by Victor Milán
Shi'a had been gaining ground in Bukhara the last few years, partly in reaction against the dominance of its ancient and solidly Sunni rival Samarkand in the Central Asian mirasist independence movement, in part because it for some reason had been attracting refugees from the Shi'ite intramural strife that had helped make Iran such a fun place to live in the nineties. It had also drawn far more numerous refugees from the sliver of Turkmenia still held by League loyalists who, squeezed between Iran, Afghanistan, and Free Turkestan and far gone in paranoia, had been making a run at the land atrocity record, as if to demonstrate the League had better claim to the name Timur than the current pretender. Bukhara simmered with anger toward the infidels of the World of Hurt. Though the revolution had begun in Uzbekistan—and Timur was widely presumed to be an Uzbek himself—it was still not much of a surprise that the first open defiance of the revolutionary chieftain should come from the city's volatile street mobs.
Eddie swept the scope back the other way, across Timur making his slow stately way through a mob that pulsated with fury at him but could somehow not lay hands upon him. Off to the right, orange hair and khaki, Timur's squeeze and her fruitbar Maghrabi videoman catching it all. Eddie was mildly surprised the bitch wasn't right there matching him stride for stride and being digitalized for the ages too. She had a major rep for getting herself in stories, and getting the stories into her. Maybe she couldn't take the heat. Journalists liked to brag how bold they were, but when the shit really hit the fan they hunkered down and screamed privilege of the press.
Something tugged at his preconscious, and he twitched his vision field back to Timur. ' 'Jesus Christ,'' he breathed. At Timur's side, a slim figure in blue jeans, the sheen of midnight hair in the sun: not his imagination, then. The babe Dr. Shih. He's letting her tag along for this? He shook his head, wondering which of all of them was craziest.
"Six to Jagun 23. Remember, if anybody makes a play for Timur, lay waste to everybody within seven meters of him who isn't that little doctor. I'll take the heat for it."
"It is bad luck to spare the Chinese, Raging Torrent," came back laughing from one of his kumli desert rats. ' 'Raging Torrent'' was the literal translation of orlok. It was a better nickname than Blue Sky.
"Put a sock in it, Yoldash."
All around him the crowd screeched and waved its placards. Its fury fell on him like a hail of stones. He kept his head high, his step sure. He was an accomplished faker by now.
Shih Tai-Yu trotted alongside like some brave sleek dog. "Is this what you bargained for, when you sought power?" she shouted.
"I never sought power." He did not raise his voice, but her face told him she heard. Had his voice always possessed such power of penetration?
"Isn't that what tyrants always say?"
The word stung him like a slap. Tyrant. He felt his eyes water. "Is that what you think of me?"
"Yes. No. I don't know." She hugged her arms under her breasts and shook her head. "I don't think you are yet. I don't know what you'll become. I can't think clearly. This crowd frightens me."
"It frightens me too." It frightened him for what it might become: a storm of fire to inundate Turkestan, the Muslim lands of the League, the Dar-ul-lslam beyond, perhaps, it seemed to him the world was well doused with aromatic fervor and hatred, the most volatile of fuels—not just religious, and not just among Muslims. It would take so little to set off a jihad firestorm that could consume the world.
The prospect that the crowd that surrounded him—two hundred thousand lungs screaming denunciations at him for not raising jihad's green flag—might turn on him and tear him to pieces did not frighten him at all.
"I never wanted power for myself," he told her. "I only wanted the ability to... change things. To make them better."
"Doesn't everybody begin that way?" She held her hands over her ears as if that could stanch the anger of the crowd. "No one—no one wants to do evil. Doesn't it always start with good intentions?"
He sat his jaw behind his facecloth and told himself she couldn't hear him anymore anyway. It saved having to confront the void of words within him.
He mounted the steps of the great glazed-brick mosque, turned, and spread his hands. He hoped his words were still oil, his people water.
"So you let them riot, and wave pictures of terrorists, and call for your downfall. Did you loose your troops on them? Did you disperse them with a whiff of grape?" Jacqui Gendron sat down heavily on the bed in the spacious suite at Bukhara's Amu-Darya Hotel. "No. You have no understanding of the uses of power."
