Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Marena—talking to me from Colorado, over a new set of encrypted cell phones that she said the firm didn’t know about—told me she wanted to push the suits to loosen up a bit, too, but that I shouldn’t try to force the issue and risk getting kicked out of the project. “Boyle and those guys are just a bunch of accountants,” she said. “Collectively, they have about as much curiosity as a jar of stale kimchi.”

  “Uh, yeah,” I went.

  “But whenever Lindsay sees the reports he’ll lean on them and they’ll come around.” She also said she was worried about my health if I started popping the stuff unsupervised. I said that was sweet of her, but that she was taking on a Sisyphean task.

  “Just hang in there,” she said.

  At any rate, on March 10 the results came in on a course of toxicity tests on a line of transgenic Yucatán micropigs. They’d gotten pretty smart on the stuff, and so far they hadn’t manifested any serious health problems. “And biochemically, they’re more than half human,” Lisuarte said. It seemed fair, since behaviorally, humans are more than half pig. Of course, my guess was that Lotos were already doing human trials, probably in India, but that they didn’t want anybody outside of the lab to know about it. Especially not a loose cannon like me. Anyway, they said they’d give us the go-ahead in a week.

  But they didn’t. The calendar gears ground forward toward 4 Ahau without us, or anyone else, getting any closer to closing in on any doomster. And outside our little enclave the world was degenerating.

  On the eighteenth the Lotos people finally sent down nearly a half-liter of each of the Game drug components. “I told you they would,” Lisuarte said. “They’re as worried as we are.” And she had a point. They were corporate, they were risk-averse, they were a bunch of lily-white, red-state, chicken-pluckin’, shotgun-totin’, penny-wise, pound-foolish, just-say-no Republican douche-bags, but in the end, they were people. They had families, they had investments, they had ambitions, they had medical needs … and like us, they understood the math.

  Releases got drawn up and signed. Doctors from Salt Lake Central came in to examine me and, I guessed, cover up and/or take the heat if it all went south. People put papers in front of me and I signed them. Probably I shouldn’t have, but there was no time for the niceties. On the nineteenth Lisuarte gave me the green light. I could try thirty mgs of the combined chronolytic and topolytic drugs as long as I was monitored nine ways from Sunday. And then, the first time they gave me the stuff, I got too messed up to play.

  Symptoms included vertigo, nausea, scintillating auras—like with a migraine—blackout, tachycardia, and presuicidal depression. When they came into the isolation room I’d slipped out of the chair and, according to Dr. Lisuarte, I’d bitten through my lower lip and was trying to gouge my right calf open with a Logitech ball mouse. They bundled me off to the infirmary. I told them those symptoms weren’t anything out of the ordinary for me, that in fact I went through all of them a few times a day, on a good day, and that I just needed to take another dose and go back to work. But instead they flushed the stuff out of my system and wouldn’t let me near the lab.

