Aces Abroad

KGB.

But the method…

It wasn't for himself he worried. It was for his wife and daughter. And for the rest of the world too; the risk was enormous, should anything go wrong.

He reached into a pocket for cigarettes and a lighter. "A filthy habit," Ulrich said in that lumbering way of his. Molniya just looked at him.

After a moment Wolf produced a laugh that almost didn't sound forced. "The kids these days, they have different standards. In the old days-ah, Rikibaby, Comrade Meinhof, she was a smoker. Always had a cigarette going."

Molniya said nothing, just kept staring at Ulrich. His eyes bore a trace of epicanthic fold, legacy of the Mongol Yoke. After a moment the blond youth found somewhere else to look.

The Russian lit up, ashamed of his cheap victory. But he had to keep these murderous young animals under control. What an irony it was that he, who had resigned from the Spetsnaz commandos and transferred to the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff because he could no longer stomach violence, should find himself compelled to work with these creatures for whom the shedding of blood had become addiction.

Oh, Milya, Mashes, will I ever see you again?

"Herr Doktor."

Tach scratched the side of his nose. He was getting restive. He'd been cooped up here two hours, unsure of what he might be contributing. Outside… well, there was nothing to be done. But he might be with his people on the tour, comforting them, reassuring them.

"Herr Neumann," he acknowledged.

The man from the Federal Criminal Office sat down next to him. He had a cigarette in his fingers, unlit despite the layer of tobacco that hung like a fogbank in the thick air. He kept turning it over and over.

"I wanted to ask your opinion."

Tachyon raised a magenta eyebrow. He had long since realized the Germans wanted him here solely because he was the tour's leader in Hartmann's absence. Otherwise they would hardly have cared to have a medical doctor, and a foreigner at that, underfoot. As it was, most of the civil and police officials circulating through the crisis center treated him with the deference due his position of authority and otherwise ignored him.

"Ask away," Tachyon said with a hand wave that was only faintly sardonic. Neumann seemed honestly interested, and he had shown signs of at least nascent intelligence, which in Tach's compass was rare for the breed.

"Were you aware that for the past hour and a half several members of your tour have been trying to raise a sum of money to offer Senator Hartmann's kidnappers as ransom?"

"No."

Neumann nodded, slowly, as if thinking something through. His yellow eyes were hooded. "They are experiencing considerable difficulty. It is the position of your government-"

"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 eyesred-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."

Molniya 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 Molniya 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. "Touch amp;" 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 Wolfs 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 amp; Koch mini-machine 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 onehanded. 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 slicksoled 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."

"What were you thinking of?" Tachyon screamed. He thought he'd blasted all his fury out of him, all over the plainclothes officers who'd been stumbling across each other demanding to know how the terrorists could possibly have gotten away. But now it was back, filling him up to overflow. "Tell me, what did you people think you were doing?"

"It wasn't my people," Neumann said. "It was the political branch of the Berlin Land police. The Bundeskriminalamt had nothing to do with it."

"It was all a setup," Xavier Desmond said, stroking his trunk with leaden fingers. "That millionaire philanthropist who lent the ransom-"

"Was fronting for the political police."

"Herr Neumann." It was a Popo with grass stains on the knees of his once sharply pressed trousers, pointing an accusing finger at Tachyon "He let the terrorists go. Pauli had a clear shot at them, and he-he knocked him down with that mind power of his."

"The officer was aiming his weapon at a crowd of people through whom the terrorists were fleeing," Tach said tautly. "He could not have fired without hitting innocent bystanders. Or perhaps I am confused as to who is the terrorist."

The plainclothesman turned red. "You interfered with one of my officers! We could have stopped them=" Neumann reached out and grabbed a pinch of the man's cheek. "Go elsewhere," he said softly. "Really."

The man swallowed and walked away, sending hostile looks back over his shoulder at Tachyon. Tachyon grinned and shot him the bird.

"Oh, Gregg, my God, what have we done?" sobbed Hiram. "We'll never get him back."

