Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  “You’re as smart as a human, probably smarter.”

  “So are some species of whales. No one is sentenced to life in prison for killing one.”

  “That’s a bunch of bullshit sophistry, Halton.” I laughed, harsh and humorless. “Boy, when the CDI ran your brain through the rinse cycle, they fucked your head up real good.”

  “That’s right,” he said. The chill was back in his voice. “I love the CDI. They created me. They raised me and trained me and gave me a purpose for existing. They are my mother and my father and my family. And I’m fully aware that I have no choice in how I feel about this. I’ve been designed and conditioned to feel this way; even the thought of doubting the CDI physically hurts me.”

  I took another long drag on the cigarette, lighting up Halton’s face, the stark shadows making him appear haunted and callous. “So if you won’t resist them, and you love them so much, just what the fuck do you expect out of me? Why are you getting me involved in all this crap? All I was supposed to do is escort you to Khuruchabja and deliver you to Sheikh Larry. That’s all. What the hell am I supposed to do about it?”

  I was pissed off all over again. “But you’ve been drawing me deeper into the shit, baiting me with Government secrets, telling me your life story, even seducing me, you son of a bitch. Certainly it’s not because of my lovable and charming personality, so just tell me, why me?”

  “Because my family, who has given me life and everything I hold dear, is planning to destroy me,” he said bitterly. “Because I want to live. Because I’m alone, and there is no one else I can turn to for help.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment, taking a last puff on the cigarette before I set that one arcing away, another little missile flung into the night. The anger had been punched clear out of me. “You don’t know for sure.” His silence told me he did. “But why?”

  “I don’t know why,” he said quietly. His own anger seemed to be spent as well. “But I do know CDI doesn’t send out fabricants on first assignments without a trainer, or at least another CDI operative. They don’t send them into high-risk countries without extensive prior experience.”

  The wind was coming up, moonlight cast through the rising dust in the distance looking like ephemeral genies let out of their bottles to play.

  “My specialty is languages, Kay Bee,” Halton said. “I was designed primarily for learning a great many languages quickly and accurately. But I’m only a linguist. All these other abilities I have that you seem to think extraordinary are standard for every fabricant made.” I shivered in the sudden cold, the heat sucked away into the vacuum of night. “I’m not Super Spy, I was never intended to be. My sub-sector is part of CDI’s exclusive quota; I’m not even supposed to be lent outside my own department, never mind given to foreign governments or civilians. I had expected to spend my life in Langley, sitting with a jack in my ear translating covert conversations. That’s all I ever wanted to do. There are other fabricants specifically designed for active espionage. But that’s not me. I shouldn’t be here.”

  I shuddered, just imagining what they must be like.

  “Two previous John Haltons were terminated,” he said, his anger lost, “because somewhere their training failed, they deviated too far outside the acceptable parameters. I think the series is still good enough to be salvageable, but used simply as one-shot weapons. Then they’re discarded. Thrown away…” He faltered. “Killed,” he finished softly, trying the word out gingerly.

  I lit another cigarette, then clamped my arms around my chest to hold in my shaking. My teeth started chattering. Halton walked to the sandjeep and came back to hand me my jacket.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I protested, and gratefully shrugged into the padded jacket. “A fabricant must cost millions of dollars. Even if you were going to be used only once, it’s just not worth blowing that much money over this little piss-ant country.”

  “You were here during the last war, Kay Bee,” Halton said. “How much money was expended in high-tech weapons used against the secondhand planes and missiles the Behjars put together from reject parts bought in India?”

  “That was different. The Behjars had infrafusion bombs, thanks in no small part to your bosses. They certainly didn’t get those by building them out of do-it-yourself mail-order kits.” My long dormant journalist brain cells were starting to nag at me. “The Behjars had to be stopped or they’d have wiped out far more people than who did get killed. Diplomacy wasn’t getting anywhere. You can’t reason with madmen. They didn’t leave us with any other choice.”

