Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER NINE

Thursday, July 17, 2042

The hotel room on the Place du Havre, opposite the ancient Gare St. Lazare, was small and musty, four paces from scarred door to grimy window, three from the far wall to the bed. It suited Lessing’s needs: Terry Copley’s secretary had said that “le Boss” would return at 1400 hours.

He ran a finger over the tatty upholstered chair, then sat down on — and almost disappeared into — the billowy featherbed that the French still preferred to anything invented since 1600.

He checked the spring-powered spit-shooter Wrench had insisted upon giving him: a short, black, plastic tube that fired darts dipped in a variant of saxitoxin, a poison the experts said would kill within twenty seconds. Lessing had not wanted the weapon, but it did provide a back-up to the 9-mm automatic pistol he carried in a shoulder holster. Neither Indian nor French airport security had objected to his armament, once he displayed the Indoco courier I.D. Mulder had provided him.

Shrill traffic noises penetrated the ancient and many-times- renovated stone walls. He got up to look outside. Paris had solved her time-honored congestion: now the only vehicles permitted within the city were battery-powered electrics, flat-bed delivery trucks, and two-or four-passenger “dodgem” cars with bodies built of a plastic material and engines that would propel them no faster than 30 kilometers per hour. Parisians displayed their traditional gallantry, adventurousness, and contempt for their fellows’ lives by naming the smaller model of these vehicles le duelliste and the larger le char — “the tank.” Both were fitted, de rigueur, with the most strident horns science could devise. The traffic situation improved somewhat, but not as much as was hoped: many people bought both a “town car” and also a larger, petrol-powered traditional automobile for extended travel. The wealthy purchased all three, which enriched the owners of rentable parking space in the suburbs beyond their wildest dreams.

Across the plaza, the weathered, time-wom facade of the Gare St. Lazare bespoke an earlier and more leisurely age. The eggshell-blue July sky seemed eternal. Crowds were denser than ever in this twenty-first century, of course: tourists in colorful shorts and Bylon shirts that could be wadded up in one’s fist and then shaken out like a magician’s handkerchief, unrumpled and crisp; French businessmen sporting fashionable frock-coats and vests, their trouser legs so tight as to be almost body stockings; shop girls in a variety of skirts and sweaters and blouses; and numerous young men attired in the scruffy shirts and pants that were as eternally Parisien as the Eiffel Tower. Lessing’s own nondescript, tan sports jacket and cuffless, brown trousers were ten years out of date here; this was just as well: he could never pass for a Parisian nor even a European, but a footloose, not-too-rich American wanderer was a useful image under the circumstances.

There were others on the street He amused himself watching several hookers in the current Banger uniform: a translucent, glassine miniskirt, glittery pasties or metal-tissue breast cups, and long braids, dyed whatever hue their owner felt matched today’s “aura.” Some of the women carried the finger-drums or tambourines that gave B anger music its name — and the rest of the world a headache — while others didn’t bother pretending. Hypocrisy aside, the good burghers of Paris considered the Banger girls an asset, as much a tourist money-maker as the Louvre or the Metro.

Lessing had been in Paris before, once on leave from Angola, and again when he flew out to join in the Baalbek War in Syria. Then it had been sophisticated and exciting; now it struck him as alien, as different from India as Mars. He sensed something of what Jameela would feel: a disturbing dose of culture-shock.

That brought him squarely back to his own problems. His last meeting with Jameela had been stormy. She wanted him with her, at Indoco, and she wanted an end to danger and instability. She had been furious when he told her he was leaving for Paris.

“Never do you talk to me! ” she had cried. “Never explain! Never say what you are doing!” In the heat of anger the hard, retroflex consonants of her native Urdu crept back into her speech, and part of her American university polish bubbled away like paint exposed to a flame.

“I can’t. You know that.”

“Take me along!”

“Can’t do that either. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

She glared at him, long-lashed eyes narrowed, two little, vertical, white lines beside her lips. He was reminded of one of their discussions about the Islamic concept of God. Allah, she said, displayed two aspects, Jamali and Jalali, the former being beautiful and gentle, the latter powerful, harsh, and violent. Like each of Allah’s creatures, Jameela Husaini displayed both of these aspects, too, and her Jalali manifestation was truly a terror to behold!

She snapped, “Mercenary work!”

It wasn’t a question, but he grunted, “Yes.”

