“Our solar panels don’t weigh much,” he said. “Just take up a lot of space.”
“Okay, E. If you say so. Other than a mid-altitude winter front, the weather looks ultra-clear. Mild tailwinds all the way. If we take it easy on speed, we should be okay.”
As Mano caught up with them to say goodbye, Franklin’s eyes suddenly went wide. He turned to Everon. “Uh — When you and Dad used to test stuff in the mine lab with Chip — uh, do you think Chip might run something for me?”
Everon looked up from his clipboard. “Run what?” Everon said with growing suspicion.
“Some of that crud that came back on one of the helicopters from Manhattan.”
“What, you took a sample? Where is it?”
He pointed, “It’s still in the small compartment —”
“Inside the jet? Shit! Get it out of there!”
Franklin recalled how Red Cross man Chuck Farndike’s Geiger counter had gone off the scale. Being too close to that gray stuff for too long has to be dangerous. He turned to Mano. “I have some gray dirt inside a plastic bottle with a scarf wrapped around its outside. It’s, uh, radioactive. I’m not sure how to handle it.”
“It from New York?” Mano asked, black pinpoint eyes widening.
“Yes. It’s a very small amount. I’d like Chip over at the mine lab to take a look at it but I don’t know a safe way for you to carry it. If you could keep it away from your body somehow . . .”
Harry’s big yellow eyes stared shakily up at Mano.
“No problem. I take it to the lab. Talk to Meester Chip. Better than carrying tha’ bird. Something wrong w’ heem.”
Mano ran off around the corner of Del’s shed.
Into the jet’s passenger compartment Franklin crawled and crunched over stacks of boxes. Every spare cubic inch of space was crammed with some piece of equipment. Large toolboxes. Cardboard cartons made taps and bangs as he went.
“What the hell are you doing back there?” Everon called.
“Getting the sample!”
Franklin wiggled back over the top of the stack, squeezed up against the white leather ceiling to reach a small upper cabinet door. Outside, he heard a vehicle zooming up the driveway strip. He flipped the catch.
Still there, the gray scarf wound around it.
With two fingers he pulled it out and worked himself backwards, until he got his feet on the jet’s floor again. Scrounge and two more of Everon’s guys were cramming in more boxes marked with computer logos through the jet’s door.
“You were right, E!” Scrounge said. “Credit cards are no good. Cash only.”
One of the guys, dressed like a white-coated chef — Lama, Everon’s main programmer — held up a hand in greeting. “Really sorry about your sister, Franklin,” he said in a high voice shot through with warmth. A bulky Hispanic-looking linesman, Ortega, put a sympathetic hand on Franklin’s shoulder, but said nothing. Other people on Everon’s team moved past, offering condolences.
Mano was waiting outside holding a square wire basket with a long handle. A rusty old popcorn popper. He slid a rectangular steel loop up the handle. Its top came free.
“Put it een here, Meester Frank.”
Franklin set the water bottle into the wire mesh tray. Mano flipped the top over, compressing the gray scarf. He held the whole thing away from his body.
Franklin picked up Harry’s cage, gave Mano a one-armed hug and followed the others back onboard.
Minutes later, Franklin looked out the window as Everon lifted the jet’s nose off the runway. Long wind turbine blades turned in the desert breeze.
They circled once above the valley and Franklin saw the tiny family graves. Shrinking, blending into the surrounding earth. What reason could God possibly have to take them all away from me? On the floor behind the cockpit, Harry sat shaking softly in his cage. Our parents, and now you, Cyn.
A yellow ball of fire was reflected by Everon’s solar panels.
When he looked again, the graves were indistinguishable from the hillside. But just for a moment, he thought he saw the glint of a lonely white cross. The reflection of a mourning brother and a morning sun.
The Scream
T-I-I-I-ING!
The scream was barely masculine, long and violent and filled with pain. It was the scream of the drugless woman in breach childbirth; of the pickpocket losing a hand to the sword of Arab justice.
