Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  “Forget it, Halton. My visa’s been yanked. If I miss this plane,” I said heatedly, “I’ll be thrown—” The words died as he pulled open his jacket.

  Somebody had shot him. Blood covered the front of his shirt in a dark shiny stain.

  “Please,” he said, closed the jacket and vanished.

  I got into the taxi and started for the airport.

  He was not my lover, I reminded myself. I didn’t have any obligation to him. He was not my friend, either. He wasn’t even a human being, for shit’s sake. It’s just a biomachine, an artificial fabricant spy, I didn’t have to involve myself in this crap anymore, I’d done dood my duty, I didn’t have to risk getting tossed in prison or even worse, I was outa here. The Old City wall loomed ahead in the fragile morning mist.

  “Stop here,” I said impulsively and leaned over the front seat, peeling off rial notes without bothering to count them. “I want you to go on to the airport and put my luggage on the plane to Cairo for me. If anyone stops you, you tell them I left on a bus headed for the American military post at Sa’deqi, okay? You didn’t see anyone else, and you don’t know anything else. You understand?”

  The driver was staring at me, eyes pale in the rearview mirror, nodding quickly. I shoved the thick bundle of notes in his hand.

  “Come back to the hotel tomorrow. If you’ve done what I’ve said and kept your mouth shut, there’ll be four times this for you there.” That would give me twenty-four hours. I hoped. I grabbed my PortaNet, glancing through the back window as I cracked open the door. “Rah” I said—“Go”— and was out and crouching in the shadows as the taxi took off.

  I cursed under my breath, hugging the walls as I trotted hurriedly down the alleyways, turning at random. I hadn’t the foggiest notion of where I was, and if Halton didn’t show up, l was going to have a hell of a time getting out of here. Turning a corner, I spotted a tiny coffee bar, elderly men just from mosque slouched at the tables outside, down hunting jackets over their qaftans against the morning chill. They blinked rheumy eyes at me as I slid into the smoky interior.

  I walked to the far end of the counter, where I could watch the door. Before I’d gotten halfway through ordering a coffee, Halton came in. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing my arm and hustling me out the back way. We jogged through more mazelike alleys. It seemed just as aimless as my route had been, but I knew Halton couldn’t be lost.

  The alley terminated in a small square bustling with men setting up their fruit and vegetable stalls under a ramshackle covered bazaar in preparation for the day’s open market. With Halton’s hand still tightly clamped around my forearm, we walked quickly to a garage at the other end. Inside, two young men dressed in blue coveralls and black grease glanced up from the open engine of an ancient Yugo three-seater. I recognized one of Ibrahim’s numerous cousins. Wordlessly, he nodded, jerking his head toward a key hanging from a hook over the tool counter.

  Halton snatched the key and we left. A few blocks later, he pushed open the door of a nondescript apartment house set in a complex of project-like apartment houses, all grim, barren and reeking of poverty. A single flyspecked light bulb hung in the entrance hall, doing little to brighten the rickety stairway leading up into the gloom.

  For someone who’d just been shot, Halton looked pallid, but not out of breath. I was the one winded by the time we reached the garret floor. Halton slid the key into the lock, and we walked into the tiny room.

  A narrow bed had been shoved against one wall, unmade and obviously well slept in. A Pakistani calendar three years out of date hung on the wall, adorned with the holoprint of a kohl-eyed movie starlet barely covering her modesty with misty-focus veils. A gravity-fed sink dripped in the corner, staining the chipped porcelain with rust from the converted gasoline-can water tank bolted to the wall over it. Clothes were piled in a heap in one corner. Dozens of books in Arabic, a few in French and English, lay scattered about, and a desk made from bricks and scrap-board supported one of the most ancient personal computers I’d ever seen outside a museum. A modem had been rigged to it, the wire running out the single window, where it had been spliced into a phone line. A few pieces of clothing fluttered from the wire to disguise it, unconvincingly, as a laundry line.

  Halton stood immobile, listening. I could feel him trembling through the hand still clasping my arm. He looked suddenly exhausted, and released me to sink heavily down on the narrow bed. Moving slowly, he unzipped his jacket, peeling it gingerly off his shoulders.

