Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  He had the tan to prove it, too.

  “I’ve always tried to avoid it, myself,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Ozone depletion, skin cancer, all that.”

  He smirked, turning to look at me with a depreciating gleam in his eye. “So, what brings you two to the Heroes Square?”

  It was his tone. Very casual. Too casual. Did he think we were meeting someone? “Just out stretching our legs. Do some site-scouting, soak up a little of the local color, you know, the usual touristy bullshit,” I said offhandedly.

  Clermont went back to absorbing ultraviolet rays on his face. “I had expected you to give us a ring. We could have helped you to make arrangements for any site locations you might need for filming. You’ve disappointed me.”

  You probably are not the only one, luv, I thought. “Sorry about that. Tommy,” I said lazily. “I’m just one of those stubborn cusses who likes to do things on my own, get the real flavor of a place rather than the sanitized official tour. Know what I mean?”

  When he looked back again, the sun had done nothing to warm up his eyes. “I’m terribly sorry if I left you with that impression, Kay Bee,” he said, his voice not matching the look. “I thought I’d shown you an indication of my sincerity, giving you the tip on His Excellency’s wife’s unfortunate demise.” He waited.

  If he was attempting to make me feel obligated, or guilty, it didn’t work. He raised an eyebrow, then shrugged.

  “I’m sure we could have provided something more out of the ordinary for you. Perhaps meet anyone you liked, film anything at all in Nok Kuzlat. For instance, you might be surprised to know His Excellency has detained without trial a few of his political opponents right here in the capital. A judicious word and goodwill gesture in the right places, you could have done an interview with some of Khuruchabja’s more interesting dissidents from deep inside the Islamic gulag, so to speak. Definitely off-limits to the usual Western reporter. You still have time. Perhaps I might still be of some assistance after all… ?”

  He was playing dirty. I’d have given my eyeteeth to get something in a slipclip with more substance than Sheikh Larry’s perspective on tiddlywinks. He also knew it wasn’t too likely I’d be visiting the neighborhood again any time soon, so didn’t need to struggle with the dilemma of most journalists, the endless balancing act between the craving that politicians and despots have for favorable public exposure and the risks taken by members of the press—their careers, visas, confidential sources, and even on occasion, their lives—for the facts. I was about to jump on the offer before it scuttled away, when I noticed Tommy looking at Halton with more than casual interest.

  “And when His Excellency discovered I was taking a little meeting with his enemies in jail on your say-so, they could go ahead and make up another cell for the three of us, Tommy.”

  “Nonsense.” Clermont dismissed the notion. “His Excellency might be inconvenienced, but he could cope with any minor external embarrassment as long as internal politics remain stable.”

  I snorted. “Which means there isn’t really anyone who could cause him much embarrassment, is there?”

  Embarrassment… Something in the word tickled a brain cell awake. “You must have some unusual authority to be able to get Western reporters into political prisons, Tommy.”

  “A better word would be ‘influence. ’”

  “Mmm. Say there was someone of interest I could interview, just what would you expect in return if you did us this favor and used your ‘influence’ to pull the right strings?”

  He eyed me for several quiet moments, then looked up serenely at Halton. “Perhaps if you… knew anything that might be of some mutual interest… discovered some useful information we could both benefit from… ?” he suggested coyly.

  “I can’t imagine what that would be, old son.”

  His gaze slid back to me. “Oh, just anything. A stray microflake, for example.”

  I hadn’t exactly been prepared for that. Not with the funny looks he’d been giving Halton. I thought he wanted to know about CDI’s planting an unorthodox agent in Khuruchabja. The skin along the back of my neck stood up, a chill like ice. Clermont smiled his direct-hit smile, amused and dry.

  “Microflakes are such a growing fad these days, aren’t they?” I said. “Seems like everybody on the block wants one to keep up with the Joneses. Personally, I think they’re overrated.”

