by Tim Lees
“I’ve got a job to do,” I said. “I need to start now. Or we’ll still be here tonight.”
“You don’t strike me as a mercenary man,” said the Colonel, “but let me add, your salary would be magnificent. More, I’d guess, than you can easily imagine.”
“Mail me a check,” I said, “and then we’ll talk.”
Chapter 9
The Shot
I went back over the cables. Mostly I lined them up against the new readings I’d taken. At certain points, though, something—call it instinct, call it sixth sense, or whatever—made me change the pattern slightly, run a cable just a few yards over, or else put a little curve on it. I couldn’t have said why. These are the things you can’t explain to laymen, and they’re probably the main reason the world’s not full of field ops. Because not everyone can do it. Not everybody can be taught.
So I was paying serious attention, and trying hard not to think about the gun held to my head, figuratively and, at times, literally, too. Except I did think about it. Difficult not to, really.
I ran the perimeter cable as wide as I could and still hope for security. There were readings outside that, but they were low and I hoped they wouldn’t matter. A little overspill, for somebody to mop up later.
Overspill. Like at Esztergom.
Last night’s dream came back to me. Coincidence, perhaps. I don’t believe in premonitions, but here, in the presence of the gods, strange things can happen. Time twists up, distorting like an image in a funhouse mirror. You can’t trust anything.
I was laying the second cable—and this was the hard one, the one I really had to feel for—when a shot rang out.
I looked up. At home, people would have stared round vaguely, just as I was doing now. Not here. The guys by the vehicles—Nouri among them—had all dropped flat. There was shouting. No one seemed to have been hurt. I dropped into a crouch myself, feeling suddenly exposed. Presently I saw a couple of the Colonel’s men, the locals, heading off around the edges of the ruins. Another couple were running in the opposite direction.
The Colonel himself walked over to me. Strolled, in full view, deliberately taunting. He stood there, hands on hips, while I twined the fine silver wires in between the blocks of ancient masonry, through dust and over stone. I said, “War zone. Right.”
“Hm?” He affected a nonchalance I thought was mostly bluff. “Oh. That. Well, it may be something, it may be nothing. Farmers here all carry guns, you know. They need them for the snakes.”
“The cobra, the saw-scaled viper, the horned viper . . .”
“You’re well-informed. Still, it may be that we’re not the only ones keen to acquire the specimen. If I were you, I’d deal with us, rather than any other likely comers. We play fair. Al-Qaeda may not be so generous.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s good to know.”
It took a couple of hours, but I set the pattern up. I’d arranged the cables in a kind of dumbbell shape around the masonry. The flask was in the middle. I kept the control box back, close by the Tabira gate. I told the Colonel, “I need Nouri here.”
“He’s not Registry.”
“No, but he’s my assistant and he knows what he’s doing. Which I’d guess is more than you lot do.”
“Dmitri will help.” He nodded to a young man with a scarf wrapped round his head. Dmitri nodded, stepped forward, very solemnly.
I said to him, “You speak English?”
He smiled, uncertainly. “A little . . .”
“Right. Yeah.”
I didn’t even have to make a fuss about it in the end, which told me something.
I got Nouri.
Chapter 10
Familiar with the Process
Nouri said, “You have a plan.”
“Not exactly.”
“You look like the man with the plan.” He put his head on one side, peering at me. “You look angry.”
We crouched over the equipment, conferring while I picked through various tools, as if they were the objects of discussion. The Colonel had been called away a moment. I don’t think anybody else had much English, which suited me fine.
I said, “I can stir things up a bit. Maybe it’ll help. If I don’t get us all killed.”
“No. Please don’t do that.”
Together, we pretended to check connections.
Nouri said, “These people are Sunni. It’s not their fight. I don’t think they will be a problem. Carl is also here somewhere, I am sure.”
I checked my reader again. The levels were all jumping around.
“It’s roused,” I said. “Just doesn’t know it yet.”
“My friend. I have a family who needs me. Be careful, please?”
“Careful as I can.”
Nouri muttered something. If it was a prayer, it wasn’t to Assur, I knew that much.
You take them by surprise. That’s the idea. A god is infinitely your superior, as you might expect, and so you try to catch it napping. If you can’t do that, then you try something else. Whatever you do, you try to make it quick. It’s a rule of thumb that, the longer from initiation to completion, the less successful the catch. The more risk you run. You’re not reeling in fish here. And it’s never the same twice.
So: a high charge on the perimeter, keeping everything contained. Subsequent charges hustle the thing towards the center, keeping it off balance, till it falls into the flask just like a lobster in a pot. It’s a quick job when it all goes right. It takes much longer to set it up than to actually do. There’s even an “auto” switch on the console, though I can’t imagine anybody stupid enough to use it. No: the gods need to be teased, cajoled, flattered, prodded, then snapped up fast. The Greeks were right about them. There’s enormous energy there, but also, even in the most somnolent, a crude form of will, a cunning that can take you by surprise. Like I always say: when it starts to be routine, that’s when you die.
