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by Greg Bear

  William looked at the maid’s cart.

  The young man with dirty blond hair and the finest little blue eyes—the girl had called him Jeremiah—tossed Rebecca’s gun aside once he saw it would not fire for him. The girl kicked it under the television cabinet.

  Rebecca sat hunched over on the side of the bed, her folded hands between her legs. They had ripped the buttons on her blouse and pulled it down from her shoulders, restricting her arm movements and pulling away her Lynx sensors. She had not been free to hit her panic button before it was on the floor. Her coat and creds were in the closet. She had removed her belt and packs before lying down and they were on the bathroom counter. The young man and the girl had not yet gone into the bathroom.

  For the moment it was best not to talk. They wanted her alive long enough to have their fun and express themselves.

  Jeremiah sat beside Rebecca, reaching around with his right hand and poking the tip of the gray blade against the right side of her throat. She could feel a drop of blood sliding like a warm slug to her clavicle.

  The girl stepped closer, sideways, as if afraid, then leaned over. She gasped as Rebecca met her eyes, then reached out and slapped her. Rebecca turned her face to one side. Dressmaker’s dummy. Let them think she was in shock. Not too far wrong. She must have been sleeping like a log. Her mouth tasted dry and sour. She could see the blood drop ooze its way down her breast. It spread out in the lace of her bra.

  The girl reached into the folds of her dress and brought out a Smith & Wesson 9mm. She pointed it at Rebecca’s head.

  The young man shook his hair aside and moved the knife down. His left hand held her left arm at the elbow. His head was about six inches behind and to her left. He leaned awkwardly on the bed. He would go off balance with less than a nudge. If he fell, the knife would slice her throat but probably not cut anything vital.

  Still, she hated being cut—any kind of cut.

  And then the girl would put a slug in her brain.

  ‘You raided private property,’ Jeremiah said. ‘You shot our daddy. You sent in the whole damned army and just shot him like a dog. Gutless cowards. You have no idea what we were getting ready for, what we had all planned out, no idea, do you?’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Rebecca said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what, bitch?’

  ‘Tell me what happened. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘You’re a damned liar!’

  Spit flew again. She wanted to wipe her eye but didn’t dare. The young man’s spit from a minute ago was sitting on the corner of her lid, still damp. ‘What’s your sister’s name?’ Rebecca asked. She could barely talk. The knife made a shallow slice as her throat moved. She grimaced. ‘Ow.’

  The boy backed the knife off half an inch. Good sign, for now.

  ‘She’s not my sister. She’s my stepmother. Daddy had four wives.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Rebecca smelled oranges. Thousands of oranges.

  ‘We’re getting out of here. We have money, safe houses, they’ll never find us. You’ll never tell. You don’t know it yet but you’re already dead.’

  Jeremiah had rebalanced himself, a young man’s natural caution, had pulled the knife back another inch and scootched himself forward on the bed. Not a well-trained move.

  Also good.

  ‘Right,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘Where’d the other one go?’ the girl asked. ‘We saw two of you check in.’

  ‘He left,’ Rebecca said. ‘He went back.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘To Seattle. I’m off-duty.’

  The girl awkwardly gripped the 9mm in both hands. She didn’t seem to know how to use it. Her eyes were dark brown and with her thin face and sallow skin she wasn’t very pretty. Rebecca saw, through the long dress, that the girl was at least six months pregnant. She looked more worried than angry but the slap had stung. And her finger was making little jerks on the trigger.

  ‘How long before you’re due?’ Rebecca asked, and then cringed inwardly. No need to remind her of her condition or her lost husband.

  ‘You slut,’ the girl said. ‘We were all doing God’s work.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Jeremiah said. ‘Let’s just cut her and get the hell out of here. We’ll wait in the other room.’

  Again the knife touched Rebecca’s throat and drew blood. She could feel the young man’s arm tighten. She looked up at the window. Bright flickering yellow warmed the rectangle of inner curtains.

  ‘Something’s on fire,’ she said.