  I was pretty upset. That is, even after the shit wore off and my mood was back to baseline, I was still pretty upset. I’d gone through fire, water, wind, and human excrement to get the stuff—well, actually, Jed2 had taken most of the abuse, but still—and now I wouldn’t even be able to use it. Lisuarte guessed the high-alkaloid component might be interacting badly with my meds. Specifically, it was blocking too much reuptake of glutamic acid, which led to excess nitrogen, excitotoxicity, self-injurious ideation, and a swag bag of other disagreeable effects. Over the next week she replaced my trusty old crew of behavior modifiers with a Don the Beachcomber Zombie cocktail of newer, meaner behavior modifiers. When I’d looked over the dosage list, it was too complicated for me to make much sense of, so I’d run it past my regular doctor back in Miami. He said it sounded like “hammering in a two-penny nail with a battering ram,” as he put it in his folksy way, but I wanted to be a sport and went on it anyway. Amazingly, the new stuff seemed to work. Just a few days later we were getting the effect we wanted: It seemed like there wasn’t much of the old Jed left. Instead of the angsty, vindictive troglodyte I used to enjoy being, there was a cautiously optimistic and rather bland individual also named Jed. In fact, the new me was almost imperturbable. For instance—just as an example—Marena had left for the States on the tenth to see Max, and she’d said she was going to make it back in a week, but here it was almost a month later and she still wasn’t here. She’d said it was because it wasn’t safe to travel. And it was true that things were seriously messed up. People were fleeing some cities and streaming into others. Customs checkpoints had waits of over ten hours. Airlines were hoarding jet fuel. Most major airports had turned a third of their hangars into enforced quarantine camps. Still, it sounded like excuses to me. If Marena gave the Warren gang a chance to work their magic, she could get back here. In fact, it seemed kind of out of character for her to be away while the rest of us thrashed on her project. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. Maybe she couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore. Maybe she just didn’t want to pull Max out of school. We’d kind of moved in together, if you could count sleeping in the same prefab dorm room moving in, and I’d thought we’d gotten pretty close, but then when she’d taken off, I wasn’t so sure. Normally I would have been raging and raving and flying up there and panting after her like a cowardly dog. But now, when I thought about her, I’d just get wistful for a second and then go grimly back to what I was doing, just like any normal person meekly accepting his daily ration of despair. Also, No Way still hadn’t turned up. I’d been freaked out about him at first and tried to go back to find him, but now I was just pretty calmly waiting to see what happened. Maybe he’d been sucked into a black hole, like I had.

  Also, I wasn’t sure about my legal status. At least six different agencies were still investigating the Hippogriff Incident—hmm, good title for a new posthumous Robert Ludlum novel—and they’d finally made the connection to Executive Solutions, which meant that the rest of us might eventually get linked to it. And to top it all off, they’d let Sic and a few of the other trainees try the Game drugs, and on them they were working well. Sic had been studying Jed2’s notes, and he’d taken to the new Game layout, and then, with the blood lightning, he’d gotten quite a bit ahead of me. Normally I would have been insane with jealousy, doomster or no doomster. Now, I just kept slogging.

  My second bout with the drugs went better. I played two games on the stuff, and I cooked. By the fifth dose I was as good with four stones as I had been with two. I asked about upping the dosage. Lisuarte said no. Nine days ago I’d completed a game using five stones. Now I was making progress with six, and yesterday I’d even glimpsed the bewildering world of seven. But like I think I said, seven stones isn’t just twice as hard as six, or seven times as hard, or forty-nine times as hard. It’s about 7!, that is, 5,040 times as hard. So, realistically, I couldn’t imagine that at this rate I’d ever get to eight stones, let alone nine, even in a lifetime, let alone in a couple of months. Some of the time, when I read in Jed2’s letters about what that Lady Koh person could do, not just playing with nine stones but using live animals for the runners, and then doing whatever that business was with the spiderweb—I almost thought he might have been exaggerating. Except, why would he? Or why would I?

  On the twenty-second, Laurence said he, and that meant Lindsay, wanted me to work on the Disney World Horror. I said I’d been planning to go directly to the Doomster and appealed to Taro and Marena. We decided I’d put in two days looking for Dr. X. If we delivered him, they said, we could write our own ticket with the DHS. After that, anything we said about 4 Ahau would immediately get taken seriously, no matter how odd it might seem. It sounded plausible, although I was sure there was more going on. Still, I’d already gone over Jed2’s notes about Dr. X from his game with Lady Koh, and they were definitely provoking some associational flashes. Although, reading them over again, I found myself getting pretty a
nnoyed with him. They were only about forty thousand words long, for one thing, which isn’t a lot when you’re trying to remember every little detail because it could possibly turn out to be important later. And then there was the style. There was a smirking slacker pomposity about the prose that set my teeth on edge. Although I realize that he/I was working under difficult conditions, but still—well, one gets annoyed with oneself a lot, even when one hasn’t split in two. Anyway, I kept going over and over the Disney World Horror game, about how he, or let’s just say I, had gotten a strong feeling that Dr. X would be someone whose name I knew well but whom I hadn’t met in person, someone who was still alive, someone who’d been everywhere and back twice, maybe someone we’d already discounted, or maybe somebody I wasn’t considering because it seemed too obvious. And as Jed2 had said, he was someone “who was once half in the light but is now again in darkness.”

