by Victor Milán
' 'I would rather set my tongue on fire and beat it out with a camel-prickle bush," a young Sart from Kattakurgan announced proudly, "than listen to that crap." Everyone tittered, Eastern style. Kolya Kuliyev guffawed. It was a Cowboy kind of thing to say.
Musical tastes in the unit ran to rap and Moroccan-roll, notwithstanding both were big-time passe in the West. The only thing they hated worse than C&W was Serious. Kolya was with them, and absent orlok Eddie too, as far as hating Serious went. They were all confirmed Airheads—as Serious fans called anyone out of tune with their duty-bound, socially conscious, anti-individualistic post-rock sound. It was a play on A/C, which could stand for either "anti-communitarian" or "air-conditioning."
A Kirghiz kid with a powder bum from a VDV Kalashnikov still plainly stamped on one chipmunk cheek picked up the remote control for the mess hall TV. He began to cycle through the channels in the endless and traditionally futile quest for something worth watching. Even an all-male military unit, a third of whom were adolescents or just past, could only watch Brazilian porn feeds so much of the time.
"Yob tvoyu mat'!" Kolya exclaimed. His hand clamped on the Kirghiz kid's biceps. The kid rolled his eyes, hurting and apprehensive, and the squaddies eyed one another. Was Nikolay the Nikolay about to make a break for it?
Kolya enveloped the boy's hand with his own, pressed his thumb down on the youngster's, hovering over the backup button. The screen flickered, and there was an evening-news feed from Moscow State TV, showing two men and a tail, dark woman on a city street.
"—ovna Kuliyeva, wife of Junior Lieutenant Nikolai Stepanovich Kuliyev, who has been a prisoner of the Central Asian bandits since the battle of the Qizil Qum last summer. She and her daughter Anya were among several hundred family members of suspected defectors arrested today in a League-wide sweep—"
The Kirghiz cried out as Kolya crushed his hand and the controller in one convulsive squeeze. It took ten of them to subdue the big Russian, bad back and all.
"Frank," the face on the screen said, "just what the fuck do you think you're doing here? This isn't playtime. You got a job to do."
Francis Marron sat there, feeling as if a small hand were holding his tongue, if I answer and he's not real, that makes me crazy. If he's real and / don't answer, that'll make him mad.
"Frank, there is a very specific thing you have to do. When you've done that you send us a specific signal, and then we come and clean up the mess and make sure you get away okay. It's all worked out."
Yeah, he thought. It's all worked out. It was all worked out before.
His very own buddy had laid it out for him. He sees it now, like a nightmare video.
"Look, pal. You can go down easy, or you can go down hard, but one way or another you're going down."
"But / didn't do anything," he says weakly.
Torrance laughing. "You are looking at this from a very outmoded perspective, my man." He reaches forward to slap Marron's cheek. "Hello! Hello! Are we awake yet? We are the government, we determine reality. The government says you did it, so you did it. All right? The question is, whether you're going to admit it or not."
"I'll fight you," Marron says.
"With what? The securities charges add up to a RICO rap. That means no lawyer will touch you. If he does, we land on him and take him for everything he's got, because hey, who can say if one of the dollars he used to pay for his boat or his condo or his kid's braces might have been the fruit of one of your illegal enterprises. And if some bleeding heart fool agrees to represent you for nothing ... well, that's going to cast serious doubt on his competence, isn't it? Not to mention his morality—stepping forward to defend an antisocial fuck like you."
He shows his eyeteeth. They are very sharp. "The U.S. attorney handling this case did a year as an intern with the Attorney General's office in Managua under the Sandinistas. They know how to handle obnoxious defense attorneys down there. We learned a lot more than just how to desaparecido people down in Central America, good buddy."
Marron shakes his head with exaggerated swings, as if this is all a nightmare he can somehow dislodge from his brain. "I won't do it, God damn you, I won't!"
