Fall

by Rod Rees

  Nevertheless, with her, Maria and Odette wearing burqas, they had managed to sneak through the backstreets of Istanbul, finally finding themselves standing in the shadows of a doorway looking out across the square that abutted CheckPoint Bravo, the second of the three gateways to the JAD. According to Moynahan they were less than half a mile from the Portal, but as best Norma could judge, for all the chance they had of getting through the Wall they might as well have been a hundred miles from it.

  ‘What now?’ Norma asked as they watched the HimPeril patrols march backwards and forwards in front of the gate. ‘We don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of avoiding the HimPeril and from what I’ve been reading in the newspapers I’ve got a feeling that they aren’t in the business of letting six Blanks skedaddle into the JAD.’

  ‘What we need is something to distract the guards,’ muttered Moynahan, and that’s just what ABBA provided.

  *

  Today was the culmination of weeks of planning. Today would be the day when he, Avraham Stern, leader of the Independent Retributive Group of Zealots, showed the Shades – and the JAD’s General Council – that nuJus were prepared to fight for their freedom. But to do that he had to get his fighters out of the JAD and into Istanbul, and that was proving to be difficult.

  The General Council had ordered that no nuJu be permitted to pass through the Wall during the curfew, but as far as Stern was concerned this was just another of the stupid, cowardly regulations designed to prove to the Shades that the nuJus were content in their servility. He would ignore this decree just as he would ignore the Council’s instruction that paramilitary groups like the Zealots were only to act in the protection of the JAD and not to mount offensive operations against the Shades.

  Total bollocks, of course. As Stern saw it, the nuJus were in a war to the death with the Shades, a war in which the Zealots would fight hard. They would not go to their ancestors easily, not when they battled with ABBA, the Lord of Hosts, on their side. Fuck what these old codgers in the Council were saying; now was the time to take the war to the Shades. But first they had to get through Checkpoint Bravo.

  Watching the CheckPoint from a window of a Zealot safe house, Stern and his gang of fighters waited silently for the guard manning the gate to change. The new guard – a Zealot sympathiser – would give them access to NoirVille. The problem for Stern was that he hated waiting. Waiting gave him the jitters. He wanted to act. Pulling his watch out of the pocket of his ankle-length dishdasha tunic, he checked the time, willing it to run faster and cursing that the guard was late. But even as he cursed, a lantern flickered briefly in the window of the gatehouse.

  ‘That’s it. That’s our signal.’ Reining back his eagerness, Stern stood for a moment to allow his fighters to make the final adjustments to their costumes. He had deliberately chosen fighters for the mission who had the same dark skin as Istanbulites, the same black-brown eyes, the same cadence of walking and the same mannerisms. But ever the diligent planner, he had had them schooled in the jive talk so popular in NoirVille and had made sure that they each wore their keffiyeh at the jaunty angle favoured by NoirVillians. And with two of his fighters he’d gone even further, employing a nuJu tailor to run up uniforms that were duplicates of those worn by the waiters working in the Hotel du Zulu.

  Stepping out of the house, Stern waved to Menachem Begin and Judas Maccabeus – the two men to whom he’d given the responsibility for hauling the cart – urging them forward, the cart’s heavily padded wheels shuddering silently over the cobbles, with Stern and the rest of his fighters falling into line behind. And as they scuttled towards the gatehouse Stern found himself holding his breath: breaking cover to get through the gate was one of the most dangerous parts of the entire operation, especially as each of the seven milk churns loaded on the back of the cart contained fifty kilos of blasting gelatin. One mishap and half of the JAD would be reduced to brick dust.

  But ABBA was with them and the gang made it across the fifty metres of open space separating them from CheckPoint Bravo without anything going bang. As they reached the penumbra thrown by the guardhouse lanterns, the guard recognised Stern, nodded a silent greeting and then moved to unbar the gate. Edging it open, Stern peeked out at the square beyond, watching the HimPeril guards as they marched back and forth in front of the Wall, thanking ABBA that their priority was keeping nuJus from entering the JAD rather than preventing them leaving it. Once the guards had their backs to him, he used a lantern to signal to John Giscala, standing a hundred metres further along the Wall. Immediately Giscala lobbed a petrol bomb over the Wall which landed with a ‘woomph’ just in front of the HimPeril guards, leavening the darkness with a gout of flame. As the guards rushed to investigate, Stern waved his Zealot fighters forward, pushing them through the gates and into the dark streets of Istanbul beyond.

