Brennan went silently through the shipping area, creeping closer to the office until he could hear what Wyrrn was saying.
“… with her dead the sssecret isss sssafffe,” Wyrm said.
There was no doubt in Brennan’s mind as to whom Wyrm was referring. Anger burned brightly in him as he suddenly stood in the doorway, arrow drawn and aimed at the back of Wyrm’s head.
It was a startling entrance. Sui Ma gaped at him in astonishment, then Wyrm also turned to stare. Brennan realized that Wyrm was packing plastic bags of blue powder into the false bottom of the suitcase. A small pile of clothes sat on the desk next to the suitcase. What looked like Wyrm’s passport was balanced precariously atop the pile.
“Yeoman!” Sui Ma said sharply. She didn’t blubber or bluster, but cut right to the heart of the matter. “I thought that you and my brother had a truce!”
“We did,” Brennan replied, “until Wyrm killed Chrysalis.”
“What?” burst from both Sui Ma and Wyrm at the same time. Their feigned ignorance seemed almost believable.
“Who told you that Wyrm killed Chrysalis?” Sui Ma demanded.
“I have my sources,” Brennan replied. “Besides, what were you talking about when I just came in? Whose death, and what secrets?”
Sui Ma burst out laughing. “Live for Tomorrow.”
Confused, Brennan lowered his bow slightly. “What?”
“Live for Tomorrow,” Sui Ma repeated. “It’s a soap opera,” she said.
Brennan felt a sense of immense dislocation. “Soap opera?”
“Yes. You see, Janice was killed in a car crash in yesterday’s episode, so Jason’s secret of actually being her love child is safe and he can marry Veronica.”
“A soap opera?”
“Yes. Wyrm had missed a few episodes. I was filling him in while he packed his, uh, delivery.”
“Sure,” Brennan said mockingly. He turned to Wyrm. “So you watch soap operas?”
The hatred was still in Wyrm’s eyes, but also something of a shameful expression, as if it’d just been revealed that he was some kind of hideous pervert. “Ssssometimesss,” he said defensively.
Brennan increased the tension on the bowstring and aimed right between Wym’s angry eyes. “That’s possibly the stupidest lie I ever heard. You’d better start talking or you’re one dead lizard. Right now.”
“About what?” Wyrm hissed angrily.
“About Chrysalis!” Brennan shouted. “Why did you kill her?”
Wyrm was about to make an angry reply when Jennifer suddenly stepped into the office through the wall. “Wait,” she said. “We’d better check this soap-opera stuff.” She turned to Wyrm as Brennan lowered his bow a little. Wyrm stared at her with the hate and anger that he usually reserved for Brennan. “So you watch Live for Tomorrow?” she asked.
“That’ssss right!” Wyrm spat out.
“Well then, who’s Erica married to?”
Wyrm gave her a cold look. “She just married Colby lasssst month,” he said, “but what she doesn’t know isss that Ralph, her first husssband, isss not dead. He hasss amnesia, and isss being exploited by terroristsss, who have convinced him that he issss Prince Rupert, a Takisian lordling, who hasss come to Earth to cure the virusss, but isss really—”
“All right,” Brennan interrupted. He turned to Jennifer. “Is that crap right?”
Jennifer nodded silently.
“Christ!” Brennan lowered his bow. His feeling of frustration redoubled, he fixed his attention on the bag Wyrm was packing. “Where are you taking that?”
“Havana,” Wyrm said sullenly.
“Step away from the desk.”
As Wyrm did, Brennan edged forward carefully. He released the tension on the bowstring so that he could hold the arrow on the string with one hand, and picked up Wyrm’s passport from the desk. He looked at the last stamped page. Apparently this wouldn’t be Wyrm’s first trip smuggling rapture to Havana. He’d been in Cuba the day Chrysalis had been killed.
“Damn,” Brennan said, throwing the passport back on the desk. Brennan’s anger flared to an uncontrollable peak. He drew back the arrow he had ready. Wyrm hissed as it flashed by him, and then whirled to see that it had skewered a rat that had been sitting by the wall and eagerly observing the confrontation. When Wyrm looked back at Brennan, the archer had another arrow nocked and ready.
