by Tad Williams
"Look, we're not either of us doing any good right now," Sorensen said when Ramsey came back into the main room, face dripping. "I've got one seriously upset wife right now and my little girl is barely holding it together. I'm worried that any minute Kaylene is going to march out of here and head for the nearest police station. I'm going back next door and spend some time with them. If you think of anything, call me."
Ramsey waved his hand. "Go on, yeah. Tell them . . . tell them I'm sorry."
"Isn't your fault." Fatigue showed in his failed smile. "Isn't really mine either, but I don't think I could convince Kay of that just now."
When the major had shut the connecting door, Catur Ramsey went to the minibar and found himself a tiny whiskey in a tiny bottle. He took it into the bathroom, this time shutting his eyes as he passed the bedroom door, emptied the bottle into a drinking glass and filled the glass halfway with water. Back in the main room, he lowered himself into the chair. He was so tired he felt he might fall asleep sitting up, and he knew the alcohol was a bad idea, but sometimes bad ideas were the only ones you had left.
We helped that poor woman get into that building when she'd probably never have made it on her own, then, just for added value, put a ring on her finger that will make a fine piece of incriminating evidence. Now we've abandoned her. That was what the whiskey was for—to dull the pain of betrayal, of failure. It's like defending someone for jaywalking and they wind up getting a lethal injection. My best legal advice, Olga? Get a different attorney.
It was a ridiculous thing to get stuck on—a mere problem of sorting through some telecom mumbo-jumbo and reestablishing the connection. There were probably a hundred bright high-school kids living within fifty miles who could do it. The boy Orlando Gardiner could probably have managed it in a matter of minutes. But it was not Catur Ramsey's world, and the need for secrecy was going to make it very difficult to find anyone who could help him, especially in the short time before things got very, very bad.
So that's your alternative, he asked himself, staring at this still-untasted drink. That's your big solution? Just bring Orlando Gardiner back from the dead?
Ramsey upended the glass and took a measured swallow, thinking of darkness and death, thinking of empty wires.
Before the whiskey had finished burning in his stomach, Ramsey remembered someone he could call.
He had not used the number in what seemed a very long time. When the tone sounded twelve times without an answer, his worst suspicions were confirmed. Then, just as he was about to give up, someone answered.
"Hello? Who's this?" The screen stayed dark, but the intonation was unforgettable.
"Catur Ramsey. You remember me, don't you?"
"I don't recognize the line you're calling on." There was a pause. "In fact, it's a pretty weird connection."
Sellars' defenses, Ramsey realized. Their outgoing calls from the hotel must be routed all over hell and Kansas, as his dad had been fond of saying. "It's me, I swear. Can't you . . . can't you do voice recognition or something?"
"Yeah." The speech seemed a little slower than Ramsey remembered. "But I'd have to run it through this police department system that . . . that a friend of mine arranged. It would take a while."
"I don't have a while. Look, do you still have my old number? Call me on that. But all I'm going to do is say, 'It's me,' then hang up and call you back. Got it?" Surely even if his regular line was tapped, that wouldn't give anyone a chance to do more than notice a strange little exchange, would it?
Two minutes later, the electronic pas-de-deux successfully completed, Ramsey called back on the shielded line.
"Satisfied?"
"I guess," the other growled. "But I may still run you through that recognition gear anyway."
Ramsey couldn't help a weary smile. So it had come to this, had it? Having to prove your identity to untrusting machines. "How are you, Beezle?"
"Okay, I guess. No word from Orlando in a long time."
Even alone in a room, talking to a jumped-up kid's toy, it was impossible to repress a flinch of guilt and sorrow. Beezle didn't know?
But how would he? It's not like anyone would have remembered to contact Orlando's gear and let it know that its master was dead, now would they? In fact, his parents were trying to find Beetle and shut him down. No wonder he's out of the loop.
"I need you," he said, sidestepping the issue entirely, but he couldn't help wondering if it was immoral to lie to a machine, more forgivable if it was only by omission. "I'm still trying to get the answers—the things you and I were working on together—but I'm in trouble."