Timur stood in the center of the bedroom, all at sea, his headcloth coming loose. The Amu was built under foreign supervision, and the paint hadn't started to peel yet. In fact, the room was luxurious, done in shades of butter and lemon as if it had been decorated by a movie set designer.
At length he sat down beside her. "I don't want power. I just want freedom for my people."
"Faugh." She stood, massaged her lumbar spine, stretched backward, facing away from him the while. "The world is teetering on the brink of disorder. It cries for a strong man to pull it back. You could be that man."
"I don't want to be that man, Jacqueline. I don't want to save the world; I wouldn't know where to begin. It seems my hands are more than full with Turkestan."
"If you'd shot some troublemakers today, your hands wouldn't be so full. Why not let that American pit bull do it? He has the crazy edge to him. He'd be happy to do it, and your precious hands would be clean."
Reflexively he raised his hands, looked at them as if checking for bloodstains. He tamed the motion into near-supplication. "I calmed them. I spoke to them, shamed them, for themselves and Turkestan. The mob broke up. Isn't that power enough for you?"
She held up her hands, palm upward, fingers clawed. "A great man must not be afraid to bloody his hands."
"Then I have no wish to be great."
"That choice is yours to make," she said crisply, and went out of the room.
Chapter THIRTY-FIVE
With the engine of Japan's economy, overstressed by government interference and the trade war with America, sputtering on the verge of throwing a rod, the Indonesians were crowding the Japs hard and wanted the world to know it. The businessman from Bandung was small and smooth, with a walnut-colored baby's face, mirror shades, and a sharkskin suit. He also had two enormous Jordanian rent-a-goons with necks wider than their heads. Renting out Hessians-conscript mercenaries—was a favored revenue enhancer for half the world; Jordan played the game on a more modest scale. Hiring its elite Arab Legionnaires as bodyguards was this season's status symbol. They were called Husseinis, because everybody in Jordan is named Hussein.
Deplaning from the 767 in Tashkent, Mr. Hussein took the lead, the businessman from Bandung went second, and Mr. Hussein brought up the rear. As they entered the terminal, the lead Mr. Hussein found the way blocked by a thin, disheveled Westerner in a rumpled tan jacket, who stood blinking at the snow-capped mountains through the green-tinted floor-to-ceiling windows, as if trying to figure out just cxactly which mountains they were. Mr. Hussein reached out a satchel-sized hand and took him by the upper arm.
Francis Marron jumped. For a moment he was back in Carson City: the grip on his arm, massive and implacable, the sense of looming male bulk behind him. Pain shot deep in his bowels, tears started in his eyes. They lied to me again.
He sees his friend's head, shaking, emitting tut-tut sounds like a scratching chicken. "Too bad what happened in there, old buddy old pal,'' said Dick Torrance, the original Swinging Richard. ' But you know how it goes these days— Tough Love incarceration for all you white-collar criminal types. But hey, just remember to be grateful they're letting all the real hard-core mothers, the mother-stabbers and father-rapers, letting 'em out early to make room for the dope dealers and data pushers and the other hurt-promoters, huh?"
But no. The grip was impersonal as an assumbly-line robot's, the breath wanning his cheek studiously minted—the man st
ill had his clothes on. Not prison, then. His heart opened its wings like a startled bird in a rib cage, even as the first Mr. Hussein carefully steered him out of the way and let him go.
Marron blinked around. The people flowing past him were speaking Russian and what seemed two other tongues, familiar but never understood. Yes, Tashkent. He was back in Central Asia.
The knowledge hit him like the slam of a cell door. He knew where he was, and why. His good friend, old buddy old pal, had let him out of prison. But only on condition. He had a little job for him.
He was still caught in the nightmare. It had just changed venue.
" 'All right, you son of a bitch. Freeze.' " Shih looked at him. She sat. He paced. "Did I hear incorrectly, or did you actually say that?"
The wind walked in the shade of the poplar treefc down by the wide slow Amu. Eddie nodded glumly. "I did."