I spent a while just fiddling around. Stalling. At times I’d stand beside the console, press a few buttons, watch the lights flash, stop, and power down again. I did a lot of tongue clicking, muttering to myself, shaking my head. I’d check connections. Once I walked a half a mile into the site, claiming I’d a loose link. What I was really checking, though, were the figures on the reader. They were changing, consolidating. This was big. I’d taken a stick, given the bear a poke. It wasn’t out of hibernation yet, but it was certainly sleeping fitfully.
The Colonel said, “Now, please, Mr. Copeland.”
“You’re the expert, are you?”
“No. But I am familiar with the process.”
I rounded on him, surprising even myself. It was the ire of a man who feels his work is under-appreciated, I suppose. Or that’s what it was meant to look like. I squared up to him.
“No. You’re not familiar. Not one bit. Because if this goes wrong, I can assure you, being blown to shit will be the very least of our concerns. There’s a lot that isn’t in the manuals, and you damn well know it. Otherwise you wouldn’t need me.” I took a breath. Then I stood back, gestured to the console. “You’re familiar with it? Well, go on then. You go on.”
I let him stew. I went back to tinkering. He had a look like some Russian statue, but he was getting edgy. I could see it, and so could his men. Which was just what I’d wanted.
All right, I thought. Let’s poke the bear again. Let’s see if we can make it dance.
Chapter 11
Retrieval
It was like juggling, really. Watching the readings, knowing when to push and when to hold back, when to move and when to stop. Only I never did know, really. Not with any certainty. Just guesswork, hunches—a calculated risk.
I had a headache. The generator kept up its annoying hum behind me. It felt like somebody was trying to saw my head in half.
“Stay down,” I said to Nouri. “If
things get bad, you run. Got that?”
I sent a charge through the perimeter, just to keep it all contained. Localized. I took a breath and moved on to the next set of controls. There was a second’s pause, a second in which nothing happened. Then the air seemed to clamp down. It was like a fist, closing on my head. I sent a quick charge through the inside cables, one to the right, one to the left. Short bursts. I thought about the god, out there, invisible: molded to the fabric of this ancient town, not under it or in it but a part of it. It had been asleep now for millennia, sated on the prayers of men long dead. And here I was, finally kicking it awake.
The Colonel said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s fucking wrong.”
I changed the levels, keyed in a batch of minor lines, shot a quarter-second burst through each of them. I ran a handkerchief across my forehead, taking off the sweat. I looked up. A wisp of white cloud smeared the flat blue sky, like a white flame, and it seemed the sky had darkened round it. I turned back to the console. Purple afterimages went floating past my eyes. I changed the levels, watched the gauge.
The shadows moved and sharpened. Someone shouted. I looked up.
The cloud was falling. It flared, almost too bright to look at, dropping, not from a thousand feet but from a hundred, maybe two hundred at most. The distances had been deceptive. It spilled like liquid, slowly at first, then more and more, pouring down, a great column of light. I’d wanted a display, a spectacle, but now I had it.
I was scared. My hands went to the dials. I’d get this over with, I’d flip the thing into the flask and close it up, fast as I could. I reached out . . . then stopped myself. I stood there while this great white cloud came tumbling down, seeming to burst upon the stones and ramparts of the ancient city. I felt the movement through my shoes. The light hit on the rocks, rebounding, rising like a wall. It raced towards me. I screwed my eyes against it, felt the sharp, electric judder as it traveled through my body, tingling, slipping through the atoms of my being—and then it was gone.
“You have it,” said the Colonel.
“No. No I don’t.”
“The god—”
“If that had been the god,” I said, “we’d none of us be standing here. That was nothing—ionized air, that’s all. That’s what happens when you get an energy field this big interacting with the solid world. That”—I was patronizing—“is what’s called physics.”
I turned away from him, but not before I’d noticed Nouri had been right: the local troops had fallen back, and were clustering around the armored car.
“Now,” I said out loud. “Why not leave it to the pros, all right?”
I have done bad things in my time. I have a moral mind-set that I often see as compromised and almost embarrassingly relativistic. But every now and then I find myself in a situation that’s so clear-cut, so black-and-white, that damn it, I will fight. Even then, it’s not so much a case of right and wrong. More often, it’s when someone’s terminally pissed me off, and I am going to make life hell for them in consequence. Perhaps that’s one reason I’m still a field op. I never could play politics.
The god was roused. It was rolling over, ready to sit up. I pumped a few light charges through it, just to keep its interest, the equivalent of whispering its name into its ear. The air began to shake.
“Who else is here?” the Colonel said. He was trying to sound calm, but not succeeding.
There were tiny, rhythmic sounds, all round us, just on the edge of hearing, and if I tried to listen they’d invariably take on the forms of speech. It was how the brain would deal with them; the very act of listening turned them into words. I had a sense that once, a long time back, I’d known their meaning, recognized their voices, and then—yes! There! And there again! And a moment, it had seemed I’d understood, remembered—
“Who’s here?”
“Just us, dear Colonel.”
“But who’s here with us?”