  Now they were in enemy territory. Now their mission had begun in earnest.

  *

  There was something almost surreal about what was happening. The last thing Jude Iscariot had ever seen himself as was a terrorist, and yet here he was on his way to bomb NoirVille. He blamed Gelbfisz for the predicament he was in. The Rabbi was too clever by half and this time he had outfoxed himself. Gelbfisz had never really taken the Zealots’ bombast seriously, never really believed they had the mettle to turn any of the wild schemes they’d dreamt up into reality and never really expected them to find the courage to go against the orders of the General Council.

  But they had. And now fifteen Zealot fighters – or more accurately, fourteen Zealot fighters and one bloody reluctant Jude Iscariot – were on their way to bomb the Hotel du Zulu and precipitate a war in the process. It was a bloody nightmare. He had tried to feign a sudden illness to avoid participating in this madness but Stern would have none of it and had insisted that, ill or not, he join the attack.

  Jude had to do something to stop the Stern gang and do it quickly. In less than an hour these maniacs would blow the centre of Istanbul to Hel and beyond, taking any chance of the nuJus maintaining peace with the Shades along with it. Desperately Jude tried to think of a way out of the jam he was in. What he actually needed was an injury: nothing too debilitating, of course, just something serious enough to persuade Stern that he was hors de combat and to leave him behind. And once he was out of Stern’s sight he would raise the alarm.

  Inspiration came. He edged closer to the side of the cart and then pretended to stumble, pushing his foot under the wheel as he went, judging a couple of broken toes as nothing when compared with the maintenance of peace. What he had forgotten was that the cart was laden with three hundred and fifty kilos of high explosive. Though the shock of the cart running over his foot didn’t cause the explosive hidden in the milk churns to detonate, it was heavy enough to smash his foot to pulp. There was a loud crack closely followed by a loud scream and Jude began to writhe around on the ground in spasms of genuine agony.

  Stern knelt down beside him, examining the foot. He shook his head. ‘Not good, Jude. It’s broken.’

  No fucking kidding!

  ‘Leave me here, Avraham,’ Jude whimpered, ‘I’m no good to you crippled. Just leave me.’

  Again Stern shook his head. ‘We can’t do that, Jude, not now we’re in enemy territory. Load him onto the cart, boys. If Jude can’t walk then we’ll have to carry him.’

  And much to Jude’s horror, that’s just what they did.

  *

  Stern refused to be troubled by Iscariot’s injury. During war there were always casualties, and anyway, from what he’d seen of the man, Jude Iscariot wasn’t much of a fighter. Fighters didn’t moan about the state of their indigestion like Iscariot had done and didn’t get their feet mashed by cart wheels. If he hadn’t known better he’d have thought the man didn’t want to be a Zealot.

  But other than this little mishap everything was going exactly to plan. The timing of the attack was, in Stern’s opinion, perfect. The sun was rising in the east, and the MuscleMen had just begun calling Be
lievers to exercise from the minaret of the HIMnasium across the square. Now was the time when the HimPeril sentries guarding the hotel would be at their most inattentive, the combination of tiredness, heat and boredom making their concentration lapse and their eyelids droop. All they would be thinking about would be going back to their barracks to have breakfast.

  Although it was still early, the streets of Istanbul were already crowded and crowds made excellent cover for an operation like this one. The days were so hot that NoirVillians had decided to rise early, to get to their places of work while it was still relatively cool and to put in a few hours’ graft before the heat made life unbearable. The marketplace bordering the Wall was already alive with people, no one giving Stern and his fighters so much as a glance as they joined this near-dawn throng and shuffled and pushed their way along the narrow streets in the direction of the hotel.