Timur had calmed the jihad-maddened masses in Bukhara, which as far as Fast Eddie was concerned came closer to magic than politics, and then had gone to a tent city outside Samarkand to hold court for a while. Francis Marron had followed him there. Eddie was not a happy camper when he learned that. He acted without thought—as usual, more Zen than smart.
She pursed her lips. She looked astonishingly cute when she did that. He hated it when she looked cute after he'd unzipped and stepped on his dick in front of her. Which seemed to be every time they strayed into each other.
"Perhaps you have seen too many American police movies, to burst in upon Timur and Mr. Marron and myself with all those guns," she said in hypothesizing tones. "Or perhaps you suffered momentary-—what to call it?—testosterone poisoning."
He made a noise. "Look, the guy has a... a rep. There was a dude in Central America a few years back, Acevedo the name was. Leader of a movement down there that favored telling the Americans to keep their hands off the region—no geopolitical games, no drafting the countries into the war on drugs or tobacco or whatever. The U.S. took exception to that, and Senor Acevedo got suddenly dead. Marron's name was... connected."
She cocked her head to one side. "But the League accuses you Americans of supporting the rebels. Why would your government send an assassin after Timur?"
"I—" He balled his hands to fists, opened them again. No answer fell out on last fall's fallen leaves. "I don't know. It's just—I don't know how good your life expectancy gets to be, if you go putting too much faitb in governments. Any government. The League says the Americans are backing Timur, the Americans vote to censure him in the Security Council, Who can say what they really mean—or if they'll mean it tomorrow?"
She sat for a moment with her face turned toward the water and her eyes turned toward the past. That's how it looked to Bddie, at least. Evening was settling on the Amu Dar'ya Valley like a gray blanket, bringing an insidious river peace. Big-winged birds flapped through the dusk ungainly as pterodactyls, seeking night's shelter amid the tugay, the riverside forest. Bugs rose in clouds; swallows slashed them through like scimitars. A hummingbird came and faced them, hovering eight feet above the sliding water. Eddie wondered what the hell it was doing there; he didn't think the little bastards drank water, just sucked nectar or whatever.
"You speak very objectively about your country," she said, brushing back a strand of hair black as a magpie's wing. "I would have expected an American soldier of fortune to put up more patriotic display."
He looked at the trees on the far bank so she wouldn't see his eyes. "Let's just say I'm Timur's man now, whatever I was before."
He trusted himself to look at her then. "You probably think I'm a total jerk-off—uh, jerk."
She laughed. "I think you are very refreshing. Gauche, perhaps, but you are unafraid to be you. That seems very American. Is it?"
Not no more, if what I see on the evening satellite is any indication. "Don't be judging America in terms of me," he said easily. "You're bound to do someone an injustice."
"You are also very facile. Very skilled at evasion."
"Hey, babe, they don't call me Fast Eddie for nothing. Come on, I'll walk you back; it's getting dark."
When Jacqui Gendron returned from Tashkent late to find the American back and talking with Timur over tea, she was pissed. But not for long. Another mood predominated, and didn't put up with competition.
When the American saw her, he jerked as if an ant had bitten him. He rose, looking disorganized and scared, and excused himself. Despite Timur's invitation to stay, he stumbled out into the velvet-painting Samarkand night.
And that was fine with Jacqui.
"In world news tonight," said the seamless television face, "two eras come to an end. In a press conference this evening in the nation's capital, the American Federal Police Agency claimed responsibility for the death of noted infopusher Fred Derwillis, gunned down leaving a brothel in Bogotd, Colombia. Derwillis, a pioneer of the hypertext concept in computing, was the creator of the outlaw Encyclopaedia Universalis information network, who had fought off numerous American extradition attempts.
"Apparently the assassination was timed to coincide with the final dissolution of America's controversial Central Intelligence Agency, whose functions are being absorbed by the FPA's parent Department of Enforcement Affairs."
Enforcement Secretary Serafin appeared then, his hair slicked, his cheeks smooth, his eyes puffy. Francis Marron felt his scrotum contract.
"Today we finally recognize that the Cold War is long dead and buried," Serafin said. "The war we're fighting now is against the hurt-promoters who prey on the minds and bodies of our children. The message we sent today was clear: this war knows no borders, and we're in it for the win."