The sun was low. The day was waning, but the light was wrong. A double shadow jutted from the ziggurat, looking like a time-lapse photo; I was seeing it at different points in history, two different moments, or more than two, as if all times were one, all times were present time. An engine growled. I glanced around. The armored car was starting up. The Colonel saw it, too, and yelled out, half curse, half order. His three young officers just stood like dummies. They really were completely useless. He ran across and physically shook the nearest one, who turned and pelted for the car like a commuter who’d just missed his bus. It was ridiculous, quite honestly.
The ground before me started rippling. It looked as if a thousand snakes were all heading towards me, except I couldn’t see the snakes, only the tracks that they were making in the dirt. Maybe it was just the light shifting, bending in the face of such enormous power. Maybe it was real. I had one of those moments—so near panic I was just a second’s thought from dropping everything and getting out of there. I blanked it out—all fear, all sense of how much could go wrong. The Colonel yelled again, and the landscape threw it back at us, a mocking echo, over and over, each time more distorted and inhuman.
The next voice that I heard was Carl’s.
It was hard, every word spoken with clarity and absolute precision.
“I wouldnae do that, mister, not if I was you.”
I turned, just for a second. Carl looked dusty and disheveled. He had a gun up to the Colonel’s crew-cut head. Nouri stepped in, took the Colonel’s pistol from his holster. He patted him down.
“No offense, sir.”
“Aye. Nae offense, pal,” Carl said, and with the muzzle of the pistol, forced him to his knees.
“We’re OK here,” he told me. “Finish the job. And you,” he jabbed the Colonel’s skull, “you tell your wee lads there to down tools and back off. You tell ’em, right?”
“Please,” said the Colonel. But there was no real pleading in it. It was as if he’d just been reprimanded for some minor misdemeanor. “We’re businessmen. We have no quarrel with you.”
“No. But I have one fuck of a quarrel with you, bampot.”
I shifted the controls. It was tricky now. One bad move, I’d lose it. The sun was almost down. I tried to clear my mind. I tried to focus.
Perimeter: full charge. Sub-per: two shots, and then in, in—
There were a couple of tricky moments. Twice when my instinct said to change the plan, when the rhythm seemed all wrong. But I listened. I trusted. And I got it right. I slammed the last few charges home.
Bingo.
The air was very still. Nothing moved. The mounds and the ziggurat were dark shapes now against a dimming sky.
I left the control box and, very gingerly, with the sense that I was treading on quicksand, I went over to the flask, and sealed it.
“You,” said Carl to the Colonel. “You have some explaining to do now, wee boy.”
Chapter 12
The Octopus
“There is nothing to explain. We’re businessmen, the same as you. In other circumstances . . .” The Colonel spread his hands. “ . . . we might be sitting at a boardroom table, drinking tea.”
“You carry your fuckin’ AK to the boardroom, aye?”
“I carry it wherever I think necessary. All that’s unusual about this is what the country itself demands.”
The only time I’d ever seen the Colonel flustered was when I had the god there, dancing on my bit of fishing line. His first retrieval. Well, at least he’d got a show. If he was lucky any later ones were going to be a major disappointment.
But now he was telling nothing. Carl made some noises about “slotting” him or “wasting” him, but the Colonel merely looked at us and asked, “Would you become a murderer?”
“Aye. You and your three sprogs. Don’t think that worries me, wee boy. Don’t you even think it.”
&n
bsp; But it did seem to worry him. It also seemed to worry him that we were getting sightseers along. He said to me, “We should be on the road. Everyone from here to Basrah’s gonnae ken what’s up.”
The three boys were a better prospect for enquiries, but for one thing: none of them spoke English.
“Ah, fuck it,” said Carl.
“Wise words, my friend.” Nouri emptied out another pack of cigs. “Fuck it, indeed.”
We left them there. There was nothing we could do, and of course, they knew it. At best we might arrest them, take them for trial; but we didn’t want them in the truck, and the mission, as Carl pointed out, was to get the flask back safely.
“I thought the mission was to get me back safely,” I said.
“Ah no. The flask is full, your job is done. You’re expendable.”
He saw the look that crossed my face and punched me on the arm. “Nae offense there, pal.”
Nouri giggled.
“Irrelevant,” I said. “Technically.”
“Aye. Too fuckin’ right.”
We took their guns, their papers. Their cigarettes. Perhaps their friends would be back for them. Perhaps not. Either way, this wasn’t exactly the middle of nowhere here.
People sat in the dirt, only a dozen or so yards away, just watching us. A water seller ambled among them; up on the road, a couple of food vendors had set up. They had lanterns hanging, they called out in Arabic.
Who’ll care about a single truck, Dayling had said. He hadn’t reckoned on a major firework display and what must have resembled one more skirmish from the recent war.
We climbed into the truck. One of the Colonel’s boys ran after us, babbling, desperate not to be left behind. But the Colonel himself merely stood, his arms folded, and watched.
As we went by, he gave a little, ironic salute.
“Fuck sake,” said Carl. “Does he not know when he’s beat?”
Their documents were Arabic and something else, probably something Eastern European. Nothing English at all. Nouri flicked through them, told us, “They name a company called Modern Light and Power. Offices in Stockholm. Does that strike you as likely?”