Tachyon tugged on his elbow, more trying to encourage him to his feet than help him. He forgot about Hiram's gravity power; the fat man popped right up. "What do you mean, Hiram, my friend?"

"Are you out of your mind, Doctor? They'll kill him now."

Sara gasped. When Tach glanced to her she looked quickly away, as if unwilling to show him her eyes.

"Not so, my friend," Neumann said. "That's not how the game is played."

He stuck hands in the pockets of his trousers and gazed off across the misty park at the line of trees that masked the outer fences of the zoo. "But now the price will go up."

"The bastards!" Gimli turned, whipping rain from the tail of his raincoat, and beat fists on the mottled walls. "The cocksuckers. They set us up!"

Shroud and Scrape were huddled over the thin, filthy mattress on which Aardvark lay moaning softly. Everybody else seemed to be milling around a room crowded with heavy damp as well as bodies.

Hartmann sat with his head pulled protectively down inside his sweat-limp collar. He agreed with Gimli's character assessment. Are those fools trying to get me killed?

A thought went home like a whaler's bomb-lance: Tachyon!

Does that alien demon suspect? is this a convoluted Takisian plot to get rid of me without a scandal?

Puppetman laughed at him. `Never attribute to malice what may adequately be explained by stupidity,' he said. Hartmann recognized the quote; Lady Black had said it to Carnifex once, during one of his rages.

Mackie Messer stood shaking his head. "This isn't right," he said, half-pleading. "We have the senator. Don't they know that?"

Then he was raging around the room like a cornered wolf, snarling and hacking air with his hands. People jostled to get out of the way of those hands.

"What do they think's going on?" Mackie screamed. "Who do they think they're fucking with? I'll tell you something. I'll tell you what. Maybe we should send them a few pieces of the Senator here, show them what's what."

He buzzed his hand inches from the tip of the captive's nose.

Hartmann yanked his head back. Christ, he almost got me! The intent had been there, for real-Puppetman had felt it, felt it waver at the final millisecond.

"Calm down, Detlev," Anneke said sweetly. She seemed exalted by the shootout in the park. She'd been fluttering around and laughing at nothing since the group's return, and red spots glowed like greasepaint on her cheeks. "The capitalists wont be eager to pay all we ask for damaged goods." Mackie went white. Puppetman felt fresh anger burst inside him like a bomb. "Mackie! I'm Mackie Messer, you fucking bitch! Mackie the Knife, just like my song."

Detlev was slang for faggot, Hartmann remembered. He kept his last breath inside.

Anneke smiled at the youthful ace. From the side of his eye Hartmann saw Wilfried pale, and Ulrich picked up an AKM with an elaborate casualness he wouldn't have thought the blond terrorist could muster.

Wolf put his arm around Mackie's shoulders. "There, Mackie, there. Anneke didn't mean anything by it." Her smile made a liar of him. But Mackie pressed against the big man's side and allowed himself to be gentled. Molniya cleared his throat, and Ulrich set the rifle down.

Hartmann let the breath go. The explosion wasn't coming. Quite yet.

"He's a good boy," Wolf said, giving Mackie another hug and letting him go. "He's the son of an American deserter and a Hamburg whore another victim of your imperialist venture in Southeast Asia, Senator."

"My father was a general," Mackie shouted in English. "Yes, Mackie; anything you say. The boy grew up running the docks and alleys, in and out of institutions. Finally he drifted to Berlin, more helpless flotsam cast up by our own frenetic consumer culture. He saw posters, began to attend study groups at the Free University-he's barely literate, the poor child-and that's where I found him. And recruited him."

"And he's been sooo helpful," Anneke said, rolling her eyes at Ulrich, who laughed. Mackie glanced at them, then quickly away.

You win, Puppetman said. What?

You're right. My control isn't perfect. And this one is too unpredictable, too… terrible.

Hartmann almost laughed aloud. Of all the things he'd come to expect from the power that dwelt within him, humility wasn't one.

