“Well,” she said, “cowboy hat or not, I look forward to meeting you. Eight fifteen tomorrow evening then,” she said. “Thank you again.”
“I’ll see you then,” he said, as professionally as he could muster. “Goodbye.”
A click. He hung up the phone, then lifted the receiver and closed the connection three times. Garcia was looking at him, a half-smile on her lips.
“She was flirting with me,” he said to her, wondering at it. “I am ninety percent certain she was just flirting with me.”
Garcia shook her head at him. She leaned in and kissed him. “You’re an idiot,” she said, patting him on the chest. “She’s onto us.”
Tarl got out of the taxi and looked about him. The gates to the Taj Mahal National Monument were ahead, but thronged with busses, both large motor coaches and smaller minibuses. There was even an old US Army truck which had been painted blue and had an elephant painted on its canvas sides. Ganesha, Tarl reminded himself. He is the Elephant God. God of…wisdom, was it?
He shook his head and looked around. He followed the throng, folding his leather satchel to his side. There were hundreds, no maybe thousands of people here. Was it a festival, or was this just something people did, come to the Taj Mahal at sunset. There were plenty of tourists here, he saw, snapping pictures with their cameras. He dodged one man, family in tow, with a silver film camera, drawing a muttered curse.
And there, he saw a flash of red. Crimson red. The woman wearing it was tall, with a red and black shawl over her black hair. He waved, and she turned to him and waved back. He approached her, dodging through the crowd near the entrance turnstiles.
“Follow me,” she called, waving something paper in one hand. Ah, a ticket, he realized. She had pre-purchased them. He followed her and watched as she handed a ticket to the guard. He nodded, and she pointed back at him, through the crowd. The man waved him forward, and Tarl tried to work his way through the crowd, but it was too packed with people.
He reached the man and he waved him through. Tarl nodded his thanks and looked for her. She was well ahead of him now, but the space was widening into a sort of plaza. He followed her onto a large rectangular plaza. A long reflecting pool ran through it.
He stopped then and took a moment to drink in the view. The woman in red, framed against the pink marble of the dome. The sky behind, bruised in orange and purples. The sky in the pool was a pale blue, blending into a maroon midnight as it fell into the dome’s shadow. It’s like a painting, he thought, amazed.
She was probably ten yards away. As she turned towards him, he dodged around another knot of tourists. He has just looked up again to find her when the shot rang out. Followed by another.
Confusion reigned. He dropped to one knee, scanning the crowd for the shooter. People were screaming now, as danger radiated through the crowd. It was fruitless; the crowd was running in every direction, and he jammed himself up against a low wall, to avoid the press of feet as people fled.
He looked back where the woman in the red coat had been. She was on the ground. He swore, words from the speech of his youth, curses from another world. Shit-eaters. He stood up and scanned the rooftops behind him, but there was, of course, no one. Professionals, he thought, half-expecting to be shot down as he stood there. But he wasn’t, and when he looked back towards the woman in the red coat, people already surrounded her. Some knelt over her hesitantly. Others stood shocked, hands over their mouths in horror.
He swore again and walked back towards the exit. Luckily, there was a taxi still free. He slammed himself into the back seat.
“Sir, where to? Where to, sir?” the cabbie was a young man, all teeth and hair.
He fished out the card with the address from the card Garcia had prepared for him, and waved off further questions with a growl. The ride away from the Taj complex took a while, and once he calmed himself, he used that time to do something he realized he’d been doing too little of lately. To think. Who had known about the meeting? Only he and Garcia.
He thought about the Boy and Grandmother. He thought about the stakes this mission held. He thought about what the Boy would do to this world if he made a mistake here. He thought about the woman in the silver circlet, watching the shadows sharpen to painful edges, seeing everything white out as the atmosphere of the planet boiled away. He thought of the madwoman in the caves below Mexico City, covering herself in gold. Don’t trust them, she’d said. Don’t trust any of them.
He reached the house and it was dark. He climbed the steps to the veranda, entering through the small black iron gate in the high iron fence. The veranda was lit with a few yellow insect repellent bulbs. The gate was unlocked, and he saw Garcia was there, dressed in black pants and a black tank top. She was lounging in a chair, one leg thrown over the arm. She had the bottle of gin in one hand. She took a long pull.
“You’re back earlier than I expected,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Not quite a successful meeting, was it?”
“That’s an interesting look for you,” he said. “I’d call it cat burglar, if I didn’t know better.”
He reached for the bottle, but she hugged it to herself in mock jealousy. “And do you know better?” she said. “Or did you miss the key point here, again, too?” She smiled, teeth yellow in the insect light.
