Wild Cards: Aces Abroad

by George R. R. Martin

  “Looking for me, little lady?”

  Sara started, turned. Jack Braun sat at the end of the bar, hardly five feet from her. She hadn’t noticed him. She had a tendency to edit him out; the force of him made her uncomfortable.

  “I’m going out,” she said. She slapped the computer, a touch harder than necessary, so her fingers stung. “Down to the main post office to file my latest material by modem. It’s the only place you can get a transatlantic connection that won’t scramble all your data.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not off pushing cookies with Senator Gregg,” he said, eyeing her cantwise from beneath bushy eyebrows.

  She felt color come to her cheeks. “Senator Hartmann attending a banquet may be a hot item for my colleagues with the celebrity-hunting glossies. But it’s not exactly hard news, is it, Mr. Braun?”

  It was an open afternoon. There wasn’t much hard news here, not the kind to interest readers following the WHO tour. The West German authorities had blandly assured the visitors there was no wild card problem in their country, and used the tour as a counter in whatever game they were playing with their Siamese twin to the east—that damp, dreary ceremony this morning, for instance. Of course they were right: even proportionally, the number of German wild card victims was minuscule. The most pathetic or unsightly couple of thousand were kept discreetly tucked away in state housing or clinics. Much as they’d sneered at Americans for their treatment of jokers during the Sixties and Seventies, the Germans were embarrassed by their own.

  “Depends on what gets said at the banquet, I guess. What’s on your schedule after you file your piece, little lady?” He was grinning that B-movie leading-man grin at her. Golden highlights glimmered on the planes and contour edges of his face. He was flexing his muscles to bring on the glow that gave him his ace name. Irritation tightened the skin at the outskirts of her eyes. He was either coming on to her for real or teasing her. Either way she didn’t like it.

  “I have work to do. And I could use a little time to catch my breath. Some of us have had a busy time on this tour.”

  Is that really the reason you were relieved when Gregg dropped the hint that it might not be discreet to tag along to the banquet with him? she wondered. She frowned, surprised at the thought, and turned crisply away.

  Braun’s big hand closed on her arm. She gasped and spun back to him, angry and starting to panic. What could she do against a man who could lift a bus? That detached observer inside her, the journalist within, reflected on the irony that Gregg, whom she’d come to hate, yes, obsessively, should be the first man in years whose touch she’d come to welcome—

  But Jack Braun was frowning past her, into the lobby of the hotel. It was filling up with purposeful, husky young men in suit coats.

  One of them came into the bar, looked hard at Braun, consulted a piece of paper in his hand. “Herr Braun?”

  “That’s me. What can I do you for?”

  “I am with the Berlin Landespolizei. I’m afraid I must ask you not to leave the hotel.”

  Braun pushed his jaw forward. “And why might that be?”

  “Senator Hartmann has been kidnapped.”

  Ellen Hartmann shut the door with eggshell care and turned away. The flowered vines fading in the carpet seemed to twine about her ankles as she walked back into the suite and sat down on the bed.

  Her eyes were dry. They stung, but they were dry. She smiled slightly. It was hard to let her emotions go. She had so much experience controlling her emotions for the cameras. And Gregg—

  I know what he is. But what he is is all I have.

  She picked up a handkerchief from the bedside table and methodically began to tear it to pieces.

  “Welcome to the land of the living, Senator. For the moment at least.”

  Slowly Hartmann’s mind drained into consciousness. There was a tinny taste in his mouth and a singing in his ears. His right upper arm ached as if from sunburn. Someone hummed a familiar song. A radio muttered.

  His eyes opened to darkness. He felt the obligatory twinge of blindness anxiety, but something pressed his eyeballs, and from the small stinging pull at the back of his head he guessed it was taped gauze. His wrists were bound behind the back of a wooden chair.

  After the awareness of captivity, what struck hardest was the smells: sweat, grease, mildew, dust, sodden cloth, unfamliar spices; ancient urine and fresh gun oil, crowding his nostrils clear to his sinuses.

  He inventoried all these things before permitting himself to recognize the rasping voice.

  “Tom Miller,” he said. “I wish I could say it’s a pleasure.”

