Wild Cards: Aces Abroad

by George R. R. Martin

  “Not my government.”

  Neumann inclined his head. “—of the United States government, that there will be no negotiation with the terrorists. Needless to say, American currency restrictions did not permit the members of the tour to take anywhere near a sufficient amount of money from the country, and now the American government has frozen the assets of all tour participants to preclude their concluding a separate deal.”

  Tachyon felt his cheeks turn hot. “That’s damned high-handed.”

  Neumann shrugged. “I was curious as to what you thought of the plan.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re an acknowledged authority on joker affairs—that’s the reason you honor our country with your presence, of course.” He tapped the cigarette on the table next to a curling corner of a map of Berlin. “Also, you come of a culture in which kidnapping is a not uncommon occurrence, if I do not misapprehend.”

  Tach looked at him. Though he was a celebrity, most Earthers knew little of his background beyond the fact that he was an alien. “I can’t speak of the RAF, of course—”

  “The Rote Armee Fraktion in its current incarnation consists primarily of middle-class youths—much like its previous incarnations, and for that matter most First World revolutionary groups. Money means little to them; as children of our so-called Economic Miracle, they’ve been raised always to assume a sufficiency of it.”

  “That’s certainly not something you can say for the JJS,” Sara Morgenstern said, coming over to join the conversation. An aide moved to intercept her, reaching a hand to shepherd her away from the important masculine conversation. She shied away from him as if a spark had jumped between them and glared.

  Neumann said something brisk that not even Tachyon caught. The aide retreated.

  “Frau Morgenstern. I am also much interested in what you have to say.”

  “Members of the Jokers for a Just Society are authentically poor. I can vouch for that at least.”

  “Would money tempt them, then?”

  “That’s hard to say. They are committed, in a way I suspect the RAF members aren’t. Still—” a butterfly flip of the hand—“they haven’t lost any Mideastern aces. On the other hand, when they demand money to benefit jokers, I believe them. Whereas that might mean less to the Red Army people.”

  Tach frowned. The demand to knock down Jetboy’s Tomb and build a joker hospice rankled him. Like most New Yorkers, he wouldn’t miss the memorial—an eyesore erected to honor failure, and one he’d personally prefer to forget. But the demand for a hospice was a slap in his face: When has a joker been turned away from my clinic? When?

  Neumann was studying him. “You disagree, Herr Doktor?” he asked softly.

  “No, no. She’s right. But Gimli—” he snapped his fingers and extended a forefinger. “Tom Miller cares deeply for jokers. But he has also an eye for what Americans call the main chance. You might well be able to tempt him.”

  Sara nodded. “But why do you ask, Herr Neumann? After all, President Reagan refuses to negotiate for the senator’s return.” Her voice rang with bitterness. Still, Tach was puzzled. As high-strung as she was, he’d thought that surely worry for Gregg would have broken her down by now.

  Instead she seemed to be growing steadier by the hour.

  Neumann looked at her for a moment, and Tach wondered if he was in on the ill-kept secret of her affair with the missing senator. He had the impression those yellow eyes—red-rimmed now from the smoke—missed little.

  “Your President has made his decision,” he said softly. “But it’s my responsibility to advise my government on what course to take. This is a German problem too, you know.”

  At two-thirty Hiram Worchester came on the air reading a statement in English. Tachyon translated it into German during the pauses.

  “Comrade Wolf—Gimli, if you’re there,” Hiram said, voice fluting with emotion, “we want the senator back. We’re willing to negotiate as private citizens.

  “Please, for the love of God—and for jokers and aces and all the rest of us—please call us.”

  Mólniya stared at the door. White enamel was coming away in flakes. Striae of green and pink and brown showed beneath the white, around gouges that looked as if someone had used the door for knife-throwing practice. He was all but oblivious to the others in the room. Even the mad boy’s incessant humming; he’d long since learned to tune that out for sanity’s sake.

  I should never have let them go.

  It took him aback when both Gimli and Wolf wanted to make the meet with the tour delegation. It was about the first thing they’d agreed on since this whole comic-opera affair had gotten underway.

