They had trained his kind in war, or at least fighting. Subterfuge, and lying. The Center, he mused, and not for the first time revealed its concerns in his training. He examined this chain of reasoning again, unpacking it like a fragile object from a secure box. The Center felt he would need these skills to do its work. To find the Mind.
Why? Why did it feel like he would need to kill, cheat, and lie to accomplish this goal? Why would he need these skills? The Center, he recalled, had told them, early in their training, that they would need these skills because these Worlds held danger and dangerous people. And it was true. Brasilia had been dangerous, and other places, some of them exceedingly so. This place was dangerous, awash in lawlessness. Guns. Gangs and hard-eyed police. Militaries. But he felt there was something more there.
He had told Silver that Talus, the World that is the Center, had lived in a dreamtime. Beyond history. And it was true. The people there were outside of history. He had no history. Why? His World had a past, but he did not know it. Why? Because the Center did not tell them, the wandering tribes nor their Guides. That was all. Nobody told them. Why did it not tell them? Presumably because it did not want them to know. Why would the Center not want them to know something? Only if knowing it, if knowing this story was detrimental to the Center’s goals. Otherwise, it would tell them. Knowledge either helped the Work, or it hindered it. There was a clear effort, on Talus, by the Center, to keep them from knowing their past. To keep them from learning it. There was probably no human alive on Talus who knew anything beyond their grandparents’ time. This was no accident, Smoke suspected.
History was dangerous. Stories defined people. Gave them context. Information, freed and unlocked out of the skulls of those who carry it. Given to others, like a disease. Spreading, unstoppable. The dreamtime was the solution. Keep the humans in a zoo. He relished the English word for this concept. Zoo. A protected sanctuary. Take away their stories. Shape them, by shaping their stories. Use them for…what? Looking for other Minds. Among other humans. Where it would be dangerous, so train them in the skills such work required.
Smoke suspected the Center knew it would be dangerous because a similar scenario had been dangerous once. For it. For its past. The Center had the history. It knew, he reflected, where it came from. It knew its story, and he wondered if it had been born out of the chaos of a World like this one. Full of rival factions vying for control over it, over its power. It must have been, if humans were its progenitors. He thought of the zoo he had seen, shortly after his arrival in the fifties, in Chicago. The placid animals, well tended, well cared for. He thought of bees, and somber Guides delivering them. The Center knew what it was dealing with.
An owl hooted outside, in the distance. They were in the country, far out of the city, with its bewildering maze-like streets full of endless streams of cars. Cars. The people here would kill themselves, he felt, Mind or no Mind. It was, he knew, amazing that they hadn’t done it yet. He had embedded himself into the US government as soon as he arrived. The security apparatus. This country’s Guides. People who, in taking on their work, did their work, what needed doing, in a similar fashion to the Guides on Talus. He had learned, over time, their history, their myths and stories. About who they emulated, out of their long past. The Caesars mostly, for Americans, though they would deny it if put to them. They were an empire, expansionist and aggressive. Their architecture, the power they gave to their presidents. Their supine Congress. It was the Roman model as he understood it. Gold had concurred, relating what she had gleaned from Silver in their time together.
They planned for war and had wars. He had helped with their wars in Asia, starting in the late fifties. Korea, Vietnam, Laos. Cambodia. To work towards the centers of power, he had been in all those places with the CIA, before he had needed to adopt a new identity and begin over inside another branch of their secret services.
It had not pleased the Center, his progress. Something had drawn them, drawn their attention here, and he was wasting time in America’s stupid military adventures. That what had drawn the Center’s attention was directly related to the US Military was not a compelling argument for long. Nuclear weapons, their use, they had told him, were signals the Center used to find Worlds such as this. Information destruction, they had told him, was disruptive. It stood out in the tapestry of Worlds congruent to Talus. Frayed it. It was the sign. In all the Worlds they believed would develop Minds, first; they created such weapons. Not for the first time, he wondered if this, too, was in the Center’s past. He no longer doubted it.