  William heaped four rolls of toilet paper on the railing with tails dragging on the deck. He then squirted them all with streamers of orange-smelling fluid from the bottle of Goo-Gone he had found in the cleaning tray on the cart. Unwinding more toilet paper around the bottom of the railing, he made sure to leave a space in front of the door. He did not want them to shrink back into the room. He wanted them to open the door, look at the fire, and then try to escape—without hurting Rebecca.

  ‘What the hell are you up to?’ a man called from the parking lot. William took a book of motel matches—some people still rented smoking rooms, thank God—and lit the soaked, citrus-scented bundles. The result was immediate—a wall of brilliant flame right in front of the window to Rebecca’s room.

  He reached around and pounded on the door. ‘Fire!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone out NOW!’

  For an agonizing few seconds, he hung back flat to the wall. He shot a glance out to the street through the flames and then to the left, at people milling in the parking lot. They were staring up, mouths gaping. He did not dare shout for them to leave. No sign of patrol cars or fire trucks or any other assistance. The smoke billowed black under the roof. What a stupid ass thing to do. What if the whole place burned down?

  How long until the manager or someone came running with an extinguisher and stood in his line of fire?

  He heard shrill, childish cries and a hoarse shout inside the room and then the door opened. William stayed flat against the wall. A hand clutching a steel blade poked out and then withdrew. He heard scuffling then a metallic pop—not a gunshot—and a mist of water puffed through the door. The room’s sprinkler system had gone off.

  ‘Fire!’ William shouted. ‘The roof’s collapsing! Get out now!’

  A young man with blond hair lurched out, wiping water from his eyes, waving the knife as if fanning away the flames. William swung a quarter turn with gun in both hands, crouched, barrel pointing right at the center of the blond man’s torso.

  ‘FBI, drop the knife and get your hands up!’ William shouted. ‘Do it now!’ The flame ebbed but thick smoke blew onto both of them.

  ‘Jesus!’ the boy shouted. He did not drop the knife. He couldn’t see William or his gun. The smoke had finished the job the water had started. William began a pull, let it off. The boy stumbled blindly away from the door, blade wavering, pointing straight out, then down.

  ‘Drop the knife NOW!’

  The young man shuddered and opened his hand. The knife handle hit the deck and bounced. Inside the room William heard a girl scream then a gunshot. The window blew out over the young man and he collapsed to his knees, covered with shards of glass. ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ he mewed.

  Rebecca lurched out with a twist of blond hair in her fist. Her blouse had been ripped and pulled down around her shoulders. She tugged the girl in the gingham dress out onto the deck and flung her at the iron rail and the burning stacks of toilet paper. The girl bounced off, knocking flaming, smoking rolls down to the cars and asphalt. Rebecca and the girl were now between William and the crouching young man. Rebecca saw this through strings of wet hair and swung about with a dancer’s precision, pushing the girl at William. William caught her, twisted one of her arms around, and had her face-down on the deck. He kneeled on top of her. Both of the girl’s hands were empty but clutching, scratching at his pants. He pressed a knee in her back hard enough to make the vertebrae pop. The girl oofed and got quiet.

  ‘Where’s the gu
n?’ William shouted.

  Smoke rolled away.

  The boy looked sideways, eyes wide and red. He reached out. Rebecca kicked the knife under the rail and over the parking lot. Then she kicked the young man in the side, hard, which put him once more on his back, and stomped him right in the groin with a bare bleeding foot. He curled up like a pillbug, alternately moaning and screaming. She flipped him over in the glass and pulled back both of his arms.

  The manager came up from the other side, spraying foam over everything. ‘Fuck this!’ he was shouting. ‘You trying to burn me out?’

  ‘FBI,’ William said, wiping his eyes.

  ‘I’ve called the cops, you fuckwad, I’ve called the fire department—’

  ‘Got your cuffs?’ Rebecca called out. The young man jerked and struggled and she smacked him hard across the back of the head, then forced his face into the glass. William tossed her the cuffs from his belt. She caught them through a swinging arc of foam.

  Rebecca’s broad, well-defined shoulders, smudged with soot, glistened as she bound the young man. With dripping hair askew, black brassiere revealed, slacks halfway down her hips—showing the top stretch of pink panties—she looked absolutely amazing. The young man gasped as she lifted her knee off his lower spine. The manager’s foam finally ran out and he flung the tank against the stucco. It bounced and rolled. They were all covered with hissing, dripping retardant.