  He didn’t seem pleased with my answer. “Some are more valuable than others. One in particular has already cost me a dear friend.” He looked at Halton again, and for a moment his face was naked, his hostility bare. A few pieces of the puzzle clicked into place, which made me none too comfortable.

  Khatijah had been his lover.

  Somehow, she had known about the flake, but not about Halton.

  Clermont hadn’t known about either one. Now he knew about both.

  Halton had killed her and her friends, but the only one who knew that had been Elias Somerton. The second Elias Somerton.

  Clermont knew Halton was a fabricant, but he didn’t know I’d already given the flake to Somerton. He thought we still had it, and was bartering for it.

  Desperately.

  None of this fit together in any kind of pattern. The situation still looked totally enigmatic. Every time I turned around, the puzzle just seemed to grow larger and larger. For all my wisecracks and the dislike I felt toward Clermont, I suddenly worried I’d given away the flake too soon. Maybe even to the wrong person.

  “You didn’t just run into us by accident, Clermont. How did you know we were at the Square?” I demanded abruptly. I was through playing verbal games. I nodded at the men across the Square, still busy studying the sports pages. “They yours?”

  Clermont glanced at them. “No.” He nodded to another set of men in business suits strolling and chatting by the fountain. “They are. Or rather they work for the Consulate. The Square is close by, they let me know you were in convenient range. I went for a walk.” He didn’t seem embarrassed.

  Why should he have been? He had his own team of babysitters traipsing after him, their own set of newspapers tucked under the bulging armpits. No foreign official could so much as jog down to the corner for a bottle of milk without an uninvited entourage sniffing at his heels. It was a traditional way of life for any foreign government staff here.

  Half the crowd in the Square must have been assorted snoops all bumping into one another. A scrawny kid in a cutoff qabah and Levi’s hawked the same newspapers that the shadows seemed to patronize heavily, the Square being a sure place for brisk business that day, I’m sure. Who knew, maybe the baby in crinoline was actually a spy on someone else’s payroll. Too bad for the newsboy that she was too young to read.

  “We must stop meeting like this, Tommy,” I said. “People might start talking.”

  “I know you consider me a prize asshole, Mr. Sulaiman,” Clermont said abruptly. I looked back at him, startled. The muscles in his face were hard, grim. “I’ll be frank with you. I’m not overly fond of myself at the moment, either. Self-loathing is always an occupational hazard for diplomats dealing with the Middle East.”

  At that moment, I almost liked him. An alarming thought.

  “I need that microflake. I could put pressure on you through official channels, but I’d like to think my honor is still sufficiently intact that I needn’t stoop to that. I find it distasteful enough being reduced to dealing baksheesh like some common tah’jeer peddling scraps in the suuqs,” he said, spitting out the word as if it left a bad taste in his silver-spooned mouth. Actually, I suspected, he had never entertained the slightest notion of leaning on me; the less people who knew anything the better.

  “I’ll promise to do whatever is necessary to get you interviews with whomever you like in Nok Kuzlat,” he said, “whenever and wherever you choose. That much is indeed within my power. I’d like to point out that I and my government will suffer certain consequences for it with the Khuruchabjans, but we can sustain the damage.”


  Sun-bronzed skin or not, Thomas Andrew HollingstonClermont was still a card-carrying member of the pasty-faced twit club. I didn’t like him, he didn’t like me. His disgust with being forced to bargain with me was only surpassed by his haughty contempt for this backwater country he obviously found far beneath his due.

  “In return, I’m only asking that you consider what I need. That’s all, nothing else. Only consider it.”

  What a gent. Problem was, I didn’t have the flake anymore.

  I stood up, stretching my back in the sunshine. Clermont was looking at me with his resentment and hope thinly veiled by his arrogant upper-class polish.

  “Sure, Tommy. I’ll think it over,” I said. I jerked a thumb at all the watchdogs scattered about the Square reading papers. “If I find interesting knickknacks lying around, I’ll place an ad in the classifieds so you’ll be the first to get the news.”

