Aftershocks

by Mark Parragh

  The man—Einar—laughed. “No. It doesn’t matter. In the end, I beat you.”

  “Congratulations,” said Crane.

  Georges held the machine gun while Crane climbed into the Zodiac and cut the fuel lines. Then they transferred Einar back aboard the boat and pushed it away. Finally, Georges dumped the machine gun over the side.

  “I beat you!” Einar shouted as the fishing boat’s engines sputtered back to life and it moved away. “I beat you!”

  Crane turned away and smiled. “That’s right,” he said quietly. “Go back and tell your bosses that.”

  Einar’s shouts faded as the boat powered away toward Grimsey Island and safety.

  Chapter 35

  Palo Alto, California, three weeks later

  Josh Sulenski returned from the San Diego Comic-Con to find a stack of mail waiting on his desk. His assistant had carefully separated it into categories. The junk mail was already gone. Here were the bills, here the various obscure print magazines Josh subscribed to, here the personal letters from people seeking money or favors—there were always plenty of those.

  And on the bottom, a package wrapped in brown paper and festooned with colorful foreign stamps. Josh turned his attention to that. He read the address label.

  “Who the hell is Halla Manisdottir?” he shouted to nobody in particular.

  He sliced through the wrapping with a letter opener modeled after Batman’s batarangs and opened the package.

  “And why is she sending me socks?”

  Again, nobody answered. Josh remembered his assistant had today off.

  They were nice socks at least. Hand knit from real wool from the looks of them. Then he realized there was something inside one. He reached in and pulled out a broken fragment of circuit board with a storage module epoxied in place.

  A wide grin broke across Josh’s face as he realized what he was holding. Georges had come back with a story about the data tap ending up in the North Atlantic, and Crane hadn’t contradicted him.

  There was a letter in the package. Josh unfolded it and read.

  “Dear Mr. Sulenski,” it began. “Our friend John Crane asked me to send this to you, but it doesn’t look like much to me. I live in the country here in Iceland, and there is little to do in the winters. So I make many socks. More than I need. I thought you might like a pair. Please tell John Crane I am grateful for his help. But he was right. It is probably best he is not in Iceland anymore. I hope you are well, and the socks fit you. Sincerely, Halla Manisdottir.”

  “You bastard,” Josh said with a broad grin. He grabbed his phone and texted Crane.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you gave the data tap to someone to mail back?”

  It was several minutes before Crane answered. Apparently, he was up to something. “I didn’t know if she’d actually do it or not,” his reply read.

  “I’m still pissed about that cruise ship cabin,” Josh sent back.

  “Okay,” Crane answered. Josh waited, but he didn’t send anything else.

  After a minute, Josh sighed. That was the thing about Crane; you couldn’t stay mad at him when he kept bringing home such interesting toys.

  Josh pulled up Georges contact on his phone and sent another text.

  “Meet me at the shop. Let’s make some unpleasant people have a really bad day.”

  Josh tossed the data tap into the air, caught it, and then headed out again. This was going to be fun.

  Part III

  Something Smart

  Chapter 36

  Yaoundé, Cameroon

  They buried Sam Eyango at two in the afternoon, and by nine that night the party was in full swing. From the ballroom and open bar, the festivities spilled out into the hotel’s terrace. In the warm night air, a packed crowd danced to a DJ hired from Paris while waiters served Cristal and Courvoisier. Sam had been a ganger boy, one of the Ibiza Boys, and he died a ganger’s death. But it was a fast life while it lasted, and the Ibiza Boys made damn sure everyone saw that part too. They sent Sam off in style. They did him proud.

