Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER SIX

Thursday, July 10, 2042

“You. Not one of us?” Liese’s full name was Anneliese Meisinger, and her curt, shorthand speech still grated. Close up, she was not as perfect as Lessing had thought. Her features were slightly irregular, her skin the sort that freckles rather than tans, her mouth a little large, her eyes a gold-flecked hazel rather than the green they had appeared under the fluorescent lights of the boardroom. She seemed a little too elegant and mannered, too sophisticated, for Lessing’s taste.

“I’m a security man,” he answered. “I was hired by Indoco for their Lucknow plant.”

“You have a German name,” Mrs. Delacroix declared sweetly. The old lady had abandoned the cockpit of her private jet to its pilot, much to the latter ‘s relief, and she now occupied a seat beside Liese and opposite Lessing in the long fore-cabin.

“My ancestors came to America during Revolutionary War times.” He was not sure, actually, but that was what his father claimed.

“Lessing,” Mrs. Delacroix mused. “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was a great German dramatist and critic of the mid-eighteenth century.”

“Worked for the Duke of Brunswick… among others,” Liese interjected. It was as though she had to pay by the word to talk.

“Never mind,” the elderly French woman said brightly. “Gotthold Lessing is long dead. This one… Alan, is it not?… is alive. I am curious about Alan Lessing.”

Talking to Emma Delacroix was like handling fragile porcelain. Lessing had the impression that she would shatter if anyone disagreed with her.

“Not much to tell. Nowhere to go at home in Iowa… that’s one of the Midwestern states. Got out of school, one year of college, no jobs, joined the Army. Served awhile, then went into the army business for myself.” He grinned self-consciously. It was a longer speech than he usually made, but Mrs. Delacroix’ shrewd, black eyes and powdered-doll smile invited confidences. And Liese was listening.

“Not a member,” Liese put in dubiously. “Yet Mr. Müller seems to trust you.”

“Who?”

“Oh… Mr. Mulder. That’s his name now.”

“And he’s a Descendant?”

“Yes. Like Mrs. Delacroix.”

He was tired of the subject. The SS and the Nazi Party were as corpse-cold as — what was his name? — Gotthold Lessing. He looked out the window at the tiers of white cloud-castles. They had left Caracas behind and were now out over the Atlantic headed for Dakar.

Mrs. Delacroix caressed one of the SS diaries with all the reverence of a nun touching a hallowed Bible. The more recent of the diaries were legibly copied in modem German and English, but the earliest of the twenty-odd volumes were written in the archaic Suetterlin German script, which neither she nor Liese could read. They would have to be transcribed when they reached Pretoria, something Mulder hadn’t done while his family held them.

The dark-blue bindings and scuffed, leather spines exuded an aura of almost mystic devotion. Those who had penned these pages had loved their cause with a terrible fierceness. They had not given up, even under the persecution of the Nazi-hunts of the last century. Lessing felt something akin to religious awe, like the time he and Jameela had visited the cave-temples of Ellura. The gods carved there were still proud, still powerful, still splendid in their enigmatic majesty. They still spoke to humankind. Jameela, whose family belonged to the Shi’a— or Shi’i, which she insisted was the correct adjective — sect of Islam, had laughed at him.

Lessing had ceased to be a Lutheran when he was sixteen, when his mother’s bitter piety and his father’s Christmas lip-service finally had eaten away the last traces of his childhood beliefs. Later he had found little to tempt him among the dogmas of the Born-Agains, the Catholics, Jameela’s Islam, or any other of the world’s faiths. He was sometimes still affected by religious and quasi-religious experiences, however. The diaries piled on the red-plush airplane seat were just that; they overflowed with a power of their own, like the mana of the South Pacific islanders. They called, cried out, almost shouted: “Believe in us! Believe in our Führer! Believe in the National Socialist movement and in Germany and the glorious destiny of the Aryan Race!” He could almost hear the chanted Sieg Heils over the droning thunder of the jet.

He jerked awake so violently that Liese stared at him.

“Dakar by evening,” she said. “Then Pretoria. Return at once?”

He struggled to decipher her odd verbal shorthand. “Uh… yes. Back to Indoco.”

She crossed one silk-sheathed leg over the other, and her pearl-grey, Chinese-silk dress slithered away from her thigh. “Slay. Day or two. Show you around.”

Her expression was ambiguous. She might be making a pass at him, or she might be offering only ritual hospitality. He smiled and said nothing. He would cross that bridge after proper reconnaissance.

He awoke again from a muddled dream of thorn bushes, black faces, and stuttering automatic weapons: Angola. For an unnerving moment he thought it was real. Just above his head Liese announced, “Africa, Mr. Lessing. Landing at Dakar. Yoff Airport.”

It was real, as hot and wet as he remembered, and it smelled like India but with subtle differences. There were real black faces now, bony men in scruffy khaki uniforms, German SM-97 submachine guns slung ostentatiously over skinny shoulders. This was the New Empire of Guinea, founded forty years before by some army captain or other. The Guineans had taken over Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and a few other relics of European colonialism. Their up-and-coming enterprise was backed by French and Portuguese money — and Euro-mere officers to command Emperor Sayyid Abu-Bakr’s Black legions.

Mrs. Delacroix disembarked, taking Liese with her. The pilot dealt with the paper work while Lessing remained in the cabin. He took what precautions he could: locked the diaries in the aircraft’s safe, checked his 7.62-mm sidearm and his 9-mm machine pistol, and inspected the tarmac and distant buildings with binoculars. If any interested parties knew that the diaries were aboard, now was the time to strike. He could expect anything from a hijacking to a rocket grenade. He switched off the cabin lights and waited.