Such a waste; he'd be such a perfect puppet. And his emotion, so furious, so lovely-like a drug. But a deadly drug.

So you've given up. Relief flooded him. No. The boy just has to die. But that's all right. I've got it all worked out now.

Shroud squatted over Aardvark like a solicitous mummy, bathing his forehead with a length of his own bandage, which he'd dipped in water from one of the five-liter plastic cans stacked in the bedroom. He shook his head and murmured to himself.

Eyes malice-bright, Anneke danced up to him. "Thinking of all that lovely money you lost, Comrade?"

"Joker blood's been shed-again," Shroud said levelly. "It better not have been for nothing."

Anneke sauntered over to Ulrich. "You should have seen them, sweetheart. All ready to hand Senator Schweinfleisch over for a suitcase full of dollars." She pursed her lips. "I do believe they were so excited they forgot all about the frontline fighter we've sworn to liberate. They would have sold us all."

"Shut up, you bitch!" Gimli yelled. Spittle exploded from the center of his beard as he lunged for the redhead. With a scratch of chitin on wood Scrape interposed himself, threw his horny arms around his leader as guns came up.

A loud pop stopped them like a freeze-frame. Molniya stood with a bare hand upturned before his face, fingers extended as if to hold a ball. An ephemeral blue flicker limned the nerves of his hand and was gone.

"IЂ we fight among ourselves," he said calmly, "we play into our enemies' hands."

Only Puppetman knew his calm was a lie.

Deliberately Molniya drew his glove back on. "We were betrayed. What more can we expect from the capitalist system we oppose?" He smiled. "Let us strengthen our resolve. If we stand together, we can make them pay for their treachery"

The potential antagonists fell back away from each other. Hartmann feared.

Puppetman exulted.

The last of day lay across the Brandenburg plain west of the city like a layer of polluted water. From the next block tinny Near Eastern music skirled from a radio. Inside the little room it was tropical, from the heat billowing out of the radiator that the handy Comrade Wilfried had got going despite the building's derelict status, as well as electricity; from the humidity of bodies confined under stress.

Ulrich let the cheap curtains drop and turned away from the window. "Christ, it stinks inhere," he said, doing stretches. "What do those fucking Turks do? Piss in the corners?"

Lying on the foul mattress next to the wall, Aardvark huddled closer around his injured gut and whimpered. Gimli moved over beside him, felt his head. His ugly little face was all knotted up with concern. "He's in a bad way," the dwarf said.

"Maybe we oughta get him to a hospital," Scrape said. Ulrich jutted his square chin and shook his head. "No way. We decided."

Shroud knelt down next to his boss, took Aardvark's hand, and felt the low fuzzy forehead. "He's got some fever."

"How can you tell?" Wilfried asked, his broad face concerned. "Maybe he's naturally got a higher temperature than a person, like a dog or something."

Quick as a teleport Gimli was across the room. He swept Wilfried off his feet with a transverse kick and straddled his chest, pummeling him. Shroud and Scrape hauled him off.

Wifried was holding his hands up before his face. "Hey, hey, what did I do?" He seemed almost in tears.

"You stupid bastard!" Gimli howled, windmilling his arms. "You're no better than the rest of the fucking nats! None of you!"

"Comrades, please-" Molniya began.

But Gimli wasn't listening. His face was the color of raw meat. He sent his companions flying with a heave of his shoulders and marched to Aardvark's side.

Puppetman hated to let Gimli off like this, walking away clear. He'd have to kill the evil little fuck someday.

But survival surmounted even vengeance. Puppetman's imperative was to shave the odds against him. This was the quickest way.

Tears streamed over Gimli's lumpy cheeks. "That's enough," he sobbed. "We're taking him for medical attention, and we're taking him now." He bent down and looped a limp furry arm over his neck. Shroud glanced around, eyes alert above the bandage wrap, then joined him.

Comrade Wolf blocked the door. "Nobody leaves here."

"What the fuck are you talking about, little man?" Ulrich said pugnaciously. "He's not hurt that badly."