  I grinned cheerfully at his disappointment, disguising the leaden feeling in my stomach, and walked away. Halton said nothing, as usual. We passed the young boy peddling his Arabic-language newspapers.

  “Buy a newspaper,” the kid said.

  “Thank you, no…” I tried to brush him off, but he danced in front of me and thumped the paper against my chest with a firm slap.

  “Buy a newspaper, get the TV guide free,” he said insistently, his aggressiveness a bit too urgent. Wasn’t there anybody here who was what they were supposed to be? I fished the coins out of my pocket and bought the grimy rolled-up newspaper, barely four pages of it. The kid tucked in a TV guide three weeks out of date.

  Oh-kay.

  The kid then turned away to try and sell his papers to the tag-team shadows following us. I made it a point to stop and wait for them, tapping my foot with feigned impatience and grinning as they scowled.

  Close to the Square was a Salon du Thé, which was about as Parisian as the tiny Muslim saint’s tomb next to it. Halton and I took a table outside and sipped mint spiced tea from gold-scrolled tea glasses as old women wrapped in red aba’ayahs prayed and gossiped by the small dome over the shrine’s square base. A couple of our snooper troopers took a table at the far corner, conversing quietly while pretending we didn’t know who they were.

  I handed the paper to Halton, and leafed casually through the TV guide. Someone had marked various random words in both Arabic and the comically translated English. This obviously wouldn’t be from Hamid; not only was it not his style, what with our chaperons, if Hamid were around, he wouldn’t come within a hundred yards of us.

  I smiled as I started working my way through the secret message, amused by the Captain Clandestine comic-book safeguards, knowing this had to be the work of Ibrahim’s little computer club. Halton folded the paper over to read the middle section, scanning the small Arabic script casually. I stopped smiling when I had enough words in a row. Halton glanced up at me from over his newspaper. “Anything interesting?”

  I wasn’t taking the chance our shadows didn’t have spikemikes. “Not much. Missed a good show last night. Our feathered friend has flown south for the winter,” I said nonchalantly. “After having contracted a slight fever.”

  Halton understood my cryptic remark, although I hadn’t been strictly correct. Gabriel didn’t have a virus. Gabriel was the virus.

  The AI program had been ARC’ed onto the flake, and when it rewrote its own programming, it had unraveled like a spring, copying itself from the flake straight out onto the kids’ electronic bulletin network.

  Had it been only the small infrastructure of friends and their antique computers, there wouldn’t have been data storage connected by modems big enough to hold Gabriel. But the network was also hooked into the government’s computer library system, courtesy of the cousins working as data entry clerks. They had been busily probing files and stealing software off the government’s computer network for years, and now Gabriel had escaped to infect the bits and bytes of Nok Kuzlat’s entire computer communications systems.

  So far, the message read, Gabriel hadn’t done anything. It sped through the electronic chains like a ghost, popping up here and there to open and close various files and programs harmlessly and unchanged, undetected by the government.

  So far.

  Abdullah had managed to engage it in a conversation, of sorts, and had asked it what it was doing.

  The answer made me shiver.

  The Archangel Gabriel was looking for the Mahdi.

  SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  We were ready for our appointment with the Boy King, HoloPak and PortaNet at our feet while we sat eating leftovers from the room service breakfast and discussing our alternatives. The Raid box blinked like a Christmas tree ornament on the trolley. Now that “they” knew I had it, there was no sense in putting up with eavesdropping vermin infesting the flower arrangements.

  I could feel some kind of nasty surprise CDI had just for us lurking in the background, but I still hadn’t come up with a plan. Telling CDI and the Sheikh to piss off, and running away together like Huck Finn and Jim down the Mississippi River on a raft was not a viable option. But there didn’t seem to be much of anything else, either.

  “We’re just going to have to go through the motions and try dealing with it as it comes, Halton. I don’t know what else to do,” I admitted finally. “Looks like you’ve backed the wrong horse.” I looked over at him, realizing by his detached expression that he didn’t understand. “I don’t know how useful I’m going to be at helping you. I’m not sure how useful I am even to myself.”