So he had made another transition after that one, a career inside their signals intelligence service, much closer to his true goal. This group was black, as they termed it. Secret. They denied it for decades. Code breakers, they had started as, but had grown into an octopus of a dozen different agencies. Some of them, the one Smoke had been most interested in, dealt with computers. Using them as tools of war. He became adept. He learned about computers and the theories Americans, and others, had of them. Primitive, but moving down a track he felt was familiar. It had pleased the Center.
It was the sixties, when he learned of Gold. Then going by the name Rose Marie Garcia. She, too, was a Cold Warrior, or pretending to be such. Interested in computers, she had been working with a team that was making significant advances in encryption. He had joined this team as a manager, tasked with a new effort in data storage. He had, as they had trained him to do, reviewed the backgrounds of this team.
Hers was different. Parents deceased, father in Normandy, the mother in Spain, dead from cancer. She had been a teenager after the War, raised in New Mexico by an aunt, also now dead in a car accident. Good grades in school, then at Georgetown, where the agency she worked at now had recruited her. He made a few phone calls to her professors. Police in her hometown. All were vague about recalling her. Some claimed to have never heard of her, despite there being records of her in their classes. Not possible, he realized, watching her.
Gold was attractive. Spanish-Mexican descent, allegedly. Tall, brown, and lean, a teenage Rose Garcia would have made an impression on somebody in her small hometown or at Georgetown. The professor who had identified her for his contacts in the intelligence community was also dead by suicide. A lot of death in her background. Too many, he felt. She was too smart, too damn sharp, too pretty. People would remember her; he had been certain. But nobody did.
So he watched her for several years, taking no action. She was, he learned, interested in information processing. Computers, their applications for national security, the new field of artificial intelligence theory, still nascent but rapidly developing, theoretically anyway. He had courted her, as they had also taught him to do on Talus, learning how men and women responded to romantic advances. It had amused her, but she went along, he later realized, seeking to learn as much from him as he from her.
She was, in bed, powerful, was how he thought of it. Volcanic, experienced, vocal and responsive. She had, in a rented bungalow in Agra, the Taj Mahal visible from their balcony, confronted him. In typical Gold style, she did while making love, straddling him. She had pinned his arms above his head, kissed him, leaned back, gripping his hips with her long, brown thighs, hooking her ankles behind his knees. She had looked him in the eyes and asked him, bluntly, who he was working for.
“Don’t lie to me,” she had said. “I will break you like a twig.” Her grip had become like iron on his wrists, around his hips. She was like a coiled spring, holding him tightly, even her sex hard and closed like a fist around him.
So he, being who he was, the young boy still inside him who wanted, a friend, a lover, something normal… he had told her. Slowly at first, to not rouse her ire, he had revealed himself to her. He told her much the same story he had told Silver recently. She had listened, attentive, asking only clarifying questions, sipping gin while the Taj glowed at them in the sunset. He had told her everything.
And she had then, seemingly reluctantly, told him her story. It m
arked the end of their romance that night, he recalled. And the beginning of their collaboration. It had confirmed for him what the Center had taught. There were gods, and they were active here. They wanted what the Center was interested in, but he suspected not for the same reasons. The gods were a threat to the Center, he had realized then, in that faraway bungalow in Agra. And that thought, furtive and glimpsed, he had locked deep into his mind. Inside a box deep within boxes. Hidden. He, as he had for years now, pretended not to know it, but it consumed him and raced his thoughts into the growing dawn.
Chapter Thirty-One
I heard Smoke get up while Gold slept beside me. We were both fully clothed, ready to go should we need to. I heard nothing besides Smoke greet the man they had left on watch inside the house. There were others, and they had been rotating through their positions all night, every four hours by my reckoning. Too regular, I thought. Predictable. In Vietnam or Poland, I probably would have exploited that. Perhaps I had. I felt I had, but the memories were hazy. Gunshots, I can remember. And being cold. Hunger. Misery.
