Turn of the cards

Fixin’-to-Die Rag
Chapter Thirty-six

“Mark.”

Seated cross-legged on the mat-covered floor, Mark looked up. Lou Inmon’s great feathered head was stuck in the door.

“We got company,” Osprey said. “Could be bad.”

Mark’s veins got cold. Not for the first time he wished that Croyd were up and around, rather than out cold and being lugged around as baggage by the mutineers. Exactly what a giant lizard could do to help if they’d been discovered was a bit problematical. But at least Mark wouldn’t feel so isolated, so alone.

“Government troops?” he asked. It had been a constant high-wire dance, in the weeks since the breakaway, trying to keep his little band accessible to the steady stream of deserters from Venceremos without exposing them to the People’s Army or the wrath of Sobel’s diehard loyalists.

Osprey shook his head. “’Yards. They just appeared.

Put the villagers seriously uptight.”

A thin, middle-aged Vietnamese slid into the hootch, keeping as far away from Osprey as possible – after initial wariness the villagers were beginning to see their joker guests as benevolent monsters, but monsters nonetheless.

“Mock,” the villager said. “Will Dark Lady appear? Will Dark Lady help us? All moi number ten, steal our women, eat our dogs.”

Mark sighed. Moi meant savages. Ethnic Vietnamese treated the Montagnards as animals – pests. I thought racism and intolerance were white-European-male kind of things, Mark thought wearily. He had been learning differently.

“You shouldn’t call them that, Thich. They’re people too.”

Thich looked skeptical. “Them steal. Dark Lady come?”

Mark stood up. “If she’s needed, she’ll come.” Thich bobbed his head and pulled back. Mark went to the door.

There were half a dozen of them, squatting in the middle of the village with carbines and shotguns across their thighs, smoking in the heavy evening sun angling in between mountain peaks and slate sky. Like most Vietnamese Mark had seen, they were small and seemed to have been wound out of wire on human-shaped armatures. Two wore turbans, and all had on wire bracelets and blankets with holes in them for their heads like scrapes.

He spared them only a glance. The man with the bandaged left hand who stood in the middle of them was tall only by comparison with the Vietnamese, but he attracted Mark’s attention like a giant electromagnet.

Mark’s hand jumped toward a pocket of his cammie blouse. Then he sighed, and his hand dropped away.

“Mr. Bullock,” he said, “you’re one persistent guy.”

“Last time I saw you, you were helping those DEA agents track me down,” Mark said, dipping up hot rice with his fingers. “Why should I treat you like a friend, Mr. Bullock? Er, Belew.”

J. Robert Belew looked up. The glow from the fish-oil lamp under-lit his eyebrows and gave his features a Satanic cast. “What if I said I didn’t walk in here without taking, shall we say, measures to ensure my safety?”

“I’d say you were full of shit, man. We’re in the middle of a whole lot of my friends, and I don’t just mean aces. If you’re planning to make any moves, you better have brought the People’s Army to back you up. And even if you did, they’d never get here in time to keep you from being slagged.”

“Threats, Doctor? That doesn’t sound like the gentle Captain Trips of old.”

Mark hunched a one-shoulder shrug. “I don’t put up with as much abuse as I used to.”

Belew laughed. “I came in here with six underfed Montagnards with about twelve rounds of ammunition among them. If I don’t walk out alive, not one blessed thing will happen, except my aged mother will be very sad in a dignified and well-bred way. If not exactly surprised.”

He set his own bowl aside. “Satisfied? Or do we need to go through more macho posturing?”

“I’m not posturing, man. I’m making my position clear.”

“Very well, Dr. Meadows. Let me make my own a little clearer: if I’m not your friend, why did the DEA agents never actually catch you?”

“I had a little bit to do with that. And my friends, yeah. But to tell you the truth – I know they’re like the big heroes and everything back in the States, but I never thought narcs were all that bright.”

Belew laughed. “You should’ve seen these two. Heckle and Jeckle.”

“So where are they now?”

“Playing drop the soap for the Turkish national ace in some awful slam in Istanbul.”

“You’re putting me on.”

Belew solemnly shook his head. “I set them up. They never suspected a blessed thing until the Turks found the coke in their luggage. And all the while they thought they were putting one over on me.” He paused to chuckle. “Naturally the United States and the Governor will get them out of it. Eventually.”

Mark laughed long and loud. When he was finished, he shook his head. “I know I should feel sorry for them. But they tried to kill me, they hurt a lot of innocent people, and they endangered a whole lot more. The heck with them.”

“Indeed.”

“Why’d you do it? Why were you trying to help me?”

“May I speak frankly with you, Doctor?”