  I was in a shitty mood, feeling sick with self-disgust, not even a flippant joke ready to lighten my mood.

  Halton studied me with calm eyes, finally getting the idiom. “I’m backing the only horse there is, Kay Bee,” he said. “We still have a week left.”

  Then it was showtime.

  Halton and I arrived fifteen minutes before the appointment. Americans are notoriously on time, and get peeved when others don’t run by the same internal clock. For some reason, the palace military guards took their sweet time searching our equipment and ordering us to walk through the sensor repeatedly. They did a thorough pat-down, making me sweat. I passed inspection, and when they were finally satisfied with both of us, we followed a pair of machine-gun-armed guards as they swaggered down the long hallway.

  Then we cooled our heels for the better part of two hours after our scheduled appointment in one of the endless number of brocade-curtained ma’gâlees, this particular tiny reception room done up as a miniature replica of the Sistine Chapel, complete with Jehovah jump-starting Adam with His mighty finger. It was a curious room to find inside the palace of a Muslim monarch, but Larry wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Muslim monarch, either.

  When one of the ancient attendants to His Excellency finally showed up, we were escorted to yet another small room, this one almost plain by comparison. Sheikh Larry lolled on a small love seat under a stained-glass window opening out onto a small, quite lovely garden. He was dressed casually, his jeans in slightly better condition than the previous pair, and a T-shirt with a newer icon of the flame-haired lead singer of Brain Damage, which seemed to be his favorite rock group. Our elderly escort hobbled to stand at one side, his twin on the other. A high, round table in the center of the room was covered with assorted documents.

  “You brought the papers?” His Excellency said unceremoniously by way of greeting.

  I drew a complete blank, taken entirely off-guard. “What papers?” Then, of course, I understood. “Oh. Yes, I have them. They’re in my Net.” I patted the PortaNet hanging from my shoulder.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.” He rose from the sofa and stood on the opposite side of the table.

  “What… ?” I stammered. “Wait a minute. I thought we had until the end of the week…” I glanced at Halton. He looked alarmed. “I need an optics man, Your Excellency ”

  Larry frowned, annoyed. “Look, just hire another photographer; there’re always a bunch hanging around. You can kee
p him until you’ve finished the interview this afternoon, but I’d like to get the formalities over with now, privately.” He grinned. “Sorry to break up a great team, but I get what I want, when I want it. I’m the friggin’ king, you got it, Sulaiman? So don’t go giving me a hard time. Capish?”

  This was not the spoiled rich brat boorishly shoving his daddy’s money around in Beverly Hills. An insolent little Beverly Hills cretin I could have decked. Sheikh Larry was still the head of state of a country not generally known for its mercy or benevolence toward infidels and other lesser beings.

  “Got it,” I said sourly.

  Halton was standing as rigid as oak as I dug the Transfer of Title papers out of the PortaNet’s side pocket. One of the twins filled in the Arabic half of the contract, while the other dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on the English half.

  The Boy King read it, smiled, and slid the papers toward me, a 24-karat gold pen resting on top. I picked up the pen with numb fingers, and pretended to read the words on the contract I couldn’t even focus on.

  I had the pen poised over the dotted line when Halton said softly, “Kay Bee…”

  Looking up, I met his wide eyes. He was staring at me in distress, frightened, a silent plea for help. I felt like a complete shit.

  There was nothing I could do; Halton knew it. The wall slid back into place, his frantic appeal replaced by cool indifference.

  I signed the goddamned papers and sold Halton’s soul to another devil.

  If Sheikh Larry noticed any of this, he was too wrapped up with the excitement of his new plaything to pay it any mind. One of the two elderly advisors gathered up the papers and discreetly retired from the room. The other stepped back, hands behind his robe at dignified attention. We stood around that small table staring at each other wordlessly until Larry suddenly flicked several bright somethings into the air with a magician’s sleight of hand.