  The whole front of his shirt was soaked with blood, still damp. He hadn’t been shot that long ago. Three small rips in the shirt showed where the bullets had gone in, a direct hit to the chest. He should have been dead. Blood smeared his shaking fingers as he tried unbuttoning his shirt.

  I shook myself, and squatted down to help him. “Jesus Christ, Halton, we gotta get you to a doctor…” I said, my own fingers fumbling from the oozing slickness. The fabric clung to his skin as I peeled it gently away from the wound.

  “Not necessary,” Halton said thickly. “He missed the heart.”

  I used the shirt to wipe away the clotting blood, then stared, astonished. It looked like he’d been shot with an Eclipse, all right, the shells’ backlash gouging babyfist-sized holes out the front of his chest. But the bullet wounds had already begun puckering over, inflamed pink skin sealing the punctures shut. The scar tissue over the wounds writhed like maggots burrowing underneath.

  I felt like I’d just stuck my hands into a nest of cockroaches, and shuddered away from him. My skin crawled, twitching in witless revulsion. I found myself pressed back against the primitive desk, gulping air through a constricted throat. I threw the shirt away from me and wiped my stained hands together in reflexive horror.

  Halton reacted as if I’d slapped him. “It’s only nanos, Kay Bee,” he pleaded. “That’s all, just the nanos…”

  We stared at each other while I shuddered, then pulled myself back under control. It was just so unnatural, perverse. “Jeesuz,” I spat out. “Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.” Not my best, but it was the only way I could deal with it. My media-art education was wasted on him anyway; he didn’t have a clue what the hell I was talking about. “Who shot you, Halton?”

  He shook his head. T don’t know.” He grimaced with pain as he reached into the pocket of his discarded jacket, and held up a single slip-clip. “I hoped you’d help me to find out.”

  I sat down in the room’s single chair, pushing the small computer to one side to open out the PortaNet. Halton watched from behind me as I slid the slipclip into the playback flat screen.

  Halton hadn’t wasted his education, however. He’d stripped the HoloPak down to essentials, redesigning and rewiring his assortment of flyeyes into hidey-holes and corners of Larry’s private rooms, triggered into individual feeder Paks by motion sensors. If he couldn’t be there personally, his own private security system could. I wondered if this had been for Larry’s benefit, or some newly developed sense of self-preservation.

  This Pak had been covering the hallway leading out from Larry’s playroom, filming from a strange angle, a fly on the wall. For most of the clip, we were entertained by the lopsided figures of military messengers stomping self-importantly along the corridor, servants dusting furniture, a flock of berobed elderly men walking slowly, heads down and muttering to each other as they came and went, a shot of Larry skate-boarding along the long hallway. Then the clip cut from a security guard in uniform schmoozing one of the veiled cleaning women busy ignoring him while vacuuming along the walls, to Halton walking in front of three other men. The light had shifted, and the tiny digital numerals in the lower corner indicated the time had changed from late afternoon to well after midnight.

  Larry came out of the games room, shut the door and turned. He was dressed in his usual casual clothes, and didn’t look as if he’d been to bed. He seemed mildly surprised to see the other men with Halton, but not afraid.

  “Damn,” one of the men
said quietly in English. The fly-eye recorded it, but His Excellency didn’t seem to have heard.

  “What’s up, John?” he said, the flyeye picking up the sound perfectly. “I thought you—”

  Halton withdrew an Eclipse from under his jacket and shot Larry point-blank in the chest. The Boy King’s arms and legs jerked out from under him, his expression dumbfounded, and he crumpled to the floor.

  I looked up from the playback, gaping at Halton. His face was ashen. “That’s not me, Kay Bee,” he said, shaken.

  The Halton on the screen bent over Larry’s body, stripping the clothes from it quickly and efficiently while one of the men behind him withdrew a bundle of army uniforms from under his robes. “Hallway’s as good as inside, I guess. Hurry up,” he said in a clear American accent. The voice seemed familiar. “C’mon, c’mon…” Halton stripped off his jacket, and pulled the uniform on quickly. He took the second uniform and began dressing the corpse.

  An alarm went off, shrilling in the background. “Right on time,” one of them said, glanced at his watch, then turned to look behind him. The flyeye picked up his face clearly.