  Mixing unnoticed with the crowd, Stern’s fighters moved down a side road that bordered Taksim Square then, turning a corner, found themselves looking out on the magnificent Hotel du Zulu. This was their target, the grandest and most luxurious hotel in the whole of the Demi-Monde, the place where NoirVille’s haut monde gathered to wine, dine and socialise. But the hotel’s mystique wasn’t just built on the excellence of its cuisine or the grandeur of its rooms, it was built on intrigue: the HimPeril had commandeered the west wing of the hotel to serve as their headquarters. It was there – according to Agent Neizvestnii – that Doge William had had the documents detailing the secrets of Aqua Benedicta delivered. By destroying the hotel Stern would kill two birds with one stone: he would ensure the Shades were deprived of the secrets of manufacturing Aqua Benedicta and bomb the heart out of the HimPeril.

  For almost a minute Stern stood in silence on the pavement across the road from the hotel, studying it, assessing it. For the first time he truly understood the enormity of the task he had set himself. The Hotel du Zulu was huge, its walls faced with red quartz that glowed in the light cast by the rising sun, this tint supposedly denoting the huge amount of blood it had cost to build such a magnificent edifice. Most importantly, though, Stern’s observations confirmed that his cryptos’ assessment of the hotel’s defences was correct. Security around the west wing was tight, this evidenced by the guards stomping backwards and forwards in front of the wing’s entrance doors, and all those arriving at the HimPeril’s headquarters having their identification papers scrupulously checked by the guards. But the barbed wire, the guards, the patrols and the heat had lulled the HimPeril into thinking that tucked up so snugly in the hotel they were safe. They weren’t, and by concentrating their security forces into one place they had made themselves a very tempting and a very convenient target. And anyway, there was always a back entrance.

  He turned to his second-in-command, Menachem Begin, who was waiting impatiently by the cart. ‘It’s time, Menachem. May ABBA be with you.’

  ‘What about Jude?’ Begin asked, nodding towards the injured Iscariot, who was laid out on the cart.

  ‘Put him on a chair in that café over there. We’ll collect him on the way back.’ He gave Jude Iscariot a beaming smile. ‘You’ll have a ringside seat, Jude, when the hotel goes up in smoke.’

  *

  Once Jude Iscariot had been settled in the café, Begin and Maccabeus, both of them dressed as dairymen, pushed the cart around the back of the hotel to the kitchen entrance. Stern followed them, anxious to confirm that this entrance had only the usual single soldier guarding it. It had.

  Trundling the cart in front of him, Begin approached the Shade and gave him a cheery wave. ‘Got a delivery of milk,’ he announced, nodding towards the seven churns.

  The Shade frowned. ‘Yo’ awful early today, man. An’ where’s de regular milkman?’

  ‘He’s ill,’ Begin replied with a smile, which became increasingly forced as the Shade started to inspect the churns.

  ‘Hey, man, why’s de tops ob de churns padlocked?’

  ‘To keep the detonators in place,’ answered Judas Maccabeus as he rammed a blade through the guard’s neck.

  Even before the man had stopped twitching, Begin had hauled the cart up to the door, where he gave a loud whistle, at the sound of which the rest of the attack group materialised out of the shadows. Immediately they got busy transferring the milk churns from the back of the cart into the hotel, along the corridors that snaked into the depths of the building, and finally to the kitchens.

  Then things started to go wrong. Never having worked in the catering business, Stern had thought that so early in the morning the kitchens would be deserted but instead he found them hives of activity. As he cautiously eased open the kitchen door he saw chefs labouring over griddles and steaming pans, and waiters busily laying breakfast trays for guests determined to make an early start to the day. He waved his fighters inside without being challenged, the kitchen staff so engrossed in their work that it took a few moments for them to appreciate that their kitchen had been invaded by a dozen heavily armed men. Their realisation was signalled by one of the waiters dropping a tray.

  ‘What de fuck is yous about, man?’ snarled one of the chefs but his criticisms of the waiter were silenced when he saw Stern standing in the doorway brandishing a revolver.

  ‘We are fighters of the Independent Retributive Group of the Zealots, dedicated to fight and die for the nuJu cause,’ Stern announced in a loud voice. ‘Do not resist or attempt to raise the alarm or you will be silenced. We mean you no harm but are on a mission to free the JAD from the evil clutches of NoirVille.’