“It appears,” Brennan said angrily, “that I got some bad information. The truce is still on.”
Wyrm hissed angrily as Brennan backed up out of the office. Jennifer followed him, watching Lazy Dragon’s rat as it shrank and turned into a hunk of soap pinned to the office wall by Brennan’s arrow.
NOON
“What’s going on?” Jay said when the jokers fell in beside him. No one answered. No one even seemed to hear him. There were a dozen or more, grim-faced, quiet, sober. An old man was sobbing, very softly, to himself. Jay looked back over his shoulder and saw more jokers following behind them. Everyone seemed to be headed in the same direction.
The garment bag was awkward. Jay moved it to his other shoulder, dropped back, fell in alongside a hulking joker whose green translucent flesh shimmied like lime Jell-O as he walked. “Where’s everybody going?” Jay asked him.
“The Omni,” the Jell-O man said.
A woman bobbed in the air above him. She had no legs, no arms. She floated like a helium balloon, her pretty face red from crying. “She lost the baby,” she told Jay. Then she flew on up ahead.
Jay let himself be swept up in the human tide that flowed through the streets of Atlanta, thousands of feet all converging on the Omni Convention Center. Slowly, piece by piece, he got the story out of the jokers who walked briefly beside him. Early this morning, Ellen Hartmann, the senator’s wife, had suffered a tragic fall down a flight of stairs. She had been pregnant, carrying Hartmann’s child. The baby had died.
“Is Hartmann going to withdraw?” Jay asked a man in a motorized wheelchair whose ragged clothing covered his deformities.
“He’s going on,” the joker said defiantly. “She asked him to. Even through this, he’s going on. He loves us that much!”
Jay couldn’t think of a thing to say.
The jokers had begun drifting over as soon as the word had reached their encampments in Piedmont Park. Atlanta police and convention security watched the crowd swell with growing unease, but made no move to disperse them. Memories of the convention riots in New York in ’76 and Chicago in ’68 were still fresh in too many minds. By the time Jay arrived, the jokers had closed all the streets surrounding the convention. They sat on the sidewalks, covered the fenders of parked cars, filled every little patch of grass. They sat peacefully, wordlessly, under a blazing Georgia sun, with every eye fixed on the Omni. There was no shouting, no chants, no placards, no cheers, no prayers. There was no talk at all. The silence around the convention hall was profound.
Eleven thousand jokers squatted together on the hot pavement, a sea of tortured flesh pressed shoulder to shoulder in a silent vigil for Gregg Hartmann and his loss.
Jay Ackroyd moved through them gingerly. He felt fuzzy and exhausted. It was over a hundred in the shade, as humid as an armpit. Jay didn’t even have a hat. The sun beat relentlessly against his head, and his headache was back screaming vengeance. His resolve had broken down and he’d swallowed a couple of painkillers, but even that hadn’t done more than dull the throbbing in his side and the pounding behind his eyes.
There was nothing anyone could do for the sick feeling in his gut. All around him, the jokers sat silently, watching, waiting. Some wept openly, but tried their best to stifle the sound of their sobs. Others hid their faces behind cheap plastic masks, but somehow you could still feel their grief.
Jay found that he could scarcely bear to look at them. None of them knew who he was or what he was doing here. None of them knew what he carried in the garment bag slung awkwardly over his shoulder, or what it would do to their hopes and dreams. But Jay knew, and th
e knowledge was making him ill.
He took up a position across from the main doors of the Omni, where he could see the delegates and journalists come and go under the watchful eyes of security. Time seemed to pass very slowly. It got hotter and hotter. TV crews panned their minicams endlessly across the sea of faces. News choppers hovered above them, and once the Turtle glided past overhead, his passage as silent as the crowd, the shadow of his shell giving the jokers a momentary respite from the sun. Later, a small woman in black satin tails and top hat emerged briefly from inside the convention hall and surveyed the crowd through a domino mask. Jay recognized her from the news: Topper, a government ace, assigned to bodyguard Gore, probably reassigned now that her man had dropped his candidacy. He thought about trying to get her attention, handing over the bloodstained jacket, making it somebody else’s dilemma. Then he remembered her colleague Carnifex, and thought again.