And dreams, those I remembered. My dreams in war are different. The dream sea becomes a torrent. A flow, sometimes branching, constantly reforming. Sometimes blossoming in a score, a hundred, an endless chromatic capillarial branch. They stream, drip and flow, mixing, splitting, mixing. Endlessly. I feel transparent during these dreams. The torrent flows through me, through every pore. Through every part of me. Every cell, I sometimes feel. They filter, scan, and see me. I feel sifted. I’m released to sleep again. Always the same, like this, in war. I was afraid to sleep, but this would be bad, and I can only do that for so long. It makes me erratic, and I needed to be stable. There were enough erratic people around at the moment, I thought, looking at Gold.
I rose, after a time, smelling coffee from the kitchen. The sun was just rising, clear and bright, washing the hills with yellow, goldening into green in patches, where cypress, pine, and oak grew in the folded hills. I paused for a moment at the view from the top of the stairs. Could be Tuscany, this place, I thought. I can’t recall being at war in Tuscany, but I could have been, I suppose. This made me sad, the thought of war visiting that place. Of me bringing it.
In the kitchen, Smoke nodded to me, sitting at the broad island. “Good morning. There is coffee, if you take it.”
I went through the cabinets until I found the cups and poured some coffee from the machine. Looked in the fridge, no cream. Nothing. We had arrived late, and I hadn’t looked through the kitchen last night.
“We will need groceries,” I said. “If we’re staying.” I looked at him.
He nodded, sipped his coffee. “On the list for today. We’ll send one of the guys into town.”
I nodded back, sipping my coffee. Too hot, but it tasted good, strong and acidic. “What’s next then?”
He cocked his head. “I need to report in. This morning. Soon, actually. You can watch, it shouldn’t take long.” He looked at the clock. “Going to have to. Due any minute.”
I looked at the clock. Almost six AM. “Early?” I said.
He shook his head. “Best to get these things over with early. Have a seat. It really doesn’t take long.”
I sat and sipped my coffee, watching him. Smoke was hard to read, but some human gestures are universal and physiological. Nervous stress revealed itself in tension in the neck muscles, the jaw, and the nostrils. Smell, too, could be a giveaway, in extreme cases. Smoke looked, if I had to judge, worried. He was dreading this, whatever it was. This report.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“No time. I’ll explain after,” he said, setting his mug down on the granite island top. He placed his hands flat on the table. Next to his walkie-talkie. Took a deep breath. “Here it comes.”
As I watched, he exhaled. There was, precisely at six AM, a faint pop, a gentle puff of air. He seemed to shimmer slightly. There was an odor of ozone. He opened his eyes.
“Silver,” he said, smiling.
“Smoke,” I said. I looked him over, he was relaxed. But his eyes were also…different slightly. More gray maybe, if such a thing were possible. They were watching me.
“Gold,” I said, not taking my eyes from him. Loudly enough so she would hear, but not yelling. One of the crew glanced into the room, a large dark man with a shaved head. Smoke nodded to him.
“Yes,” Smoke said. “Gold should be here. We need to talk.”
“Hello, Smoke,” Gold said, from the top of the stairs. She had been awake then, probably in the hallway, lurking and listening, since I had gone downstairs. Good.
I reviewed the situation. Something had changed. Subtly, but there was a difference. Smoke was, different.
“How long were you gone, when you reported in?” It hadn’t been just the fraction of a second that had elapsed. Time had passed for him, this much I grasped.
He smiled. “Good, you are with me. On the same page.” His accent was thicker than it had been. He’d vanished some lengthy period. “Some time, yes, some…months, probably.”
“A vacation then?” I said, rotating the coffee cup in my hand so I had a good grip on the barrel of the cup. In case. Something was off here. I could feel it. Not the same.
“More like an extended interrogation,” he said, wrinkling his forehead. “Comfortable enough, physically.” He picked up the walkie-talkie, fiddled with it. I heard a click from it, then another. A third.