  “Ah, yes, Senator. But I can.” He could feel Gimli’s gloating as he could smell his stinking breath—toothpaste and mouthwash belonged to the surface-worshiping nat world. “I could also say you have no idea how long I’ve waited for this, but of course you do. You know full well.”

  “Since we know each other so well, why don’t you undo my eyes, Tom.” As he spoke he probed with his power. It had been ten years since he’d last had physical contact with the dwarf, but he didn’t think the link, once created, ever decayed. Puppetman feared loss of control more than anything but discovery; and being discovered itself represented the ultimate loss of power. If he could get his hooks back into Miller’s soul, Hartmann could at the very least be sure of holding down the panic that bubbled like magma low in his throat.

  “Gimli!” the dwarf shouted. His spittle sprayed Hartmann’s lips and cheeks.

  Instantly Hartmann dropped the link. Puppetman reeled. For a moment he’d felt Gimli’s hatred blazing like an incandescent wire. He suspects!

  Most of what he’d sensed was the hate. But beneath that, beneath the conscious surface of Gimli’s mind lay awareness that there was something out of the ordinary about Gregg Hartmann, something inextricably tied to the bloody shambles of the Jokertown Riots. Gimli wasn’t an ace, Hartmann was sure of that. But Gimli’s natural paranoia was itself something of a sixth sense.

  For the first time in his life Puppetman faced the possibility he had lost a puppet.

  He knew he blanched, knew he flinched, but fortunately his reaction passed for squeamishness at being spat on.

  “Gimli,” the dwarf repeated, and Hartmann sensed he was turning away. “That’s my name. And the mask stays on, Senator. You know me, but the same doesn’t apply to everybody here. And they’d like to keep it that way.”

  “That’s not going to work too well, Gimli. You think a ski mask is going to disguise a joker with a furry snout? I—that is, if anybody saw you grab me, they’ll have little enough trouble identifying you and your gang.”

  He was saying too much, he belatedly realized—he didn’t want Miller dwelling too much on the fact that Hartmann could make him and some of his accomplices. Whatever had put him out had stirred his brains like omelette batter.

  —an electrical shock of some sort, he thought. Back in the Sixties he’d been a freedom rider briefly—it was an up-and-coming New Frontier sort of thing to do, and there was always the hatred, heady as wine, the possibility of lovely violence, crimson and indigo. A peckerwood state trooper had nailed him with a cattle prod during the Selma protests, which was too firsthand for his taste and sent him back north in a hurry. But it had felt like that, back in the limousine.

  “Come now, Gimli,” said a gritty baritone voice in accented but clear English. “Why not have the mask off? The whole world will know us soon enough.”

  “Oh, all right,” Gimli said. Puppetman could taste his resentment without having to reach. Tom Miller was having to share stage with someone, and he didn’t like it. Little bubbles of interest began to well up through the seethe of Hartmann’s incipient panic.

  Hartmann heard the scrape of feet on bare floor. Someone fumbled briefly, cursed, and then he caught his breath involuntarily as the tape was unwound, pulling reluctantly away from his hair and skin.

  The first thing he saw was Gimli’s face. It still looked like a bag-ful of
rotten apples. The look of exultation didn’t improve it any. Hartmann pushed his gaze past the dwarf to the rest of the room.

  It was a shitty little tenement, like shitty little tenements pretty much everywhere in the world. The wooden floor was stained and the striped wallpaper had patches of damp like a workman’s armpits. From the general scatter of crunchy and crinkly trash underfoot, Hartmann guessed the place was derelict. Still, a light-bulb glared in a busted-globe fixture overhead, and he felt a radiator drumming out too much heat the way every radiator in Germany did until it came down June.

  For all he knew he could be in the Eastern sector, which was a hell of a cheery thought. On the other hand, he’d been in German homes before. This one smelled wrong, somehow.

  There were three other overt jokers in the room, one swathed from head to feet in a dusty-looking cowled robe, one covered with yellowish chitin dotted with tiny red pimples, a third the furry one he’d seen next to the van. The three young nats in Hartmann’s field of vision looked offensively normal by comparison.