  What the hell was really going on in Khuruchabja that the CDI would waste a fabricant over? And why had a microflake which cost even more than a fabricant been risked by being so precariously smuggled in? And by whom? We were caught in a crossfire we couldn’t even see. Was Sheikh Larry’s ludicrous dream of an Islamic wirtshaftswünder, or CDI attempts to frustrate it, really worth throwing away this much money?

  True, this wasn’t the billions of dollars spent on eradicating a small group of deadly fanatics, but nobody squanders that much money without a damn good reason. Not even the U.S. Government.

  And why was I here? Never mind what Somerton had said, they didn’t really need me at all to plant Halton inside Khuruchabja. They could have parachuted him somewhere over the desert, had him walk in disguised as just another nomad shepherd, and no one would have known the difference. But Somerton was right, somehow, that I was a part of the setup working for the benefit of CDI, and I wasn’t even getting the company dental plan out of it.

  Halton could hear the rusty wheels squeaking in my head, letting me think. “But why me?” I mused. “Why would they team you with me?” I said, slowly, balancing puzzle pieces in my head. There were too many missing elements to make the picture clear. Halton was quiet. “They want a thickheaded, burned-out journalist here for more than just making a simple delivery. I’m being used, too.” I glanced at him suspiciously. “You knew that, didn’t you?”

  He took a breath before answering. “Except for the details, I had that part figured out fairly quickly, yes.”

  I snorted, looking away back at The Mothers, demurely shrouded in the evening darkness.

  “And of all the things you did tell me, that wasn’t one of them.” I wasn’t angry, honest. My cigarette had burned down far enough so that my fingers could feel the heat. I flicked yet another tiny rocket off into the night air. It hit the ground, rolling embers before it vanished in the dark. I hadn’t chain-smoked like this in ten years, and the nicotine rush was making me feel slightly vertiginous.

  “I was afraid to,” Halton said, his voice low. I turned to face him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “If I’d told you I was part of a plot CDI was setting you up for, would you have been willing to try to help me then? Would you have even believed me?”

  “Probably. Possibly. Shit, Halton, I don’t know.” I sighed, and then shook another cigarette out of the package. Four left, I was getting low. The lighter cast a wavering yellow glow over his troubled features. I inhaled deeply, feeling about twenty more cilia curl up and die in my lungs. The smoke looked like pale silk billowing on a slight breeze. “Tell me something. Whose idea was it to seduce me, yours or theirs?”

  “Mine. I think.”

  I chortled, painfully. “You don’t even know that?”

  “I can’t tell you the exact reason, Kay Bee. Maybe it’s true. I wanted to have sex with you only because I’m preconditioned that way. Or maybe I deliberately wanted to create a psychological bond between us, calculated to make you more attached to me, to manipulate you. Maybe that’s part of my programming, too.” He looked at me, his eyes glittering in the dim light. “Maybe I just wanted to fuck, and it’s no more complicated than that.”

  That stung. “Jeez, thanks, Halton,” I sneered. “All those possibilities make me feel so much better.”

  He suddenly reached out and grabbed me by the arms, jerking me around to face him. My cigarette spun out of my hand
, unnoticed. His fingers were tight, but not painful, just hard enough to let me know I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I wasn’t trying to make you feel better, Kay Bee. I was trying to be honest with you.”

  “That*s what friends are for, right?” I said cuttingly.

  He held me trapped in his grip for a long moment, seemingly frozen into place. That weird look had come back into his eyes, not seeing me, an ominous emptiness, frighteningly alien. “Friends?” he repeated, as if the concept was completely foreign to him. “I have no friends. Friends are people who trust each other.” I could feel a sudden tremor in his hands. “Do you trust me, Kay Bee?” he whispered. “Are we friends?”

  It was part defiant challenge, part a desperate plea. And part something I couldn’t decipher.

  I believed he wasn’t lying about wanting my help, not playing a role in some complicated CDI plot. But he was still a CDI spook fabricant. Despite all the secrets he’d told me, I still knew nothing about how his head was really wired. How could I believe this wasn’t just part of some devious manipulation outside his control? How could I be sure he wasn’t acting exactly the way CDI had intended him to, whether he knew it or not? If he’d deviated this far from “acceptable parameters,” bucked his programming this far to resist his makers, how could I be sure all his mental equipment was in working order?

