Comeback Tour

by Jack Yeovil

  He wriggled into his black silk robe, and got out of the bed. Captain Machsler would be here soon. They had talked over the phone earlier, and arranged a time for the meeting.

  He considered the sombre black Josephite outfit hanging in the closet, but opted for a lightweight tropical number.

  Simone lay on her back under the nets, stretching out like a long, thin cat. She had been an honour student. Math, Chem and Geology. She had had a place waiting for her at Tallahatchie Tech when the indenture men came for her.

  Duroc saw a cockroach, easily seven inches long, scuttling out from under the double bed. He bent over swiftly, and pinched the insect between thumb and forefinger. Simone ughed in revulsion and he held it up, its six legs wriggling in the air, mandibles working. The creature was fascinating, monstrous. It twisted round, trying to clamp some flesh in its mildy-venomed jaws. Duroc held it carefully, and smiled.

  “Ladybug, ladybug,” he cooed, “fly away home…”

  He dropped it into his barely sipped drink, and prodded it down past the icecubes and the fruit chunks with the plastic stirrer. Then, he clamped a coaster over the top of the glass, and watched the insect drown. It took a long time. The new breed of cockroaches were hard to kill.

  “Your house is on fire, your children are gone…”

  Finally, the thing stopped kicking and floated dead in the drink.

  Simone was watching him with a horrid fascination.

  “Why do you do that?”

  Duroc took off the coaster, and gulped down a swallow of bug-flavoured cocktail.

  “Whenever you kill something, it makes you more alive.”

  The girl didn’t question his answer.

  There was a knock at the door. Simone made a pull for the quilt, drawing it up over her nakedness. Duroc signed to her to lie there still, and opened the door.

  Machsler was out of uniform, but was unmistakably a soldier even in jeans and T-shirt. The shirt bore a familiar survivalist logo. “Kill ’Em All—Let God Sort ’Em Out.” The officer held a battered briefcase, and wore a cowboy-style sidearm slung in a leather holster on his hip.

  “Mr Duroc?”

  “Elder Duroc.”

  Machsler shook his hand, and sidled into the room, looking over his shoulder. Duroc gently closed the door.

  The soldier looked around, as if expecting a gang of Maniax to be lurking in the closet. He stared at Simone.

  “Don’t mind Mademoiselle Scarlet,” Duroc said. “She’s an old friend.”

  Machsler obviously wasn’t sure about that, but decided he could live with it. He hadn’t met the same person twice since Seth got him on the hook, so he must be used to nervous situations.

  “Can I get you a drink? Some iced tea? Co-Cola?”

  The soldier shook his head, and paced the room like a caged tiger. Duroc noticed he kept his hands above his waist. That way he would have a chance to get one up in front of his adam’s apple if someone looped a cheesecutter over his head. The Special Forces trained its people thoroughly.

  “You have the money?”

  Duroc patted his top pocket.

  “Good.”

  “You have the merchandise?”

  Machsler held up the briefcase. It had a fancy lock attached to the old leather.

  “Then we can do business?”

  The soldier sat down, case in his lap. He was sweating, and scratching at the bites on his forearms. He was tattooed with the symbol and number of his unit, and his blood group and medical details.

  “Are you from New Orleans?” he asked.

  Duroc shrugged. “My accent, you mean? No. I am from Paris, France. But that was a long time ago. I am a citizen of Deseret, now.”

  Machsler was satisfied. The officer was the captain of the high school football team, ten or fifteen years on, fighting to keep his ball-player’s body despite too many gassy beers, greasy chilli dogs and butt-flattening hours at a desk. All those “i” sound girls had been over him like a cheap suit when he was a kid, but those days were past. Maybe he had an expensive wife, who insisted on being called by her full “a” sound name. Not Cyndi but Cynthia, not Mindy but Miranda. Probably, he wanted to send his kids to a pricey PZ school with well-dressed killers as security guards, not to some public hellhole where the blackboard monitors forced fourteen-year-olds to turn tricks in the lunch hours, the canteen had a semi-official smacksynth dealer and the school clinic knew more about abortions than grazed knees. America still had dreams, but these days the pricetag was high. Too high for honest public servants.