"Sure you will, good buddy, sure you will. You'll stand up there in court, and you'll stand up there in Congress, and you'll say exactly what we tell you to. We're going to sink fucking Central Intelligence, and you're going to be a good little torpedo. And in exchange for that, you do a little light time in some federal country club and walk away.''
"No no no no—"
"Yes, yes, yes, yes. Or—let me see. You lose everything— got that? And everybody who invested with you—everybody who trusted you—they lose everything too, poof/ Because, who knows if they may have gotten hold of some of your tainted money too? And, let's see. Your daughter. You obviously have not been instilling her with proper communitarian values. We might have to take her away from you. There's a serious shortage of foster families, so we'd have to put her in a camp. Not a National Service camp—not that I'd want my daughter in one of those, nothing unpatriotic or anything, you understand—but a girl's shock incarceration camp. It's supposed to do wonders for attitude adjustment. Of course, if you're squeamish about your daughter getting fucked with a broomstick..."
It was after midnight when Eddie, exercising an orlok's privilege, let himself into Timur's tent. He pushed through the waiting room and the reception chamber and into the inner sanctum, not caring what Timur was doing or whom he was doing it to.
But Timur was miraculously alone. No Shih, no orange-haired journalist bimbo, not even his latest shadow Marron. Just the man himself, reading a book by the light of a kerosene lamp. He looked up.
Eddie faltered. The fugue state that had carried him back from the high Fergana Valley dissipated, leaving him adrift and wondering what the hell he thought he was doing.
"Ah, Twaav-janaap,'' he mumbled, "sorry to bother you. Maybe I should come back tomorrow."
"Not at all, Senior Lieutenant Gorsunov. Why don't you sit down and join me in some tea?"
Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT
He had broken down, of course. Given them everything they wanted. And they stuck him in the hell of Fort Carson and left him to rot.
Now they had taken him out again.
"Frank?" Dick Torrance said. "Talk to me, Frank. We have a situation here, the pressure is getting very intense at this level, if you know what I mean. We be rolling for mucho high stakes here, buddy. I can't afford to have you go blank on me—"
"Mr. Marron?"
He broke the connection with a fumbling guilty snap, spun to face the entrance to his tent. As he did, he realized that this wasn't a dream, wasn't hallucination. He had really been speaking with Torrance. This time.
"May I come in?"
She was standing with one hand up at the top of the doorway, putting on her best Bacall slink. It was wasted. He bobbed his head as if it were attached to the body of a stuffed dog in the back window of a taxi.
"Please do."
The warm air that accompanied her in was scented in jasmine with undefinable accents. The perfume she had chosen came from a Third World country that wasn't signatory to the accords that allegedly kept cosmetics free of unsafe or environmentally impious substances. Breathless rumors—carefully disseminated and nurtured by corporate agents—whispered that the scent contained actual human pheromones, designed to drive any viable male into a sexual frenzy, and derived from human corpses. It was hooey, but then, no human pheromone had ever been isolated. As fraud, it was no more brazen than nuclear winter.
It was intensely illegal anyway. That was what gave it its real aphrodisiac edge, mostly in the user's perception. It was not really that expensive. So much was illegal these days, and what was legal so encumbered with taxes and regulations that much of what actual business got transacted was perforce on the black—on the left, as the Russians said back in their bad old days. Here, as in so many other ironic ways, the ostensibly free world had passed the League going
in the opposite direction.
She entered and sat down across the tent from him. The yellow light from his turned-down kerosene lamp softened her features, turned her eyes large and luminous and topaz-colored. She wore khaki pants deceptively similar to her usual telejournalist kit, but cut closer and lacking the pockets. She wore a lightweight mauve blouse that just happened to be unbuttoned to her navel.
"Mr. Marron," she said, "I've been watching you."
Yes, he thought, with distaste. He flicked his eyes hurriedly to her face, then, to see if he'd unintentionally spoken the words aloud, or if she'd heard them anyway. Sometimes it seemed to him that everyone around him was hearing everything he thought.