  His power felt others behind him. That was strange. He wasn’t usually able to taste another’s emotions, unless that one was broadcasting strongly, or was a puppet. He sensed a peculiar squirming in the power inside him.

  He glanced back. Two more back there, nats to the eye, though the scrawny youth leaning on the stained wall next to the radiator had an odd look to him. A man in his mid-thirties sat next to him in a gaudy plastic chair with his hands in the pockets of an overcoat. Hartmann thought the older man was subconsciously straining away from the younger; when their eyes met he caught a quick impression of sadness.

  That’s odd, he thought. Maybe tension had heightened his normal perceptions; maybe he was imagining things. But something was coming off that kid as he grinned at Hartmann, something that prickled all around the edges of his awareness. Again he had that evasive feeling from Puppetman.

  A shoe crunched debris. He turned, found himself looking up at an enormous nat dressed in suit coat and trousers of an odd tan-green, almost military. The man had no tie; his shirt collar hung unbuttoned around a thick neck, open to a spray of grizzled blond chest hair. Big hands rested on his hips with the coattails swept up behind, like something out of a little theater production of Inherit the Wind. His long hair lay combed back from a high forehead.

  He smiled. He had one of those rugged ugly faces women fall for and men believe.

  “A very great pleasure to meet you, Senator.” It was the rolling sea swell of the voice he’d heard urge Gimli to remove his blindfold.

  “You have the advantage.”

  “That’s true. Oh, but I daresay my name won’t be unfamiliar to you. I am Wolfgang Prahler.”

  Behind Hartmann someone tsked in exasperation. Prahler frowned, then laughed. “Ah, now, Comrade Mólniya, do I break security? Well, did we not agree that we must come out into the light of day to accomplish a task so important?”

  Like many educated Berliners he spoke English with a pronouncedly British cast. From behind, Puppetman felt a flicker of agitation at the name Mólniya. It was Russian. It meant lightning; the Soviets had a series of communications satellites by that name.

  “What exactly is going on here?” Hartmann demanded. His heart lurched at the words. He didn’t mean to take that tone with cold-blooded killers who had him altogether at their mercy. But Puppetman, coming suddenly into arrogance, had taken the bit in his teeth. “Couldn’t you wait until the Aide et Amitié banquet to make my acquaintance?”

  Prahler’s laugh resonated up from deep in his chest. “Very good. But have you not figured it out? It was never intended you should reach the banquet, Senator. You were, as you Americans say, set up.”

  “Drawn to the bait and trapped,” said a slight redheaded woman who wore a black turtleneck and jeans. “Set cheese for a rat; set a fine banquet to catch a fine lord.”

  “Rats and lords,” a voice repeated. “A fine rat. A fine lord.” It giggled. It was a male voice, cracked and adolescent: the leather boy. Hartmann felt a tickle run along the cord of his scrotum like the fingers of a whore. No doubt about it. He was getting emotion from him like static on a line. A hint of something potent—something terrible. For once Puppetman felt no desire to probe further.

  He feared this one. More than the others, Prahler, these casual youths with guns. Even Gimli.

  “You went to all this trouble to help Gimli here settle an old, imaginary score?” he made himself say. “That’s generous of you.”

  “We’re doing this for the revolution,” said a youthful nat with a blond flattop and a heat-lamp tan and the air of having worked hard to memorize the line. His turtleneck and jeans were molded around an athlete’s figure. He stood by the wall caressing the muzzle brake of a Soviet assault rifle grounded by his foot.

  “You’re of no significance, Senator,” the woman said. She flipped her square-cut bangs off her forehead. “Simply a tool. What your naive egotism tells you notwithstanding.”

  “Who the hell are you people?”

  “We bear the sacred name of the Red Army Fraction,” she told him. She hovered over a stocky youngster who sat cross-legged fiddling with a radio perched on a warped wooden nightstand. He wouldn’t meet Hartmann’s eyes.

  “Comrade Wolf gave it to us,” the blond boy said. “He used to hang out with Baader and Meinhof and them. They used to be close like this.” He held up a clenched fist.