"I don't know." The cab-driver voice still seemed to lag a bit, as if Beezle had taken the electronic equivalent of a few Saturday afternoon beers and was finding it hard to get started on short notice. "I need to keep my lines clear in case Orlando tries to reach me."
Ramsey closed his eyes. He was so tired he could barely talk, so worried about Olga Pirofsky he felt sick to his stomach. Only a decade's worth of courtroom training helped him keep his temper and not say anything stupid or irretrievable, but just barely. "I'm sure if he tries to get in touch with you, there's some way for you to know about it. Please, Beezle. This is important. If . . . if what Orlando's gone through means anything, then this is what it's about."
There was another pause, in all probability while Beezle parsed Ramsey's tortured syntax, but it seemed as if he were considering the pain in Ramsey's voice. "Tell me what you need, boss," the agent said at last. "I'll see if I can help."
"Thank God," Ramsey breathed. "And thank you, Beezle." He got ready to send everything of Sellars' that he had on his pad, including the records of the last call. He could not help wondering what Beezle had been doing in the dead days since the last time they had spoken. "Where are you, anyway?"
"Not really anywhere," the raspy voice said. "Just. . . ." It trailed off. Ramsey cursed himself for a clumsy question—after all, what did physical location mean to electronic circuitry? In fact, Ramsey decided, bemused again by the topsy-turvy universe he was currently inhabiting, it wasn't just a clumsy question, it was almost cruel. Like asking an orphan, "Where are your parents?"
Indeed, when Beezle spoke again, there was a tone of confusion that Ramsey had not heard before. "Where am I? Just . . . waiting. You know. Waiting."
Saturday afternoon had inched along like a dying animal. It was all Calliope could do not to ring up Kendrick's friend and demand a progress report.
He's just a kid, Skouros. And he's working for free. Besides, what's your hurry, anyway?
Elisabetta had not returned her call. In fact, the girl's roommate had been so vague and scatty Calliope had very little faith the message had even been delivered. Bored and unaccountably anxious, she had been thrown back on household chores.
Mixed results, she could see herself reporting to an imaginary commander. We didn't catch the Merapanui girl's murderer, but I finally scoured my sink and threw away some old clothes in my closet.
Afternoon crept toward evening. The apartment finally clean, or at least cleaner than it had been in some weeks, she settled down with a flick she had been wanting to watch, some figurativist thing from Belgium that Fenella had been talking about the last time Calliope had seen her. It would be fun just this once, she decided, to know what someone was talking about—even though by the time she saw her again, Fenella would undoubtedly be raving about something new, a museum retrospective or some ballet about the genocide against the Tasmanian Aboriginals.
Half an hour in and Calliope had completely lost track of the story, or what passed for the story. Instead of sitting wishing she knew an actual Belgian figurativist so she could strangle him, she turned it off and brought up her copy of the Merapanui file. The ghostly images of John Dread mocked her. You think you can find me? they seemed to say. I'm dust, I'm the wind. I'm the darkness in your own shadow.
She went back over her notes, looking for something she'd missed, anything, as the sun slid down behind t
he harbor. If John Dread was alive, as she felt so certain he was, why didn't anyone know it? Or did people know, and, they were just too frightened to say? She couldn't help remembering the odd look that had flickered across the face of 3Big Pike. "You cross him, he come back out of the ground and kill you three ways."
Where in the world was he? On a train in Europe, in an American mall, sizing up his next victim? Or somewhere closer? Still on the Australian continent, maybe? Lying low in some cattle station in the Outback, waiting until the time was right to come back to his old haunts with a new identity? Waiting like an evil spirit. . . .
The beep of her pad startled her badly.
"Yes?"
It was Gerry Two Iron. "Been working on that thing of yours, seen?"
She could feel her heart beating. "And you found out. . . ?"
He looked a little ashamed. "Harder than I thought it was. Somebody got a rare venture here. Duppy little piece of fenfen."
