(Yes, this was teeth-grindingly frustrating. Mike may be a master in aikido, but I’m nearly his equal at judo. I don’t mind that he’s technically a better fighter than I am—we both started practicing our respective arts when we were five, so he’s got a twelve-year head start on his training. But nooooo, I need an escort because vagina and…snarlgrowl.)
After the paperwork was done (there’s always paperwork, and Speedy had to translate part of the forms), we took Goodwin to a local bar as a thank-you gesture for smoothing everything over. They put us on the patio, fire burning all around us in various containers, and the Parthenon shining on the hill behind us.
Halfway through the third round, I realized I had no idea why Goodwin was there.
“So,” I said, as I played with the brazier set in the middle of the table, “how did you know we were at the police station?”
Goodwin had the grace to look embarrassed. “Well…”
“Easy,” Speedy said. “He knew you were coming to town, and he told the police to call him when they brought you in.”
“If,” Goodwin quickly said. “If they brought you in.”
The cardboard bar coaster I was teasing through the fire burst into flame, and we had an interesting few moments when we all suddenly discovered the coaster had been soaking in a high-proof alcohol instead of water. And then we learned that the nearby planter hadn’t gotten any water recently. And then the manager showed up. By the time I had paid for damages, Goodwin was laughing.
“Okay,” the ambassador said, as Speedy settled across his shoulders like a living mink stole. “Now I don’t feel nearly as guilty about warning the police.”
“Things come up,” I sighed.
A few more hours of drinking, and Mike and Speedy called it for the night. They left for our hotel while I stayed behind to talk shop with Goodwin.
“What’s the mood like back home?” he asked.
“You saw the news?”
“Yes,” he said. “Is it true? What Hanlon did to your husband and the other Agents?”
“It’s all true,” I said. “Except you’ve probably read the filtered stuff that Hanlon put out as damage control. Wanna hear the real story?”
He did.
I’ll spare you the hour-long Oh no, nobody could be that cruel! back-and-forth between Goodwin and myself, and give you the short version.
Remember when I said that the chip in my husband’s brain was the outcome of a government conspiracy?
Well, the dude behind that conspiracy was Hanlon.
About ten years ago, his company had developed the technology for the implant. Instead of using it to make himself rich(er), Hanlon had turned around and given the data to the U.S. government. Said they could use it to help undercover field operatives talk over long distances.
Nice guy, right?
Wrong.
See, Hanlon wanted the cyborgs’ abilities, but he didn’t want to risk putting a chip in his own brain, and he didn’t want to go through the bother and expense of making cyborgs himself. By donating his tech to the government, he got the U.S. taxpayers to fund his scheme. But Hanlon also needed the Program to fail, hence the buggy AI that reduced my husband and the rest of OACET to emotionless husks.
Oh, and while this was going on? Hanlon was running for political office, so he’d be in the right place at the right time to suggest that this failed Program should be defunded. Don’t worry, he’d say. Since this is partially my fault, I’ll offer all of these poor people excellent jobs in my company…
If you’re a sadistic evil genius with enough patience, it’s the ideal way to build your own cyborg army.
I couldn’t even think about Hanlon without wanting to kick down a wall—
“Hope?” I felt Goodwin’s hand touch mine, and noticed that I was squeezing my whiskey glass so hard that my fingers had gone white. I shoved the glass away from me before I shattered it and tore myself to hell.
Some psychics can heal themselves. I’m not one of them, and I scar way too easily to be careless with sharp edges.
“So, how are things here?” I asked. “All we hear about Greece is austerity, austerity, austerity…financial chaos.”
“That’s pretty much right on the nose,” he replied. “No one knows what to do, and none of the major players are communicating with each other. The banks have known that the country was bankrupt for years, but they kept telling the people and the government that they’re solvent. The government has known they’re bankrupt, too, but they thought they had the European Union to fall back on...
“The people are the ones who are suffering,” Goodwin said, his eyes tight. “Jobs are collapsing, and there’s no centralized reconstruction strategy. But there are plenty of opportunists out there who are trying to use the chaos as a way to further their agendas. There’re several nationalist movements that are—”
His head snapped up. “Be careful, Hope. Americans are easy targets—you, probably more than most.”
“I know,” I said. “But this country is still safe for tourists, right?”
“Are you kidding?! You were attacked not three hours ago—”
I waved off his concern. “No no, that’s just me. I mean, is Greece still safe for the average tourist?”
“In Athens and the more populated areas? Definitely. Out in the country…?”
He didn’t want to finish that thought aloud. Ah, politics.
“Good to know,” I said, as I topped off our glasses from a handy tumbler. “I’ll try to stay in the cities.”
Goodwin insisted on seeing me safely back to the hotel lobby; I insisted on waiting with him until his car service arrived. I tucked him into the shopworn Fiat, and promised him I’d call him before leaving Athens.
I was…concerned.
Not about getting kidnapped and ransomed—although I still needed to look up the Greek for “chloroform” [5]—but about moving through the country. I’d never expected to travel unnoticed, but I had expected to be able to travel.
Ghosts and goons and a country on the brink of collapse.
Whee.