  About to do him a lot prouder, Michel thought as he led the girl across the terrace. He hadn’t come to his friend’s funeral to get laid, but he wasn’t about to pass up a girl like this. He’d seen her earlier, dancing by herself near the end of the terrace, arms over her head and the fringe on her bright red mini-dress shimmering around her hips. He’d watched a couple hangers on take a run at her and get shot down, but when she found out he ran with Yanis and the gang, that he was a friend of the dead man, well that made all the difference. She loved a bad boy, this one. Michel had seen it before. Some girls, they weren’t gangers, they weren’t hard. But they liked to play a bit at danger sometimes for a bit of escape from their safe, boring lives. The scent of death—not too close, just a whiff—would melt them like butter.

  And this one—her name was Romy, he reminded himself—was melting down. She leaned drunkenly against him as he led her inside. He felt her body slide against him, and she laughed. She leaned over to snatch an open bottle of Cristal from the bar and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Yeah, that was the idea. He steered her through the ballroom.

  “You’ve got a room?” she asked. “Someplace we can be alone?”

  Michel smiled. “A suite, baby, all to ourselves. You know Yanis Kamkumo, right? The big man?” He held up two fingers. “We’re like this. First class all the way.”

  He was exaggerating, of course. But this was no time for modesty.

  In the elevator, he pulled her around, pressed her against his body, and kissed her hard. He slid a hand down her side and around toward the inside of her thigh, but she caught his wrist and pulled his hand away. She looked into his eyes as she brought his hand up and took his index finger into her mouth. She closed her lips around it and slowly drew it out again. Michel laughed.

  “We’re going to get along real good,” he said.

  “Let’s drink to that,” she said and tipped the bottle into his mouth. He gulped the fine champagne and felt it spill down his chin. It was going to be a good night.

  In the suite he locked the door and turned to see her standing at the window, looking out across the teeming city. “Tell me about him,” she said. “Your friend. How did he die?”

  “Let’s not talk about that,” he said. “He’s gone. We’re here. Let’s be alive.”

  He reached for her, and she kissed him again. Then she said, “no, tell me! I want to know.”

  “It turns you on, doesn’t it? You’re a bad girl, aren’t you? A dirty girl.”

  She poured the last of the bottle into a glass on the sideboard and handed it to him with a wicked grin. “You got a problem with that?”

  “No, baby. Not at all.” He drank down the champagne and said, “all right. His name was Sam, but we called him Bullet because he got shot once, and they left it in him. He was a tough man.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Michel’s head was swimming. He must have drunk too much too fast. He sat down on the bed. “He got jumped,” he said. “They cut him up bad and left him in some woods at Mvolyé Cemetery.”

  “Do you know who did it?” she asked. He could see her excitement growing. This was a weird girl, but that wouldn’t matter. He’d never see her again after tonight. He just had to keep it together long enough to get her in bed. He shouldn’t have drunk so much.

  “No,” he said. “We’ve got enemies. Some other gang. To cut him up that much…”

  “You look tired, baby,” she said. She knelt on the bed beside him, and he didn’t protest as she laid him down. “Rest a minute. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think it must have been a woman that killed him.”

  “What? Why?” Alarm bells started going off in the back of Michel’s head. He felt…wrong somehow.

  “To cut someone up the way you say, they must have been very angry at him. That kind of rage, that takes a woman. He must have done something to bring that
out of a woman. Something really horrible.”

  She pulled her dress off over her head and tossed it onto the nightstand. She wore only a black bra and panties, but Michel saw something strapped around her upper thigh—a black, stretch fabric belt that held something metal.

  “Maybe he hurt someone she loved,” she said. “Maybe he destroyed her life.”

  Michel tried to get up, but he could only raise his shoulders a few inches from the bed. He wasn’t just drunk. She’d done something to him.

  “Shh, shh,” she hushed, gently pushing him back down onto the bed. “Stay there,” she said softly. With one hand she drew a gleaming medical scalpel from the belt around her thigh.

  “You don’t remember me at all, do you,” she said. “You just saw my picture. And it was a few years ago now. Sam didn’t remember me either.”

  Michel tried to shout for help, but made only a thin, raspy sound. She grabbed his jaw in a fierce, iron grip and forced his head around so he was looking straight up. His eyes watched the scalpel in horror. The light from the nightstand glowed off the small blade.