Pang Zhou had killed more people faster than any human being in the history of Man on Earth, yet the huge Asian quaked in terrible agony, loosing yet another piercing retch of such torment its vibration surely penetrated his cabin door and echoed down the steel hallways of his ship. Pang Zhou simply could not escape the televised image he had witnessed: the head of his spirit guide — his owl Ting — emerging between the buttons of the blue-eyed man’s white shirt.
His ship pushed on, and as rage overtook him he threw his huge dark head back and screamed again and again. T-I-I-I-I-ING . . . !
When enough of the pain had drained away, Pang Zhou knelt down naked, scarcely noticing his testicles sagging against the cold painted steel of the cabin deck. Few indeed had ever been to the place he was about to go. Few had ever desired it.
The loss of Ting worried through him once more, yanking him away from the nascent state. He rubbed at the place between his left shoulder and his broad back where the lightning strike once exited into the cloud-dark sky. He whispered roughly, “Always the Americans! Always the sea! Unless I move upward through the heavens, to gain pure knowledge, how can I know?”
Choice is none!
Without Ting, he was lost. Without Ting, he would be unable to reach his greatest source of power, the Laitou Mountain Spirit, the white-headed monster at North Korea’s South China border — the one place where nothing could escape his view.
Lacking Ting, he could not move upward. His only choice was downward. Into the earth’s depths.
The journey would be more dangerous than any he had ever taken. He could not descend alone, not among the spirits, the ten thousand hungry Kami who would line his path, attempting to pull him into a hell from which there could be no return.
Dangerous as the journey was, he had but one chance to make his way: Enlist that most ferocious guide of all . . .
He tilted his wide head back, a cup to his lips, drinking deep of the Peruvian psychoactive ayahuasca tea — a two-plant combination, leaves from one, pounded vines the other. He closed his eyes. Began the sacred chant. Calling the Pali Kongju. The Rejected-Princess-Of-Hell. To guide him to the place he would learn what must be done.
Zhou’s heart slowed. His mind opened. And darkness overtook him.
A dark door opened. Pang Zhou’s nostrils felt the acridity of burnt sulfur, the doorway suddenly filled with glowing flame. In its center, the flame coalesced . . . into a slender, silvery shape, an angry woman with glowing eyes of gold.
The Rejected-Princess-Of-Hell.
The Pali Kongju.
Without gesture, she turned away.
Zhou forced his feet into the burning mass of fire behind her. He could feel the heat but was not burned. She was protecting him. She began to descend, down what looked to be a path of endless flaming stairs.
Deeper the Kongju led. And there they were.
Desperate Kami reached out, snatching at Zhou’s naked skin:
Mao, Kami of the once great dictator!
Ancient spirit of Suicide-Into-The-Well!
Hirohito, Emperor of Nippon seeking Zhou’s endless subservience!
The two-headed lotus beast, hoping to taste his flesh.
Each flung effortlessly back into the flame, the Kongju’s burning hands flicking whips of fire, lashing the interlopers’ touch away.
The stairs flattened to a red and scalding earth. Miles long, it seemed, Pang Zhou followed. No end in sight.
The heat intensified. The surface of his skin began to give off smoke.
The Pali Kongju halted.
There! Within the fiery inf
erno. TING! His beautiful tawny fish owl. His spirit guide, held prisoner within the burning flame.
Pang Zhou reached out, painful fingertips brushing his ally’s feathers. He jerked his fingers back. Ting’s feathers. Hot, scorching.
Why?
A face took form, laughing behind his precious guide. Wide chin. Long cheek planes. Dark swirling hair and eyes of cobalt blue! Long-fingered hands that pulled Zhou’s true guide back, deep into the fire beyond his reach!
No!
Until Ting and the blue-eyed man had completely disappeared within the flame.
A Private Celebration
Low in the sky, the moon cast shadows across warm, silent dunes, one sandy peak playing onto the side of the next. Four camels, feet peacefully tucked in, lay on the ground, tied at the end of a row of twenty-foot-tall date palms. Alongside the camels, the moon made some unusual shapes on the sand too. Parked parallel to each other were an eight-wheeled transport truck, a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom, three Mercedes 600s, two high-clearance desert jeeps, and at row’s end an especially long low-slung wedge — a yellow Lamborghini.
