One.
The bomb detonated with a loud bang, but it didn’t go off in the office as Atlas had planned. The scent of gasoline and burnt paint drifted toward him. He traced the odors to a burning car parked down below. Atlas swore in earnest. Someone must have thrown the bomb. But who?
Once outside, he could sense dawn approaching. He wasn’t ready to fold. He still had one more explosive.
Atlas glided back to the window and flew inside. A friendly face was there to greet him. ‘Moira?’ Atlas frowned.
She pressed something rubbery into his hand. It was a mask. ‘It was all a trick.’
For the first time in a long time, Atlas was grateful he had put his faith into another bloodstalker. Then he asked the one question he already knew the answer to. ‘Who did it? Who…’
‘Martha.’
‘Is she―’
Moira smirked. ‘We’ll keep her alive for you.’
He coughed uncomfortably. ‘Guess we have a date.’
‘Guess so.’
Atlas transformed one more time and sailed off into the failing moonlight. As he bolted toward his haven in the open desert, he burst with anticipation. It didn’t matter what Dr. Sage had planned. All he could think about was that Martha’s nightmares were about to come true.
Bad Beat for Aaron Burr
Kenneth Hite
Ray Cazador walked into the casino on Bedloe’s Island like he was doing it a favor. Head tilted up, eyes cool, arms akimbo, feet pointed out and forward, just that much short of a swagger in the legs. He didn’t mind all the faces turned to look at his―literally nobody in the world knew who he was. He wanted to see them, see who else they looked at, get some data to run a solution, to point him toward his target. Only Troutman might have guessed that someone like him might be there, might have looked for someone tonight, and Cazador didn’t rate Troutman’s guesswork very high. Cazador especially wanted Troutman to look, which was why he’d brought the girl.
She cost two thousand New Dollars a night, and even in this New York that was a lot of money. She was worth a look: tall and leggy, blonde and slightly imperious, with killer cheekbones and no tits. She wasn’t Cazador’s type. She was Troutman’s type, if his browser history was anything to go by. Leggy, thin-waisted blondes and poker—mostly the virtual version of both—were apparently how Troutman killed the idle hour back on the Earth with an Internet.
Troutman’s browser had been scrupulously clean of any searches or file dumps on the other Earths. Troutman had either been smart enough to do all his alt-historical research on a dump palmtop or stupid enough not to do any research, to take whatever the Bridgekeeper was selling under the table in a quick hop to any Earth with dentistry and air conditioning. Cazador thought it was most likely the former. Stealing your turbine designs from the company that owned them and hitting a Bridge was only profitable if you knew something about your new Earth’s industrial capacity, and stupid people generally don’t keep turbine designs in their heads. Then again, hydrodynamic engineering and being a cross-world fugitive were two very different skill sets.
For example, a key rule for cross-world fugitives is: ‘Stay away from your past’. Not just your personal past—finding out what Mom is doing on this Earth is a great way to get rattled and get caught—but your Earth’s past. For some reason, runners stop and gawk at places that aren’t famous on their new Earth, wide spots in the Potomac marshes where the Lincoln Memorial should be, that kind of thing. On this Earth, France wouldn’t give a statue to the whipped-dog United States when it could kiss up to the Empire that Aaron Burr had built in Mexico. So this New York had a casino in the old fort on Bedloe’s Island, and Gustave Eiffel’s Statue of Fraternity stood in Veracruz harbor. But Troutman wouldn’t be in Veracruz, or anywhere else in El Imperio Mexicano. For one thing, Troutman didn’t speak any Spanish. Troutman’s politics probably ruled out the Confederacy, which was even poorer and more insular than this Earth’s United States anyway. It wasn’t impossible that Troutman had already gone north to Canada, cut a deal with the British. But not likely. In Troutman’s place, Cazador would want the security of ‘neutral ground’ to negotiate any deal like that. And Troutman would need to get his legs under him in the new Earth. He’d be looking for something familiar and safe: poker.