  He’d wanted to forbid them. He didn’t like the smell of this rendezvous . . . but that was foolish. Reagan had closed the door on overt negotiation, but didn’t the current Irangate hearings with which the Americans were currently amusing themselves prove he was not averse to using private channels to deal with terrorists against whom he’d taken a hard public line?

  Besides, he thought, I’ve long since learned better than to issue orders I doubt will be obeyed.

  It had been so different in Spetsnaz. The men he’d commanded were professionals and more, the elite of the Soviet armed forces, full of esprit and skilled as surgeons. Such a contrast to this muddle of bitter amateurs and murderous dilettantes.

  If only he’d at least had someone trained back home, or in a camp in some Soviet client state, Korea or Iraq or Peru. Someone except Gimli, that is—he had the impression years had passed since anything but plastique would open the dwarf’s mind enough to accept input from anyone else, nats in particular.

  He wished at least he might have gone on the meet. But his place was here, guarding the captive. Without Hartmann they had nothing—except a worldful of trouble.

  Does the KGB have this much trouble with its puppets? Rationally he guessed they did. They’d fluffed a few big ones over the years—the mention of Mexico could still make veterans wince—and GRU had evidence of plenty of missteps the Big K thought they’d covered up.

  But the Komitet’s publicists had done their job well, on both sides of the quaintly named “Iron Curtain.” Down behind his forebrain not even Mólniya could shake the image of the KGB as the omniscient puppet master, with its strings wrapping the world like a spider’s web.

  He tried to envision himself as a master spider. It made him smile.

  No. I’m not a spider. Just a small, frightened man whom somebody once called hero.

  He thought of Ludmilya, his daughter. He shuddered.

  There are strings attached to me, right enough. But I’m not the one who pulls them.

  I want him.

  Hartmann looked around the squalid little room. Ulrich was pacing, face fixed and sullen at having been left behind. Stocky Wilfried sat cleaning an assault rifle with compulsive care. He always seemed to be doing something with his hands. The two remaining jokers sat by themselves saying nothing. The Russian sat and smoked and stared at the wall.

  He studiously didn’t look at the boy in the scuffed leather jacket.

  Mackie Messer hummed the old song about the shark and its teeth and the man with his jackknife and fancy gloves. Hartmann remembered a mealymouthed version popular when he was a teenager, sung by Bobby Darin or some such teen-idol crooner. He also recalled a different version, one he’d heard for the first time in a dim dope-fogged room on Yale’s Old Campus when antiwar activist Hartmann returned to his alma mater to lecture in ’68. Dark and sinister, a straighter translation of the original, sung in the whisky baritone of a man who, like old Bertolt Brecht himself, delighted in playing Baal: Thomas Marion Douglas, Destiny’s doomed lead singer. Remembering the way the words went down his spine on that distant night, he shuddered.

  I want him.

  No! his mind shouted. He’s insane. He’s dangerous.

  He could be useful, once I get us out of here.

  Hartmann’s body clenched in rictus terror. No! Don’
t do anything! The terrorists are negotiating right now. We’ll get out of this.

  He felt Puppetman’s disdain. Seldom had his alter ego seemed more discrete, more other. Fools. What has Hiram Worchester ever been involved in that amounted to anything? It’ll fall through.

  Then we just wait. Sooner or later something will be worked out. It’s how these things go. He felt slimy vines of sweat twining his body inside his blood-spattered shirt and vest.

  How long do you think we have to wait? How long before our jokers and their terrorists friends blow up in each other’s faces? I have puppets. They’re our only way out.

  What can they do? I can’t just make someone let me go. I’m not that little mind-twister Tachyon.

  He felt a smug vibration within.

  Don’t forget 1976, he told his power. You thought you could handle that too.

  The power laughed at him, until he closed his eyes and concentrated and forced it to quiescence.

  Has it become a demon, possessing me? he wondered. Am I just another of Puppetman’s puppets?