"Who says he's not eh?" Shroud said. For the first time Hartmann realized he had a Canadian accent.

Gimli's face twisted like a rag. "That's shit. He's hurting. He's dying. Dammit, let us go."

Ulrich and Anneke were sidling for their weapons. "United we stand, brother," Wolf intoned. "Divided we fall. As you Amis say."

A double clack brought their heads around. Scrape stood by the far wall. The assault rifle he'd just cocked was pointed at the buckle of the blond terrorist's army belt. "Then maybe we just fell, comrades," he said. "Because if Gimli says we're going, we're gone."

Wolfs mouth crumpled in on itself, as if he were old and had forgotten his false teeth. He glanced at Ulrich and Anneke. They had the jokers flanked. If they all moved at once…

Clinging to one of Aardvark's wrists, Shroud brought up an AKM with his free hand. "Keep it cool, nat."

Mackie felt his hands beginning to buzz. Only the touch of Molniya's hand on his arm kept him from slicing some joker meat. Ugly monsters! I knew we couldn't trust them.

"What about the things we're working for?" the Soviet asked.

Gimli wrung Aardvark's hand. "This is what we're working for. He's a joker. And he needs help."

Comrade Wolf's face was turning the color of eggplant. Veins stood out like broken fingers on his temples. "Where do you think you're going?" he forced past grinding teeth.

Gimli laughed. "Right through the Wall. Where our friends are waiting for us."

"Then leave. Walk out on us. Walk out on the great things you were going to do for your fellow monsters. We still have the senator; we are going to win. And if we ever catch you-"

Scrape laughed. "You gonna have trouble catching your breath after this goes down. The pigs'll be crawling all over you, I guarantee. You're such total fuckups I can smell it."

Ulrich's eyes were rolling belligerently despite the rifle aimed at his midsection. "No," Molniya said. "Let them go. If we fight everything is lost."

"Get out," Wolf said.

"Yeah," Gimli said. He and Shroud gently carried Aardvark out, into the unlit hallway of the abandoned building. Scrape covered them until they were out of sight, then swiftly crossed the room. He paused, gave them as much of a smile as chitin would permit, and closed the door.

Ulrich hurled his Kalashnikov against the door. Fortunately it failed to go off. "Bastards!"

Anneke shrugged. Clearly she was bored with the psychodrama. "Americans," she said.

Mackie sidled over to Molniya. Everything seemed wrong. But Molniya would make it right. He knew he would.

The Russian ace was cake.

Ulrich swung around with his big hands tied into fists. "So what's going to happen? Huh?"

Wolf sat on a stool with his belly on his thighs and hands on his knees. He'd visibly aged as the thrill of high adventure ebbed. Perhaps the exploit he'd hoped to cap his double life with was going sour on his tongue.

"What do you mean, Ulrich?" the lawyer asked wearily. Ulrich turned him a look of outrage. "Well, I mean it's our deadline. It's ten o'clock. You heard the radio. They still haven't met our demands."

He picked up an AKM, jacked a round into the chamber. "Can't we kill the son of a bitch now?"

Anneke laughed like a ringing bell. "Your political sophistication never ceases to amaze me, lover."

Wolf hiked up the sleeve of his coat and checked his wristwatch. "What happens now is that. you, Anneke, and you, Wilfried, will go and telephone the message we agreed upon to the crisis center the authorities have so conveniently established. We've both proved we can play the waiting game; it's time to make things move a little."

And Comrade Molniya said, "No."

The fear was gathering. Bit by bit it coalesced into a cancer, black and amorphous in the center of his brain. With each minute's passage it seemed Molniya's heart gained a beat. His ribs felt as if they were vibrating from the speed of his pulse. His throat was dry and raw, his cheeks burned as though he stared into the open maw of a crematorium. His mouth tasted like offal. He had to get out. Everything depended on it.

Everything.

No, a part of him cried. You've got to stay. That was the plan.