  It was Cullen Laidcliff.

  Halton had finished dressing the dead king in the second army uniform, picked up the Eclipse from the floor and stood up, facing the three other men calmly, the gun in his hand hanging limply by his side.

  “Ready?” Laidcliff said to the one on his left.

  “Yeah,” the man said, and reached over the body to take the Eclipse away from Halton. The fabricant looked at the weapon indifferently, making no move to protect himself as the man shot him.

  In the chest. Three times.

  “It wasn’t me, that can’t be me…” the Halton behind me murmured. His knuckles had gone white clenching the back of the chair. I thought any moment he’d crush the cheap aluminum tubing.

  A second later, one of the three had discarded his robes, and I got my second shock. It was His Excellency, Lawrence Abdul bin Hassan al Samir al Rashid. He was gazing down unemotionally at the two fallen bodies as the man with the Eclipse twisted the barrel, then stepped across the body to fire a wide-angle blast into the dead Larry’s face, ripping it to mangled, unrecognizable shreds. He turned, and the fly-eye recorded the second man’s almost delicate features clearly, green eyes, sandy hair.

  “We can’t have two,” he said, and shot another wide-angled discharge into Halton’s face, nearly tearing the head off the body. Halton’s legs jerked; then he lay still, the obliterated face oozing dark blood and brain matter. Now there were only two anonymous dead army soldiers lying on the hallway floor.

  The muffled sound of shouts, someone pounding outside an unseen door, could be heard over the still-blaring alarm. The sandy-haired man slapped the Eclipse into the living Larry’s hand, and grinned. “That’s it, you’re on, boy,” Laidcliff said sardonically. “Make it look good.”

  His Excellency slowly twisted his head, looking straight into the flyeye. An impassive cold drifted through the inhuman eyes, a glacial look I knew so well sending shivers through me. I rubbed the hairs standing up on my arms.

  “We are being recorded,” the replacement Larry said, his voice colorless.

  The two other men twisted around, staring up at where the fabricant was gazing, their faces crystal-clear on the clip. “Son of a bitch,” the sandy-haired man cursed. He snatched back the Eclipse, raised it and shot out the flyeye, the tape going dead.

  “I didn’t kill him, it wasn’t me,” Halton was still whispering to himself. He looked as if he were in shock, pale and stupefied.

  “Not unless you’ve got nanos that can scoop brains back into your skull, Halton,” I snapped at him. “Calm down, get a grip on yourself.” He blinked rapidly, focusing slowly on my face. “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” I said, and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands.

  “Kay Bee… ?”

  “Just tell me what happened, everything you remember,” I prompted him.

  “A little before one A.M., His Excellency sent me to wake al-Hasmani, the Minister of the Interior.” Halton took a deep, shuddering breath, visibly settling down. “The old man he plays… played hologames with. Al-Hasmani has his apartments connected with the palace, off the main building, so that he can be summoned whenever His Excellency was in the mood for a game. It’s in a secured area, only family members or trusted ministers. No one could have gotten in or out of the palace at that time of night without either my approval, or by direct order of His Excellency.”

  Halton sat back on the bed, his panic quelled. He distractedly picked through the pile of clothing on the floor and selected a shirt from it, shaking the wrinkles out to examine its size.

  “I arrived at the Minister’s offices and woke his secretary. He said the Minister was in the lavatory, he’d be back soon, that I should wait. I sat down to read a magazine. The Minister is an old man, he sometimes needs a few minutes. The secretary got a phone call, spoke in Markundi. He left immediately afterwards on an errand, said he’d return in a moment. I looked up when the door opened a few minutes later. The man in the clip—not Mr. Laidcliff, the other one, I don’t know who he is—shot me. Twice.”

  Halton’s forehead creased with concentration, his hand flitting to his chest, where three inflamed punctures in his skin continued their bizarre wriggling. “I stood up, and fell face-down on the floor. The man pushed me onto my back with his foot, stood over me and shot me a third time. My nanosystem took over, and he must have thought I was dead.”