  No. I’m the master here. Puppetman’s just a fantasy. A personification of my power. A game I play with myself.

  Inside the tangled corridors of his soul, the echo of triumphant laughter.

  “It’s raining again,” Xavier Desmond said.

  Tach made a face and refrained from a rejoinder commending the joker’s firm grasp of the obvious. Des was a friend, after all.

  He shifted his grip on the umbrella he shared with Desmond and tried to console himself that the squall would soon pass. The Berliners strolling the paths that veined the grassy Tiergarten park and hurrying along the sidewalks of the nearby Bundes Allee clearly thought so, and they should know. Old men in homburgs, young women with prams, intense young men in dark wool sweaters, a sausage vendor with cheeks like ripe peaches; the usual crowd of Germans taking advantage of anything resembling decent weather after the lengthy Prussian winter.

  He glanced at Hiram. The big round restaurateur was resplendent in his pin-striped three-piece suit, hat at a jaunty angle, and black beard curled. He had an umbrella in one hand, a gleaming black satchel in the other, and Sara Morgenstern standing primly next to him, not quite making contact.

  Rain was dripping off the brim of Tach’s plumed hat, which swept beyond the coverage of the cheap plastic umbrella. A rivulet ran down one side of Des’s trunk. Tach sighed.

  How did I let myself get talked into this? he wondered for the fourth or fifth time. It was idle; when Hiram had called to say a West German industrialist who wished to remain nameless had offered to front them the ransom money, he’d known he was in.

  Sara stood stiff. He sensed she was shivering, almost subliminally. Her face was the color of her raincoat. Her eyes were a paleness that somehow contrasted. He wished she hadn’t insisted on coming along. But she was the leading journalist on this junket; they’d have had to lock her up to keep her from covering this meeting with Hartmann’s kidnappers at first hand. And there was her personal interest.

  Hiram cleared his throat. “Here they come.” His voice was pitched higher than usual.

  Tachyon glanced right without turning his head. No mistake; there weren’t enough jokers in West Germany that it was likely to have two just happen along at this moment, even if there could be any doubt about the identity of the small bearded man who walked with the Toulouse-Lautrec roll beside a being who looked like a beige anteater on its hind legs.

  “Tom,” Hiram said, voice husky now.

  “Gimli,” the dwarf replied. He said it without heat. His eyes glit­tered at the satchel hanging from Hiram’s hand. “You brought it.”

  “Of course . . . Gimli.” He handed the umbrella to Sara and cracked the satchel. Gimli stood on tiptoe and peered in. His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “Two million American dollars. Two more after you hand Senator Hartmann over to us.”

  A snaggletoothed grin. “That’s a bargaining figure.”

  Hiram colored. “You agreed on the phone—”

  “We agreed to consider your offer once you demonstrated your good faith,” said one of the two nats who accompanied Gimli and his partner. He was a tall man made bulkier by his raincoat. Dark blond hair was slicked back and down from a balding promontory of forehead by the intermittent rain. “I am Comrade Wolf. Let me remind you, there is the matter of the freedom of our comrade, al-Muezzin.”

  “Just what is it that makes German socialists risk their lives and freedom on behalf of a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist?” Tachyon asked.

  “We’re all comrades in the struggle against Western imperialism. What brings a Takisian to risk his health in our beastly climate on behalf of a senator from a country that once whipped him from its shores like a rabid dog?”

  Tach drew his head back in surprise. Then he smiled. “Touché.” He and Wolf shared a look of perfect understanding.

  “But we can only give you money,” Hiram said. “We can’t arrange for Mr. Hassani to be released. We told you that.”

  “Then it’s no sale,” said Wolf’s nat companion, a redheaded woman Tach could have found attractive but for a sullen, puffy jut to her lower lip and a bluish cast to her complexion. “What use is your toilet-paper money to us? We merely demand it to make you pigs sweat.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Gimli said. “That money can buy a lot for jokers.”

  “Are you so obsessed with buying into consumption fascism?” sneered the redhead.

  Gimli went purple. “The money’s here. Hassani’s in Rikers, and that’s a long way away.”