When Topper went back inside, a gaggle of delegates emerged through the open doors. One was a huge man with a spade-shaped beard who moved lightly in spite of his size; his impeccable white linen suit made him look cool even in this terrible heat.
Jay got to his feet. “Hiram!” he shouted over the heads of the jokers, waving his arm wildly despite the dull flare of pain in his side.
In the silence of the vigil, Jay’s shout seemed like some obscene violation. But Hiram Worchester looked up, saw him, and made his way through the crowd, as ponderous and stately as a great white ocean liner sliding through a sea of rowboats. “Popinjay,” he said when he got there, “my God, it is you. What happened to your face?”
“Never mind about that,” Jay said. “Hiram, we got to talk.”
“What was all that about?” Jennifer asked.
Brennan was still seething. “A setup. A goddamned setup.”
“What?”
Brennan looked at Jennifer. “We weren’t set up. Wyrm and Sui Ma were.”
“I see. I think.”
“Let’s find a phone.”
There was one on the corner. Brennan dialed and Fadeout picked it up on the second ring. “Hello.”
“I don’t like to be lied to,” Brennan said softly.
“Well, Cowboy. Nice to hear from you at a decent hour.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Well, sure. What’s it in reference to? I didn’t get the dope on Morkle wrong, did I?”
“That was fine,” Brennan said. “The dope on Wyrm wasn’t quite as accurate.”
“Oh?”
“He had nothing to do with Chrysalis’s death. He was in Havana when she was killed.”
“Oh. Well. Sorry.”
Greasy weasel, Brennan thought. “I’m not your private executioner,” Brennan said grimly.
“It was an honest mistake—”
“Don’t compound the lie,” Brennan said. “I’ll be in touch—”
“Wait,” Fadeout said before Brennan could hang up. “Anything on Chrysalis’s files yet?”
Brennan put the phone down without answering.
1:00 P.M.
“It’s simply not possible,” Hiram said after Jay had finished telling his story. “No.”
Jay unzipped the garment bag, brought out the jacket, and laid it on the table between them. “Yes,” he said.
The cocktail lounge was one of those places that was as dark at noon as it was at midnight. It was well away from the convention, deserted enough to give them a little privacy. The air-conditioning was set way below arctic blast, but beads of sweat trickled down Hiram’s broad forehead into his neatly trimmed beard. The booth was a tight fit for the ace’s imposing bulk, his ample stomach pushing up hard against the table, but when Jay put down the jacket, Hiram seemed to squirm backward, as if he were afraid to touch it.
“This is some kind of grotesque misunderstanding. Gregg is a good man. I’ve known him for years, Jay. For years!”
Jay touched the jacket. “You were with Hartmann in Syria. Is this the jacket or isn’t it?”
Hiram forced himself to look at the jacket. “It appears to be,” he said. “But Jay, an off-the-rack sport coat, they manufacture them by the thousands. It has to be a fraud, it has to be.”
“I don’t think so,” Jay said. “Stigmata had no reason to lie. He didn’t even realize what he had. The other jacket was the fraud. Kahina never trusted Gimli. She gave him a double, probably used her own blood so a test would show the presence of the virus. That was what Gimli gave to Chrysalis. The real one Kahina kept for herself. She must have had her own plans, but Hartmann and Mackie Messer didn’t give her the time to carry them out.”
“Then,” Hiram said hesitantly, “Chrysalis…”
“Died for nothing. For a phony jacket.”
“The assassin she hired wasn’t phony!”
“No,” Jay admitted. “George Kerby is real. The hell of it is, right now I’m not sure if I’m rooting for him or against him.”
“You can’t mean that!” Hiram said in horror. “What Chrysalis did makes her no better than the Nur … murder is murder, I don’t care what she knew or thought she knew. If she had charges to make, she should have come forward and made them. Doesn’t Gregg deserve the opportunity to defend himself? Jay, I tell you, this is all wrong. If you knew Gregg Hartmann the way I do … he, he’s such a fine man … so much courage … in Syria, if you’d only seen the way he stood up to the Nur al-Allah, you’d have been so proud. To accuse him of such … such monstrous crimes … and based on what, what? The testimony of Digger Downs?” Hiram was getting angry now. “The man’s a professional liar, Jay! How many times have I had to throw him out of Aces High?”
