Rife's jet sits on the tarmac, engines idling, waiting to taxi out onto the runway. In the cockpit are a pilot and copilot. Until half an hour ago, they were loyal employees of L. Bob Rife. Then they sat and watched out the windshield as the dozen Rife security drones who were stationed around the hangar variously got their heads blown off, their throats slit, or else just plain dropped their weapons and fell to their knees and surrendered. Now the pilot and copilot have taken lifelong oaths of loyalty to Uncle Enzo's organization. Uncle Enzo could have just dragged them out and replaced them with his own pilots, but this way is better. If Rife should, somehow, actually make it onto the plane, he will recognize his own pilots and think that everything is fine. And the fact that the pilots are alone there in the cockpit without any direct Mafia supervision will merely emphasize the great trust that Uncle Enzo has placed in them and the oath that they have taken. It will actually enhance their sense of duty. It will amplify Uncle Enzo's displeasure if they should break their oaths. Uncle Enzo has no doubt about the pilots at all.
He is less happy with the arrangements here, which were made rather hastily. The problem is, as usual, the unpredictable Y.T. He was not expecting her to jump out of a moving helicopter and get free from L. Bob Rife. He was, in other words, expecting a hostage negotiation somewhat later on, after Rife had flown Y.T. back to his headquarters in Houston.
But the hostage situation no longer obtains, and so Uncle Enzo feels it is important to stop Rife now, before he gets back to his home turf in Houston. He has called for a major realignment of Mafia forces, and right now, dozens of helicopters and tactical units are hastily replotting their courses and trying to converge on LAX as quickly as they can. But in the meantime, Enzo is here with a small number of his own personal bodyguards, and this technical surveillance man from Ng's organization.
They have shut down the airport. This was easy to do: they just pulled Lincoln Town Cars onto all the runways, for starters, and then went into the control tower and announced that in a few minutes they would be going to war. Now, LAX is probably quieter than it has been at any point since it was built. Uncle Enzo can actually hear the faint crashing of surf on the beach, half a mile away. It is almost pleasant here. Weenie-roasting weather.
Uncle Enzo is cooperating with Mr. Lee, which means working with Ng, and Ng, while highly competent, has a technological bias that Uncle Enzo distrusts. He would prefer a single good soldier in polished shoes, armed with a nine, to a hundred of Ng's gizmos and portable radar units.
When they came out here, he was expecting a broad open space in which to confront Rife. Instead, the environment is cluttered. Several dozen corporate jets and helicopters are parked on the apron. Nearby is an assortment of private hangars, each with its own fenced-in parking area containing a number of cars and utility vehicles. And they are rather close to the tank farm where the airport's supply of jet fuel is stored. That means lots of pipes and pumping stations and hydraulic folderol sprouting out of the ground. Tactically, the area has more in common with a jungle than with a desert. The apron and runway themselves are, of course, more desertlike, although they have drainage ditches where any number of men could be concealed. So a better analogy would be beach warfare in Vietnam: a broad open area that abruptly turns into jungle. Not Uncle Enzo's favorite place.
“The chopper is approaching the perimeter of the airport,” Ky says.
Uncle Enzo turns to his lieutenant. “Everyone in place?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you know that?”
“They all checked in a few minutes ago.”
“That means absolutely nothing. And how about the pizza car?”
“Well, I thought I would do that later, sir—”
“You need to be capable of doing more than one thing at a time.”
The lieutenant turns away, shamed and awed. “Ky,” Uncle Enzo says, “anything interesting happening on our perimeter?”
“Nothing at all,” Ng says.
“Anything uninteresting?”
“A few maintenance workers, as normal.”
“How do you know they are maintenance workers and not Rife soldiers in costume? Did you check their IDs?”
“Soldiers carry guns. Or at least knives. Radar shows that these men do not. Q.E.D.”
“Still trying to get all our men to check in,” the lieutenant says. “Having a little radio trouble, I guess.”
Uncle Enzo puts one arm around the lieutenant's shoulders. “Let me tell you a story, son. From the first moment I saw you, I thought you seemed familiar. Finally I realized that you remind me of someone I used to know: a lieutenant who was my commanding officer, for a while, in Vietnam.”