  Wolf was frowning at Gimli in a speculative sort of way. Somewhere an engine backfired.

  The woman spat like a cat and jumped back, face pale, eyes feral.

  Motion tugged at the corner of Tach’s eye.

  The chubby sausage seller had flipped open the lid of his cart. His hand was coming out with a black Heckler & Koch minimachine pistol in it.

  Ever suspicious, Gimli traced his gaze. “It’s a trap!” he shrieked. He whipped open his coat. He’d been holding one of those compact little Krinkov assault rifles beneath.

  Tachyon kicked the foreshortened Kalashnikov from Gimli’s hand with the toe of an elegant boot. The nat woman pulled out an AKM from inside her coat and stuttered a burst one-handed. The sound threatened to implode Tach’s eardrums.

  Sara screamed. Tach threw himself onto her, bore her down to wet, fragrant grass as the female terrorist tracked her weapon from left to right, face a rictus of something like ecstasy.

  There was motion all around. Old men in homburgs and young women with prams and intense young men in sweaters were whipping out machine pistols and rushing toward the party clumped around the two umbrellas.

  “Wait,” Hiram shouted, “hold on! It’s all a misunderstanding.”

  The other terrorists had guns out now, firing in all directions. Bystanders screamed and scattered. The slick-soled shoes of a man waving a machine pistol with one hand lost traction on the grass and shot out from under him. A man with an MP5K and a business suit tripped over a baby carriage whose operator had frozen on the handle and fell on his face.

  Sara lay beneath Tachyon, rigid as a statue. The clenched rump pressed against his crotch was firmer than he would have expected. This is the only way I’m ever going to get on top of her, he thought ruefully. It was almost physical pain to realize it was contact with him and not fear of the bullets crackling like static overhead that made her go stiff.

  Gregg, you are a lucky man. Should you somehow survive this imbroglio.

  Scrambling after his rifle, Gimli ran into a big nat who snatched at him. He picked him up by one leg with that disproportionate strength of his and pitched him into the faces of a trio of his comrades like a Scot tossing the caber.

  Des was making love to the grass. Smart man, Tachyon thought. His head was full of burned powder and the green and brown aromas of wet turf. Hiram was wandering dazed through a horizontal firestorm, waving his arms and crying, �
��Wait, wait—oh, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

  The terrorists bolted. Gimli ducked between the legs of one nat who flailed his arms at him in a grab, came up and punched a second in the nuts and followed them.

  Tach heard a squeal of pain. The snouted joker fell down with black ropy strands of blood unraveling from his belly. Gimli caught him up on the run and slung him over his shoulder like a rolled carpet.

  A gaggle of Catholic schoolgirls scattered like blue quail, pigtails flying, as the fugitives stampeded through them. Tachyon saw a man go to one knee, raise his machine pistol for a burst at the terrorists.

  He reached out with his mind. The man toppled, asleep.

  A van coughed into life and roared from the curb with Gimli thrashing for the handles of the open doors with his stubby arms.

  Hiram sat on the wet grass, weeping into his hands. The black satchel wept bundled money beside him.

  “The political police,” Neumann said, as if trying to work a shred of spoiled food from inside his mouth. “They don’t call them Popo for nothing.”

  “Herr Neumann—” the man in mechanic’s coveralls began beseechingly.

  “Shut up. Doctor Tachyon, you have my personal apology.” Neumann had arrived within five minutes of the terrorists’ escape, just in time to keep Tachyon from being arrested for screaming abuse at the police interlopers.

  Tachyon sensed Sara beside and behind him like a whiteout shadow. She’d just finished narrating a sketch of what had just happened into the voice-actuated mike clipped to the lapel of her coat. She seemed calm.

  He gestured at the ambulances crowded together like whales with spinning blue lights beyond the police cordon, with a hat still bedraggled from being jumped up and down on. “How many people did your madmen gun down?”

  “Three bystanders were injured by gunfire, and one policeman. Another officer will require hospitalization but he, ah, was not shot.”