  “Look, it’s not my business,” began Machsler, “but what do you want with this stuff? It’s fifteen-twenty years out of date. Very low priority.”

  “You are right. It is none of your business.”

  “Okay, okay.” The soldier was regretting his involvement in this transaction. Duroc could see that it was problematic for the man.

  Nguyen Seth had been cultivating Captain Ronald Machsler for three years now, pulling him towards the Faustian bargain all men must make. At first, it had been the usual army surplus scam. The Elder’s agents had approached the Captain and offered him a good price for ammunition, slightly behind-the-state-of-the-art weaponry and bulk supplies of medicinal drugs. The Church of Joseph had its own supplies of those commodities, of course, but Captain Machsler had to get used to dealing with the Devil, had to get in deep enough not to kick when the real bite came. They had tested him by asking for confidential documents. Troop dispositions along the Rio Grande Wall, the codenames and cover identities of some military intelligence personnel in Managua, the routes of some nuclear waste convoys. It was stuff Seth had no interest in, but Duroc had cast an interested eye over the material, and disseminated it on the underground nets. A minor gangcult took out one of the convoys and, for thirty-eight hours, were in possession of enough weapons-grade plutonium to win them a seat at the United Nations. Turner-Harvest-Ramirez put them out of business, but the raid served to convince Captain Machsler that he was deep into Seth’s pocket. Since then, they had been blinding him with silly requests, for almost random information. Having been forced to dredge up a lot of barely-classified documents about long-abandoned plans for military intervention in Central America and rejected designs for long-range missile transportation, Machsler was thoroughly confused. He must be putting his current commission down to the same quixotic interest in military ephemera, which was just what Seth wanted. There would be a few more blind requests over the next year, just to keep the soldier in the dark, but this was the important leak. Duroc was taking personal receipt of this briefcase.

  He slipped the cashcard out of his pocket, and laid it on the coffee table. The hologram shimmered in the light. It was real gold. Machsler whistled unconsciously.

  “A pay rise?”

  “You do good work, Ronald. Elder Seth thinks you deserve it.”

  Machsler reached, and then froze. He put his hand back on the briefcase. He flushed. Underneath his bee-fuzz crewcut, his scalp glowed red.

  Duroc raised his drink in a toast. The soldier goggled at the bug slowly revolving in the glass.

  Machsler got up, and put the briefcase down by Duroc’s chair. Then he took the cashplastic, slipped it into his back pocket and sat down.

  Duroc tapped the access code into the lock, and opened the case. The file was brittle cardboard, full of yellowing papers. He cast an eye over the top few sheets. There were some wiring diagrams and, essentially, a page of deep-buried codewords.

  “Are you sure you won’t have that drink?”

  “Positive.”

  There was an embarrassed moment. Obviously, Machsler wanted to leave, to get as far away from the hotel as possible, but felt he had to stay for form’s sake.

  Simone got out of bed and walked across the room to the fridge. Machsler’s eyes followed her, but Duroc could not tell whether he was fixing on her body in general or the marks on her back in particular.

  “You play rough, eh?” he said, with a weak smile
.

  Duroc was offended by the soldier’s presumption. He sipped his drink. “Sometimes.”

  Machsler got up, and edged towards the door. “I have a gondola waiting,” he said. “I have to be back in base by nineteen hundred hours.”

  “Goodbye, Ronald.”

  “Goodbye, Elder. It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

  “Likewise.”

  Machsler closed the door behind him, and Simone poured herself another tumbler of mineral water. Her body was finely sheened with perspiration. She was displaying herself to him, as she had been taught. She was a good little indenture girl.

  Duroc was more interested in the papers Machsler had brought him. He would have to supervise the reconnection. Fonvielle was too far gone to be much help in that department. The Church had its experts on call, but Duroc would have to oversee the project.

  “What are you reading?”

  Simone was standing with her hip cocked, weight on one leg, a red-nailed hand idly scratching her flat lower belly. She was obviously posing, a private pornosnap for the customers.