  How could I trust Halton?

  I had a sudden intuitive flash: If I said no, I’d condemn him to death. He’d simply give up and walk in front of a firing squad without a fight. If I said yes, I’d end up taking on the entire CDI with a stolen biomachine already proven to be lethally dangerous, possibly even renegade, having to rely on its uncertain guarantee not to kill me or get me killed.

  I gave the only answer I could.

  Fitting my hands around his waist, I drew him gently to me in a calming embrace. My head tucked under his chin, he held me tightly against his chest.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me against the world, kid.”

  SIXTEEN

  * * *

  Rule Number One of staying alive is C.Y.A., Halton,” I said. “It means ‘Cover your ass.’ Self-preservation.” I jabbed him in the chest with two fingers. “Get some. I have too much, you have none at all. Understand?”

  “I think so,” he said earnestly.

  “Hmph.” I’d been racking my brain for the better part of a day to come up with ideas for a way out of this mess with both our skins intact, and so far hadn’t done much more than bluster. We had less than four more days to think of something before I had to turn Halton over to Sheikh Larry. But what actual constructive action I was going to be able to take, I hadn’t a goddamned clue.

  I’d wanted to confer with Arlando, hoping to set up some preventative maintenance on his end, but Halton had emphatically nixed that idea. He had no idea what hold CDI had on my boss, but he knew enough about the internal workings of his own organization that any discussion of our problem with Arlando would only tip them early that something wasn’t kosher.

  He made it clear that as soon as CDI suspected their fabricant of making any attempt to defect, they would waste no time in wasting him. Not that there were many places to defect to. While there had still been a Vice-President’s Council on Competitiveness to pressure for relaxing of Federal regulation of biotechnical products, the CDI had been busily buying up patents on human DNA through the back door, ignoring the loud screams of various Greens and the EPA. The industry’s safety regulations were too burdensome to business, came the official statement from the conservative White House. The free market economy was too eager to grab their lion’s share of the world’s multibillion-dollar biotech boom to bother worrying about a bunch of leftist pinko crackpot environmentalists.

  But Clinton had abolished the Council, global wanning steamed up, a forty-mile-long ice cube dropped off the Antarctic shelf, and by the turn of the century, environmental protection had become as sacred an American icon as Mickey Mouse and Michael Jordan. Once the Ripe Tomato Gene disaster of ’02 had devastated half of the entire Midwest’s farm crop with an accidental mutation, the pendulum completed its panic swing totally in the other direction. The Environmental Protection Agency had had no trouble pushing their Public Health and Safety Act through Congress. Biotechnological regulations now included instant seizure and destruction of any genetically engineered products even slightly suspected of being defective, whether they were proven to be or not. If it turned out they weren’t, well, better safe than sorry, right? Everybody could sue each other for damages later.

  It was meant for medical gene-splicing and viral pesticides, but it covered any defective artificial biological product. Halton was an artificial biological product. He was also quite defective.

  That didn’t leave us a whole lotta options.

  What kind of “trust” did Halton believe we had? On the one hand, while his entire life had been rigidly controlled by humans and he obeyed their orders without question, he was neither stupid nor naive enough to believe we were smarter than he was, or infallible. It wasn’t so much that he had confidence I could somehow get him out of a lousy situation as it was he was trusting me to try. If I failed, it would be circumstances, not betrayal. He would be satisfied with that, even as it killed him.

  It didn’t make me feel any better.

  We apparently had alarmed the watchdogs by slipping our leashes, and were being much more closely followed since we got back from our little field trip in the desert. We had led them around for an hour after we left the hotel without shaking them. But we weren’t trying that hard, really. At the moment, we sat on the long shelf bench ringing the Nok Kuzlat War Heroes Memorial Square in the Old City, talking while we watched our keepers pretend to read newspapers.