The lieutenant is thrilled. “Really?”
“Yes. He was young, bright, ambitious, well educated. And well meaning. But he had certain deficiencies. He had a stubborn inability to grasp the fundamentals of our situation over there. A sort of mental block, if you will, that caused those of us who were serving under him to experience the most intense kind of frustration. It was touch and go for a while, son, I don't mind telling you that.”
“How did it work out, Uncle Enzo?”
“It worked out fine. You see, one day, I took it upon myself to shoot him in the back of the head.”
The lieutenant's eyes get very big, and his face seems paralyzed. Uncle Enzo has no sympathy for him at all: if he screws this up, people could die.
Some new piece of radio babble comes in over the lieutenant's headset. “Oh, Uncle Enzo?” he says, very quietly and reluctantly.
“Yes?”
“You were asking about that pizza car?”
“Yes?”
“It's not there.”
“Not there?”
“Apparently, when they set down to pick up Rife, a man got out of the chopper and climbed into the pizza car and drove it away.”
“Where did he drive it to?”
“We don't know, sir, we only had one spotter in the area, and he was tracking Rife.”
“Take off your headset,” Uncle Enzo says. “And turn off that walkie-talkie. You need your ears.”
“My ears?”
Uncle Enzo drops into a crouch and walks briskly across the pavement until he is between a couple of small jets. He sets the skateboard down quietly. Then he unties his shoelaces and pulls his shoes off. He takes his socks off, too, and stuffs them into the shoes. He takes the straight razor out of his pocket, flips it open, and slits both of his trouser legs from the hem up to his groin, then bunches the material up and cuts it off. Otherwise the fabric will slide over his hairy legs when he walks and make noise.
“My God!” the lieutenant says, a couple of planes over. “Al is down! My God, he's dead!”
70
Uncle Enzo leaves his jacket on, for now, because it's dark, and because it's lined with satin so that it is relatively quiet. Then he climbs up onto the wing of one of the planes so that his legs cannot be seen by someone crouching on the ground. He hunkers down on the end of the wing, opens his mouth so that he can hear better, and listens.
The only thing he can hear at first is an uneven spattering noise that wasn't there before, like water falling out of a half-open faucet onto bare pavement. The sound seems to be coming from a nearby airplane. Uncle Enzo is afraid that it may be jet fuel leaking onto the ground, as part of a scheme to blow up this whole section of the airport and take out all opposition at a stroke. He drops silently to the ground, makes his way carefully around a couple of adjacent planes, stopping every few feet to listen, and finally sees it: one of his soldiers has been pinned to the aluminum fuselage of a Learjet by means of a long wooden pole. Blood runs out of the wound, down his pant legs, drips from his shoes, and spatters onto the tarmac.
From behind him, Uncle Enzo hears a brief scream that suddenly turns into a sharp gaseous exhalation. He has heard it before. It is a man having a sharp knife drawn across his throat. It is undoubtedly the lieutenant.
He has a fe
w seconds to move freely now. He doesn't even know what he's up against, and he needs to know that. So he runs in the direction the scream came from, moving quickly from cover of one jet to the next, staying down in a crouch.
He sees a pair of legs moving on the opposite side of a jet's fuselage. Uncle Enzo is near the tip of the jet's wing. He puts both hands on it, shoves down with all his weight, and then lets it go.
It works: the jet rocks toward him on its suspension. The assassin thinks that Uncle Enzo has just jumped up onto the wingtip, so he climbs up onto the opposite wing and waits with his back to the fuselage, waiting to ambush Enzo when he climbs over the top.
But Enzo is still on the ground. He runs in toward the fuselage on silent, bare feet, ducks beneath it, and comes up from underneath with his straight razor in one hand. The assassin—Raven—is right where Enzo expected him.
But Raven is already getting suspicious; he stands up to look over the top of the fuselage, and that puts his throat out of reach. Enzo's looking at his legs instead.
It's better to be conservative and take what you can get than take a big gamble and blow it, so Enzo reaches in, even as Raven is looking down at him, and severs Raven's left Achilles tendon.