Mark gave him the Big Doubt eye, one eyelid at half-mast, the opposite brow arched Mr. Spock style. “Why do I have the feeling you’re going to do anything but? But go for it, man.”

It was Belew’s turn to laugh. “I like your style, Dr. Meadows. I thought you were just another naпve hippie burnout. But you’ve got something to you. Some steel in your spine.”

“I’d rather you think of me as a hippie, if it’s all the same.”

Belew showed him a raised eyebrow back. “A hippie, in command of a hundred armed men and getting set to take on the whole Republic of Vietnam?”

“So call me a combat hippie. This isn’t exactly the role I ever had in mind. But you were about to be frank, Mr. Belew”

“Never give me a straight line like that, Doctor. But yes. With all due respect, my helping didn’t actually have much to do with you personally. It was more to put a spike in the wheels of the people who were after you.”

“You got something against the DEA? Uh, you want a beer?” He held up a couple of bottles of Giai Phong with the necks between his fingers.

“No thanks. I’m trying to cut down on formaldehyde. No, I don’t have anything against Drug Enforcement; I’ve done contract work for them. That’s a career option I have a sneaking suspicion is going to be closed from here on in.

“I have something against the people they were fronting for.”

Mark stopped with his beer halfway to his lips. “You going to give me a line about some kind of big conspiracy behind the U.S. government?”

“No. I’m going to give you a line about a worldwide conspiracy. It’s not exactly behind the government of the United States, but it has its claws in governments all around the world.”

Mark set his beer down. “That’s very interesting, Mr. Belew. But I’ve been having kind of a busy life lately, so I hope you’ll don’t mind if I just cut this short”

“I thought hippies were naturally drawn to conspiracy theories.”

“So I’m an unorthodox hippie. All the conspirators I ever knew, they, like, had a hard time figuring out what to eat for lunch by six o’clock at night.”

Belew laughed again. “Look, Doctor, I’ve taken substantial risks in order to come here and talk to you as you yourself were at pains to point out. Why not listen to what I have to say before you dismiss me as a random lunatic?”

“I never thought you were a random lunatic. You seem like a pretty single-minded lunatic to me. But, okay. I’ll listen.” The only thing this was keeping him from, after all, was Moonchild’s evening exercise, and Mark was none too eager to let her out to agonize over Eric. Besides, the sky was clear, and that meant stars. Mark was still not sorry to miss them.

“Very well. You’re certainly aware that anti-wild card sentiment is very prevalent today. It takes the form of anything from verbal abuse to legal strictures to mob violence and assassination. But doesn’t it sometimes strike you that the hate campaign is fairly well orchestrated?”

“You mean, like Leo Barnett and the fundamentalists?”

Belew smiled and shook his head. “Barnett’s a well-meaning fool – all right, you don’t have to agree with his goals, and obviously you don’t, but he sincerely believes he’s doing the right thing. Of course, as that malignant but astute dwarf Alexander Pope informed us, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But Barnett is an outsider, a hillbilly barbarian at the gates. I’m talking about entrenched men, powerful men. Insiders.”

“How’d you find out about this conspiracy?”

“I don’t suppose it would surprise you if I told you I used to work for the CIA?”

“No,” Mark said. “Are they in on it?”

Belew gestured with his good hand. “Yes and no. The CIA is not monolithic, any more than most governments or even governmental agencies throughout the world are. Group dynamics are more complicated than that; that’s where most conspiracy buffs make their mistake.

“But yes. There is a sizable faction within the CIA that is connected with the conspiracy. As there is such a faction within the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

Mark gave him a narrow eye. “How did you find out about all this?”

“Do you remember the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1980 with an all-ace strike team?” Mark nodded. “I commanded it. That’s when I first became aware of an anti-wild cards conspiracy.”

“I thought you military types blamed Carter for that.”

“No. Carter was spineless and a fool, though he showed a certain grace when he accepted responsibility for the mission’s failure. Of course that was wrong, too; I was the commander on the ground, I lost almost half my people, so the fault was legitimately mine.”

“I can’t tell you how confident this makes me feel.”

“I’m being straight with you, Doctor. I need you to believe the unbelievable. What better way to establish my bona fides than being honest about my own failures?”

Mark waved a noncommittal gesture.

“I’ll spare you the details. I will say that I found reason to believe that the mission was intended to fail from the inception, in order to embarrass not just aces in general but Carter, who was felt by certain parties to be soft on wild cards.”

“Why didn’t you, like, report it?”

“To whom?” A small smile. “One of the men I suspected – suspect – was a National Security adviser, who’s very well connected. I’m a cowboy, a shadow operative – contract man. Who’d believe me?”

“You expect me to.”

Belew laughed. “You have firsthand experience of the conspiracy.”

