Busted Flush

Volunteers of America

Victor Milán

TWO TALL MEN IN Nigerian Army uniforms stretched the young boy’s arms out to the sides. A third stepped forward, raising a machete.

Screaming, the boy’s mother bolted from the flock of Ijaw villagers kneeling under the patrol’s guns. Sergeant McAskill, mercenary “advisor,” bellowed a command. Beneath his boonie hat his face was redder than usual, clashing with his ginger mustache. A buttstroke took the mother down, blood and teeth flying. Her husband sobbed in his mush-mouthed wog English that they were innocent.

Watching from well back among the cluster of shacks that rose on stilts from pale green swamp weeds and white sand, patrol leader Captain Chauncey grinned in his beard. Sod that for a game of soldiers, he thought. LAND, the Liberation Army of the Niger Delta, had blown an oil pipeline two kilometers away last night. The lump of black smoke still hung in the sky to the northeast.

These people knew the game. Prices must be paid. And as for innocence—“It’s bloody Africa,” he said aloud, shaking his head. He inhaled deeply from his cigar.

The blade fell once, twice. It chopped the boy’s arms off just below the shoulder. If the boy made any noise it was lost amid the villagers’ screams. His blood spurted bright red in the morning sun.

From the corner of his eye Chauncey saw something in the sky. He looked around right quick. A man was flying low over the village. It was the blond-haired pretty-boy ace from down south in the People’s Paradise.

Quickly Captain Chauncey stepped back out of view under the overhang of a roof meticulously hammered out of scavenged soup cans. Once when the sergeant didn’t think his CO was listening, McAskill had dared to call him a “podgy, pasty-faced git.”

The captain smiled again. Now he’d learn what happened to those who said shite like that about Butcher Dagon.

The flying man stretched out his hand. A line of bright fire leapt from his palm. It hit McAskill in the back.

With a scream that was mostly superheated air expelled from already-dead lungs McAskill flung his arms out straight as flame enveloped him. His FN-LAR rifle went flying.

Gunfire began to flash and thunder from the surrounding weeds, raking the Nigerians. The Butcher flicked his butt to the ground.

“Sod you, McAskill,” he said, and took himself off.

Crouched among weeds the twenty-one-year-old woman felt fear spread like sickness from her belly. Though it was probably no hotter nor more humid here near the Bight of Bonny than in her home city on the Congo River, now part of the People’s Paradise capital of Kongoville, the sweat streamed down her face and from her armpits inside the camouflage blouse she wore.

Her desire to rush forward and save the child from the blade had burned like fire. But the hard men around her in their Ray-Ban sunglasses and distinctive spotted camouflage, elite Leopard Men commandos, would shoot her if she gave away the trap about to be sprung. As surely as their comrades, fanning out to surround the village on three sides, were about to cut down the Nigerians and their SAS advisors.

Her breath caught in her throat as the golden-haired hero of the PPA, of whom her people said his skin was white but his soul a black man’s, touched lightly down by the man he had incinerated and swatted away the soldiers who had mutilated the boy. As the Leopard Men opened fire she unfolded long slim legs and stumbled forward.

Her escort let her go. They were intent on shooting at the now-fleeing remnants of the Nigerian patrol. Stealth was no longer a concern.

As if drawn by an invisible tether she approached the boy flopping and bleeding his young life away into the white sand. The risk of accidental shooting meant nothing. Her whole being had narrowed to needle focus on her duty: to succor the hurt. As only she could.

She walked as though she sank to her knees in the soft sand at every step. Because she walked also into her own private world of pain.

“This is gold!” Sun Hei-lian’s cameraman exclaimed. “Holy shit, this is great.”

Annoyance stabbed Hei-lian as behind her a new crew member turned to lose his lunch in the weeds among the palm trees a hundred meters from the village. She had spent much of the last two decades working third world crises, seen a hundred people’s share of horrors. Yet her own pulse ran almost stumbling fast and her skin prickled with adrenaline from what she’d just witnessed.

It was so horrible she had actually felt an urge to intervene. But their Leopard Society guards had made abundantly clear that while her CCTV news team represented the People’s Republic of China, whose fraternal assistance to the PPA they greatly appreciated, if they got out of line, they’d be killed without hesitation.

If I can take it, she thought, the newbie can, too.

Her longtime sidekick and cameraman, Chen, a chunky crew-cut gargoyle kneeling at her side, seemed focused as tightly as his camera. Hei-lian had to agree that what they’d just captured, the boy’s mutilation followed by the ace formerly known as the Radical leading a surprise assault on his tormentors, was electric. A victory for her team as complete as the one the commandos were even now mopping up.

A young native woman, willowy-tall and fresh-faced as a child, emerged from tall grass to Hei-lian’s left. Hei-lian’s instincts started barking like excited guard dogs. “Chen,” she said urgently. “Track left.”

A brief scowl creased his big round face behind his viewfinder. She actually thought that in their years of working together as a team he’d learned to overlook the fact that she was a mere woman—as well as the indignity of having to take orders from her. He swung the camera left.

“What’s with this chick?” he asked. They spoke English in the field, for practice. “She’s moving like a zombie from Dawn of the Dead.”

“Get that sat dish set up now,” Hei-lian shouted. The use of Mandarin instead of English made the young tech wiping puke from his mouth with the back of his hand jump like a jolt from a cattle prod. He and his assistant didn’t fumble as they unfolded the small metal flower of the portable uplink. They didn’t dare. “Get us a signal.”