His face was replaced by the face of Dick Torrance, the original Swinging Richard, with a shock of black hair in his eyes and his mouth in a mean fox grin.
"Francis," the head said, and shook, as Marron's fingers scrabbled at the carpet which served as inadequate intermediary between his butt and hard-packed soil. "Francis, you're dragging your feet. This just won't do, at all, at all."
Marron covered his face with his hands. When he looked again at his satlinked notebook computer, the screen was blank.
Timur sat on the futon and unwound the cloth from his head. The act had a ritual quality to it. It enabled him to breathe more easily in more than the physical sense; with the headcloth he put aside a burden, a life, a lie. Without the mask he was no longer Timur. If only I didn't have to put it on again tomorrow.
He looked up into the eye of a palm-sized camcorder. Its scrutiny stung his face like a splash of acid.
He jumped up, waving splayed hands like palms fronds between the camera and his face. "Jacqui, what are you doing?"
She danced back, evading him easily and laughing with silver malice. "Come on, Timur. I am a photojournalist, I live for the visuals. Can't I have something to remember you by?"
He looked in her eyes. His hands dropped to his sides. He nodded. "Very well. Take your pictures."
She was wearing a loose robe in pastel swirl, that left her long shanks bare. He came to her, purposefully, heavily, opened the robe. She was nude beneath. He dropped to his knees. Laughing, she aimed the camera down, following him, holding the focus as he buried his face in her.
In his own tent, not far from Timur's, Fast Eddie tried to gear down and go to sleep and not think about Dr. Shih Tai-Yu. He cracked his notebook comp for a quick look around the world in general. He was getting to be a real Nethead.
There was just one message in his personal mailbox. He Ihought about blanking it, then thought, What the fuck, over. He punched it up.
It read: "Alyosha, it is imperative that we meet at once."
It was signed "Arbatov."
Chapter THIRTY-SIX
The wind scattered sand in fistfuls like a gambler throwing dice. It would have ruffled the hair of Arkady Arbatov, chief of the Fifth Chief Directorate of the KGB, if he'd had any. Ruffled his eyebrows, though.
Fast Eddie stood with hands in the pockets of his bag
gy khaki pants, looking at Arbatov across the floor of the natural amphitheater in the heart of the Red Sands. That same wind had shaped these yellow sandstone walls.
"You said we had to meet," he said. "We're meeting."
Arbatov removed a handkerchief from an inside pocket of his ill-fitting tieless suit, mopped at his gleaming forehead. "You did not pick an appropriate meeting place."
Eddie fished an apple from his pocket and began to eat. "I like it. I like the desert. The dry heat clears my sinuses."
Arbatov's eyebrows lowered like thunderheads. "You should show more respect," Arbatov said. "You are surrounded."
"I am?" Eddie's right hand was still jammed in a pants pocket. He wiggled the thumb.
The sandstone bowl filled with thunder, loud as a sun-tipped ICBM lighting off from the silos of Tyuratam, not many kilometers northwest of here. It was a noise that threatened to crush the skull. That strong man Arbatov, that giant, staggered as it reverberated. He barely paid attention to the geyser of dust that squirted up practically between his legs and rose higher than the dome of his head.
"That was the sound of a 14.5-millimeter Steyr-Mannlicher Anti-Materiel Rifle, fired by a one-hundred-and-three-year-old yefreytor. Shoots pretty good for an old guy, huh? You let me have the home field advantage, Arkasha. Panic move; itot bright. Now, are you convinced, or would you like me to start having the heads of your Komitet goon squad rolled down to us, one by one? You have a very sexy little MiG/ Mitsubishi Uragan, just big enough for you and about thirty of your favorite leg-breakers, parked on an old road five klicks from here. You can start talking like a human being. Or you can start walking back to your plane." He took a bite of apple. "Alone."
Arbatov straightened arthritically and put his hands in his own coat pockets. Probably has a hideout piece in there, thought Eddie, munching. It didn't give him much concern. The day he couldn't beat a sixty-year-old Chekist to the draw was one day longer than he had any business living.