CHAPTER NINE
The next day, I was supposed to meet our archaeologist over dinner. Before that, we went shopping for knives.
Mike and I strongly agree on the topic of edged weapons: we don’t like them. In a combat situation, they can be taken from you and used against you. Hands, feet, and other body parts? Much more reliable, and if the dude you’re up against is willing to take your body apart to keep you from knocking him around, you’ve already got bigger problems than a knife can manage.
But knives aren’t just for stabbin’. When you’re wandering around a foreign country, you want a knife. A good knife isn’t a weapon. It’s a tool when you’re hungry and all that’s nearby are fish and bunnies. More importantly, it’s a nice piece of universal barter when a local townie has something you need and doesn’t trust cash from a foreign yahoo.
Plus, if everything goes well and you get to keep your new knife, you can mail it home to yourself and add it to your ever-growing collection. It makes a really nice souvenir.
Mike had a friend of a friend who knew a guy. This guy owned a shop, an import-export boutique not too far from the Athens Central Market. Mostly knives, we were told, with some utility tools, and thanks for supporting the local economy because boy does it need it!
We stopped at the Market on the way, because you can’t be near the Market and not drop in to gawk at it. The Market’s one of those old-time enclosed halls that seems to go on for miles, and is made up of different pieces of architecture all banged together. Sometimes there are skylights and huge arched windows; other times, you turn a corner and find yourself in a cool, dark alley full of raw meat.
Have you ever seen a basket of live snails? I hadn’t. For a couple of Euros, the vendor let me stick my hand in the basket, and all of these snails the size of golf balls started crawling up my arm. It was adorable and amazingly ticklish.
(And slimy.
I really should have thought about the slime. That goop took two showers and three bars of soap to scrub off.)
And there was food on top of food on top of food!
My favorite part of traveling overseas is the food. I love American cuisine, I do, but it’s pretty limited, with the same basic meats and vegetables spun into those so-called ethnic meals. Give me something without chicken and tomato any day. Give me something made from tree fruits I can’t even pronounce. Give me a taste of this world we live in!
We grabbed lunch. It might have been a sandwich, I don’t know, but loaves of bread were involved and they had rich, creamy centers.
Mine had meat. I’m not sure what kind. Mike and Speedy are vegetarians, so I couldn’t ask them. I think it was lamb. I know it was really good.
(If Speedy and I had been alone, I would have described my meal in detail and watched him squirm in jealousy, but Mike gets a little green when I talk about eating flesh. He’s already cut out all root vegetables from his diet, saying that murder is murder regardless of the type of mind involved. The day that science figures out how to let a human photosynthesize will be the happiest day of Mike’s life, and even then he’ll sunbathe in a parking lot to make sure he isn’t depriving the grass of their fair share.)
After lunch, we wandered around the market. It was mostly farm stands, but there were enough trinkets to keep us interested. Plus, Speedy tended to attract a crowd no matter where we were, so he performed a few poems from his perch atop Mike’s shoulder. There was the usual bout of laughter, followed by mothers gasping and slamming their hands over their kids’ ears.
Have you ever seen small children hauled away by their ears? It’s pretty horrible. In their mothers’ defense, getting a child out of harm’s way is instinctive, but oh will those kids be sore tomorrow!
Two hours, another quasi-sandwich, and three streets later, we ended up at the knife store.
It was pretty seedy. It reminded me of shopping in India, where none of the stores have counters. Americans need counters when we go shopping. We’re conditioned to counters. We love our many-layered glass display cases, and the crazy amount of variety therein, probably because it means we can feel so damned righteous when the owner doesn’t have exactly what we want.
Here, it was a few tables in the middle of the room, with short knives laid out on pieces of old cloth. Along the walls were longer knives tucked within the wooden beams, with the occasional sword propped up on the sills.
There was a man in the store, flipping through a magazine with his feet propped up on one of the tables. He glanced up, did a double take, and yelled something at us in Greek.
Speedy shouted something back, also in Greek.
The man’s temper rose, then blinked out in a string of halting words as he realized who (what) had spoken to him. [6] He turned and walked into a back room, and I heard the loud pop of a cork, followed by liquid glugging into a glass.
Mike placed Speedy on the floor, and us two humans began to browse the knives.
I wasn’t expecting anything fantastic. American imports were on a table off to the side, all familiar makes and models. Nothing exciting, and identical to items we could have easily picked up at home. The European knives were about the same, although there were a couple of custom items from makers that I’d never heard of before.
My eyes fell on a Finnish Puukko knife with an inlaid wood handle and a matching leather sheath. I picked it up and flipped it around a little. It was pretty much perfect for me. The right size, the right weight… I couldn’t wear it in a city (obviously), but it’d be small enough to tuck under my shirttails when we got out in the country.
“How’s it feel?” Mike asked.
I held it out to him, handle first. “Great balance,” I said. “Mind if I call dibs?”
He took it, held it for a few heartbeats, and then handed it back to me. “It’s yours,” he replied.
“Too small for your hand?”
He grinned at me. “Sure.”
“Friend of David?”