“Why bother?” Chen said. “The healer ace. Oh, boy. What? She’s going to conjure bandages out of thin air? Bo-ring.”

“Just keep shooting,” Hei-lian said.

“All right, I know. Human interest. Yada-yada-yada.”

But Hei-lian knew something more was happening. She wasn’t really a telejournalist. Or rather, she was that among other things. And she was getting the intuition in stereo.

The African girl’s smooth face showed keen suffering now, as if she felt not just sympathy but the brutalized child’s actual pain. An empath-ace? wondered that specialized part of Hei-lian’s mind. The Ministry of State Security, the Guojia Anquan Bu, Guoanbu for short, had no information on the girl: she was new. Their would-be allies, the PPA, were holding out on them. Again.

“Hong,” she said.

“Got it!” the tender-tummied tech sang out. “You’re live, Sun.”

She straightened and shifted so that Chen could frame her briefly with the young woman in the background. “This is Sun Hei-lian, CCTV, reporting live from an Ijaw village in the disputed oil lands of the Niger River Delta, where Leopard Men commandos from the People’s Paradise of Africa, led by the ace they call Mokèlé-mbèmbé after the legendary hippopotamus-slaying river dragon, have just stopped a Nigerian platoon advised by British SAS troopers from carrying out a massacre. Now PPA ace Dolores Michel is about to heal a youthful atrocity victim.”

Hei-lian moved to clear the frame. Obediently Chen focused on Dolores. She had slowed even further, as if the air had congealed around her. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Tendons stood out on her throat. Hei-lian could see her shaking from here.

Ten feet from the boy she stopped. Her body spasmed violently. She threw back her head and screamed.

In great gushes of blood her arms blew off her body at exactly the same points at which the boy’s had been severed.

Sun Hei-lian and crew emerged first from the Gulfstream that had brought them from a strip in the recently incorporated PPA province of Cameroon, into the hot green twilight of Kongoville’s Patrice Lumumba International Airport. They set up on the apron next to the mobile ramp to shoot.

Medical technicians carried Dolores Michel down on her gurney, moaning in agony unallayed by painkillers. Briefed by a propaganda officer during the return from the Delta, Hei-lian now knew they interfered with her ace.

Tom Weathers stepped into the sunset light slanting across the Congo River. The crowd held back by Simba Brigade soldiers roared adoration.

A striking woman, tall and slim with blond hair flying, ran from the knot of waiting dignitaries through heat that rose from the pavement like shock waves. She caught Weathers in a passionate embrace. For all her self-control Hei-lian couldn’t prevent a mouth-twist of distaste.

The woman detached herself from Weathers. To Hei-lian’s keen discomfort she ran up and hugged her. She was taller than the Chinese woman, who was middling tall even by Western standards.

“Hei-lian,” she said.

She had the voice of an adult woman, the inflection of a child. Sprout was not Weathers’s lover, but his daughter—protected fiercely throughout his mercurial career as the last international revolutionary. She had the mind and emotional development of a seven-year-old.

Disgusting, that he indulges the creature so, Hei-lian thought as Sprout released her. She fought the urge to dab at herself, as if to wipe away some unseen contagion.

There was mystery, too, that caught at Hei-lian’s mind like a cat claw snagged in the skin of her arm: though her face was unlined and lovely, Sprout, close-up, looked to be on the cusp of middle age. Perhaps not much younger than Hei-lian’s forty-one years. She actually looked older than her father did.

Yet, Guoanbu knew, the Radical had aged normally since bursting on the world like a car bomb over a decade before.

Chen had panned around to catch President-for-Life Dr. Kitengi Nshombo and his sister Alicia, flanked by Leopard Society men in dark suits, leopard-skin fezzes, and their inevitable aviator shades, advancing to welcome the homecoming heroes. The president was a head shorter than his sister, handsome in an austere way. In his heavy-framed glasses he looked a little bit like Malcolm X, but scaled down, concentrated, with skin almost as dark and hard-looking as obsidian.

Dr. Nshombo gave a short speech in French, the official language of the People’s Paradise. Though she understood it perfectly Hei-lian tuned it out: boilerplate.

Alicia enfolded Tom to her vast bosom. “Mokèlé-mbèmbé, you have struck a mighty blow for revolutionary justice everywhere!”

Chen caught Hei-lian’s eyes and rolled his.

“There is good news, Tom, my friend,” the president said as they walked toward limousines waiting to carry them to the palace. He said “my friend” as if barely familiar with the words. They were probably almost true. No one quite knew how the Africa-for-Africans ideologue with the charisma of a plank of wood and the white-skinned global guerrilla idol had formed their partnership. But there was no question it had proven highly profitable for both.

And soon it will profit China, Hei-lian thought. She felt . . . as close to happy as she ever did.

“What’s that?” Tom asked. He spoke French with an outlandish American accent that Hei-lian suspected was part of his act. He walked hand in hand with his daughter, who took all the fuss surrounding her daddy in stride. She was used to it.

At least she’s a well-behaved thing, Hei-lian thought.

“A delegation of UN aces are on their way from New York, Tom, cher,” said Alicia, beaming from behind her glasses as if announcing the advent of Santa Claus. She acted as her brother’s right hand. She was also head of the Leopard Society, which among other things constituted the secret police. “They’re going to investigate whether to intervene—to help us free the oppressed people of the Delta from Nigerian and British imperialism.”