  “This is for my mother,” she said, and her voice was cold, the kittenish tone gone, suddenly and completely. She slashed his cheek deep from below his eye down to his chin. He could feel the flesh part beneath the blade. He gasped in pain, and in a flash she leant over and slashed the other cheek. Michel saw his own blood dripping from the blade as she sat back up. She wiped the scalpel on the bedspread and put it away.

  Then she drew another blade from inside her thigh. This one was longer and heavier, but it had the same polished gleam and a push handle wrapped in black cord. She held it up for him and locked her eyes on his.

  “But this,” she said, “this is for me.”

  Michel tried to scream, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t move. All he could do was see the cold hatred in her eyes, and watch the blade rise in her hand. “Please,” he managed to murmur.

  Then the blade sank into his flesh, over and over, until all Michel could feel was pain and fear, and all he could see was his own blood flowing into his eyes.

  After she cleaned up in the bathroom, Romy walked carefully around the bed and put her dress back on. What was left of Michel soaked blood into the bedspread. She didn’t look at him; she didn’t think about him at all as she checked once more to make sure she’d left nothing behind. Then she left the room and walked calmly down the hall.

  A man passed her, and Romy felt a cold chill of fear down her back. Yanis Kamkuma himself. The man it had always been about. Romy fought down her fear. She had to look normal, give no outward sign of the chaos going on within. He gave her an appraising look and a smile as they passed, but then she saw a flicker of…what? Doubt? Perhaps recognition? Then she was beyond him, and it took all her strength not to break and run for the elevators.

  She reached them at last and pressed the call button. Time seemed to stretch out forever. Behind her, Yanis pounded on a door.

  “Michel! Come on, god damn it, I know you’re in there.”

  She glanced back and saw him at the door to the suite she’d just left. He fumbled in his pockets.

  Shit! He had a key! The elevator doors stood solidly closed. Romy walked quickly to the stairwell. She had to get out. She had to be gone from here now!

  She took the stairs down to the ground level and stopped. To her left was the main lobby, quiet and dim. To her right, the sound and light of the party. Yanis’s men were that way, but so was the loud, busy wake. She could lose herself in the crowd. She turned right.

  She made her way through the ballroom to the terrace. The DJ still spun his tunes, people still danced. But now she saw Yanis’s men moving fast through the crowd. One tapped another on the shoulder and leaned in, speaking urgently. She saw surprise break across the new man’s face, and he took off in another direction.

  They’d found him. They were looking for her.

  Romy kicked off her heels so she could run. She hurried across the dance floor toward the row of pompon trees at the far edge of the terrace. Complaints followed her as she bumped into dancers, but she didn’t care. Beyond the trees she could fade into the night. There were a thousand different turns she could take, a thousand dark places where she might disappear. But the time for stealth was past.

  Then she spun to avoid a dancer and ran straight into another man. He caught her to keep her from falling. She tensed to push away from him, but then he said, “Romy?”

  She froze.

  “It is you!”

  She looked up into his smiling face. Daniel Massila. A boy she’d dated in school. He realized he was still holding her arms and let her go. God, of all the luck!

  “Daniel.”

  He seemed so happy to see her. “My God, when did you get back?”

  Of course, she realized. He saw the old Romy, from before. He had no idea who she was now. “I didn’t.”

  Behind them, someone shouted, “Hey! She’s here!”

  “Get away from here, Daniel,” Romy hissed. “Run. Now!” Then she spun, pushed a dancer out of her way and left him bewildered as she ran for the trees.

  Chapter 37

  Palo Alto, California

  Georges’s lab at the Myria group was a cavernous, windowless space in the middle of the building, an oddly-shaped artifact forced on the design by some unusual choices by the original designers. Georges had turned it into a maze of shelves, workbenches, and heavy equipment. Power and data cables snaked around the floor like vines.

  “We can’t do the real demo in here,” said Josh, shaking his head in dismay. “Place is a death trap.”