As he's turning away to protect himself, something hits him very hard in the chest. Uncle Enzo looks down and is astonished to see a transparent object protruding from the right side of his rib cage. Then he looks up to see Raven's face three inches from his.
Uncle Enzo steps back away from the wing. Raven was hoping to fall on top of him but instead tumbles to the ground. Enzo steps back in, reaching forward with his razor, but Raven, sitting on the tarmac, has already drawn a second knife. He lunges for the inside of Uncle Enzo's thigh and does some damage; Enzo sidesteps away from the blade, throwing off his attack, and ends up making a short but deep cut on the top of Raven's shoulder. Raven knocks his arm aside before Enzo can go for the throat again.
Uncle Enzo's hurt and Raven's hurt. But Raven can't outrun him anymore; it's time to take stock of things a little bit. Enzo runs away, though when he moves, terrible pains run up and down the right side of his body. Something thuds into his back, too; he feels a sharp pain above one kidney, but only for a moment. He turns around to see a bloody piece of glass shattering on the pavement. Raven must have thrown it into his back. But without Raven's arm strength behind it, it didn't have enough momentum to penetrate all the way through the bulletproof fabric, and it fell out.
Glass knives. No wonder Ky didn't see him on millimeter wave.
By the time he gets behind the cover of another plane, his sense of hearing is being overwhelmed by the approach of a chopper.
It is Rife's chopper, settling down on the tarmac a few dozen meters away from the jet. The thunder of the rotor blades and the blast of the wind seem to penetrate into Uncle Enzo's brain. He closes his eyes against the wind and utterly loses his balance, has no idea where he is until he slams full-length into the pavement. The pavement beneath him is slippery and warm, and Uncle Enzo realizes that he is losing a great deal of blood.
Staring across the tarmac, he sees Raven making his way toward the aircraft, limping horrendously, one leg virtually useless. Finally, he gives up on it and just hops on his good leg.
Rife has climbed down out of the chopper. Raven and Rife are talking, Raven gesticulating back in Enzo's direction. Then Rife nods his approval, and Raven turns around, his teeth bright and white. He's not grimacing so much as he is smiling in anticipation. He begins to hop toward Uncle Enzo, pulling another glass knife out of his jacket. The bastard is carrying a million of those things.
He's coming after Enzo, and Enzo can't even stand up without passing out.
He looks around and sees nothing but a skateboard and a pair of expensive shoes and socks about twenty feet away. He can't stand up, but he can do the GI crawl, and so he begins to pull himself forward on his elbows even as Raven is hopping toward him one-legged.
They meet in an open lane between two adjacent jets. Enzo is on his belly, slumped over the skateboard. Raven is standing, supporting himself with one hand on the wing of the jet, the glass knife glittering in his other hand. Enzo is now seeing the world in dim black and white, like a cheap Metaverse terminal; this is how his buddies used to describe it in Vietnam right before they succumbed to blood loss.
“Hope you've done your last rites,” Raven says, “because there ain't no time to call a priest.”
“There is no need for one,” Uncle Enzo says, and punches the button on the skateboard labeled “RadiKS Narrow Cone Tuned Shock Wave Projector.”
The concussion nearly blows his head off. Uncle Enzo, if he survives, will never hear well again. But it does wake him up a little bit. He lifts his head off the board to see Raven standing there stunned, empty-handed, a thousand tiny splinters of broken glass raining down out of his jacket.
Uncle Enzo rolls over on his back and waves his straight razor in the air. “I prefer steel myself,” he says. “Would you like a shave?”
71
Rife sees it all and understands it clearly enough. He would love to see how it all comes out, but he's a very busy man; he would like to get out of here before the rest of the Mafia and Ng and Mr. Lee and all those other assholes come after him with their heat-seeking missiles. And there's no time to wait for the gimpy Raven to hop all the way back. He gives a thumbs up to the pilot and begins climbing the steps into his private jet.
It's daytime. A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from the tank farm a mile away, like a time-lapse chrysanthemum. It is so vast and complicated in its blooming, uncontrolled growth that Rife stops halfway up the stairs to watch.