Behind his eyes he saw his daughter Ludmilya sitting in a rubbled building with her melted eyes running down blister-bubbled cheeks. This is at stake, Valentin Mikhailovich, another, deeper voice replied, if anything goes wrong. Do you dare entrust this errand to these adolescents?

"No," he said. His parched palate would barely produce the word. "I'll go."

Wolf frowned. Then the ends of his wide mouth drew up in a smile. Doubtless it occurred to him that would leave him in complete control of the situation. Fine. Let him think as he will. I've got to get out of here.

Mackie blocked the door, Mackie Messer with tears thronging the lower lids of his eyes. Molniya felt fear spike within him, almost ripped off a glove to shock the boy from his path. But he knew the young ace would never harm him, and he knew why.

He mumbled an apology and shouldered past. He heard a sob as the door shut behind him, and then only his footsteps, pursuing him down the darkened hall.

One of my better performances, Puppetman congratulated himself.

Cake.

Mackie beat his open palms on the door. Molniya had abandoned him. He hurt, and he couldn't do anything about the hurt. Not even if he made his hands buzz so they'd cut through steel plate.

Wolf was still here. Wolf would protect him… but Wolf hadn't. Not really. Wolf had let the others laugh at him-him, Mackie the ace, Mackie the Knife. It had been Molniya who'd stood up for him the last few weeks. Molniya who had taken care of him.

Molniya who was gone. Who wasn't supposed to go. Who was gone.

He turned, weeping, and slid slowly down the door to the floor.

Exhilaration swelled Puppetman. It was all working just as he had planned. His puppets cut the capers he directed and suspected nothing. And here he sat, at breath's distance, drinking their passions like brandy. Danger was no more than added poignance; he was Puppetman, and in control.

And finally the time had come to make an end of Mackie Messer and get himself out of here.

Anneke stood over Mackie, taunting: "Crybaby. And you call yourself a revolutionary?" He pulled himself upright, whimpering like a lost puppy.

Puppetman reached out for a string, and pulled.

And Comrade Ulrich said, "Why didn't you just go with the rest of the jokers, you ugly little queer?"

"Kreuzberg," Neumann said.

Slumped in his chair, Tachyon could barely muster the energy to lift his head and say, "I beg your pardon?" Ten o'clock was ancient history now. So, he feared, was Senator Gregg Hartmann.

Neumann grinned. "We have them. It took the Devil's own time, but we traced the van. They're in Kreuzberg. The Turkish ghetto next to the Wall."

Sara gasped and quickly looked away.

" An antiterrorist team from GSG-9 is standing by," Neumann said.

"Do they know what they're doing?" Tach asked, remembering the afternoon's fiasco.

"They're the best. They're the ones who sprang the Lufthansa 737 the Nur al-Allah people hijacked to Mogadishu in 1977. Hans-Joachim Richter himself is in charge." Richter was the head of the Ninth Border Guards Group, GSG-9, especially formed to combat terrorism after the Munich massacre of '72. A popular hero in Germany, he was reputed to be an ace, though nobody knew what his powers might be. Tach stood. "Let's go."

Mackie's left hand cut right down Comrade Ulrich's right side from the base of his neck to the hip. It felt good going through, and the kiss of bone thrilled him like speed.

Ulrich's arm fell off. He stared at Mackie. His lips peeled back away from perfect teeth, which clacked open and closed three times like something in the window of a novelty store.

He looked down at what had been his perfect animal body and shrieked.

Mackie watched in fascination. The scream made his exposed lung work in and out like a vacuum cleaner bag, all grayish purple and moist and veined with blue and red. Then his guts started to spill out the side of him, piling over his fallen rifle, and the blood rushing out of him carried away the strength that kept him standing, and he dropped.

"Holy Mary mother of God," Wilfried said. Puke slopped from a corner of his mouth as he backed away from the wreckage of his comrade. Then he looked past Mackie and yelled, "No-"

Anneke aimed her Kalashnikov at the small of the ace's back. Fear knotted her finger sphincter-tight.