Mark rubbed his chin. Bristles scraped his palm. He had stayed mostly clean-shaven since going on the run after the trial. He was going back and forth now about whether to grow a beard or not.

“So that’s why they were after me so hard.”

“On the operational level, yes. The reason these particular boys pushed so hard is that one of them conceived himself as having a personal grudge against you. His partner was killed in that shootout in your upstairs lab, back in New York.”

Mark slammed his open hand down on the floor so hard, the beer bottles and earthenware bowls danced. “I wasn’t even there.”

“Western linear thought was not this boy’s strong suit. You’re a bad guy; in his mind you were responsible.”

“I’m a bad guy? How many crowds of bystanders did I hose down with machine guns in Amsterdam and Athens? Jesus!”

“DEA has a simplistic worldview, even by cop standards. To get back to the point, Agent Saxon was set on your trail because the conspirators within DEA were morally sure he’d have no qualms about killing you.”

“Why?”

“You are one of the most potent aces in the world. Killing you would be a triple coup: it would bring you back onto CNN Headline News as a major ace crime-lord – no, save the indignant denials; I know it’s not true – which would boost public perception of aces as a serious threat. It would neutralize a potentially dangerous opponent. And it would be a welcome victory in a War on Drugs whose poll ratings are beginning to grow just a trifle threadbare.”

Mark sat staring down the neck of his mostly empty bottle as if he’d find an oracle in there. It made sense to him. He never had figured out why the DEA had pursued him across the entire Eurasian landmass with such vindictiveness. Even if they really believed he was a major drug supplier – which he never had been, except occasionally to Croyd – it seemed entirely out of proportion.

Belew’s seeds were beginning to germinate in his mind. As a matter of fact, he secretly was inclined toward conspiracy theory. Even if his rational mind knew better.

And Belew read him like a road sign. “The real conspirators are smart men, shrewd men, used to playing power games for blood. These aren’t a bunch of your standard fanatics huddled in some cellar making bombs from The Anarchist’s Cookbook by candlelight, like the Symbionese Liberation Army nut cases your wife used to run with.”

Mark looked up at him, eyes big and round as a frightened cat’s. “How’d you know about that, man?” He would have sworn not another soul in the world knew of it.

“I’ve been studying you for a long time, Doctor,” Belew said, his mellifluous voice almost a whisper. “I’m very good at what I do. ’Military intelligence’ isn’t always an oxymoron. That’s why I was able to keep credibility with the DEA while steering them into a series of near-misses with you. I had a clear, accurate mental image of you and could make a fair guess what moves you’d make. They were working from their profile, which was ab initio all wet.”

In the stretching silence a rhinoceros beetle crawled across the woven mats. Mark stared at it, wishing Croyd were here instead of doing his personal version of the Big Sleep; he’d be happy for the snack. But then, that was probably all behind him now, unless he still hadn’t exhausted his bug-eating karma.

He raised his eyes to Belew. ’All right. Say I buy this conspiracy for a minute. What’s your role in it? Why were they letting you come along for the ride?”

“Since I finished my twenty in 1979, I’ve never been an actual employee of the U.S. government. I’m a contract man, as I mentioned. A mercenary, if you like.”

Mark grunted.

“My usual employer has been the CIA, As I said, I have also done piecework for Drug Enforcement.”

“So how -?”

Belew grinned. It took forty years off him. “I allowed the DEA to think I was working for the CIA, and Central Intelligence to believe I was -”

“- working for Drug Enforcement.” Mark shook his head. It wasn’t a denial; he could see how spook agencies could outsmart themselves in their cloak-and-dagger games.

“So, what’s your big interest in me?” he asked.

“The same reason the conspirators are interested in you: you’re a powerful ace. Plus, the very fact of their interest in you. If they want you dead, I want you alive. What your enemy wants, you deny him. ’When the enemy is at ease, be able to weary him; when well fed, to starve him; when at rest, to make him move,’ Sun Tzu says.”

“Why, man? Why should you give a damn what they do to wild cards?”

“Because I am one, Mark.”

Mark’s eyes narrowed in disbelief. Belew laughed softly. He held up his left hand and began to unwrap the bandages.

“They caught up with me in Saigon,” he said, “and I had to use my ace to make a quick exit, stage right. Not elegant, I admit, but everyone has to improvise sometime.”

The bandage came off, showing a puckered stump. Four fingers and a thumb protruded from it like a cluster of pale tubers. “Regeneration’s just one of my gifts.”

Mark nodded. “Okay, man. You’re an ace. What do you want with me?”

“I want to help you.”

“Do what?”

“Just what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?” Unfortunately it was not a rhetorical question. Mark had no clue what he was up to. He regretted spilling the fact right out there on the mat.

“Preparing to bring down the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” Belew said.