  Halton glanced at me, troubled, apologetic. “He had the Eclipse set for narrow fire, or I would be dead. He missed the aortic arch by millimeters, nicked the pericardium. The sternum gladiolis deflected most of one shot, but the other two ruptured the left anterior segmental bronchus and part of the left upper lobe of the lung. The nanosystem is triggered by acute trauma, drops me into a catatonic state, no heartbeat, no breathing, temperature drops, barely any brain activity, while it—”

  “Don’t bother me with the technical details, Halton,” I interrupted. “Just get on with it.”

  He nodded. “I don’t know how long I was unconscious. When I woke, I could hear the alarm going off in His Excellency’s palace. I still had severe damage, but by then I was able to walk. The Minister’s secretary was standing in the doorway; al-Hasmani was behind him. They both started screaming when I stood up. I pushed them out of the way, and ran back toward the main hall, where I had left His Excellency. I heard Mr. Laidcliff coming with another man. They were talking about the timetable being screwed up now, about the other fabricant, and Larry’s body and mine, about finding out fast where the damned flyeye led to.”

  Halton hesitated, swallowed. “That’s when I knew His Excellency was dead,” he said quietly. The thought seemed to cause him some pain. I waited for him to go on.

  “I’d set up the flyeye for the main hall, to transmit short pulse to a feeder Pak in one of the anterooms off the corridor. I headed directly for the Pak, got the clip out of it just as they traced it.” He had calmed and pulled the rumpled shirt on. It was slightly too small; his fingers bumbled with preoccupation in buttoning it.

  “I had the clip in my hand when I turned; there was Mr. Laidcliff and the other man.” His eyes were remote, remembering precisely each detail recorded in his eidetic memory. “They seemed surprised to see me still alive. They didn’t say anything. The other man started to bring the gun up. I picked up a chair, threw it through the window and jumped out. There was a tiled roof two stories below. I landed on it, ran as far as I could, jumped the space across to the roof of the next building. It was dark, the spotlights were turned on, someone began shooting. The perimeter stone wall has electrified razor-wire. I had to climb over it to jump onto another roof…” He focused back to me in the present. “I ran,” he finished simply.

  “Straight to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “The first place they’d probably expect you to go.”

  He looked
stricken. “What else could I do, Kay Bee?”

  I didn’t have to answer that. The next second, he was off the bed, pushing me behind him. Footsteps pounded up the stairs, and a voice yelled out in Markundi, fists banging on the door.

  “Sirs! Sirs! You’ve got to get out of here, j’ahkzhil…!”

  Halton jerked open the door, and a barefoot teenaged boy in a T-shirt hastily thrown on over torn jeans appeared, out of breath from his flight up the stairs. “Yousef’s been arrested,” he babbled. “Mahmud telephoned they came to the garage and took Yousef Mahmud got away but they’ve gone to Yousef’s mother’s house she’s sure to tell the police about Yousef’s room we’re all in a lot of trouble if you don’t leave. Hurry—”

  The boy had pushed into the room, hysterically jerking the modem wire from the window and gathering up the antique computer equipment. He stopped, his arms full, as Halton said quietly, “It’s too late. They’re already here.”

  Many running feet were thumping up the steps, and the shouts of men echoed in the street below. “Oh, Allah, what am I gonna do…” the kid wailed, and ran out the door. I heard a clatter as he jerked open another door, and flung the equipment in, my last sight of him a pair of frightened eyes before the hall toilet door slammed and the bolt slid into place.

  Halton shoved the door to the garret room shut, dragged the bed in front of it, then toppled the brick-and-board desk over that. I had popped the clip out of the playback reader, stuffed it into my pocket and started breaking down the PortaNet.

  Halton had the window open. “Leave it,” he said, looking down.

  “You’ve got to be joking,” I said unbelievingly. “You may be able to stop speeding bullets and leap tall buildings in a single bound, but not me.” Someone began yelling, pounding on the door.

  Halton grabbed me tightly by the waist, yanking me to him and said, “Hang on,” and out we went.

  “Hang on” was right. Seven stories up. I had my legs wrapped around his middle, my arms squeezing so hard around his neck I thought I’d strangle him. He carried me piggyback, his hands and feet scrabbling frantically for purchase as he descended the outside of the building.