A powerful disturbance is moving through the flame, leaving a linear trail in the light, like a cosmic ray fired through a cloud chamber. By the force of its passage, it leaves behind a shock wave that is clearly visible in the flame, a bright spreading cone that is a hundred times larger than the dark source at its apex: a black bulletlike thing supported on four legs that are churning too fast to be visible. It is so small and so fast that L. Bob Rife would not be able to see it, if it were not headed directly for him.
It is picking its way over a broad tangle of open-air plumbing, the pipes that carry the fuel to the jets, jumping over some obstacles, digging its metallic claws into others, tearing them open with the explosive thrust of its legs, igniting their contents with the sparks that fly whenever its feet touch the pavement. It gathers its four legs under it, leaps a hundred feet to the top of a buried tank, uses that as a launch pad for another long, arcing leap over the chain link fence that separates the fuel installation from the airport proper, and then it settles into a long, steady, powerful lope, accelerating across the perfect geometric plane of the runway, chased by a long tongue of flame that extends lazily from the middle of the conflagration, whorling inward upon itself as it traces the currents in that Rat Thing's aftershock.
Something tells L. Bob Rife to get away from the jet, which is loaded with fuel. He turns and half jumps, half falls off the stairs, moving clumsily because he's looking at the Rat Thing, not at the ground.
The Rat Thing, just a tiny dark thing close to the ground, visible only by virtue of its shadow against the flames, and by the chain of white sparks where its claws dig into the pavement, makes a tiny correction in its course.
It's not headed for the jet; it's headed for him. Rife changes his mind and runs up the stairway, taking the steps three at a time. The stairway flexes and recoils under his weight, reminding him of the jet's fragility.
The pilot has seen it coming, doesn't wait to retract the stairway before he releases the brakes and sends the jet taxiing down the runway, swinging the nose away from the Rat Thing. He punches the throttles, nearly throwing the jet onto one wing as it whips around in a tight curve, and redlines the engines as soon as he sees the center line of the runway. Now they can only see forward and sideways. They can't see what is chasing them.
Y.T. is the only p
erson who can see it happen. Having easily penetrated airport security with her Kourier pass, she is coasting onto the apron near the cargo terminal. From here, she has an excellent view across half a mile of open runway, and she sees it all happen: the plane roars down the runway, hauling its door closed as it goes, shooting pale blue flames out its engine nozzles, trying to build up speed for takeoff, and Fido chases it down like a dog going after a fat mailman, makes one final tremendous leap into the air and, turning himself into a Sidewinder missile, flies nose-first into the tailpipe of its left engine.
The jet explodes about ten feet off the ground, catching Fido and L. Bob Rife and his virus all together in its fine, sterilizing flame.
How sweet!
She stays for a while and watches the aftermath: Mafia choppers coming in, doctors jumping out with doc boxes and blood bags and stretchers, Mafia soldiers scurrying between the private jets, apparently looking for someone. A pizza delivery car takes off from one of the parking areas, tires squealing, and a Mafia car peels out after it in hot pursuit.
But after a while it gets boring, and so she skates back to the main terminal, under her own power mostly, though she manages to poon a fuel tanker for a while.
Mom's waiting for her in her stupid little jellybean car, by the United baggage claim, just like they arranged on the phone. Y.T. opens the door, throws her plank into the back seat, and climbs in.
“Home?” Mom says.
“Yeah, home seems about right.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book germinated in a collaboration between me and the artist Tony Sheeder, the original goal of which was to publish a computer-generated graphic novel. In general, I handled the words and he handled the pictures; but even though this work consists almost entirely of words, certain aspects of it stem from my discussions with Tony.
This novel was very difficult to write, and I received a great deal of good advice from my agents Liz Darhansoff, Chuck Verrill, and Denise Stewart, who read early drafts. Other people subjected to the early drafts were Tony Sheeder; Dr. Steve Horst of Wesleyan University, who made extensive and very lucid comments on everything having to do with brains and computers (and who suddenly came down with a virus about one hour after reading it); and my brother-in-law, Steve Wiggins, currently at the University of Edinburgh, who got me started on Asherah to begin with and also fed me useful papers and citations as I thrashed around pitifully in the Library of Congress.
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