“The Committee dudes?” Tom flashed that grin of his.

“Indeed,” the president said. “Your video from the Delta has stirred outrage worldwide. The UN at last heeds the calls for action.”

He flicked a look at Hei-lian. As usual his face was expressionless. A warm flush ran from her stomach to her cheeks. Our video, she thought. That in itself was a victory for the PRC.

The president’s Mercedes limousine waited with top defiantly open, in contrast to the bulletproof carapaces beneath which most world leaders cowered to “meet” their subjects. “Wait one,” said Weathers.

If the delay annoyed Nshombo he gave no sign. He seldom did. If you managed to annoy him, you found out about it from Alicia.

A medical crew was about to load Dolores Michel into a nearby ambulance. Weathers walked up to her in that long-legged swagger of his. Hei-lian gestured her crew along and followed.

The girl was conscious. Even Hei-lian winced at that. Her face was ashen green and streamed with sweat. But her eyes were clear.

The Angel of Mercy. That was what the Information Ministry man told the CCTV team to call Dolores.

Bloodless lips moved. She seemed to be praying repetitively. Hei-lian recognized it. Her father had been a priest, albeit of a different confession.

“You really gonna heal up, there, girl?” Weathers asked. Dolores’s eyes met his. She actually tried to smile. She managed a nod.

“You did a great thing back there in the Delta,” he said. Bending down he kissed her forehead. “When you get up you’ll be a heroine to the whole friggin’ world.”

“Tell me a little about yourself, Dolores,” the Chinese woman said.

Dolores sat in a wheelchair in the vast rose garden on the presidential palace grounds. It was the day after their return from Nigeria. Because of the need for strong light to shoot by they couldn’t be in shade. The high hedges were gloriously colored, but they also cut off any breezes that might have relieved the oven heat. And the concentrated fragrance made her woozy.

Despite all that, Dolores felt much better. She only wished she weren’t so afraid of the reporter. Though totally old, maybe even over forty, she was quite lovely in an alien, austere way. Certainly she moved with the grace of a jungle cat.

The gaggle of Chinese men filming and recording her didn’t help put her at ease. But she had been ordered to do this for the People’s Paradise.

“I was born here,” she said. “In 1988. The city was Kinshasa then. My father was a clerk with the Ministry of Transportation. My mother was a schoolteacher. We were good Catholics. Our life was good despite political upheavals and outbreaks of violence; they were worse in the countryside.”

She smiled. “We welcomed it when Dr. Nshombo and his . . . war leader took power, united the Democratic Republic with our neighbors the Republic of the Congo, and combined Kinshasa with Brazzaville into Kongoville. It brought peace and stability at last.”

The journalist smiled and nodded. Dolores was a child of a mass-media generation; her family had satellite TV. She understood the smile was purely professional. Yet she couldn’t help responding to it.

“You did something remarkable yesterday, taking that poor child’s injuries on yourself. They tell me both you and he will heal with astonishing rapidity—that you’ll actually regenerate the severed limbs. Is that true?”

“Yes. Already my arms grow back. They—they itch terribly. I wish I could scratch.”

She laughed. She did not mention how badly she still hurt. Laughter gave blessed if temporary relief.

“You’re an ace.”

“Yes.”

“When did you turn your ace?”

“I was a student nurse at Liberation University. I was given . . . a test.”

Dolores bit her lip. The Ministry of Information woman had coached her carefully. She hoped she’d get her lines right. Mistakes cost. It was part of the price of order.

“So it revealed your ace.”

“Yes.”

No. But the true nature of the facility she had been taken to, far out in the bush, was a state secret. And if she mentioned the experimental injection she and the others received there . . . even her sudden heroine status wouldn’t save her.

“Once they found out I had an active wild card I was taken to a special school for wild cards. They gave me more tests.”

And I failed them. The memory still brought on a cold sweat. Those who manifested no useful ace powers met the same fate as jokers and deuces. And the black queens, for that matter. They were taken away. What happened then no one knew.

If they guessed, no one dared whisper. Those who spoke too candidly also disappeared.

“There was an accident on the training ground,” she said. “A young man, Pierre, was terribly burned by a new ace who didn’t know how to control his power. They brought him in as I was being taken out.”

To meet my own fate. The State had lost patience with her. She knew the survival of the People’s Paradise in the face of imperialist hate and envy required harsh measures. But she feared death.

Almost as much as she feared pain.

“As he was rushed past on a gurney, I—I felt as if I had caught fire. I fell down screaming. My flesh blistered. Actually charred.”

“How terrible.”

“The pain was—unbelievable.” She blinked away tears of remembrance. It was never easy; but that was still the worst. “My injuries exactly mirrored Pierre’s. And we both healed totally within a few days.”

The reporter shook her head. “So you actually experience it all? The wounds, the pain?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You are an exceptional young woman.”

“I’m just a normal girl. I don’t mean to be a heroine.”

“But to walk up to that poor Ijaw boy, knowing what would happen to you—where did you find the courage?”

“It’s my gift.” My cross. “Because I can do this, I feel I—can’t not.”

The reporter nodded. Clearly she had what she needed.

“Thank you, Dolores,” she said. “I can well see why they call you the Angel of Mercy.”

Dolores made herself smile and nod. That, too, was duty. But the Ministry had hung that name on her.

What people really called her was Our Lady of Pain.