“That’s not the issue, Hiram,” Jay said.
Hiram Worchester frowned. One hand curled into an impotent fist on the table in front of him. “Where is Downs?” Hiram demanded. “I want to look into his eyes and hear this story for myself. I’ll know if he’s lying, and I swear, if he is…”
“The airline lost him,” Jay said ruefully. The cat carrier hadn’t been on the flight after his, or the flight after that one either. Delta said on the next plane for sure. “Never mind.”
Hiram looked confused. He drained half his Pimm’s Cup in a series of long gulps. His hand was shaking when he put it back on the table. “You didn’t say who you think … actually did the … the business … with Chrysalis, I mean.”
“Let’s just say I’m going to be real interested to find out what Billy Ray was doing on Sunday night and Monday morning.”
“Billy Ray,” Hiram said. “My God, that’s absurd! He’s a Justice Department operative! You can’t think the whole federal government is involved in this, surely!”
Jay shrugged. “Until somebody proves otherwise, I’m not trusting anyone I don’t have to.”
Hiram finished his drink. He looked down at the empty glass, but his eyes had turned inward. “So many people have worked so hard. We’ve all … done so much. You saw those pour souls in the street. Gregg’s their only hope. What will they do if it’s true?”
“Vote Republican?” The quip was a halfhearted effort and the minute it was out, he regretted it. It was far too flip for the circumstances, for Hiram’s genuine grief.
But Hiram scarcely seemed to hear it. He pulled out a black silk handkerchief from his lapel and used it to mop his brow. The huge man looked confused and lost, too weak to carry all that flesh. “There’s a reporter,” he said slowly. “Sara Morgenstern, she’s been telling everyone that Gregg is a killer ace. No one believed her. She’s not a very stable person, you know. But last night, an attempt was made on her life. By an ace, I’m sad to say. Jack Braun saved her, and would have died himself if I hadn’t taken a hand.”
“I saw the highlights on TV,” Jay said. “The man Braun fought fits Digger’s description of Mackie Messer.”
“It sounds like the same man,” Hiram said. “That doesn’t prove he was actually working for Gregg, but I suppose…” He gave a long deep sigh of resignation, like a man being forced to
accept something he could not stomach. “I suppose I must take this all seriously. Very well, then.” For a moment he sounded like the old Hiram; decisive, full of resolve. “I’ll take you to Dr. Tachyon. He can perform the necessary blood test, and if need be, he can go into Hartmann’s mind and find the truth. Whatever that truth may be.” On the table, his fingers opened and closed, opened and closed. Hiram stared down at them, grimaced, forced his hand to relax. “So much is at stake,” he said. “Jay, if we’re wrong, think of all the people we’ll hurt.”
“And if we’re right?” Jay asked quietly.
Hiram seemed to shrink in on himself. “If we’re right,” Hiram said softly, “God help us all.”
“Ever see anything like this before?” Brennan asked Tripod, putting the mysterious note down on the bar, careful to avoid the wetness seeping out from around the joker’s beer mug.
Tripod bent down close to the bar to get a good look at it and shook his head. “Nope,” he said.
“Great.”
Squisher’s Basement was still packed with the lunch crowd. Squisher himself was floating contentedly in his aquarium. He waved a long boneless arm at Brennan and whistled in a shrill, piping voice. “Hey, big guy, long time no see. Who’s the babe?”
Brennan glanced at Jennifer. “Friend of mine.”
“Hey,” Squisher said, “we should all be so lucky.” He winked his huge, staring eye and smiled leeringly. “Free drinks for my pals,” he ordered the bartender.
“Thanks,” Brennan said. He remembered the quality of their whiskey. “I’ll have a beer,” he told the mouthless bartender who was staring at him and Jennifer fixedly.
“White wine,” Jennifer said, and the bartender continued to stare. “Uh, I’ll have a beer, too.”
“Right,” he rasped through the small hole cut at the base of his throat.
“Find a table,” Brennan told Jennifer and Tripod, “where we can talk things over.”
They pushed off into the crowd. He waited for their drinks, nodded thanks to the bartender, then took them over to a small, isolated corner table. He put the drinks down. Tripod took a long sip of beer through a straw.
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