  “Nonsense,” said Georges. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  Georges, Josh, and a young agronomist named Kevin made their way through the dimly lit passage between blinking server racks. Georges had brought Kevin on a week ago to provide specialized expertise for this latest project.

  “Safe for you, sure,” said Josh. But there’s a thousand different ways for a visitor to die in here, depending on what they trip over.”

  “Kevin’s been here a week now. He’s fine.”

  “If he dies, we can get another agronomist,” Josh said with a sly grin for Georges. “Nothing personal, Kevin.”

  “No, sir,” Kevin stammered.

  “But I’m not bringing the board of the World Bank Food and Agriculture Practice in here and getting someone maimed. And we can’t fly a drone in here anyway. We’ll set up your test bed outside and do the demo from the roof.”

  “Sure,” said Georges.

  He led them into a large open space at the back of the lab with a raised metal platform. They clanked up the stairs and looked down on a thirty-foot square wooden bed full of soil.

  “So what’s wrong with it exactly?” asked Josh.

  Kevin spoke up, suddenly in his element. “It’s a typical famine area soil in south Asia, sir. You’ll note the reddish tone. Rich in potash but low in nitrogen and phosphates. Could use a little more carbon content as well. Crop yields are low, requiring more acreage of arable land per person.”

  “South Asia?” said Josh. “Where did we get it?”

  “We flew in a couple tons from southeast Maharashtra,” said Georges.

  There was a pause. “You did say to spend what we needed,” Georges added.

  “Yes, I did,” said Josh. “Eh. It’s just money. We’ll make more. All right, show me.”

  From a shelf bolted to the railing, Georges picked up a grenade launcher with a drum magazine and a wide muzzle. He pointed it into the bed of soil and fired. There was a thump from the launcher, and something slammed into the dirt below. It buried itself in the topsoil, leaving only a small cloud of dust and a mark about the size of a mole’s hole.

  Georges snapped open the launcher and ejected a round from the magazine. It was a stubby shape, rounded at the rear with a smaller rounded point in the front.

  “Caseless,” he said. “We aren’t helping if we litter the whole place with shell casings in the
process.”

  He handed it to Josh, who held it up to the light.

  “That darker band at the back is the propellant,” Georges explained. “The chemical payload is in front. Nitrogen, carbon, phosphate, a little lime to balance the acidity in the soil. A couple other chemical tricks. That was the real work. But you come back in a week and test that soil, and you’ll find very different chemistry in a ten-foot circle around that spot.”

  Josh nodded. “So we’ll want to lay down a grid with one of these every twenty feet.”

  “In each direction, yes.”

  “So to cover a square mile, we’re taking about…” he did some quick math in his head. “About seventy thousand rounds.”

  “When production scales up, we estimate they’ll cost a little over three cents a round,” said Georges. “That’s not bad.”

  Josh shook his head. “And how big does the drone need to be to carry all those rounds? We’ve got another month before the World Bank shows up. This is a good start, but let’s keep working.”

  After Josh had left for his next meeting, Georges sent Kevin off to do more soil tests and returned to his desk in a hidden corner of the lab. He put on some old De La Soul and leaned back in his chair, staring up into the darkness of the metal trusses in the ceiling. Josh wanted them to save the world. It was a good goal. The best. But it seemed very abstract sometimes. Put more nutrients in the soil in lands plagued by famine. Take a bit of carbon back out of the atmosphere and bury it deep underground. They were nudging things just the tiniest bit and hoping the effects would grow over time. Maybe they would, but Georges couldn’t help feeling that the world needed something bigger.

  John Crane was in Finland doing God knew what. He hadn’t needed any of Georges's technical wizardry apparently, because they hadn’t brought him in on this one. Georges wished they had. He felt more effective supporting Crane’s field missions. Crane took action. He produced results that changed things now. Georges knew his own work was important, but he couldn’t help his impatience, and he felt something missing in his life that couldn’t be solved by making better soil.