I studied him. “So, how did it go? You came back, so I guess they weren’t too upset with you.”
“No, not at all. Nothing like that,” he said casually. But his eyes, gray as the sea, reflected movement.
I threw myself back and down, leaving the stool awkwardly as they fired over my head from the right. Two from the right. Something had warned them, and the three clicks on their mike buttons were their signal to move. They were good, all of them. Good soldiers. Elite. But in the end, human. Their shots went high, close, but high. On the ground, I rolled quickly, hot coffee spilling over my hands and stomach as the cup in my right hand emptied. I spun on my left knee, driving my knee into the tile floor, pivoting quick, spinning with my core. As I came around, I threw the coffee cup at the far left one. I threw it very hard. He had been moving to his right, shooter stance, and the heavy mug took him in the face, knocking him back and exploding into a cloud of shards.
I kept the pivot going, curled onto my shoulder blades, and swept the feet of the other shooter who was closer. He went down hard with a grunt, and I was on top of him, from behind, legs and arms sliding around him, close as a lover. He smelled of sweat and machine oil, and had just tensed in resistance as my hands grasped each other behind his neck, my left leg hooked around his thigh, my right knee in his back. “Fuck,” he said, just before I gave a jerk, and rolled quickly off him.
The tall black one from the living room came charging in, weapon coming up. Gold dropped over the railing onto him, her long legs hooking him under the armpits and swinging him a foot off the ground before twisting his head around with a crack. She let him go and dropped.
She slid and reached the first, the one who I struck with the cup. It had dazed him, his face torn under the freely streaming blood, facing me as I crouched. Gold wrapped her arm around his neck and twisted with her roll. He flopped, neck broken, and she had his gun, still strapped to him but training it towards Smoke. Maybe five seconds had passed. Maybe four.
He had crouched as I went to the floor. Now he vaulted from behind the kitchen island, over the back of the sofa, and leaped a huge, soaring leap towards the picture window facing the hillside downslope. Gold tracked him with the gun, and I heard it click, but no shots. Smoke, at the last instant, curled into a tight ball and went through the window, a crash of golden dawn-lit slivers.
“Shit,” Gold said. “Smart guns.” Biometrics, fireable only by their owners. Clever.
“There’s one more,” I said tersely, in Nahuatl. “Outside.”
“Got it,” she said, and unstrapped a blac
k-bladed knife from the corpse she was straddling. “He will run. Stay here?”
“He moved fast with that jump,” I said, doing the same with the knife my victim had strapped on his leg. “You ever see him move that fast before?”
“No,” she said, from behind the island. “That was new for him. He’s in good shape but he can’t move like that.”
“Okay,” I said, filing it for later. “So he might not run. Might think he can take us?”
“He might.” But then we heard the roar of an engine and tires churning on gravel, I risked a peek over the edge of the shattered window and saw the SUV in the cypress-lined drive, slowing down, a sprinting Smoke heading for it.
“Get some car keys from these goons,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
I sprinted upstairs. Jessica’s room had some nickel-plated locking contraption, mechanical, designed to turn an ordinary house door into a prison. I tested it. Solid. I could hear Jessica talking behind the door but didn’t bother listening to her. She sounded panicked.
“Stand clear of the door,” I said, loudly. I took a few steps back and, spinning, knee tight to my chest for the open doorway, snap kicked the door, just above the bar, feeling the jamb give way through my hip. The bar hung from the hinge-side screws. I pushed open the door of the room they had given Jessica. She shrieked, holding a lamp like a cudgel. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go. Now. No talking. Downstairs with Gold. Now. Move.”
I turned away and went to the room with Rodriguez. It was farther down the hall, towards the back of the house. It had a similar bar, and I gave it a similar treatment. He was on the bed, arms wrapped around his knees. “Let’s go. We’re leaving. This place might be rigged to blow. Let’s go. No time to get dressed. Run downstairs, straight out into the driveway. Gold is down there. The rest of them are dead or leaving. Go.”
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