He made himself nod. His capacity for thought and volition had gone away somewhere. Until they came back, he could just play the role. He could do that with anybody; he'd been raised to it since birth.
She leaned forward, allowing her blouse to fall open a little farther. If he craned his head slightly, he could see her nipples. He did not.
"I think you are the one man I can talk to," she said breathlessly. "There's an energy in you. A power. I can feel it."
Yes, he thought. I'm crazy. That's not power you feel, that's schizophrenia.
"A great opportunity exists here in Tbrkestan," she told him. "This is a World-Historical moment."
jacqui was playing to herself; but then, she was always her best audience. "Timur has proven himself unworthy to seize this great moment, to play the role of the strong man, the Napoleon, the Alexander—the Tamerlane. For a long time I wondered why. Now I know."
She reached out to touch her fingertips to his wrist, where the end of his cuff exposed skin. "I have been researching Timur's background in Tashkent. I have learned something, a terrible secret." She executed a quick the-walls-have-ears glance around the tent.
"Timur is a fake. An impostor. More than that--" Her voice fell to the bottom of her throat, "he's an agent of the KGB."
Marron watched her, apparently alert and receptive, wondering exactly what he was supposed to make of what she was telling him. If he was supposed to care. ,
Interpreting his silence as the stunned variety, she put herself beside him, so quickly she might have teleported there. That's funny, he thought. I never used to think in fanciful terms like that.
She laid her palm on his chest. His Brooks Brothers shirt was open against the heat beating up from the ground. His chest hair was chestnut-colored, and slightly grizzled.
"You are touched by Destiny," she said. "I feel it in here."
He glanced at the open screen of his notebook computer. It was still blank; Torrance wasn't watching him. He smiled. This woman was so sure of herself, so sure she knew everything about him. And yet she knew nothing at all.
"Yes," she said, running her fingers inside his shirt. "You feel it too, don't you? You are American. Americans are always confident; they are touched by destiny, and they know it. We Europeans, we are decadent, we hate to admit it. But the future belongs to you."
"To me," he echoed. If he hadn't been so numb, he would have laughed aloud at the absurdity of it.
"To you." She took one of his hands in hers, held it up as if she could tell him something new about it.
"These are strong hands. Capable hands. Hands that can seize the moment. Seize your destiny."
This was too much. "Seize it how?"
"Kill Timur."
"What?" He frowned in incomprehension. He started to pull his hand away.
She held fast to it. "Kill him," she whispered, and licked the lobe of his ear. Her blouse had come all the way open and fallen halfway down her shoulders. Her small breasts pressed his arm and chest.
"Kill him. He's obstructing History. It is the destiny of America and Russia to rule the world together. He is standing in the way. You have the chance to remove him. Kill him."
"Kill him? Kill Timur?" He started to laugh.
"That's it," Dick Torrance said from the turned-off computer screen. "Kill the puke. She's got it."
•This woman was trying to seduce him into doing the thing he had been let out of prison and sent back to Central Asia to do. The thing his old friend had been badgering him from the screen to do since he had arrived.
She thought she could fuck him into doing that. After all the times he'd been fucked already. It was too funny. Big fat tears started rolling from his eyes.
When he started to laugh, she knew she had him. That was what her script said, and as a good advocacy journalist she always made sure she had her stories well written before she went out and got them.
She slid off her khaki trousers. She wore nothing beneath them. She writhed against him, smooth and lively as an eel, while her fingers adroitly opened his fly.
He wasn't hard. That was no problem. The powerful men, the movers and the shakers—the only kind she cared for—were mostly older men, preoccupied men, and not uncommonly saddled with a dependency on one or another form of synthetic self-esteem that interfered with their responses. For business and pleasure both, she had learned a good many tricks.
He gazed past her shoulder at the open screen. He saw news footage playing there now. Footage of him being led from the Senate building in leg irons.
He had just finished testifying before a secret Senate subcommittee how the CIA had orchestrated the Red Sands uprising. Swinging Richard was swinging along beside him, grinning all over his long fox face.