  Hartmann sucked in his lips. Since the terrorist wars had gotten underway for true in the early Seventies, it wasn’t uncommon for radical attorneys to come to involve themselves directly in the activities of those they represented in court, especially in Germany and Italy. Apparently, if what the kid said was true, Prahler had been a leader in the Baader-Meinhof group and the RAF all along, without the authorities ever getting wind of the fact.

  Hartmann looked at Tom Miller. “I’ll rephrase my question. How did you get mixed up in this, Gimli?”

  “We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, Senator.”

  The dwarf smirked at him. Puppetman felt an urge to crush that smug face, to tear out the dwarf’s guts and throttle him with them. The frustration was physical torment.

  Sweat crawled down Hartmann’s forehead like a centipede. His emotions were oddly distinct from Puppetman’s. His other self whipsawed from rage to fear. What he mostly felt now was tired and annoyed.

  And sad. Poor Ronnie. He meant so well. He tried so hard.

  The redhead suddenly slapped the seated man on the shoulder. “You idiot, Wilfried, there it was! You went past it.” He mumbled apology and dialed back.

  “—captured by the Red Army Fraction, acting in concert with comrades from the Jokers for a Just Society who have fled persecution in Amerika.” It was Comrade Wolf’s voice, pouring like liquid amber from the cheap little radio. “The terms of his release are these: release of the Palestinian freedom fighter al-Muezzin. An airliner with sufficient fuel to take al-Muezzin to a country in the liberated Third World. Immunity from prosecution for members of this action team. We demand that the Jetboy memorial be torn down and in its place a facility built to provide shelter and medical attention to joker victims of Amerikan intolerance. And finally, just to poke the capitalist swine where it most hurts them, ten million dollars cash, which will be used to aid victims of Amerikan aggression in Central Amerika.

  “If these terms are not met by ten o’clock tonight, Berlin time, Senator Gregg Hartmann will be executed.

  “We return you now to regularly scheduled programming.”

  “We have to do something.” Hiram Worchester tangled his fingers in his beard and gazed out the window at the patchy Berlin sky.

  Digger Downs turned over a card. Trey of clubs. He grimaced.

  Billy Ray paced the carpet of Hiram’s suite like a tyrannosaurus with an itch. “If I’d been there, this shit would never have happened,” he said, and aimed a green glare at Mordecai Jones.

  The Hammer sat on the
sofa. It was oak and flowered upholstery, and like many of the hotel’s furnishings had survived the war. Fortunately they’d built stout furniture back in the 1890s.

  Jones made a dirty-gearbox noise toward the center of him and stared at his big hands, which he was working into tangles between his knees.

  The door opened and Peregrine flew into the room. Figuratively, at least, her wings jittering on her back. She wore a loose velour blouse and jeans that muted the advanced state of her pregnancy.

  “I just heard on the radio—isn’t it terrible?” Then she stopped and stared at the Hammer. “Mordecai—what on earth are you doing here?”

  “Just like you, Ms. Peregrine. Won’t let me out.”

  “But why aren’t you in the hospital? The reports said you were terribly injured.”

  “Just shot a little.” He slapped his gut. “Got me a pretty tough hide, kind of like that Kevlar stuff you read about in Popular Science.”

  Downs turned up a new card. Red eight. “Shit,” he muttered.

  “But a van fell on you,” Peregrine said.

  “Yeah, but see, I got these funky heavy metals replacing the calcium in my bones, so they’re like stronger and more flexible and all, and my innards and whatnot are a lot sturdier than most folks’. And I heal mighty fast—don’t even get sick—since I turned up my ace. I’m a pretty durable sort of dude.”

  “Then why’d you let them get away?” Bill Ray challenged, almost shouting. “Goddamn, the senator was your responsibility. You could’ve kicked some ass.”

  “To tell you the entire truth, Mr. Ray, it hurt like a sonofabitch. I wasn’t good for much for a while there.”

  The Mister came out differently than Ms. had. Billy Ray cocked his head and looked hard at him. Jones ignored him.

  “Lay off him, Billy,” said Carnifex’s partner, Lady Black, who sat to one side with her long legs crossed at the ankles before her.