  “You told me fabricants have a certain amount of free will, right? So exercise it. Get creative. Think about ways to protect yourself, not just whoever you’re assigned to. You’re no good to anyone if you’re dead. Then find ways to make yourself indispensable to the right people, making getting rid of you a losing proposition.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Like blackmail?”

  Yup, he was learning. But I wasn’t really being too creative about thinking up exact details on operating instructions. I didn’t know much about the nuts and bolts of extortion, not being a blackmailer either by nature or profession. Halton probably knew it, but he sat, listening solemnly and nodding in the right places.

  Pigeons pecked at scattered crumbs, their heads bobbing as they strutted jerkily across the square like wind-up toys. Well-dressed children with healthy round cheeks squealed and chased the birds as their parents strolled across the wide, ornately paved square. Men in expensive business suits or impeccable qaftans walked together, some chatting as their hands gestured with energetic animation, while others played with strings of amber prayer beads, Arab hands always busy, even if not actually doing anything. An occasional rich man’s wife, enveloped in lightweight silk robes, her face hidden behind an embroidered yashmak and h’jab, followed at a discreet distance behind her husband. Probably the highlight of her week.

  The square’s main feature was an immense scrubbed metal sculpture at its center, an avant-garde artist’s interpretation of the folds of a tent blown by a violent wind. Water jetted from nozzles placed along the pleated edges, spraying rainbows in the air before drizzling into the huge basin below.

  Kids wearing miniature versions of their father’s three-piece business suits played with motorized boats in the water. A tiny girl, dressed in a dozen layers of crinoline petticoats under a pastel-pink dress, baby hair drawn up into two pink-ribboned ponytails, tottered along the plaza, tended by an anxious-looking Filipino woman wearing the mandatory black aba’ayah that Khuruchabjan Islamic law required all foreign women to wear. Red was reserved for native citizens. The nanny’s bad Markundi was muffled by the cloth around her head clenched tightly between her teeth. Only the top of her face was visible, pretty Oriental eyes tired and nerv
ous. The child giggled, lurching away on chubby legs to escape her restraint.

  Enjoy it while it lasts, kid, I thought sourly.

  At each end of the square a pair of Khuruchabjan army soldiers in fancy dress uniforms stood at the ready, jaunty red berets at an angle, uniforms crisply creased, burnished machine guns cradled in their arms. They looked like statues themselves, pointedly ignored by the people in the square. But no one doubted that under the mirror-shades their dark, sullen eyes constantly scanned the crowd.

  I scanned the crowd as well, keeping tabs on our shadows, and it was with mixed feelings I spotted Thomas Andrew Hollingston Clermont, Esq., strolling across the wide, paved park in deep conversation with two Arab men in white and gold robes. I grimaced and shifted in my seat, ducking my head in the hope he would overlook us, but his eyes widened and he smiled, changing direction.

  “How very pleasant to run into you again, Mr. Halton, Mr. Sulaiman… Kay Bee,” he said in his exquisite accent. He then switched to Markundi, managing to sound equally posh as he introduced us to his companions, high-ranking men who worked in Larry’s government and liaisoned with the British Consulate.

  Which meant, of course, they were in reality a couple of Larry’s snottier relatives skimming a healthy percentage of baksheesh off the Brits in exchange for awarding outrageously priced bids on Khuruchabjan construction projects to favored companies. The real work would be done by poorly paid non-blueblooded Khuruchabjans supplying any physical labor necessary, and other maltreated foreign “guest” administration workers needed for the skills the Khuruchabjans were sadly lacking in.

  So it has always been. Yah zhsa’ara.

  We smiled and shook their hands, murmuring the correct social phrases, returning polite salaams. Clermont exchanged a few more pleasantries with the two Arabs before they sauntered off in search of other kickbacks.

  Clermont took out a silk handkerchief from his pocket and dusted off a spot on our stone ledge before sitting down. He turned his face up to allow the sunlight to fall full glare upon his skin. Blinking against the harsh light like a cat stretching itself, he said, “So different from London. I adore the sun.”