She was proud of her self-control. "Gerry, I don't know what any of that means. Just tell me in English."
He rolled his eyes. "It's, like, complicated, yaa? Trying to track it down, but it's all over the place. All kinds of switchbacks, blind repeaters, fen like that."
"Does that mean it's not from the University of Helsinki?"
"Means it's from the University of Scan Major. Someone made this real twisty. Someone good at hiding things."
Calliope sat forward. "So it's not just a straightforward request."
Gerry Two Iron shrugged, his frosted hair bouncing gently. "Don't know about that—could just be from someone utterly private, seen? Someone who doesn't like anyone else knowing their venture."
She tried to keep her elation under control. What did they have, really? As the boy said, it might be a perfectly ordinary request from someone who, for whatever reason, had a well-shielded system. But she could not help looking up at the frozen, smeary face of John Wulgaru on the wallscreen above her. I'm going to get you, you bastard. Somehow. Some day.
"When can you find out for sure where it's from?"
"Don't know." He stuck out his lower lip, thinking. "Pretty drezzed right now. I'll work on it again tomorrow. But might take me some more days than that."
"You can't work on it again until tomorrow?"
Gerry Two Iron gave Calliope the universal teenage look saved for crazy grown-ups. "Haven't even had anything to eat yet, me." He smiled his annoyance. "Even the police let a guy eat, don't they?"
"Okay, you're right. I really appreciate what you're doing—sorry to be difficult."
When he had broken off, she sat back, irritated with herself. It wasn't like there was any real time pressure, was there? Polly Merapanui had been dead and buried for five years. John Wulgaru, aka Johnny Dread, had been presumed dead for a few months longer than that. What was the hurry?
Still, as she sat with the blurry pictures and the picked-over files on the wallscreen providing the only light in the darkening apartment, she could not help feeling that more than a weekend was slipping away.
Most of the morning was gone when she dragged herself out of bed. It had taken her four beers after dinner to get relaxed enough to sleep and she felt every one of them. She sat in the living room nursing her coffee with the blinds shut tight, wondering whether God had deliberately made the light of Sunday mornings unpleasant to the eye to try to force sinners to shelter in dark churches.
She was finishing the second cup and deciding that she might even be able to eat a little something when she finally noticed that what she had dismissed as a symptom of her incipient headache was actually a message alert blinking in the corner of her wallscreen. She had slept through a call, apparently.
Elisabetta? Or Kendrick's friend? Could this turn out to be a decent day after all? Suffering with a sour stomach and a dry, gritty mouth, she found that hard to believe, but she called the message up.
It was from Gerry Two Iron. He had been working late, he said, and he had a little something for her. That thing she wanted to know about, his recorded image reported with heavy significance. Even through impatience and the actual arrival of the headache, she had to smile. This kid watches too many spyflicks. She called him back.
When they were finished, she thanked him for his help—yes, she promised, she would definitely look into the chance of him becoming a police auxiliary (whatever the hell that meant)—then sat back, staring at the now-cold coffee in her mug. The fruits of Gerry Two Iron's search might be something useful, but it could just as easily turn out to be no more than what the original request had seemed to be—someone researching a piece of Aboriginal folklore, But it was out of a Sydney telecom router, so if she could get the provider to cough up a street address. . . .
Calliope sighed. Was this any way to spend a Sunday? If she couldn't get any voluntary help from the telecom company, she'd need a judge's order to get anything. How could she get that without opening herself up to a bulk scorch from the captain, or maybe even a formal inquiry?
She'd try a little persuasion on the provider and see what happened. Another weekend day shot to hell. Well, it was better than cleaning.
And what if she did somehow get an address? Wait until Monday?
Stan's line rang for a long time. When it finally answered, the face that greeted her was a monster's, powder-blue, with insect eyes and long antennae.
"Christ!" she said, startled.
"Stanley Chan is not home," the thing said doomfully. "He has left the planet."