“I’m John Fortune,” said the kid with the lump in his forehead, shaking Tom Weathers’s hand.

No shit, Tom thought, glancing once at the bump and then forgetting it. What meant something to him was the presence of a class enemy. Even if he hadn’t known Fortune was a celebrity brat he’d take him for a rich kid. He squeaked with privilege.

Worse, he was Establishment all the way. Head of the Committee. In tight with UN boss Jayewardene. The Man, junior fucking varsity.

President Dr. Nshombo stood there, grave and graven in the cool dark room in his palace depths with all the monitors in it, to ensure this first meeting between the UN aces and his field marshal went smoothly. Tom would keep his personal feelings in check. Basic revolutionary discipline.

“Yeah,” he said.

The guy flashed his eyes at him. For a moment Tom thought he might take a swing at him. But no such luck.

An image of a different John Fortune flashed through his mind: a little boy, clutching the hand of his slim, beautiful mother with her wings folded at her back. He hadn’t had the lump in his forehead then. . . .

Tom shut his eyes and shook his head once, quickly. Not my memory, he thought. That dude’s dead.

“So you are the famous Radical,” said the slim Goth chick beside Fortune. She had chin-length hair, brass red, streaked electric chartreuse. Her English had a French accent. “I’m totally excited to meet you.”

“This is Simone Duplaix,” Fortune said. “Also known as Snowblind. She’s from Quebec. That’s in Canada.”

Ignoring the gibe, Tom grinned as he shook her hand. “Pleasure’s mine. But these days I just go by Tom.”

Her grip lingered on his. “I had your poster on my closet door in college,” she said. “To me you are a hero.”

“Long live the Revolution,” he said. He let her hand go and turned to the next visiting fireman. Sure, Snowblind was ready to get it on. But not really that cute. He was doing better. And if he was going to get some on the side, that ace chick who’d gone with them on the Oil Rivers raid was pretty foxy. Before her arms blew off and all.

Briskly, Nshombo introduced Buford Calhoun, a big blond redneck who wore a dark business suit and tie, but looked as if he ought to be wearing greasy coveralls with his name on the chest. “Pleased to meet a famous ace such as yourself, Mr. Weathers,” he said. Southerners always sounded dumb to Tom. He right away suspected that dumb ran a little bit deeper with ol’ Buford.

“And this is Mr. Tom Diedrich,” Nshombo said. “He also goes by Brave Hawk.”

Nshombo spoke English not with a French but with a touch of stuck-up-sounding English accent. Tom usually talked French with him anyway to keep his hand in. He’d learned the language during an earlier go-round in Africa. He picked it up pretty easily. He did most things pretty easily. Except keep a gig.

Until now. Nshombo might be a stiff. But the man had vision. And he wasn’t afraid to leave Tom free to do his thing. To let him be . . . Radical.

Even before he heard the ace name, Weathers had this other Tom pegged as Native American. He stood six or seven inches less than Weathers’s six-two, copper-skinned, hair black as a crow’s ass. He wore cowboy duds: pointy boots, faded denim jeans, blue denim shirt. A coral-bead necklace with a smooth-polished stone hawk fetish encircled his neck.

To Tom’s amused delight he actually tried the hand-crushing game. Diedrich had pretty strong hands. For a nat.

Tom Weathers’s grip could powder brick. Literally.

He was above that kind of macho posturing. He squeezed back just hard enough to make the Indian’s eyes water and bandy knees buckle. Then he let him go.

Gotta admit the little fucker’s pretty hard-core, he thought. He’d let me squash his hand before he cried uncle.

Diedrich gave him a flat look and a tiny nod. “Hear you fight for the rights of indigenous peoples,” he said huskily. “Don’t see a lot of white-eyes actually step up and do that. Mostly they’re just talk.”

Looking as if Brave Hawk’s implied slam had put his aristocratic nose a bit off true, John Fortune said, “And this is the Lama, from Nepal.”

He’d saved the weirdest for last. The Lama was a skinny little brown guy in a yellow robe who sat in the lotus position.

Two feet off the hardwood floor.

He didn’t offer a hand. Tom didn’t push it. “The Llama?” he said. “Isn’t he some South American guy, spits, like, sticky tear-gas slime, kicks real hard?”

“That is properly pronounced yama,” the floating man snapped. “I must mention he is merely a poser with a cape and a pencil-thin mustache. Whereas I am being a seeker after spiritual truth.”

“Whoa! Hang on, Mr. Holy Floating Dude,” Tom said, holding up his hands. “Don’t get your dharmic diapers in a wad.”

The Lama looked pissy. Before he could say anything Tom heard a pop and felt air puff against his face. A woman appeared in the briefing room.

Tom blinked. An amazing woman. Gleaming black hair flowed down over her shoulders to blend in with a black cloak worn over a white jumpsuit. Her eyes were silver in her exquisite heart-shaped face. Zippers slashed this way and that across the jumpsuit. Tom noticed they offered ready access to ripe breasts and pussy. His heartbeat picked up.

“Fashionably late again, Lilith?” Fortune asked acidly.

“Right on time, I’d say, Johnny dear,” she said. Her voice was a kind of purr that tickled right up Tom’s nut sac. Complete with one of those velvety Brit accents. “I’ve just missed the boring parts, it seems.”

John Fortune clenched his hands. His lips moved. So did the lump in his forehead. Tom stared at it with horrified fascination. Christ, is that a fucking bug? He almost imagined he could see little legs twitching under the coffee-with-cream skin. He’d first thought it was just some physical thing that came along with Fortune’s ace, a minor joker manifestation . . . .