Fuel trucks rumbled out to the plane, several commercial craft landed and took off, and airport control officers came aboard and then disembarked, redolent of Mrs. Delacroix’s best French Pernod. The pilot, a sandy-haired, young Scotsman, bent over his charts to plot a course for Pretoria. Outside, lines of blue landing lights made geometric diagrams upon blackness, and the dank odors of Africa mingled with those of gasoline, asphalt, and hot metal.

A white light raced across the tarmac, became two lights, and resolved itself into an open car. Mrs. Delacroix and Liese? Not at that speed! And not with three huddled figures carrying blue-gleaming automatic weapons jammed into the front seat.

This could be it.

The pilot emerged at Lessing’s call, stared, ducked back into his cockpit, and returned with a Japanese GK-11 assault rifle, grenade launcher attachment, bayonet, scope, and all. He grinned at Lessing. “Backed up the old girl a few times before.”

The vehicle squealed to a halt beside the landing stairs, and three Black soldiers in shiny, steel helmets and neatly pressed white uniforms leaped out. Behind them came a bony European in civilian bush-shirt and shorts.

“Hey, up there!” the latter shouted. “You! Lessing! Muh-fuk-kah!”

Lessing gaped. It was Johnny Kcnow. They had been meres in the same unit during the Baalbek War.

The pilot smiled weakly and lowered his weapon, but Lessing hesitated. He wasn’t ready to be thumbed by an ex -comrade now working for a different side.

“Johnny? Put your piece down and come on up. Leave your doggies there.”

There was a puzzled expletive from below. He heard the clatter of a weapon being tossed into the back seat of the car. Then Johnny Kenow came loping up the metal stairs, two at a time.

Lessing backed into the shadows inside the door, unwilling to let Kenow within close-combat reach until he knew more. Those troopers down there could be up and into the plane within seconds.

“Hey, man! He-e-y!” Kenow grasped the situation at once. He stopped and flung his arms wide. “Clean! I’m clean! What the hell’s up?”

“Nothing, I hope. Just being wise. Come on in.” He bent an eyebrow at the pilot: he wanted to know instantly if Kenow’s buddies decided to join the party.

Johnny Kenow was as Lessing remembered him: a lanky straw-sucker from Montana with pallid, mottled skin; oily, dark hair that covered his skull like a coat of paint; and eyes so close-set that people said he had to look through a pair of binoculars one eye at a time. After the Baalbek War Kenow had taken service in the Imperial Palace at Conakry. Now he was the Supreme General of the Emperor’s Ever-Victorious Army, and it was rumored that he had acquired a squad of Eurasian concubines, a chest full of medals — and a chest full of gold to match.

Not such bad duty. But then the life expectancy of imperial generals was no longer here than it had been in ancient Rome.

Lessing asked, “How did you know I was on this plane?”

“Keep my ass clean and my eye on the passenger manifests.” Kenow winked, an unprepossessing sight. “Down here to pick up a French girl, a gift from the Emperor to his pig-suckin’ son. Royal reception.” He snorted. “Best I tell her what’s happenin’ before she gits in with the wrong parties.”

“Palace intrigue?”

“Yeah. ‘Nough bull-pucky to fertilize all o’ Africa.” Lessing began to relax a little. Kenow’s next words brought him back to full alert.

“Boys here lookin’ fer you. Two, three weeks ago.”

“Who?”

“Dunno. Euro-mercs, mebbe, or Arabs.” He pronounced it “Ay-rabs,” even after fifteen years in the Middle East. “Told ’em you was croaked.”

“Any idea what they wanted?”

“Not a goddam. Heard there was other guys askin’ about you, too.” He gave Lessing a sly look from narrow, red-rimmed eyes. “You stash some loot you was s’posed to lake home to papa?”

Lessing’s “samples” of Pacov rose instantly to mind. But no one could know about that. The little globe and the tube were concealed behind a metal inspection plate in the very innards of Indoco’s

Lucknow plant. He knew for a fact that nobody had looked there since.

“Or mebbe you thumbed somebody you shouldn’t?”

Lessing felt relieved; Kenow was just fishing. He smiled. “Hell, I’m too smart to screw up like that. Just do my job.”

“You always was a careful sonuvabitch.” The other dug into a shirt pocket, produced a tattered pack of American cigarettes and held it out. Lessing shook his head. “Heard somethin’ else, too. Some kind of big rumble between the Israelis and the Rooskies. Mercs, regular soldiers, lots of scurryin’ back ‘n’ forth. Americans and Brits and everybody else in the fuckin’ world all hoppin’ around. More kikibirds than you kin shake your dong at.”

“Kikibird” was slang for a spy, an intelligence agent; Lessing had heard that it came from some archaic joke about a big, dumb bird that sat out in the snow all winter and hollered, “Kee… kee… kee… rist, it’s cold!”

There was a shout from below, and they stood up to look. One of the helmeted soldiers pointed across the moisture-slick runway toward the blinking lights of a plane just landing. Kenow spat out through the doorway.

“There’s our French hoor now. Got to go. Mebbe I can knock off a bit o’ nookie before Mademoiselle La-de-fuckin’-da becomes Queen Empress.”

“Hey, at least tell me what you think’s going on!” Lessing, also at the door, spied the lights of a second car coming toward them. Mrs Delacroix’ coiffure glittered like a silvery tiara in the back seat.

“God damn it, I got no idea.” Kenow shook hands, clapped Lessing on the shoulder, and started down the stairs. “It’s big, though. Mebbe the Big Boom that’ll take out the world. I got the Emperor diggin’ a bomb shelter right down to the middle of the earth! If anybody phones, that’s where I’ll be.”

He waved and was gone.