Garcia had known about the meeting. He gave her a long look. Pieces clicking into place. “I have been a fool." He regarded her, taking her in. Black pajamas, dirt and dust on one knee. "You are not who you say you are,” he said slowly. “I have been a fool, haven’t I?” His belly was full of ice as he said it, knowing it was true.
She pointed at him with the neck of the bottle. “Score one for Smith,” she said. “You have been a fool, but you’re a man, baby.” She grinned. “Born that way.” She drank again, eyeing him as she wrapped her lips around the bottle. She swallowed.
“Not every day you shoot, what, a friend? Former colleague?” he asked, watching the wet grin spread across her face as he said it.
“Look at the big brain on you,” she laughed. “So quick. What gave it away? The clothes?”
He nodded. “You had time to change, and you didn’t. You come back here on foot?”
“Bicycle,” she said. “I threw it in the bushes. The rifle I left on the roof. They’ll find it but it’s not traceable. Not in India." She laughed. "Just a rifle. A Mauser, can you believe it? Twenty years old. Shot was from about three hundred yards. I had a scope though, so…” She shrugged and drank again.
“Who was she?” he asked. “And why?”
“Who?” she said, looking at him, puzzled. “The girl in the red coat?”
He nodded, furrowing his brow. “Yes,” he said carefully. “The girl you shot.”
“Oh, I have no idea,” she said, waving her free hand at him. “I do know who it wasn’t, and that is our friend Miss Velli Samara. Or, as she prefers to be called, Silver.”
Silver. An icy finger traced its way up his spine. “Silver,” he said. “Is that a code name?”
“Aren’t all names code names?” she asked, looking up at the night sky. “Silver is what she called herself when I met her.” She shrugged. “It suits her.”
“And when was that?” He asked. “And when did you get so good with guns? You never told me you knew how to shoot.” It wasn’t something women commonly learned here, he knew.
She smiled. “I’ve been a gun-nut since I first saw what they could do in Mexico. Men came to my city with guns, and I saw that these things were powerful, so I needed to know about them.” She took a quick sip and sat up. “But I didn’t really become a good shot until the Eastern Front, in this last War.”
“You were a kid in the war,” he said, his mind trying to keep up with what she was telling him.
“Oh no,” she said, looking at him with concern. “Didn’t we just establish that story was, um, a cover?” She smiled sweetly at him. “That’s the word, right?”
He nodded, bewildered
. “It’s one word,” he shook his head. “Wait, why is she called Silver?”
“It’s just a name, not a code name, just a name. She’s Silver, and I…” she paused, glancing at him. “She called me Gold. I'm...like her. The same. The same sort of...thing.”
He stared at her, mind racing. I have been blind. “Gold?” His mind flashed back to the woman under the city, covered in gold dust milled from the corpse of the dead god. Gold. He looked at her in wonder.
“Holy shit,” he said. “I think I see it now.”
“That is the most interesting thing you’ve said all night, Smith, or whatever your name is.” She barked a laugh. “Oh yeah, I looked into your story too. Mr. Nameless walk-in, with your spooky story about Stalingrad and the Einsatzgruppen.” She spat, and mimed holding the gin bottle as a rifle. “I used to shoot those fuckers in the knees, you know, to draw out their friends.” She smiled sweetly again. “I know your name is a lie, and I know you’ve got a secret. You have a real name?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “I do,” he said at last. “But I’ll keep it to myself for now, thanks.” He spread his hands. “So what now? You just murdered an innocent woman, an actor I presume?”
She shrugged. “Someone she paid to meet you, I guess.” She took another drink. “She is cautious, but sends a message all the same.”
“What message?” he said. His head was pounding, and he reached for the bottle. She relented this time. “Did she call again?”
Garcia, no Gold, shook her head. “Not since I got back,” she said. “No, her message is the girl. She wanted us to know she was onto us. She made us, despite this whole elaborate trap we laid, she sniffed it out.” She sighed, reaching for the bottle. “So I sent her a message back.”
“That’s why you killed her?” He gaped. “To send a message?”
“You do not understand what you are dealing with in her,” she hissed. “She is a scorpion unlike anyone you have ever met.”
But I have met her, he wanted to say. But instead he paused to consider. He didn’t know this woman. She passed him the bottle.
“I imagine you have quite a tale,” he said. “About the two of you. Did she name you Gold?”
“Names are wind,” she sighed, yanking the bottle back from him. “Speaking of, you didn’t tell me your name.” She took another swig, eyeing him. “You’re slippery. Like oil. I could call you Oil. Or Eel.” She giggled, whispering it. “Eel.” She giggled again. “But you’re less real than an eel, even. You’re like air, or vapor, or…” she glanced at him “…smoke.” She nodded emphatically, poking him in the chest with one finger. “Smoke.”