“She brought us here yesterday,” John Fortune said with what seemed unnatural control. “She’s been away on business of her own. As is often the case.”

“She only comes out at night,” Simone said. “Like a vampire.” Tom wasn’t sure if she was being—what was the word?—snarky, or if she spoke with a certain admiration. Outside he knew the sun had just dropped below the horizon with equatorial abruptness. In here it was never day or night, warm or cold. It just was, like Limbo.

“And you must be the famous Radical,” Lilith said, ignoring the editorial commentary. She smiled at Tom. He forgot all about John Fortune.

It took a strong man to withstand the sheer sensuality of the look and not get knocked flat on his ass. They didn’t come stronger than Tom. Rest easy, sweetheart, he thought at her. I’m Alpha Male of the whole fucking continent of Africa.

Except the little dapper guy at his side. But Nshombo never showed any interest in sex. What got him off was power.

Tom Weathers had charisma in buckets. He knew that. He used it—for the Revolution, of course. But if he’d had any of what the petit bourgeois wimps called “people skills” these days, he wouldn’t have had to tuck Sprout under his arm and run away from the collapse of a score of revolutionary movements in a dozen years, brought about by the sudden onset of pissed-off government troops or mutiny by capitalist running-dog lackey traitors in his own band. Or both. Still, he couldn’t help noticing that if either Hei-lian or little Goth-punk Simone had drawn a death glare ace, the newcomer would be a smoking heap.

“Now that we are all present,” the president said through silence thick as the sex in the air, which hung heavier than the humidity of the Kongoville night outside, “has your delegation had sufficient time to peruse the evidence we provided you, documenting Nigerian crimes against the native peoples of the Niger River Delta, whose land they plunder of oil?”

That was the problem with the man. He really talked like that.

“Not really, Your Excellency,” Fortune said. “You loaded us down pretty well.”

“My eyes are turning around in my skull from all this stuff,” Brave Hawk said.

Buford gave him his lights-on/nobody’s-home smile. “I don’t bother my head with none of that,” he said. “I just go where they point me and do what they tell me, and leave the thinking to them as’re good at it.”

Nshombo nodded his big head precisely. He was very good at it. “We wished to leave no doubt in your minds as to the justness of the cause we share with the oppressed people of the Delta. Now, please give your attention to our guests from Chinese Central Television. As you may know, Ms. Sun and Mr. Hong accompanied yesterday’s attack which interrupted the Nigerian atrocity.”

He nodded to Hei-lian and one of her pet geeks, who had hung back playing furniture during the introductions. Hei-lian smiled that gorgeous smile of hers. It lost a little bit of its luster with Lilith in the room. But not all.

Tom slid his tongue over his underlip. He was starting to get ideas.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Hei-lian said. “Gentlemen, Ms. Duplaix, Ms.—Lilith. If you’ll just look at the monitor here—”

“I am so not watching that horrible arm-chopping video again!” the Goth girl exclaimed.

“I quite understand your feelings,” Hei-lian said. “Fortunately, we need not. My crew has blown up and enhanced certain frames from footage taken moments before the counterattack began.”

Hong diddled dials. To Snowblind’s visible relief—and what’s somebody called Snowblind doing here just south of the equator? Tom wondered—what appeared on one of the big flat-screen monitors was huddled Ijaw huts, distance-grainy. Among them stood a figure. It looked up and to its right, then backed into a doorway out of sight.

“Wait,” Fortune said. “Run that back.”

Hong did. The man stepped back out into sunlight. He was short, plump, white, and bearded, and wore the same style bush hat, khaki shorts, and short-sleeved shirt as the red-haired guy Tom had torched. He carried a long old-style Brit assault rifle.

“Freeze it,” Hei-lian said.

“Son of a—” Fortune cut himself off just before he said something a well-behaved little fascist type didn’t say in front of presidential guys. “That’s Butcher Dagon!”

“He is familiar to you, Mr. Fortune?” Nshombo asked.

“Le bête!” Snowblind hissed.

Fortune controlled himself with visible effort. “Yes, Mr. President,” he said. “Yes, he is. The Committee knows him way too well. His real name’s Percival Chauncey. I’m not sure if he’s number one on the list, but he’s definitely one of the most-wanted ace criminals in the world today.”

“So my intelligence analysts tell me,” Nshombo said. “He currently styles himself a captain, although his actual military record is spotty. The Nigerians, it would seem, have added a rogue ace to the SAS advisors who lead their death squads.”

“If that Limey prick’s involved,” Diedrich said, “something bad’s definitely going down.”

He and Tom gave each other hard grins. Tom may’ve been like that with Nshombo. It didn’t mean he had to go sucking up to him like Fortune did. He appreciated Brave Hawk’s disrespect for authority. Even if he’d be smart not to push it here in the PPA.

Nshombo ignored the crudity. He gazed intently at the delegation’s young leader. Despite modern A/C Fortune’s forehead shone with sweat. It made the strange bulge gleam in the fluorescent light.

Fortune’s eyes flared. He clenched a fist and raised it. “We’ll—”

He cut off. He unwound his hand, dropped it behind his back, as if it suddenly embarrassed him. In a less clotted voice he said, “We’ll have to study the situation carefully before committing to a course of action. A lot’s at stake here. And Nigeria’s not the first country to hire a dodgy mercenary ace.”