Mackie phased out. The burst splashed Wilfried all over the wall.

Molniya stood with hands on knees and his back against the side of a stripped Volvo, pulling in deep breaths of diesel-flavored Berlin night. It wasn't a part of town in which. strangers cared to spend much time alone. That didn't concern him. What he feared was fear.

What came over me? I've never felt like that in my life. He'd fled the apartment in a bright haze of panic. No sooner had he stepped outside than it evaporated like water spilled on a sun-heated rock in the Khyber. Now he was trying to collect himself, unsure for the moment whether to carry on with his errand or go back and send a couple of Wolf's vicious cubs.

Papertin was right, he told himself. I've gotten soft. IFrom above came a familiar heavy stutter. His blood ran like freon through his veins as he raised his head to see fireflashes dancing on chintz curtains two stories up.

It was all over.

If I'm not found here, he thought, then maybe-conceivably-the Third World War won't happen tonight.

He turned and walked away down the street, very fast.

Hartmann lay on his side with the floorboards throbbing against the bruise they'd made on his cheekbone. He'd kicked the chair over as soon as things started happening.

What in hell's name went wrong? he wondered desperately. The bastard wasn't supposed to talk, just shoot.

It was '76 all over again. Once again Puppetman in his arrogance had overreached himself. And it may just have cost him his ass.

His nostrils buzzed with the stink of hot lubricant and blood and fresh moist shit. Hartmann could hear the two surviving terrorists stumbling around the room shouting at each other. Ulrich was dying in wheezes a few feet away. He could feel the energy running-from him like an ebb tide.

"Where is he? Where'd the fucker go?" Wolf was saying. "He went through the wall," Anneke said. She was hyperventilating, tearing the words out of the air like pieces of cloth.

"Well, watch for him. Oh, holy Jesus."

Their terror was stark as crucifixion as they stood trying to cover all three interior walls with their guns. Hartmann shared it. The twisted ace had gone berserk.

Someone shrieked and died.

Mackie stood for a moment with his arm elbow-deep in Anneke's back. He took the buzz off, leaving his hand jutting from the woman's sternum like a blade. Blood oozed greasily around the leather sleeve on Mackie's arm where it vanished into her torso. He enjoyed the look of it, and the intimate way what remained of Anneke's heart kept hugging his arm. The fools hadn't even been looking his way when he slipped back through the wall from the bedroom, not that it would have helped them if they had. Three quick steps and that was it for redheaded little Comrade Anneke.

"Fuck you," he said, and giggled.

The heart convulsed one last time around Mackie's arm and was still. Putting a slight buzz on, Mackie pulled his arm free. He swung the corpse around as he did so.

Wolf was standing there with his cheeks quivering. He brought up his gun as Mackie turned. Mackie pushed the corpse at him. He fired. Mackie laughed and phased out.

Wolf emptied the magazine in. a shivering ejaculation. Plaster dust filled the room. Anneke's corpse collapsed across the senator. Mackie phased back in.

Wolf screamed pleas, in German, in English. Mackie took the Kalashnikov away from him, pinned him against the door, and taking his time about it, sawed his head in two, right down the middle.

Riding in the armored van with the particolored lights of downtown Berlin washing over her and the faces and weapons of the GSG-9 men who sat facing her, Sara Morgenstern thought, What's come over me?

She wasn't sure whether she meant now or before weeks before, when the affair with Gregg began.

How strange, how very strange. How could I have ever have thought I loved… him? I feel nothing for him now. But that wasn't really true. Where love had left a vacuum an earlier emotion was seeping in. Tainted with a toxic flavor of betrayal.

Andrea, Andrea, what have I done?

She bit her lip. The GSG-9 commando riding across from her saw and grinned, his teeth startling in his blackened face. She was instantly wary, but there was no sex in that smile, only the self-distracting camaraderie of a man facing battle with both pleasure and fear. She made herself smile back and nestled closer against Tachyon, sitting by her side.

