah looked at him, then grinned. "Oh," she said, and brought her foot back.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Ray's mind was no longer functioning on a conscious level when he shuffled backwards and slammed Johnson against Churchill's casket. He heard Johnson grunt with pain. He staggered away from the bier, then slammed into it again. The pressure around his throat lessened and his lungs sucked in a molecule or two of oxygen. It was all he needed. He slammed Johnson against the casket once again, breaking the Shark's hold. There were screams and moans from what was left of the onlookers as the coffin slid, tilted, and fell off the bier.

  It crashed to the flagstones with a resounding boom. The lid popped open and Churchill rolled out. Ray, down on one knee and gasping for breath, looked at his waxy face. "This is one hell of a funeral," he told the remains.

  Johnson had apparently decided on the better part of valor. He was heading for the darkness of the apse, holding his side like he'd cracked a rib. Ray hoped he'd cracked his fucking back. Johnson was fast, strong and agile, but Ray, even with a bayonet-sized hole through his gut, was an ace. He was up on his feet, running after him.

  They passed history that Ray never even noticed, the tomb of Henry the Seventh, the massive blue-and-red stained glass window dedicated to the heroes of the Battle of Britain, the shrine of Saint Edward the Confessor, the last Saxon king and the man who had the church rebuilt in 1065, and the tombs of the cousins Mary and Elizabeth, queens both.

  Ray knew they were heading toward the south transept. He lost sight of Johnson, and when he went around a corner and found himself in Poet's Corner again he skidded to a halt.

  "Goddamnit," he said.

  Johnson had blundered into Harvest, or perhaps vice versa. But Johnson clearly had the upper hand. He had Harvest around the throat, her gun pointed at her head.

  "Stop right there, Ray, or she gets it."

  "You've got more lives than a fucking cat."

  "More'n you can take care of, anyway."

  They were backing up, heading for the screened-off chapel that was the back wall of the south transept. Ray started to follow, but Johnson squeezed her throat harder.

  "I'll kill her."

  "You do and you've got nothing to bargain with. I'll be all over your ass."

  "Don't worry about me," Harvest said. "The Black Trump!"

  "What the hell about it?"

  She pointed as best she could. "The goddamned caterpillar's after it."

  Ray whirled to see Hartmann chasing Horvath. What the hell was Hartmann doing here? By the time Ray turned back Harvest and Johnson had disappeared through a door in the chapel's back wall. Ray was indecisive. "She can take care of herself," he finally said and started after Horvath, the caterpillar, and the decanter of virus-tainted wine. "I hope."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Hannah's kick, harder than Gregg expected, catapulted him into overdrive. For the first several seconds, he had no control at all over his direction. He slammed into the wall, scrambled up the stone front of some statesman's statue, and hurtled from the head to the fluted columns of the wall. Below him, the crowd had snapped into slow motion. As Gregg finally gained some control over his hyperactivity, he saw Horvath several yards away, heading for a small door to the right of the entrance to St. Faith's chapel. Near Poet's Corner, Billy Ray saw Gregg and pointed.

  Someone had knocked over Churchill's casket; the old man's body was spilling out of the coffin, one pudgy arm flung wide as if inviting someone to join him.

  Gregg leaped off the column, landing on the shoulders of a matronly woman in black dress and veil, and jumping from her shoulders to the top of a middle-aged man's head. He skidded - knocking the man's toupe awry - and leap-frogged toward Horvath across the heaving sea of heads as people reacted belatedly to his presence. Horvath, moving as if immersed in water, turned slowly to see what was causing the new uproar. He saw Gregg and began running toward the door, slipping through it as Gregg hopped down into the clear space near the far wall. Gregg managed to slither through the opening before the door shut.

  The sounds of panic faded. Gregg was standing at the top of a flight of steps leading down; Horvath had turned a corner ahead of him, doubling back under St. Faith's chapel. The Hannah-given adrenaline rush was fading; Horvath seemed to be moving at normal speed now, and Gregg hurried after him. Gregg's nostrils were full of the scent of age, and he could hear Horvath's shoes clattering on stone flags as the man reached the bottom of the steps. Gregg half-ran, half-slid down the last flight of stairs on the evaporating edge of overdrive, and saw Horvath's back twenty-five yards ahead. The man had stopped and was staring at something ahead of him in the corridor. Staring at someone. Gregg saw a blurry figure step out of the shadows ahead of Horvath.

  "Hannah Davis," Horvath said. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Gregg. "And Gregg Hartmann, too. I should have had you killed back in Belfast."

  "Too late," Hannah told him - she must have come down from a stairway on the other
side of the chapel. Gregg could see the gleam of metal in her hands: the handgun Bowler had given her. "Put down the decanter."

  Horvath held it up, instead, swirling the dark red liquid inside. "So you know what this is," he said. He backed up a step.

  "Horvath - "

  "Shoot me, and I'll drop it. Shoot me and the virus spills right here. Then what do you do?"

  "What happens? Then I shoot you, just for being obstinate. I'm a nat, Horvath. The virus won't hurt me.

  "It'll kill Hartmann."

  Hannah's gaze flicked over to Gregg, and he saw an azure affection there, and the muted gray of regret. "Yes. And I'd trade one life for the millions we'd save. That's a trade I'd make any day. Any time."

  "I don't believe you."

  Hannah smiled, and it was the coldest expression Gregg had ever seen on her face. "Then that's another mistake on your part, General. It's your move."

  For long seconds, Horvath stared at Hannah. The virus swirled under the cut glass. Then he slowly set it down on the flags. "Gregg - " Hannah said. Gregg scurried forward and retrieved the decanter. Holding its slow death in his hand, he made certain to brush against Horvath as he passed. The eddying emotions around the man strengthened as he made the contact, letting him follow the welling emotions back to their source. His link made, Gregg moved back.

  "Now what?" Horvath asked.

  Hannah sniffed. "Now you tell us where Rudo is. That's not all the virus. There were three vials. My guess is that you got one. Where's Rudo? Where are the other two vials of Trump?"

  "You think I'm going to tell you, just because you're holding a gun? You don't know me. You don't know me at all."

  Gregg reveled in the confrontation, feeling the wild anger from the two of them. Hannah, he could tell, was beginning to waver, not certain what to do next. He found the strings to her anger, to all the resentment over what the Sharks had done to her over the last year, to the underlying rage over the death and pain they'd caused over the decades. He opened the channels to that fury, let it pulse and surge until it pushed aside the pale yellow, Hannah suddenly moved the muzzle of the gun; her finger convulsed on the trigger. The sound of the shot was deafening, and Horvath went sprawling, clutching at his right knee. Blood trickled from between his fingers. "You don't know me, either," Hannah told him. "Rudo destroyed my life, murdered my friends, and tried to kill me. Now you're trying to kill everyone infected by the wild card. You people want to play God. Well, I told you before; I'll trade one life for several any time, and if it's yours, I don't mind playing God myself. Now, where's Rudo?"