"That was great, buddy boy. Just great." He slapped Marron on the arm. "Too bad you're headed for a long stay at Carson City."
"Carson City? That's maximum security! You—you told me I'd do easy time."
' 'Hey.'' Torrance held his hands up by his shoulders. ' I lied. By the way, your wife's going for a divorce. This legal thing is just a pretext, something that'll look good when she files. The real truth is she was just fed up with you."
Marron stared at him, lips hanging loose. Disasters were coming too fast to process. "Elinor? Divorce—?"
"It was bound to happen anyway. You two just didn't communicate. Did you know your wife loves it in the ass? No, of course not. You see, old buddy, you were just too big a weenie ever to find that out—''
The body memory of the impact of his fist on the side of Torrance's face made him hard, though he still felt no excitement.
Jacqui moaned. She pushed him back, and straddled him, and sank herself upon him.
Chapter THIRTY-NINE
"When did you make me?"
Eddie sat down and accepted a piyaala from Timur. The tea was hot enough to burn his lips. He never felt it. What he felt was the quavery release/relief he imagined serial killers felt when the cops snapped the cuffs on.
"The first time I saw you, there in the schoolyard." Timur began to unwind his blue-checked headcloth. Eddie watched, too surfeited with emotion to be surprised. When he was done, Timur tossed the cloth aside with a relieved grunt, as if the cloth were lead.
The face that looked at Eddie was .. .just a face. Middle-aged, mildly handsome. Remarkable only in how unremarkable it was.
Then why the mask bit? a voice asked at the back of Eddie's skull. It was as if someone else were in there with him; the only question that might have had real relevance to Eddie was what would become of him, and he didn't care. He was drained of curiosity. Whatever came, he accepted in advance.
"I wish you wouldn't stare at me so fixedly," Timur said. "It makes me quite uncomfortable. There is nothing supernatural about my spotting you so quickly; you had plant written all over you. I know the signs; I was KGB myself for twenty-five years. First for the Soviets, then for the League."
Eddie breathed shallowly, as if the sound of his breathing might drown important words. "You mean you—Timur was a double agent all along?"
"I mean nothing of the sort." Timur giggled, and then the laugh erupted from his belly in full-blown Western fashion. "My boy, not only am I not Tamerlane, I'm not even Timur."
"What?" Eddie said.
Timur
picked up his cup, drained it, and set it down again. "The man known to the underground as Timur was an authentic resistance leader for many years, a very brave and clever man who never had the resources to be more than a gnat buzzing in the Nikolays' ear. Eventually he got unlucky, and was arrested in Samarkand, his stronghold.
"There were already riots going on at that time. KGB transferred him to its regional headquarters in Tashkent to prevent his rescue by street mobs. They wanted to try to buy him off, or, barring that, discredit him with a show trial: lots of media, lots of manufactured evidence that he was a drag kingpin or something equally unpopular. The League can be quite as heavy-handed as ever the Soviets were, but they knew better than to make him an out-and-out martyr."
He braced his hands on the carpet and raised his ramp off the cushion to give his tailbone a momentary respite. "I spoke to him in jail. I wanted to help him. I could offer him the things he lacked: organization, equipment, direct intelligence of his enemies' actions. I had quite a thriving network built up by that time myself, and it was all at his disposal. But he refused. He called me agent provocateur. He was really very vehement."
"What happened then?"
"He died. Suicide. One of his many secrets was that he was diabetic, which he withheld until it was too late for our doctors to save him." Timur smiled. "So I combined his network with mine, and I became him. After that, things went as you saw them on the evening news."
Eddie sat for a while and stared into the yellow glare of the lamp. Finally he asked, "Why?"
Timur leaned back with his hands on his thighs. "A long time ago there was a Sart, mostly Tadzhik, whose name was Ivan Yakovovich Mukhtaari, His father dreamed of nothing so much in the world as to have his son become fully assimilated, to shed the stigma of being a black-ass. But the father died while the boy was still in his teens, of cancer.