Tom smiled a slow smile and glanced at Nshombo. The president’s face showed no more emotion than the polished teak idol it resembled. But if he’d been a betting man, he would’ve just lost to Tom Weathers.

Tom stooped and opened a red and white cooler that sat discreetly against a wall. A wisp of dry-ice fog puffed out. He took out a white plastic garbage bag. It was full of lumpy, pokey objects.

“Here’s what’s at stake here, man,” Tom said, handing it to Fortune. “See for yourself what we’re up against.”

Its weight caught the slick Committee ace off guard. He’d forgotten how strong Tom was. Fortune fumbled the bag and it fell open, spilling its contents down his pants and across the floor.

“Fuck!” he yelled.

Snowblind screamed.

It was a bag of severed hands, their dark skin gone ashen.

“Daddy! Oh, I want my daddy!”

Sun Hei-lian prided herself on her ability to keep cool under the most demanding circumstances. Being interrupted while concentrating so intently snapped her equally well-honed survival reflexes into play against her. Startled, she jumped up from elbows and knees.

Tom slid out of her. She bounced on her bare buttocks on his disordered bed.

“It’s all right, honey,” said Tom from his knees behind Hei-lian. “I’m here.”

Sprout’s hair was disarrayed, her eyes puffy with tears. She wore an oversized Hello Kitty T-shirt that came down almost to her knees and clutched a well-worn teddy bear to her breasts.

Lying supine to receive Hei-lian’s ministrations, Lilith raised her head from her pillow with one brow raised. “And what might this be?”

“My daughter,” Tom said. “She’s—special. You know.”

“I see. Does she often burst in under such . . . circumstances?”

“Hey. Sex is a natural thing.”

But Hei-lian noted he swept up the sheet to cover his rampant erection and turned away as he folded the woman weeping into his arms, so as not to give her an inappropriate prod in the flank. He also left both women completely uncovered.

“I had a bad dream,” Sprout sobbed. “I want my daddy.”

“Hey, sweetheart,” Tom said. “You got the world’s greatest ace right here. I’ll always be here for you.”

Sprout buried her face in his shoulder. Tom embraced her, stroking her long blond hair with genuine tenderness.

To muster such modesty as was available to her with minimum commotion Hei-lian lay down on her belly. Now that the passion-spasm had been broken she felt glad enough for a break.

Her mind whirled with thoughts. There was the odd phrasing Sprout had used—twice saying she wanted her daddy, when he was right here in front of her. But that struck her as a likely product of the creature’s retardation. One could read nothing into it.

What stuck in her mind, though, was the stricken look in Lilith’s silver eyes as she watched Tom Weathers comforting his daughter like any loving father.

“So,” Lilith said, “however did a Western man of mystery wind up warlord of a Central African revolutionary movement?”

The lovemaking was done. Hei-lian was glad. Although the pleasure had been seismic she was both exhausted and sore. And now that the passion had subsided she felt a certain shame at what she had done.

You’ve done worse for the People’s Republic, she reminded herself.

She raised herself to prop elbow on bed and cheek on palm and gazed with half-lidded eyes across the golden length of Tom Weathers in the light of the bedside lamp. He lay on his back with hands linked behind his glorious halo of hair. Sweat didn’t seem to dampen its spirits. Hei-lian wondered if that was another facet of his ace. He certainly displayed a remarkable array of powers.

On his other side Lilith lay in similar pose, all silver skin and gleaming midnight hair. She had asked her question lightly, almost teasingly.

Hei-lian kept her expression neutral. She was skilled at that. She felt a visceral dislike for the other woman. Even though she still had the smell of her on her upper lip.

It’s not jealousy, she told herself. That’s personal sentiment. This is national security.

Tom’s eyes flicked from Lilith to Hei-lian and back. He smiled lazily. If he made an effort to hide his smugness, Hei-lian thought, he failed.

“If I tell you, I won’t be mysterious,” he said.

Silver eyes narrowed. Hei-lian watched the British ace raptor-close. Lilith seemed as skilled and imaginative at pleasing a female lover as a male one; the more so when the object of their exercise was to excite a man who scarcely needed erotic encouragement. Until the fourth or fifth time, anyway . . .

And Tom—before sleeping with him the first time, weeks ago, Hei-lian expected his lovemaking to be brisk and perfunctory, perhaps even brutal. And indeed when his passion mounted he was forceful as a stallion. But before that he was both remarkably sensitive and skilled.

As he had been tonight, despite devoting greater efforts to the interloper. I suppose I can assuage my ego with the fact Tom can actually enjoy my aging face and body at the same time as this perfect black and silver succubus.

“You’ve fought many brilliant guerrilla campaigns, Tom,” said Lilith, running a black-painted fingernail down his chest. His pectoral muscles were defined but no more: without his remarkable ace gifts he would have been strong, but wiry-strong, not a steroid-pumped freak. “Each time betrayal brought you down.”

“Damn straight,” Tom said. “It was the only thing that could.”

“Yet your partnership with President-for-Life Nshombo endures. A few years ago, he was just another minor faction leader in the endless, bloody Congo wars. The next thing the world knows you’re at his side; he’s vanquished his rivals, conquered the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then the Republic of the Congo, and is well on his way toward carving a new resource-rich superpower from the heart of Africa. What transformed both your fortunes so?”