All of this gave Cazador more than enough reason to bring the girl here to the Harbor Casino to flush his quarry. So he filled her slim hand with chips and sent her off to draw some attention: Troutman’s, ideally, but any attention would do. As heads predictably turned to watch the girl cross the casino floor, Cazador let his shoulders slump, shrugged his dinner jacket out of true, and turned his toes inward. He lowered his chin a fraction of an inch, ran disarranging fingers through his hair, and then let both hands drop like they were used to heavy burdens. By the time Cazador picked his diffident way to a corner, nobody bothered looking at him at all. If they did, they would never connect this slouching nonentity with the expensive blonde now laughing by the ten-dollar poker tables, drawing every male glance in the room.
Setting his point on the girl, Cazador watched her watchers. He watched the crowd form and re-form as she moved through the gamblers, the swells, the servants, and the sharks. Cazador read marriages creaking under the strain of her, read high rollers mentally figuring the number of her nights they could afford, read waiters reveling in the perks of working tonight and pit bosses taking the opportunity to switch dice. When he saw the snatch-and-grab men, he noticed them first by the off-green of their jackets. Casino guard jackets were darker, less olive. The snatchers didn’t match the crowd, either. They weren’t responding with their neighbors but to a signaler—there. And who was he looking for? Right, the swell who probably rode or swam and, on second look, carried himself like a fencer or even a kickboxer. Track back along the fencer’s line of sight, then, past the girl to the man gripping his bright pink New Dollars too tightly, staring at the girl and gulping like he’d forgotten about oxygen. Cazador started to move, because the man was Troutman. Cazador was apparently not the only hunter at this particular watering hole.
The fencer’s men had a better position, blocking the approaches around the poker table and moving toward Troutman careless of who they shouldered or what they spilled. Troutman was so gaffed by the sight of the girl that he didn’t react until the second thug grabbed his other elbow. His reaction became a noiseless squeak when the strength of that grab showed itself. Cazador couldn’t get there without vaulting a table or two, so he redirected toward the fencer, timing his arrival for the start of the snatchers’ come-along. One casino guard, either not paid off or not remembering it, started moving about then. The fencer nodded his third man into action. At that moment, Cazador shoved a fortyish woman in the small of her back, sending her tilting past the fencer and spilling her drink on his right arm. Still looking like just another staring rube in the crowd, Cazador ducked around the fencer as he turned. He made the brush lift while the woman somehow protested and apologized simultaneously, her flat New England voice soon just part of a clattering wave of chaos expanding outward into the casino floor. Those disarrayed in the wake of the snatchers were gathering their own dudgeons and dignities now that the disturbing large men were moving safely away.
The snatchers moved away toward a set of doors Cazador had already scouted as leading back to a rear loading area. The fencer moved toward his lieutenant and the insufficiently bribed guard, a pink bill peeking out of his tanned fingers. Cazador knifed for the front doors, suddenly a man to defer to with his head slightly tilted and his right shoulder slightly forward; a hunting predator stance. Without knowing precisely why, people got out of Cazador’s way. Cazador would have liked to try circling around and prying Troutman out of his predicament before the kidnappers could finish the snatch, but he reluctantly discarded the idea. The jackets and the loading doors showed at least some preparation on the fencer’s part, likely including a boat and one or two more men waiting for their prize. But the jackets had
n’t been close enough, when another day could have made them perfect. Cazador knew that, because he had a complete suit of Harbor Casino livery hanging in his closet back at the hotel. Which showed something else: the fencer was audacious and improvisational to the point of overconfidence.
Cazador could use that, but first he had to pin the fencer down a little more. In the water taxi on the way back to Manhattan, Cazador opened the fencer’s wallet and read the name: Don Vicente Teodoro Garcia Estancia y Jackson. Mexican near-royalty, then. Then Cazador read the printing above the name: Ministeria Confidential de la Emperador. Don Vicente was near royalty in more ways than his blood: he worked for the Confidential Ministry of His Imperial Majesty Aaron IV Burr. And he was so sure he was untouchable he kidnapped people right off of casino floors in a foreign country. Audacious, indeed, although Cazador suspected there wasn’t a lot these United States could do about it even if Troutman had been an American citizen on this Earth. But Don Vicente carried his ministerial credentials on his kidnapping jaunts. To the point of overconfidence, then—and perhaps a good way past it.