  “These are the instructions for a machine we’ve just bought. They tell me how to light the blue touch paper and retire…”

  That was over the girl’s head.

  He had an idea. “Simone,” he said, “have you ever been to Florida?”

  “Izumi took me to Daytona Beach for a convention once. We stayed in the hotel most of the time. There was a kumite contest, one of those to-the-death pyramid games. Gen Tech were sponsoring a fighter they’d tricked out with bio-bits. The fighter won, but was too damaged to appear in the teevee ads. Izumi was furious.”

  She ran her finger along her thigh, outlining a barely visible scar.

  “When Izumi was furious, he was a beast.”

  Regular as a digital watch, it started to rain outside. New Orleans was a monsoon zone. It was something to do with the Winter Corporation’s chemical synthetics plant, Duroc had heard. From three till five every afternoon, thick sheets of scalding, corrosive rain fell on the city. Everyone had worked the indoor siesta into their lives. Duroc wondered if Machsler’s gondolier was caught in the downpour.

  “How much would it cost to buy your indenture contract from Mink Hat?”

  Simone looked frightened. “I don’t think he wants to sell. I’m new in the stable, and I bring in…”

  Duroc finished his drink, stranding the dead cockroach in the melting icecubes. “He’ll sell. The Church is persuasive, and rich.”

  “Do you want to…” she couldn’t get the word out… “to buy me, m’sieu?”

  Duroc nodded. “I’m moving to Florida for the next few months. I would be honoured if you would come with me?”

  “Are we going to Daytona? Miami?”

  “No. We’re going to a little place you may not have heard of. It was quite famous once, before you were born. It’s a little place called…”

  V

  “… Cape Canaveral?”

  “It’s in Northern Florida,” said the smart, sharp-suited young woman.

  “I know where it is,” snapped the Op. “I just haven’t heard the name for a long time. That’s the place where the moon rockets used to take off, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Elvis looked at Krokodil, and found her as inexpressive as a statue. She was young, pretty and dressed in a conservative skirt and jacket, dark grey with a fine pinstripe. Immaculately made-up, her only really distinctive feature was the eyepatch half-concealed by a wing of raven-black hair. She was attractive, but there was something hard, almost scary, about her. Elvis had known cyborgs in the services, and there was something of the biomechanical about Krokodil. Her handshake had been a bone-crusher; he wondered how much of her was real, how much from the lab? She spoke perfect English, like an amnesiac who has had to relearn everything as an adult, but there was an occasional NoGo twist to her vocabulary. Krokodil hadn’t been born to the style she was sporting.

  The man was easier to take. Dressed in dusty denims, with a weathered face and a black pigtail, he was a Navaho. He had introduced himself as Hawk-That-Settles. Elvis had had a Cherokee great-great-great grandmother, Morning Dove White. As a teenager, watching Western movies from a pickup in the Tupelo Drive-In, he had been torn between his loyalties to the cowboy heroes all the fellows tried to imitate in speech and manner and his yearning for the Indian’s life. One of his few regrets about quitting the movies is that he never did get to play the half-Kiowa hero of Flaming Star, the only decent script that got past the Colonel to him. John Saxon had been okay in the picture, but Elvis knew he would have been better.

  Hawk was the talker, but Krokodil put over the punchlines.

  They were meeting in a diner in Whitehaven, a Southern suburb of Memphis. Elvis knew the place well, and often used it as an office for the Hound Dog Agency. Gracelands, the mansion he had owned in the music days, was five blocks down, owned by a CAF auxiliary, the Church of Jesus Christ, Caucasian.

  Cape Canaveral?

  “Isn’t that under water?”

  Hawk smiled. “Yep, but only a foot or so. They threw up them walls along the Indian River Coast when the Cape was still NASA’s head office. They leak a little bit, but you can walk around with your head out of the water.”

  “What about the diseases? And the skeeters?”

  “Not much we can do about them, is there?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Cissy, the waitress, came by and refilled Elvis’ and Hawk’s recaff cups. Krokodil still hadn’t touched hers. The Op wondered if she needed to take nourishment at all, or whether a few hours jacked into the mains would juice her up.