He put his arm around her. It wasn't just a brotherly gesture. Even the prospect of danger wasn't enough to drive sex wholly from his mind. Oddly she found she didn't mind the attention. Perhaps it was her acute awareness of how incongruous they were, a pair of small gaudy cockatoos riding among panthers.

And Gregg… did she really care what happened to him?

Or do I hope he never leaves that tenement alive?

The screaming had stopped, and the buzz-saw sounds. Hartmann had feared they might go on forever. He gagged on the reek of friction-burned hair and bone.

He felt like something from a medieval fable as painted by Bosch: a glutton presented with the fullest of feasts, only to have it turn to ashes in his mouth. Puppetman had drawn no nourishment from the terrorists' dying. He'd been nearly as terrified as they.

A humming, coming closer: Moritat, The Ballad of Mackie the Knife. The mad ace was locked in killing frenzy now, stalking toward him with his terrible hand still dripping brains. Hartmann writhed in his bonds. The woman Mackie had impaled was a dead weight across his legs. He was going to die now. Unless…

Bile surged up his throat at what he was going to do. He choked it back, reached for a string, and pulled. Pulled hard. The humming stopped. The soft tocking of clogs on wood stopped. Hartmann looked up. Mackie leaned over him with glowing eyes.

He pulled Anneke off Hartmann's legs. He was strong for his size. Or maybe inspired. He pulled Hartmann's chair upright. Hartmann winced, dreading contact, fearing death. Fearing the alternative almost as much.

His own breathing nearly deafened him. He could feel the emotion swelling within Mackie. He steeled himself and stroked it, teased it, made it grow.

Mackie went to his knees before the chair. He unfastened the fly of Hartmann's trousers, slipped fingers inside, tugged the senator's cock out into the humid air and fastened his lips around the glans. He began to pump his head up and down, slowly at first, then gaining speed. His tongue went caduceus round and round.

Hartmann moaned. He couldn't let himself enjoy this.

If you don't it's never going to end, Puppetman taunted. What are you doing to me?

Saving you. And securing the best puppet of all.

But he's so powerful-so… unpredictable. Involuntary pleasure was breaking his thoughts into kaleidiscope fragments. But I've got him now. Because he wants to be my puppet. He loves you, the way that neurasthenic bitch Sara never could.

God, God, am I still a man?

You're alive. And you're going to smuggle this creature back to New York. And anyone who stands in our way from now on will die.

Now relax and enjoy it.

Puppetman took over. As Mackie sucked his cock, he sucked the boy's emotions with his mind. Hot-wet and salty, they gushed into him.

Hartmann's head went back. Involuntarily he cried out. He came as he had not come since Succubus died.

Senator Gregg Hartmann pushed through a door from which the glass had long since been broken. He leaned against the cold metal frame and stared into a street that was empty except for gutted cars and weeds pushing up through cracks in the pavement.

White light drilled him from the rooftop opposite, fierce as a laser. He raised his head, blinking.

"My God," a German voice yelled, "it's the senator." The street filled up with cars and whirling lights and noise. It didn't seem to -take any time at all. Hartmann saw magenta highlights struck like sparks off Tachyon's hair, and Carnifex in his comic-book outfit, and from doorways and behind the automotive corpses appeared men totally encased in black, trotting warily forward with stubby machine pistols held ready.

Past them all he saw Sara, dressed in a white coat that was the defiant antithesis of camouflage.

"I… got away," he said, voice creaking like an unused door. "It's over. They-they killed each other."

Television spotlights spilled over him, hot and white as milk fresh from the breast. His gaze caught Sara's. He smiled. But her eyes drilled into his like iron rods.

Cold and hard. She's slipped away! he thought. With the thought came pain.

But Puppetman wasn't buying pain. Not tonight. He drove himself into her through the eyes.

And she came running for him, arms spread, her mouth a red hole through which love-words poured. And Hartmann felt his puppet wrap her arms around his neck and makeupstreaked tears gush onto his collar, and he hated that part of him that had saved his life.

And down away where light never was, Puppetman smiled.