Guards patrolled the parking area, circled the large adjacent desert tent. It wasn’t as though they were needed. Primary security was provided by the location itself. Sand and miles of single-track road separated the meeting from any vestige of civilization.
“Not exactly what we had in mind!” the speaker, seated among the others inside the tent, said thoughtfully. Humor rolled off the sandy whisper they knew so well. They laughed with him.
But his nose and mouth were covered by white muslin; his smile showed only at the tops of his cheeks, the crinkles around his eyes. Since the surgery three years ago, only three people knew what his face truly looked like.
All three were present in the tent. The plastic surgeon was dead.
The speaker wore the long white robes, the red and white headscarf of an Arab royal chieftain, which he was not. Not in fact, an Arab or Semite of any tribe, not even a Muslim. He was a professional terrorist, a man wanted dead or alive in more than sixty countries, a man known only as the Architect.
Strange nickname for an Arab, some thought. But the three men present who knew his background, knew that though the Architect built nothing, the thing he designed, for a price, was chaos. And death.
A fragrant aroma filled the air. It was a happy evening, a festive occasion. Millions of the infidels had been killed.
The Architect’s guests — men from across the Middle East and Malaysia — sat legs-folded at ground level around a huge table covered by thirty oval silver plates filled with mezze — unusual tangy cheeses from Switzerland and Germany and Denmark; cashews, raisins, pistachios, dates and lightly dilled finger pickles, sliced peaches and pears.
Servant boys, none over the age of twelve, brought baba ghanouj eggplant dip — cratered by pools of golden walnut oil and whipped creamy-white chickpea hummus, both topped with many red olives.
The men scooped their choices by pinching the thinnest of toasted pita between thumbs and extended middle fingers of their right hands. Nut-tasting cracked burghul wheat mixed with chopped fresh green parsley and spearmint, toasted pine nuts, slivered almonds, diced tomatoes and green onions, and unpeeled cucumbers specially cut into sickle moons — topped with a mixture of freshly squeezed lemon and olive oil, just touched by powdered cinnamon.
As dishes were added, never was anything deleted from the menu so that the crowded table spread grew and grew, earlier dishes replaced afresh as their contents diminished.
The pungent smell of boiled grape leaves filled the air, wrapped tightly into finger-pods around tender non-sticky basmati rice — and in deference to the Architect’s Pakistani guests, speckled gold with saffron. Quartered and fried tomatoes freckled with nutmeg. The licorice of aniseed. The sweet orange of cardamom and coriander. The salted delicacy of milk-drained yogurt and olive oil cheese balls — the labneh bil zayit topped with wild thyme.
The Architect saw every desire of his guests fulfilled. He did not eat. He would eat later with his master chef.
As the laughing voices inside the tent settled, the Architect added, “The event, perhaps more than what we had in mind. Certainly not less.”
More laughter perforated mutters of approval.
“The stupid Americans,” an Arab prince said. “The Infidels! They think they will take our oil. Force us to their will. Submit to ever more intrusive inspections again and again. It is our oil. Our land!”
“Yes, but remember,” the Architect whispered forcefully, “we could not do what we will next without them!”
Serious mutters of agreement filled the huge tent.
“At present they have no idea?” The speaker was dressed in khaki, bearing the insignia of a general’s desert uniform. Thought publicly to be the enemy of many present, he was the leader of the new Iraqi army.
“None,” the Architect agreed.
“I am only glad I was not in New York two days ago,” admitted a man known around the world as the U.N. Ambassador from Syria.
“Most propitious!” the Architect agreed to general laughter. “Though I am saddened by the loss of so many of our Muslim brothers,” he added to murmurs of painful agreement. It was the only awareness their celebration offered to the misery of millions.
“However. We should move forward now, with all haste,” said the Ambassador. Other voices of assent joined in.