We turned to see the shopkeeper stumble out of the back room. He was flushed, and he glared at Speedy with a wavering gaze; at least one goodly-sized glass of booze had helped steady his nerves, but Speedy had climbed up the exposed wood beams and was now leering down at him from the ceiling.
“Yes,” Mike said, nodding. “David sent us.”
“David…” he began, but didn’t know the English, and the rest of the sentence stumbled into Greek.
“‘David’ is a code name. The person who sent us here has a sick sense of humor, and didn’t tell him who was coming,” Speedy translated.
The shopkeeper gulped. “Yes,” he said, still staring at Speedy. “Humor.”
“Okay,” I said, holding up the Puukko knife. “I’ll take this, and as many utility tools as you’ll sell me.”
Speedy translated, and the shopkeeper went from Nervous to Nervous but Hey, Money’s Money.
“Yes,” the shopkeeper said to me, and then a question in Greek to Speedy.
“Utility tools,” Speedy replied.
“Yes, utility tools,” he said. “Leatherman? Gerber? Swiss Army?”
I nodded, grinning at the universal language of brands.
He pulled out a dozen of these, and these went into a canvas sack along with my new Puukko knife.
Speedy, Mike, and the shopkeeper began haggling over the price of the tools. Speedy is a huge cheapskate—Mike needed to make sure he didn’t rip the shopkeeper off.
(Keep in mind that this was unnecessary labor for Mike on multiple levels, as I was the one footing the bill for this adventure. Everything’s a game to Speedy. The only reason I trust his translations is that you can only torture ants for so long before you get bored, and he got bored with false translations years ago. Plus, he knows that if he really pisses me off, I would totally leave him sitting on a rock in the middle of a field full of scorpions.)
That’s when I found the sword.
There was a pile of blue velvet on one of the tables, the smallest flash of metal sticking out from under a fold. I tossed the folds of the cloth open, and…
It wasn’t for sale. I knew that just by looking at it. It was a raw blade waiting for a handle and hilt. I guess it was a long knife, technically, but it had a little curve to it that reminded me more of a sword than a knife. There wasn’t a speck of ornamentation on the blade, but it was made from real Wootz steel and it didn’t need anything to—
Sorry. I should have said Damascus steel. You’ve probably heard of that. But even if you’ve never heard of either Wootz or Damascus steel, you’d know it if you saw it. Those knives with all of the crazy patterns in the metal? That’s Damascus.
It’s got a hell of a history, Damascus steel does. It’s incredibly sharp and can take a beating, and during the Crusades it was probably the source of those stories where the knights are cleaved clean in twain. There’s even a rumor that each new sword needed to be quenched in the blood of a red-headed boy before it could be put to use.
It doesn’t exist anymore—the art of making it, I mean. Damascus steel started out in the Middle East in the third century, bounced around the continent until some thousand-plus years later, and then, poof! Gone, vanished into history due to new trade routes and globalization and all of that fun stuff. Maybe there was a dire shortage of red-headed boys.
There are reproductions, obviously, made by artisans who’ve managed to come close to duplicating the original process. These modern versions are arguably better quality, but…
I knew I was looking at the real deal.
Then the shopkeeper noticed what I was doing, and started to shout at me.
Speedy shimmied along the ceiling beams, upside down, like a super-fluffy crawling bat. “Don’t!” he translated gleefully. “That’s for a customer! Please, miss, don’t!”
I nodded to show that I understood, and backed away from the knife a step or two. “Mike, you’ve got to see this.”
Mike reac
hed me before the shopkeeper, and we both stood and marveled at the blade.
The shopkeeper, realizing we weren’t about to pick it up and start swinging it wildly, calmed down.
“Where did you get this?” I asked him.
Koala chatter.
It took the shopkeeper a moment to reply. When he did, Speedy laughed. “He’s lying,” he said. “He claims he took it as a trade from a customer who didn’t know its value.”
“How do you know he’s lying?” I asked.
Speedy shot me a look. “The guy’s running stolen antiquities out of the back room,” he said. “You think a dinky knife store can stay alive in this economy?”
“Why’d he leave this out here on the table?” I asked.
“It’s trash. You should see what he’s got in the back,” Speedy said. From his vantage point on the ceiling, he could see over the clutter to what lay beyond. “Dude needs to invest in a decent door.”
“Hey Mike?” I asked, as the light dawned in my rock-hard skull. “This friend of a friend of yours? Did you ask him to put us in touch with somebody in the black market?”
Mike didn’t say a word, but he was very loud about it.
I sighed. Personally, I didn’t give two shits if we had stumbled into something illegal. I would have raised holy hell if the dude was selling animal parts, but antiquities? Dead is dead, and I know dead. Anyone associated with that Damascus sword had long since found better weapons.
However…
I really didn’t want to start any rumors that the Cyborg King’s wife was involved in a smuggling operation.
The shopkeeper glanced between us and Speedy, and asked the koala a question.
“He wants to know where you’re from,” Speedy said.
Before I could answer, Mike said, “Lake Minnetonka.”
I slapped my hand across my eyes. You had to know Mike—he didn’t lie. So his friend of a friend must have given him a password one step higher than ‘David’, and now, just like magic, we had become accomplices to trafficking in stolen artifacts.
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