  Huh.

  That day I got to my cubicle a bit late and scattered the first batch of seeds at noon. I tried to integrate the Game with LEON’s search engines. Secret contracts, I thought. Cayman banks stuff. Functionaries living beyond their means. Jets, yachts, and Bugattis turning up in the wrong backyards. Gambling winnings. Wives suddenly inheriting a hundred times more than anyone thought they would. Antiques, artwork, old jewelry with new stones. Anything. Come on. Quid bonum? Follow the bucks—

  Damn. Blocked.

  I ran through it again, sifting one cyclopean block of data through another and then chasing down the points where they crossed. Hopping down the money trail. Come on. Forward. Into the Value of Cash. Mammon to the right of them. Wondering, wondering. Forward. It’s definitely one person in charge, I thought. The whole thing was too coherent for groupthink. And as far as who benefited goes, well, that was easy, in a way. Every military contractor in the world benefited. Say it’s one of them. Which one is it? Whose shares went up the most? Or second-most, say. Come on. Say it’s Corporation A. Except Corporation B owns most of Corporation A. But maybe it’s Corporation C that’s really going to benefit, because they’re going to get bought out by Corporation B. Or maybe it’s Corporation D, which is going to make a deal to buy all of them. This way. That way. That way. This way. Hippity, hoppity. Chains of causes. Chains of effects. Russian nesting dolls within nesting dolls. Russian nesting-doll factories full of Siamese nesting dolls. Within Triamese and Tetranese nesting dolls. Come on. Every chain has a crummy link—

  Hmm.

  There was definitely cash there, and it was swirling around something, an outline of a shape—a head, maybe … and I could almost see it emotionally, that is, there wasn’t really a visual, but I got a sense of hatred around it, maybe not even so much from the shape itself, but …

  Yeah. Other people’s hatred.

  He’s an outcast.

  Come on. Think.

  Someone wealthy and powerful whom nobody likes. Someone loathed even by the people on his own side. Someone who was beaten up on the playground. Someone with a twisted face. Someone who’d confirm my worst suspicions. Someone who’s already considered truly evil. By most people, anyway. Some exiled imam? That guy from Myanmar? No, that’s not it. Damn it, am I just getting stupid in my middle age?

  Maybe I couldn’t see it because it was too much what I’d expected. Maybe I’d already discounted it, like the way you might be looking for your car keys all over because you’d checked all your pockets, and then after turning the house inside out you find them in your pocket because in the first ten seconds of looking for them you’d misidentified them as, say, your house keys and not your car keys, and that was enough … well, you know what I mean. Okay, come on. Forward. LEON goes, I go. Chain of events. Chain, chain, chain, chain of food. LEON goes, I go. LEON goes—

  Whoa. There it is.

  Eighteen billion euros. And, really, it was just one transaction. Details clicked reluctantly into place like the tumblers of some big rusty old antique lock. The door groaned open—

  Not Richard. The company.

  Gotcha.

  [67]