  ‘Careful with the girl, she’s pregnant,’ Rebecca warned William.

  She had humped up strangely. He eased her over on her side. The girl moaned between quick bursts of prayer.

  Gun. He leaned far enough to see a pistol on the floor of Rebecca’s room, far out of anyone’s reach.

  ‘Room’s clear,’ Rebecca said.

  Below, tenants were backing out their cars and leaving. The manager shouted over the railing: they hadn’t paid their bills.

  Chest heaving, Rebecca toed a blackened, sodden roll of toilet paper. ‘What the hell was that?’ she asked William.

  ‘Advanced tactics,’ William said.

  She sucked in her breath, pulled up the shoulders of her blouse, and gave him the sweetest smile. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Turkey/Iraq

  The Superhawk hit a wall of air over the endless wrinkled blanket of the Zagros mountains. It shuddered like a stunned ox and fell for a few hundred feet until the blades growled, bit air again, and whanga-whanged like a Jamaican steel band. Fouad had never heard a sound like that and it made him go pale. He clutched at the belt over his slung seat.

  Across from him, Special Agent Orrin Fergus signed a thumbs up and then tapped his nose. Fergus shouted, ‘The shit is mostly over. We’re coming into Diyala. That’s an Iraqi muhafazah. Province or whatever.’

  ‘Governorate,’ said the master sergeant on Fouad’s left. He was a compact, well-muscled man about Fouad’s age, fully tricked out in flak plate and desert camouflage, helmet overlaid with headphone and gogs and a rucksack full of folded plastic maps. His dedicated satlink kept him fully informed about activity in the area—what little activity there was. He was a connected kind of guy and looked like a robot samurai.

  The crew chief moved to the rear. ‘Down in thirty. Use the green bucket if you are so moved. Captain Jeffries does not like a slippery deck.’ He looked hard at Fouad. ‘First time?’

  Fouad nodded.

  The crew chief used his boot to shift the bucket next to Fouad.

  ‘I will be fine,’ Fouad said, looking up with wide black eyes.

  The crew chief grinned and walked back to his position on fire control.

  ‘They call Kifri UXO Central,’ Master Sergeant said. ‘Decades of back and forth between the Kurds and the Sunnis. The national animal is the Gambian rat. They use ’em to sniff out mines and ordnance. Happy little beasts, work like sonsabitches. Last time we were through here an Iraqi film company was making an epic about Arabs stomping Persians fourteen hundred years ago. Pretty big deal. Then the director stepped on a Coalition bomblet and blew off his leg. Took out a cameraman, too. Shit. They were feeling pretty low that day.’

  ‘Do they mind that we are here?’ Fouad asked.

  ‘The folks in Baghdad mostly don’t give a fuck,’ Master Sergeant said with a grin. ‘They’re supposed to be our allies, so we turn a blind eye when they kick Kurdish butt.’

  Orrin Fergus moved over to Fouad’s side and shouted into his ear. ‘We’re going to meet up with Tim Harris’s team in Kifri. You’ll conduct the interrogation for us. Harris’s accent just makes ’em blink. How’s your skill at the local dialect?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Fouad said, feeling unsure of himself, and for reasons other than his stomach. ‘Here they may speak Arabic, but also Kurdish, Turkish, or even Aramaic or Assyrian. If they are Yazidis—’

  ‘This year, they mostly speak Arabic,’ said Master Sergeant. ‘At least that’s what we’ve been told. I love surprises, don’t you? We’ll find out when we get there.’

  ‘If we find bodies, I’ll be busy,’ Fergus said. ‘So keep your eyes and ears open. Talk to the locals, if any, but keep your cards close. I hear there’s a fellow named Tabrizi or something like that waiting in town. They don’t need to know anything from us. Since we haven’t been issued MOPP gear, just filter masks and BAMs, anything requiring major decon will delay our start by ten minutes while the crew seals the cabin. We’ll have to wait for decon until we get back to Incirlik. And if we’re dirty or acting weird—well, I hear Kifri is outstanding this time of year.’