***
Even, or perhaps especially, in this New York City, finding a store selling dodgy merchandise late at night was no problem. Cazador stopped at the second one he passed and bought a self-developing Eastman camera along with enough extra film packs to get him past any alter-tech stumbles. At an all-night dime store, Cazador picked up some cheap paper and envelopes, a fountain pen with its own ink reservoir, and a roll of quarters with James G. Blaine’s head on them. The next stop was a phone booth with a good view of the street in both directions. Cazador laid out his coins and started calling hotels. It only took three calls to find out ‘Mister Estancia’ was registered at the Astoria: no low-profile safe houses for this not-very-secret agent.
Back in his room, he photographed Don Vicente’s credentials until he had a print showing no part of the desk. He put that photograph into an envelope addressed to ‘Don Vicente Estancia y Jackson, Hotel Astoria’, along with one of Don Vicente’s visiting-cards and the money from Don Vicente’s wallet. Around that packet, he folded a note:
Your Excellency and I have inadvertently obtained one another’s property. If you wish to discuss repatriation, I shall make myself available at the Harbor Casino tonight at eight o’clock.
Calling a bellboy and giving him a tenner to mail the envelope from Grand Central Station took only a few minutes. Cazador had cut the fellow out of the herd a week ago, marking his high intelligence and low scruples. Then he took off his shoes, his shirt studs, and his dinner jacket, and laid down for a few hours’ sleep.
The next morning, Cazador shaved and dressed in his Harbor Casino guard’s uniform and packed his dinner jacket, trousers, and dress shoes in a garment bag. Taking a tram down to the Battery, he stood with arms pointed in and shoulders back; he was a working stiff who neither needed nor desired any interaction. Lighting a cigarette and striding with bored disinterest, he walked into the casino and back into the guards’ locker room uninterrupted. There he hung his garment bag in a vacant locker, put on a padlock of his own, and strolled out to begin his self-appointed rounds. After briefly inserting himself into his shift-mates’ eye-line a few times, he put on a beleaguered expression, picked up a handy clipboard, and headed for the rear loading area the Imperial agents had used the night before.
It’s not quite true that you can go anywhere on any Earth with only a clipboard as your credential. In Cazador’s experience, you also needed a look of slow-burning exasperation, something which told the world you would rather be anywhere else and, if given half a chance, would expatiate on that theme for up to an hour. As it happened, nobody seemed willing to risk that hour of their time, so Cazador was able to stake out the rear loading dock. Boats, mostly loaded with food and drink, pulled up from Jersey and Manhattan and Brooklyn and unloaded cargo. Some dropped off more staff: janitors, clerks, and such. Some of them greeted the guard watching the boats unload, a short man with fat hands and an unattractive rill of hair on his collar. Most of them avoided him. Cazador watched all of this and, on his occasional stroll down to the pier with a smoke, listened. Once he bummed a cigarette from the guard, whose name was Emmett, and whose expression of meaningless injustice suffered in imperfect silence matched his own. Forty minutes and three cigarettes later, he had a very full picture of the casino’s security and staff situation, albeit as seen through Emmett’s jaundiced eye.
Half an hour before the afternoon shift change, Cazador walked back down to the pier.
‘Why don’t you knock off early, Emmett? That asshole Quintero is making me pull a double shift, but we don’t both gotta suffer.’ Emmett agreed with the general philosophy, and after a bare minimum of convincing, with the specific plan. Cazador readjusted his stance to match Emmett’s bureaucratic self-righteousness and spent the next ten minutes rooting through the duty shack for a suitable set of forms for his clipboard. Then he took up the departed Emmett’s mantle of boat greeter.
‘You need to fill this out. Not all of it, just funnel number and your yard of origin.’
‘Look, I know you. You know me. But Quintero don’t care, and Levy really don’t care.’
‘Someone’s been leaning on someone, someone didn’t get their palm greased this month, so we gotta fill out bullshit forms now.’
‘Funnel number, yard of origin. No, don’t give me the cargo manifest. I don’t need that hassle. Neither do you.’