  I ’ d kind of expected that the DHS and all the other agencies would have been pretty well paid off and that nothing would happen after we fingered the culprit besides, maybe, them trying to bump us off. But apparently the government still wasn’t quite so monolithic because, amazingly, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the FBI conducted simultaneous raids on Halliburton offices in Houston and Bakersfield, on the KBR building in Harris County, and on twelve offices and a hundred and ten servers owned by either Dyn-Corp or by shell firms controlled by the Carlisle group. 243 people were arrested. And according to Laurence, who’d gotten it from Lindsay, who’d undoubtedly gotten it either from someone very much on the inside or from God, they’d found files relating to aerosolized polonium in four of the raids, and there was a memo in one of the servers that talked about how the centralization of the military was “our number-one rainmaking priority.” I guess the money trail was pretty damning when you had all the details. The short version was that they used a hawala system, which basically just means that everybody’s a member of some big Islamic clan that all trust each other and don’t write anything down. No actual money actually got shipped anywhere. Years before—in 2006, in fact—a couple of hotel owners in Dubai had hired some Moscow-based contractors to build some private highways and airstrips, and they’d let them overcharge a little. The contractors used the money to pay off debts to another firm—probably one of the firms that had merged into Lukoil—which had inherited the undocumented polonium 210 from the original manufacturer. And then the Carlisle people had undercharged the hotel chain a little for construction work on developments in Jordan and Lebanon. And this was spread out over dozens of handshake deals. So you’d think with all that, they could have kept everything under the Isfahan rug. But the fact is that eighteen billion is still a lot, even these days, and most of it will eventually be represented in some deposits somewhere. And with new banking laws and improving search engines, it’s getting easier and easier to search for deposited amounts that match estimates of missing amounts. Once LEON and his counterparts at the DHS knew what they were looking for, they just kept crunching data until eventually they had two patterns—kind of like two thumbprints—that matched enough to convince the judge.

  Even so, though, they hadn’t come up with a warrant for Cheney himself—he was still just a “person of interest”—and, as might be expected, he’d apparently been tipped off and was not to be found.

  And he’s not likely to be, I thought. The cat has more undisclosed locations than the Atlas Missile Program. Even if we worked on him full time, they’d just keep moving him around and we’d probably always be a step behind. Well, I did my job. It was unsatisfying, but things are unsatisfying. Anyway, there’d probably be more coming out about it all later. And that’d bring a lot of other people into the picture and maybe somebody’d drop the dime on him. So far most of the media response to the raids was just speculation, but supposedly there was going to be a big leak later in the week.

  Or I’ll blow the whistle myself, I thought. Just as soon as I get a break from some more immediate problems.

  Things in the wide world had gotten flaky and flakier. Bangladesh was almost completely without electricity, food, water, or law. The Sword of Allah was attacking American bases in Pakistan. FEMA said it had underestimated the number of terminal cases in Florida and that they were now projecting sixty thousand fatalities within the next few years, which would bring the total death toll from the Disney World Horror to a little over a hundred thousand. Or probably about 124,030 people, I thought, give or take. There weren’t enough facilities to take care of them all in the U.S., so the more advanced cases were being shipped overseas, although the State of Florida was already building the world’s largest and most advanced hospice park. So far there’d been fourteen copycat alarms in major cities mimicking the Orlando attack. All of them had turned out to be dry, that is, without any real polonium, but the evacuations had cost billions. Conventional explosives, though, were enjoying a resurg
ence. Two days ago, eighty people had been killed in a second suicide bombing in DeKalb, Illinois. Like a lot of the new bombings, the DeKalb incident had been in two parts—that is, there’d been one large bomb that had taken out a whole dorm building and that the perpetrator had watched through binoculars, and then when that was done, he’d blown himself up with something about the size of a hand grenade. Investigators were pretty sure it was what they were calling “unaffiliated,” that is, it wasn’t ideological but part of a rising trend of suicide bombings by regular folks, people who were just fed up and wanted to take as many classmates, local officials, or coworkers as possible along with them and who, a few years ago, would have to have been satisfied with the handful of people they’d be able to shoot. And worst of all, there was evidence from the Sacrifice Game that the Doomster was on the move.

  By the last day of March LEON’s probability engines were indicating that the world—very roughly speaking—had reached a permanent critical state. That is, human history was at a point where any small disturbance might trigger an avalanche that would flatten the whole sand pile. In terms of the Doomster progression, the implication was that even if we identified and stopped the first (and still hypothetical) lone Doomster, pretty soon there’d be another like him. And there would be more, and at an increasing rate, maybe one every two or three years, say, for a while, and then one every month, and then one every day, and so on into inevitability. And for that matter, even if the first doomster’s actions weren’t a total success—even if it only affected one continent, say—a “casualty event” on that scale was “liable to reduce the functioning of all societies to the point that they will be severely vulnerable to further stresses.” Or as Ashley2 put it, the world’s immune system was drastically compromised, and a cold could be fatal.