“I do not agree,” a single voice broke through.
All eyes turned to a dark-haired man, one of the few not in white robes. He wore a dark, stylish business suit. A checkered red and white royal headscarf like the Architect’s.
“This should be a quiet time,” Prince Ali argued. “The Americans are sure to take severe action against those seen in any way as taking action against them.”
From the cooking area in the adjoining tent, the main courses finally arrived: a combination of unusually flavored falafel, which the Architect guessed was spiced with parsley, red senorita jalapeño peppers (he knew that much) and lemony-sumac. And the marinated layers of boned chicken breast and lamb cooked in a perfection of mysterious spices on a vertical rotisserie — sliced and rolled, interspersed with onions, green peppers and tomatoes into mouthwatering seared chicken-lamb kebabs — lightly blackened outside, yet bitter-sweet and tender-moist inside.
Is there a brush of lemon juice? The Architect himself wasn’t sure.
But all was accompanied by the milky yogurt labneh into which his guests could dip and cool both hot falafel and the meat.
“It is too risky to continue,” Brother Ali said between bites of baby camel, dripping with such virginal tenderness and generosity as to make a gourmand weep, the succulent strips that were his special weakness. A dish prepared just for him.
The Architect’s Lebanese master chef had been in his exclusive employ for more than six years. Tonight the Architect thought he could scent garlic among the many spices he had learned to identify in the man’s amazing culinary offerings — though a few not even the Architect could guess at, so skilled was his chef in their combination.
Do I detect a hint of thyme, perhaps clove? Cumin maybe, a tingle on the tongue — marjoram? Sesame?
He could not say for certain.
Once the Architect had casually tried to peek in upon his chef at work. Arms folded, the man had refused to continue — to the point of letting a dish burn — until the Architect had left the kitchen.
Smart, the Architect smiled grimly. It was the single reason the man would never lose his job, or his head. The Architect had admitted the same to himself many times, for his master chef was the second man, after himself of course, who knew the Architect’s face and true name.
A long, broken series of belches erupted from Prince Ali’s mouth. “I — I do not feel well.”
“Perhaps you would care to lie down for a few minutes?” the Architect asked considerately. “In the next tent, we have a small but comfortable space.”
Outside in the parking area, one of the guards turned, seeking the source of an odd humming sound. Through a pair of infrared goggles he looked into the sky.
The Intruder
“Brother Ali is resting now,” the Architect said smoothly, returning to his guests.
Spices and poisons, he thought, a hint of smile on his unseen lips, the specialties of any great master chef. Ali will not recover.
His guests began to peer carefully now at what one another were eating. Choosing dishes with hesitation. The festive mood contained itself.
Though the boys served dessert on large rectangular silver trays — an unusual warbot pastry that looked much like baklava but was filled with a sweet thick white cream, along with the grouchy dark Turkish coffee — his guests’ appetites seemed suddenly sated as signaled by the vociferous belches of polite appreciation.
It is time.
The Architect stood.
Though he did not remove his face scarf, the Architect bent and lifted a small, dark-filled cup from the table below, from which no sip had yet been taken.
“Our man is in place. Your resources are required now. His team even today prepares their run.”
“You have done well, my friend,” said the Syrian Ambassador. “You have accomplished far more than we could have ever hoped.”
“Thank you,” the Architect acknowledged gracefully. “Are you with me?” he whispered.
The pale gray eyes offered a moment’s complete attention to each man, slowly, carefully, one after another. A group — all groups, the Architect noted silently — students, soldiers — he looked around the tent — even a group of political leaders, has its own personality. It cheers loudly. It applauds delivery to the table of the Christmas ham.
Major disputes eliminated, always there is one to whom it turns.
His guests looked at each other until finally all eyes gravitated onto a single face, one quiet man dressed far less regally than the others, in the robes of the religious mullah. The robes of Allah’s voice. He was the third man who knew the Architect’s true name. And the entirety of the Architect’s remarkably impressive history.
Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2) Page 10