When the next shift came on duty, Cazador explained the new dispensation. ‘We need to get the funnel number and yard of origin for these boats now. I don’t know, maybe just until the end of the month. Emmett? I ain’t seen him—I got put on this shit job because he’s too hung over to come in, is my guess. It’s that way for me all week, swear to God…’
Rather than listen to any more of Cazador’s extemporaneous workplace gripes, the new guard accepted the clipboard and the improvised data collection task. Cazador beat a retreat and stayed out of everyone’s sight for the next few hours, slipping into the twilight time as the waiters and pit bosses and dealers began to flow in and the casino began to light up and come alive. Starting a little before seven, Cazador went back to staking out the loading dock, now watching the boats exclusively. Waiting for the familiar figure of Don Vicente or, more likely, his muscle and their straw boss. When they pulled up at 7:16, Cazador took the opportunity to watch their interplay and listen. The boat pilot and the two men in dark sweaters who stayed on board were all New York by their accents (more Irish-Italian-Breton than Jewish-Italian in this world), as were the two thugs in the too-olive jackets. The straw boss was tougher: Cuban? Guatemalan? Cazador didn’t have enough data to be sure, but probably not a pure local. Probably a long-term Imperial Mexican asset, maybe even the local equivalent of the ‘chief of station’, an ambitious provincial frustrated at cooling his heels in a backwater like New York.
After they went into the casino, Cazador had to wait another ten minutes for the guard to put the clipboard back down. A few fast steps, a quick riffle, and an answer: the Ministeria Confidential moored its getaway boat at the 41st Street docks on the Hudson. Manhattan, then. And Cazador had another answer: nobody in his right mind would take that boat wallowing out of the harbor. Certainly nobody as image-conscious as Don Vicente Teodoro Garcia Estancia y Jackson. While a rendezvous with a Mexican ship or submarine couldn’t be ruled out, Cazador didn’t think either would be Don Vicente’s style. He wouldn’t want to share his glory with either a heroic sub captain or a pedestrian steamship officer. Extracting Troutman by train would take too long: hours to get to Colorado and the Imperial border. Hours in which anything could go wrong, including another border crossing into the nervous, touchy Columbian Union at Youngstown. A car or truck had the same problems, compounded by the grim prospect of an undignified road trip across a parochial, backward countryside full of people who sullenly resented Imperial Mexico. No, it would have to be an airplane. On a Mexican-flagged airline. That way Don
Vicente could use his ministerial credentials to evict two businessmen from their cushy leather seats and fly his catch nonstop into Mexico City in first-class luxury and solo glory.
Cazador called the casino concierge from a house phone, and found out the last Aerolineas Imperial Skyliner would leave from J.P. Mitchel Airport at midnight, nonstop to Mexico City. Then he walked down to the employee cafeteria. He took his time over the meal, then went to his locker and changed into the trousers and shoes from his evening clothes. He carried his dinner jacket out over one arm, moving fast to prevent anyone from lingering past the uniform coat. In a briefly empty corridor, he switched jackets. He left the uniform one in a trash bin and backed out into the casino, hunching his back and tying his cravat with deliberately shaky hands as he did so. Anyone who looked would see someone perhaps a little under the weather, a little sick and hesitant. They would probably look away out of politeness or subconscious disease-fear, but there was an undeniable risk here.
The moment passed, though, and Cazador lengthened his stride, straightened his spine, and walked up to the bar as an only slightly disheveled, even rakish, swell. He curved his neck, shot his cuffs, and gathered in the nearest waitress with an eye roll. ‘Here’s a hundred. Whatever I order, you bring me ginger ale. Jake?’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw Don Vicente sweep through the front doors, his stride proclaiming impatience.
Now all he had to do was find, or build, the right game. It took about forty minutes to find his seed crystal, a rich Texican cattleman at a high-dollar table with an empty seat. Definitely not a Tejano, not for this game. Cazador sat and made a friendly competitor with just the right man-to-man shrug at a freak flush. Then he began filling the rest of the table to his specifications. He played cards strong and close, cleaning out players he didn’t need and losing to players he wanted to keep. The Texican, whose name was Marland, turned out to be in oil, not cattle. He stayed in mostly on his own strength; Cazador only needed to throw him one pot the whole time. He ordered rye whiskey and drank ginger ale and waited until 9:30 before sending a tequila over to where the increasingly agitated Imperial agent waited with his slightly-wrong thugs and his likely-resentful subordinate.
The New Hero: Volume 1 Page 19