  The chef was singularly unimpressed. ‘Fuck you, man. Yous can’t do dat. Yous gonna fuck up mah breakfast schedule and ah ain’t never bin late—’

  His objections were terminated when Judas Maccabeus whacked him over the back of the head with the butt of his rifle. There were no further objections – in fact, when Stern ordered that ‘All hotel staff are to sit facing the far wall with their hands on their heads’ there was a scramble to obey. As soon as all the hostages were settled, Stern signalled to his fighters to position the churns, one alongside each of the seven concrete pillars that supported the west wing of the hotel.

  ‘Set the fuses for thirty minutes,’ Stern ordered, but even as his fighters bustled to prepare the bombs, the dilemma posed by having so many hostages suddenly came home to him. If he and his fighters were to leave the hotel now, undoubtedly the kitchen staff would raise the alarm, but the alternative – killing them – was too brutal to be even considered.

  He considered it anyway. But even as he stood there in the sweltering kitchen preparing to order his fighters to sacrifice the twenty or so chefs, busboys, kitchen porters and waiters in the cause of nuJu freedom, Fate took matters into its own hands.

  1:18

  Istanbul District: NoirVille

  The Demi-Monde: 7th Day of Fall, 1005

  1.6. Having built the Nine Worlds, ABBA rested, having put in what He regarded as a full shift. 1.7. And inspecting the worlds He had wrought, ABBA decided that His favourite was the Demi-Monde as it was built in accordance with the principles of Cool, so there weren’t no square circles, four-sided triangles, effect coming before cause or any of that other surrealist shit you see on some of the worlds built by lesser gods. Which is just as well ’cos ABBA ain’t hip to disorder and chaos: it gives Him a headache and makes His ass itch.

  The HIM Book, Book of the Coming: Chapter 1, Verses 6–7

  Left by himself in the café with just a cup of coffee for company, Jude Iscariot’s brain whirled, trying to think of what would be the best thing to do. Somehow he had to stop the attack and unfortunately the only way he could see of doing that was to betray the Zealots to the Shades. Not an enticing proposition as it would be an act that would for ever brand him as a traitor to the nuJu cause, but Gelbfisz had been very insistent that Stern’s fighters be prevented from provoking the Shades. Nothing was to be done to goad the Shades into attacking the JAD, and as goads went, blowing up the Hotel du Zulu was akin to stic
king an assegai right up HimPeror Xolandi’s arse.

  Two cups of coffee in, Jude decided on a course of action. He scribbled a note on a page of his notebook, pulled a ten-lira note out of his pocket and then gestured to one of the waiters. ‘If you take this to the nearest HimPeril guard and bring him to the café I’ll give you another ten.’

  The waiter gawped. Ten lira was a fortune, so, after checking that the banknote was genuine, he rushed off in the direction of the HimPeril guardhouse. A breathless HimPeril agent arrived a couple of minutes later.

  *

  ‘You de wun who sent dis note, man?’ panted HimPeril Agent Solomon Edu as he bustled his way into the café. He wasn’t a happy man. He was an agent who did what he was told by his sergeant and tried to keep his nose clean, having realised a long time ago that he wasn’t built for dealing with off-beat action, which didn’t come any off-beatier than the note the waiter had delivered. But as he’d been the only agent in the guardhouse when the waiter had arrived, he’d had no alternative but to demonstrate initiative. The trouble he had was that his sergeant wasn’t a great believer in initiative; he put more store in his agents simply following fucking orders. Unfortunately for Edu, there hadn’t been anyone around to issue any orders, fucking or otherwise.

  In response to Edu’s question the scumbag sitting at the table gave an enthusiastic nod. ‘Yes. And right now nuJu Zealots are mounting a bomb attack on the Hotel du Zulu!’

  Edu stroked his chin. This was serious shit … serious if this item could be believed. He glanced over to the hotel, which seemed, in his opinion, to be mighty quiet for a place under attack by terrorists. Edu had the troubling feeling that he was being set up. And anyway this note-writing item looked too much like a nuJu for Edu’s liking and everyone knew that nuJus were tricky fuckers.