  Fergus specialized in bioweapons and had been qualified as a medical examiner before joining the FBI. Fouad muttered the acronyms under his breath: MOPP was Mission Oriented Protective Posture, BAM was Biological Agent Monitor.

  The Superhawk circled the town.

  ‘Drop in five,’ the captain announced. ‘Master Sergeant is your god. We drop and then we go park and we will pickup, and you will be there on his command.’

  Fouad nodded compliance, though the pilot could not see him.

  Most of Kifri looked like a collection of shoeboxes kicked open by unruly children. Shattered brown domes and hollowed-out two-story houses clustered around the skeleton of a bazaar. Only a few of the houses and buildings were still standing. Six years of civil war and Kurdish cleansing and decades of tyranny before that—including phosphorus bombs from Saddam—had sucked most of the life out of the town. The Superhawk flew south over a ruined military installation, an antique, war-stamped moonscape.

  These were the leftovers from when Americans had briefly dreamed they could save the world from terrorism, one miserable tyranny at a time. Now, a few Yanks still flew in, around, and about, and the Iraqis did very little if anything to stop them—everybody knew they were just buzzing, like flies.

  Kifri was a poster child for the cancer of history and hatred and nation-building. Nations don’t get built—they grow like mold. Iraq was a whimpering mess, abandoned on the sidelines of a new war. Iran was the center of action now. Defiantly nuclear, it was being taken on—diplomatically, so far, but with many threats covert and otherwise—by the UN, Europe, Russia, and even China. The Americans had opted in as junior partners, allowing that its allies had a bigger stake because they were within range of Iran’s missiles.

  Americans no longer had much heart for direct fighting in Iraq, so they flew support and reconnaissance and pounded the ground in a few areas, hunting up intelligence.

  Fouad tried to keep from shivering. Fergus and Master Sergeant shared a smoke. The sun through the windows swept brilliant squares over their chests as the Superhawk circled, and then they slowed and dropped. Master Sergeant unstrapped, found his balance, and motioned for the crew chief to throw open the door. The mid-morning glare blinded Fouad. Then he saw pale brown houses, broad unpaved streets, dry potholes, craters, broken windows under shattered wooden awnings, a two-story government building, Iraqi guards sitting and standing around the brick steps, smoking cigarettes and wa
tching—and a Humvee flying a blue and yellow flag from its high antenna.

  Fergus grabbed Fouad’s arm. ‘Let’s go.’

  They jumped to the dirt street and ran from under the shadowy wind of the blades. A man in a khaki shirt and pale green cargo pants with lots of pockets, a camera around his neck, a big red head of hair and no hat matched speed and pumped Fouad’s hand and then swung about and waved to the Superhawk pilots. Fergus introduced him. This was Special Agent Tim Harris, Diplomatic Security, liaison in Iraq between the FBI and the CIA and definitely part of BuDark.

  The pilot lifted the chopper away. Fouad looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Welcome to Kifri, home of the stupid and the brave,’ Harris said. ‘The weather today is dry and slightly uncool, sporadic pissing contests with the police guard, but no sign of a storm. We now proudly fly the blue and yellow flag of official Baghdad approval because they want to know who’s using anthrax to kill Kurdish Jews in a town where there should not any longer be Kurds, much less Jews.’

  The Master Sergeant opened the Humvee’s door and sat shotgun. He carried a machine pistol with an assault clip like a flattened ram’s horn. Harris had two Glocks, one in a shoulder holster, the second under his left cuff, above his boot. The Humvee had a ROAG—Remotely Operated Autotargeting Gun—a rapid-fire twenty millimeter mounted over the roof like a small steel sewage pipe.

  Inside, with the engine running, the Humvee cooled quickly. They were surrounded by two inches of punch-suck armor, just barely enough to stop an old RPG, not enough to worry the nose-heavy, slag-splat anti-tank shell currently in fashion in these parts. Three UAVs—automated aerial drones—relayed data from hundreds of meters in the sky. Screens in the dashboard popped up as Harris spun the vehicle about. Sensors started pinging like sonar in a submarine, scoping out potential targets. Echoes from around corners attracted particular attention. Sound trackers on the roof could zero in on weapons action and coordinate return fire through UAVs and their only other air support, the Superhawk.