"Kidnapped!" said another bug-eyed mask, shoving its way into view. "Kidnapped by aliens!"
Now Calliope could see Man sitting on the couch, pretending to be tied up while his nephews recorded the message. He waved his hands, bound by what looked like the belt of a bathrobe. "Sorry, everybody! I'm being taken to another planet," he called. "Or the zoo. Or something."
"Into space, to be tortured," said the first monster, rubbing his hands in anticipation.
"Message," hissed the second.
"Oh, yeah. If you want to leave a message, go ahead. But it won't do Mr. Chan any good, because he'll be on our home planet, being like utterly tortured to death."
Calliope left a message asking the prisoner to call back when he got home. Even if her partner was no longer in the galaxy, and she was about to waste her Sunday trying to track down a meaningless detail from a closed case, she didn't want to lose touch with him entirely.
CHAPTER 34
Desert Smile
* * *
NETFEED/DOC/GAME: IEN, Hr. 17 (En, NAm)-"TICK TICK TICK"
(visual: contestant in flames)
VO: The season-ending episode of the popular game show, in which twelve contestants are given mystery injections and have to wait a week for the results. Ten are harmless, and the contestants win only the home version of the game. One injection creates the famous "Wild Credits" logo on the winner's skin, signifying that he or she has won a million Swiss credits. The twelfth contestant-a designation the show has now made famous-spontaneously combusts. The fun comes in watching what the contestants do during the seven-day countdown as they wait to discover their fate on live television at week's end. This final episode of the season ends last week's contest, and also provides a retrospective of some of the most touching and outrageous moments from earlier shows.
* * *
The priest with the dull eyes set the ivory box down on the stone beside Paul. One corner pressed into his skin as the priest opened it and began carefully to remove a collection of bronze knives and other objects not so immediately classifiable.
"Here is the malefactor, O gods,"
Userhotep chanted,
"The one whose mouth is closed against you as a
door is shut."
Paul tried desperately to concentrate on the drone of the priest's voice, the flickering lamplight as it splashed and ebbed along the ceiling, even the smirking god-mask of Robert Wells—anything but what was going to happen.
As the dead-eyed man bent towar
d him, a polished crescent of bronze shining in his fingers like a tiny moon, Paul tensed his muscles, then jerked his torso to one side, stretching the ropes until they creaked. The knife made only a shallow cut, which nevertheless left a stripe of agony along his rib cage. Paul's breast heaved with the effort but he had bought himself only a few seconds. Userhotep shot him a look of contempt, then prepared to cut again.
"It's really rather pointless, Mr. Jonas," said Robert Wells. "All this struggling. Why don't you just be a good sport?"
Staring at the hateful yellow face, Paul felt his mouth fill with acid rage and despair. Something burned into his side like a white-hot flame and a scream forced its way out of him like an animal fleeing its lair.
"The sooner you relax and stop fighting, the sooner we can break down that hypnotic block." Wells' voice floated to him from what seemed a great distance. "Then the pain will stop."
"You bastard," Paul sobbed. The shadows in the room seemed to be coming alive. Something was moving behind Wells, a widening angle of black.
The kheri-heb priest suddenly dropped his knife. Even before it clinked on the stone floor the torturer had staggered back from the butcher block, waving at his face. He was being swarmed by something Paul could not quite see, a moving cloud of pale shapes.
"Master," the priest shrieked, "save me!"
But something had grabbed Wells, too: Paul could just see him from the corner of his eye, a tall, bandaged figure struggling with something small and hairy that gripped his leg like a dog. Wells was cursing in shock and pain, flailing at his attacker. Then other shapes poured into the room. People shouted. The torches fluttered so that the shadows, which moments earlier had been so still, began to leap along the walls. Everything seemed to expand and waver.
Now Wells was wrestling with a dark-haired figure almost his own size. As they rolled on the floor together a flash of electrical light turned the world blue for a painful instant. Paul strained his head upward from the stone, trying to blink away the effects of the explosive glare.