  “You ready to order?” Cissy asked, simpering a little. Elvis reckoned she was a little sweet on him.

  Elvis went for the jambalaya, Krokodil had the crawfish pie and Hawk picked the fillet gumbo. If you’re in the South, you eat Southern.

  When Cissy had wiggled her plump ass back to the kitchen, Elvis got back down to business.

  “I’m still not quite straight on this, ma’am? What is this job? Courier, bodyguard, shotgun?”

  Krokodil explained patiently. “The job is whatever the job is, Colonel Presley. I have to make a trip to the Cape, and we would like you to come along to deal with any hazardous eventualities that might arise.”

  “We’re way out of our territory, Colonel,” said Hawk. “I’m from Arizona, and Jessamyn… Krokodil, I mean… is from Denver, originally. We’re more used to sand than swamp. You must be familiar with the terrain, and with its dangers?”

  Elvis knew what Hawk meant. “Uh-huh. Hazardous eventualities is what we have a bellyfull of. The further you get into the swamps, the harder it is, mister. You know about the skeeters and the speedboat gangcults, I guess. But there are other things out there. Lice the size of dogs…”

  “You mean the trilobites?”

  “Yeah, living fossils. Nasty li’l things. They take a chew on your arm and you’re out of the game for a few months. And who knows what other things are coming back to the bayous? It’s a regular primordial ooze out there. GenTech and the other corps have been dumping their toxic goop into the swamps for years, and weird things have been breeding. The way I hear it, the big lice ain’t the only living fossils you’ve got to worry about.”

  “We are familiar with the weird,” said Krokodil in a way that struck the Op as being seriously chilly.

  “Then you’ve got your hostile natives. Them Cajuns are strange. One quarter French, one quarter Injun—no offence, man—one quarter skunk and one quarter ’gator. Sometimes, they like you, and kill you straight off. Other times, you’re not so lucky and they invite all their cousins over for a party. I’ve got a few friends. I do favours whenever I can. But friendships don’t stretch very far away from the PZs. There are lots of paranoid little communities on islands. People have been trying to clear them out and make them change their ways ever since the pirate days when Andy Jackson tried to make ’em all dance ’possum up a gumtre
e’ on the end of a rope. They don’t like strangers. You and me, we’re strangers.”

  Krokodil didn’t seem impressed. Elvis felt he owed them the full scare story before he took the commission.

  “So, if you’re really going to make this trip, then you’d better have a damn good reason for it.”

  “I have a good reason,” Krokodil said, offering no more.

  “And I need to know what it is.”

  There was a pause.

  “That’s a problem,” said the Indian.

  “It’s easily solved. I’ve got two ears, and I’ve heard a lot of unbelievable stories in my time.”

  Krokodil brushed her hair away from her eyepatch. “I’m trying to salvage some equipment left behind when the space program closed down.”

  “Valuable equipment,” underlined Hawk.

  “It would have to be. If my cut is a million dollars, then you must stand to clear… what… ten? Twenty? More?”

  “I will not profit personally.”

  “Lady, that I don’t believe.”

  “You can believe it or not, but it’s the truth.”

  Looking into her clear, green eye, Elvis was sure that it was. Not the whole truth, but a goodly chunk of it.

  “This sounds straightforward, then. Dangerous, but straightforward. You must have a few details you want to tell me. The gig has to have some complications. At least a million bucks’ worth, if I’m any judge.”

  The food arrived. Hawk hungrily spooned his into his mouth. Krokodil left hers alone.

  “The Cape is owned by the Josephite Church. They bought it from the government last year.”

  Elvis looked at the Indian. “The Salt Lake City crowd? What do they want with a stretch of real estate under a foot of stagnant water?”

  Hawk shrugged. “Who knows? The Josephites are crazies.”

  The Indian had spoken just a hair too quickly, had been just a mite too dismissive.

  “They seem to be doing all right by their Deseret, though. I hear that they’ve been raising crops where everybody says that can’t be done.”

  “I do not underestimate the Josephites,” said Krokodil. “They are dangerous. They are hostile to me.”