Tom shrugged. “Nothing succeeds like success, like the capitalists say. Dr. Nshombo’s objectively Marxist. We’re after the same ends. We agree on the means. Especially that to make an omelet you’ve got to break a few eggs.”

Hei-lian wasn’t objectively Marxist. Far less Maoist. Never had been. She had learned all the right words, and parroted them with appropriate conviction. She had her Party pin, which always delighted Tom when she wore it. But to her it was no more than a necessary token, a kind of union card. Had she actually believed the rhetoric, the Ministry would have purged her years before as an idiot or a dangerous loon.

A brow-furrow marred the smooth perfection of Lilith’s face. Hei-lian repressed a smirk. She almost wished her opposite number—for Guoanbu agreed with the world intelligence community’s consensus that Lilith was a spy for the Crown, although her background was if anything a darker secret than Tom’s—luck in learning anything. Hei-lian had gotten little more from Weathers than anyone could get from a quick Google. And Hei-lian was good.

“And then there’s your daughter, Sprout,” Lilith said. “She’s quite lovely, make no mistake. Yet one almost gets the impression she’s older than you. How is that possible, really?”

Hei-lian felt Tom tense. “It’s an ace thing.”

“But when first you burst upon the scene, twelve years ago, you looked to be a man of twenty. In the interim you’d appeared to have aged quite normally.”

“Yeah. Shit happens.”

Lilith drew back slightly. Hei-lian allowed herself the ghost of a smile. Lilith clearly wasn’t used to men talking to her like that.

“Speaking of your daughter,” Hei-lian said. Not to let her rival off the hook. She had her own agenda. Or, she amended quickly, her country’s. “I’m concerned by her, Tom.” Appalled would be a better word, but she’d never dare say that. It was absurd to indulge a real child as he did Sprout. To so indulge an adult—and for an adult to act so utterly like a child—made Hei-lian’s flesh crawl.

“She’s happy here,” Tom said.

Lilith seemed not to resent Hei-lian speaking. If anything she seemed mildly hopeful Hei-lian, as a lover of some standing, could winkle out of Tom some scrap that a mere one-night stand, however spectacular, could not. Neither did Lilith show jealousy of her. She wouldn’t, Hei-lian thought, any more than Tom would feel jealous of the world’s strongest nat.

Any more than she herself would feel jealous of an ant. Although she envied them, sometimes, the mindless simplicity of their drudge work.

“But wouldn’t Sprout be better off in a proper institution?” Hei-lian said. Locked away where real humans wouldn’t have to endure her? she didn’t say. As Sprout surely would be in the People’s Republic. “Wouldn’t she be safer?”

“Hey, she followed me from camp to camp for eight years,” he said. His tone stayed light. It didn’t deceive Hei-lian. “We had some narrow escapes, sure. But I kept her with me. I kept her safe. People asked lots of times why I exposed her to that. The answer was: I’d never turn her over to the Man. Never.”

Intelligence agencies had long speculated that their relationship was not decently that of father and daughter. Weathers was a notorious womanizer, a male chauvinist as unapologetic as the 1960s revolutionaries he aped. But no one had turned up a whiff of incest. Even before Sprout’s interruption of their ménage à trois, Hei-lian had known the relationship was not incestuous. Tom was fanatically protective of Sprout. He was capable of many things—some, Hei-lian knew, quite dreadful. Harming his daughter in any way was simply not among them.

That vulnerability appealed to the yin in Hei-lian, her feminine side. But the yang knew it was a vulnerability.

“Living is obviously easier in a palace than in the bush,” she said. “But doesn’t it make her a more visible target?”

His smile was ugly. “Anybody makes a move on her gets to find out how they like orbit. Without a spacesuit.”

“But you can’t be always around. Especially with the war to liberate the Oil Rivers heating up.”

“She stays,” he said, like a door shutting.

Hei-lian felt the pressure of Lilith’s eyes. Don’t you dare pity me! she thought.

She made herself smile. “Whatever you say, lover.”

She lay back beside him. Tom stayed tense, staring at the ceiling.

Lilith leaned in to kiss his lips. She swept her hair back to give Hei-lian a clear view. Was it gloating? An invitation? Beneath a pang of resentment Hei-lian felt arousal stir. She almost resented that more than Lilith’s casually proprietary way with Hei-lian’s lover—and asset.

“I’m sure your life story is fascinating,” Lilith breathed. “I’d love for you to share it with me. I’d find that . . . exciting.”

Tom responded. Not the way either woman expected. He got up abruptly off the bed.

“I wanna show you something,” he said.

He went to a chest of drawers and opened the bottom one. The two women knelt naked at the edge of the bed to watch. The drawer was full of clean socks and underwear, neatly folded and placed by the palace staff. Great egalitarian Tom Weathers saw nothing incongruous in being waited on hand and foot by people of color like a colonialist of old, it seemed. Then again, neither did the president, nor his sister, nor for that matter any “revolutionary” leader Hei-lian knew of. And she knew them all.

Tom brought out what looked like nothing more than a roll of athletic socks. When he unrolled it a big peace medallion fell into his palm.

“Here.” He handed it to Lilith.

Her eyes went wide. By its obvious weight in the other woman’s palm Hei-lian guessed it was solid gold. At today’s prices Weathers had a young fortune stashed in his sock drawer.

“Your old medallion!” Lilith said. “I’ve read about it. You used it a lot in your early career. People theorized it served as a sort of focus for your powers. I’ve wondered what became of it.”