A shiver ran through him. The woman in Mexico had called him that. She was slurring her words. The bottle was almost empty. He reached for it. “Enough of this,” he said, setting it down. She frowned, but did not object.
“So what now?” she asked. She moved and was suddenly very close to him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. He tensed.
“You need to tell me your story,” he said. “I need to know who I am dealing with in you.”
She kissed him sloppily, and he tried to push her away, but she was strong, and held him. He resisted briefly and then relaxed. She looked up and regarded him. “But I don’t remember,” she said, pouting. “I really don’t.” She looked at him, her eyes wide and brown. “But she does, and if we catch her, she can tell us both.” She brightened. “Things are developing. I can feel it, and she's part of it.”
Things are developing? She is drunk, he thought. “Where do you think she’ll go?” he said.
Gold looked up at the sky. “She’ll go undercover, and she’ll go deep. We must keep the day jobs to find her, no way we’d do it on our own.”
“Stay at the Agency, you mean?” He nodded. It might be best.
“And you will need to tell me your story,” she said, tightening her grip around his neck just briefly. “Tell me all of it, and maybe I’ll tell you some of what I remember.”
He thought of the Boy. He thought of the sun he’d seen wash over the Taj Mahal’s pink and white tiles, growing into a hot, angry red. He saw the Taj bursting into flames before being engulfed in an awful white light. He saw all these things in vivid clarity, knowing the Boy would not, when he knew, hesitate. Unless Tarl came to him with a plan. Unless he could present a counterproposal first. Things were developing here, and now he had confirmation of the congruence. He was Smoke, and she was Gold, and the woman Silver was here as well. They were all the same, bound on a great fiery wheel, spinning around and around.
The people here in India had a name for it, he realized. For escaping it, for getting off the wheel. It made a certain kind of sense. Nirvana. He was groping towards it, but it was all shadows. He shook his head and made up his mind. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, and she looked up at him, puzzled. And then, knowing it was foolish, and knowing it was dangerous, he told her.
They spent most of that night talking, and then, just before dawn, she rose, and took him by the hand into the bedroom. They lay together in the cool sheets. She straddled him and he thrashed under her like a drowning man. He looked up at her but saw Silver, coated with oil and gold dust, sparkling in the torchlight. She looked down on him but could see only shadows, and they flowed together, faster and faster, coiling and twining together in the dim predawn light, until he was hollowed out and empty. Until there was nothing in him but swirling shadows and smoke.
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Books by Rich X Curtis
THE TAPESTRY CYCLE is a four book sci-fi technothriller series spanning millennia and a multiverse of worlds to unravel an advanced Mind before it threatens humanity itself.
Book 1: SILVER’S GODS — Silver, a tool of mysterious gods that have guided her dreams for thousands of years, races to confront a rogue AI before it triggers a cross-dimensional cataclysm.
Book 2: GOLD’S PRICE — Exiled in time, Silver and Gold battle to find each other in a future dystopian China, unraveling a mystery at the heart of the multiverse.
Book 3: SMOKE’S FIRE — Smoke battles a rebellious Center as he scours the Tapestry for allies in the final battle to save all of existence from the nihilistic gods.
The Prequel: SHADOWS AND SMOKE — A spy for the enigmatic Select is sent to Earth to seek answers to an ancient mystery, and is drawn into a conflict between old gods and new.
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About the Author
Rich X Curtis is a novelist. A Californian living in New England. Always a fan of adventure stories and science fiction, he has worked as a sous-chef, literary editor, video game designer, loaded trucks in a warehouse, and toiled in the software mines. Mid-century modern is his jam, as his kids say these days. Get off his lawn. The X marks the spot.
www.richxcurtis.com
Contents
Chapter 1
The Eagle’s Nest, Austrian Province
Chapter 2
The River Marshes, Talus
Chapter 3
The Center, Talus
Chapter 4
The Center, Simulation Room
Chapter 5
The Center, Training Grounds
Chapter 6
The Southern Fleet, Atlantic Ocean
Chapter 7
The Center, at the Tree
Chapter 8
Central Asian Continent, The Temple of the Dreaming Woman
C
hapter 9
The Center, The Black Barracks
Chapter 10
Mexico City, In the Ruins
Chapter 11
Mexico City, The Visitation of the Cave
Chapter 12
The Center, Debriefings
Chapter 13
Texas, USA
Chapter 14
The Center, Debriefings
Chapter 15
India, Agra
About the Author
Shadows and Smoke Page 22