Tom shrugged. “I guess I just stopped needing it.”

“Didn’t it used to glow?” she asked, handing the golden peace sign back.

His face shut down briefly. “Used to,” he said. He rerolled the medallion in the sock.

“It just got dimmer and dimmer,” he said, putting it back. “Then it went out.”

He shut the drawer with a bang.

Wearing only an outsized Grateful Dead T-shirt of Tom’s, Sun Hei-lian padded into the suite’s darkened living room. He had wakened her, moaning in his sleep. Another of his nightmares. They seemed to be coming more often.

Nshombo and his retinue temporarily occupied a palace built by Mobutu Sese Seko, the longest-lasting Congolese dictator, who had named the country Zaire. A colossal new People’s Palace was being built in the heart of the former Kinshasa. Dr. Nshombo had no known vices. A vegan, he ate sparingly. He neither smoked nor drank. His personal quarters were ascetic in the extreme: a pallet, a lamp, a well-stocked bookshelf.

Yet while Alicia Nshombo enjoyed power’s perquisites quite visibly, even her extravagant tastes couldn’t account for the new palace’s sheer scale.

Hei-lian understood. The colonialists, like their feudal ancestors, had built their residences and administrative buildings in order to cow their subjects. Kitengi Nshombo built to cow the colonialists back.

Sitting on a sofa with legs tucked beneath her she switched on satellite TV. The first thing she saw was . . . herself, reporting from the Niger Delta swamp with the pale grass blowing about her legs and the pipeline on its scaffolding gleaming like bone in the background. Her face pleased her: quite well preserved. She could even see beauty of an austere kind. She might stay before the cameras for years yet, if her masters so decreed.

Again she wondered at her appeal to Tom, her ju nior by at least a decade, if appearance didn’t lie. Wondered if it could last.

He’d been interested enough after the odd interlude with the amulet, when Lilith, laughing, had led them through one last intricate three-way erotic ballet. Then, the jumpsuit rolled beneath one arm, Lilith had swirled her black cloak around her nakedness and vanished.

Hei-lian lit a cigarette and laughed at her own foolishness. Her life’s trade was that of a moth testing how close it could fly to flame. Everything was ephemeral. Humans most of all.

Tom’s unease concerned her, though. Only because he’s vital to our plans, she hastened to think. Things were about to come to resolution, to triumph or calamity. And he was acting strangely.

She recalled an incident at dinner that night. The Lama excused himself to go to the lavatory. Brave Hawk made some contemptuous comment about him.

“Yeah, he seems pretty useless,” the American with the curious lump in his head, John Fortune, had said. Hei-lian marveled at the UN’s idiocy, sending a mere youth in charge of such an important mission. “When I was a kid, my mom, Peregrine, used to take me to Aces High. Sometimes there’d be like this weird guy, this old hippie who wore a purple and green Uncle Sam suit. Called himself Cap’n Trips. Nobody seemed to know what he did, or what he was doing there. Maybe he was just buds with Tachyon. Anyway, this Lama dude kind of reminds me of him, for some reason.”

And Tom paled and went still. As if he had seen a ghost.

Hei-lian shook her head, as colorful electric shadows washed unseen over her face. Who knew the mind of a gweilo? Tom Weathers’s mind was disordered and undisciplined even for an American.

Is that why he appeals to you? a voice in her head asked. She shook it off.

If she had learned one thing, it was that worry never helped. The People’s Republic had won. She had won. For now. The future would bring what it would bring. She would adjust. Or fail and die.

She stubbed her cigarette and lay down. Smiling, replete almost despite herself, Hei-lian fell into the deepest sleep she had known for years.

On the television the images of horror her own team had captured endlessly replayed themselves.

Tom Weathers slept, too. Not well: but this sleep, it seemed, was a pit he couldn’t escape no matter how he tried.

He was coming. Tom could sense it. His nemesis. The one being on all the earth—as a good Marxist he disbelieved in heaven, and as a rebel laughed at hell—whom Tom feared.

He sauntered, long-legged, loose, scarecrow gaunt. With his shoulder-length hair, silvered blond, and his beard and mustache, he looked like the WASPiest Midwest Baptist Jesus portrait ever. His shirt was a tie-dyed tee; his pants were elephant bells.

Just an old hippie. To anybody else he’d be a figure of fun. Almost a clown.

Some people dreaded clowns. That was irrational phobia. This was anything but.

“I know what you really did,” the newcomer said, smiling sadly. “I know what you really are.”

His words filled Tom with terror. “You don’t know anything!” he screamed. “You don’t know shit!”

“I created you.” He shook his head. “To think I tried to bring you out again for so long. I wanted to be you. And for the last dozen years I’ve been you. Watching helplessly while you trashed everything I stood for: peace, love, justice.”

“Don’t talk to me about justice!” Tom shouted. “You’re just another bourgeois poser, man!”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m still a man.”

“You’re nothing! You don’t even fucking exist.”

The man looked at him. The eyes were the same eyes that looked at Tom in the mirror every day: light hazel. Even though the other’s were magnified by Coke-bottle lenses. Round and rimless, of course.

“I’m sorry I ever created you,” Mark Meadows said. “But I feel even sorrier for you. You’re losing it, Radical. You can feel it slipping away. And when you lose it—well, I’m waiting, man. Right here. I never go away.”

He flashed a peace sign and faded into mist.

Tom Weathers woke screaming.