“You just go… kill people, shoot people… fight. No reason except money. No principle. No… no—”

“Ethics? We meres… soldiers… have ethics. Sometimes they’re different from those of the folks back home “

“No feelings! A… a robot with a gun!” Tears welled up, and she fiercely scoured them away. “Stay here, Alan. My father is a high officer in our CID. He’ll protect you. He’s what protects Indoco.”

That confirmed one of Wrench’s more devious suspicions. Jameela Husaini had been planted in Indoco as a spy, to keep an eye on the foreigners. Her father probably had not ordered her to start an affair with Lessing, however. The Soviets and some Western intelligence agencies might do that sort of thing, but it would violate too many taboos for an Indian father to ask that from a daughter, even in the interests of national security.

“I don ‘t need protecting. I ‘m going on a trip to see an old friend.”

How devious one could be and still speak the truth! He would not tell Jameela about Mulder’s Nazi machinations or about Pacov. Either might get her thumbed. As far as he knew, too, she had no connection with Bauer; at least she hadn’t gone up to Balrampur Hospital in Lucknow to see him, according to Kuldeep, the driver.

“Stay with me. I… want you.” It was the nearest she had ever come to saying “I love you” out loud.

He went to her.

Memories. Lips, breasts, nipples, soft skin, smooth thighs, fingers sliding and grasping and caressing, heavy tresses upon his breast, perfumed serpents coiling in the dark.

Orgasm, thunderous, rhythmic, and savage, as close to the raw animal as a human being can get.

But was it “love”?

He shook his head, ran fingertips through his hair. Jameela knew him better than he knew himself. It was so hard to feel, so impossible to speak. Others could say “love” as glibly as they said “hello.” Not Alan Lessing. Others instinctively sensed a “right” and a “wrong,” although that was perhaps cultural and not some internal, universal voice of conscience, a God who just coincidentally happened to have all the values of a twenty-first century, middle-class, American WASP from Iowa. Others had something to live by, even when it was demonstrably stupid. Even Mulder and Liese and Mrs. Delacroix stuck to their principles, although the rest of the world might despise them for it.

He looked inside himself, as he often had done when he was a child, then later as an adolescent, and still later when he had faced death in a half-dozen unmemorable countries. He looked within… and discovered the same, old jumble of half-formed ideas, feelings, sensations, facts, fancies, memories — an attic full of junk he could neither use nor throw away.

Was everybody like this? Jameela and Liese and the rest seemed so certain of themselves. Were they as confused inside? Were they too, unable to speak, souls imprisoned in statues with hps of stone?

God damn it.

Or had God already damned him?

The telephone purred. Monsieur Copley would see him now. The squat, little “dodgem” taxi let him off in Rue Madeleine Michelis in Neuilly. He checked carefully for pursuers but saw no one Copley had a flat in one of the nicer buildings the French government had built after the labor riots of 2035. Lessing found “511-COPLEY” beside a button on the directory board in the glossy, plastic-panelled lobby. He pressed, received an answering buzz, and entered the elevator beyond. It was undoubtedly fitted with a spy-eye, and there would be more along the white, antiseptic corridor that led to number 511. Copley was a cautious man.

The blank outer door opened upon desks, secretaries, computers, filing cabinets, molded Paradox chairs, and a coffee table heaped with magazines. The place looked like a dentist’s waiting room. Three swarthy men, Arabs or Iranians, occupied seats along the left wall, and a single youngish European with a scraggly, blonde beard sat by himself on the right. Lessing tossed his jacket onto a chair, sat down next to the blonde man, and waited. It was a full half hour before the plump French receptionist called Lessing’s name.

Colonel Terence B. Copley, U.S. Army, retired, rose from behind a paper-cluttered desk and stuck out a hand. He hailed from Alabama, a red-haired, bony, freckled, barrel-shaped man m his forties, with eyes as sharp — and, oddly, as leaden — as two splinters of shrapnel. His short-sleeved shirt and Parisian string-tie gave him a raffish, slightly silly look. He would have been more at home m a jogging suit and running shoes, a high school gym teacher who had gone astray and ended up in far-off Paris.

Lessing glanced around. The room was painted a bland off-white, its wall-to-wall carpet a neutral beige. The desk that sat squarely in the center of the floor was a bad copy of an ugly original, the chairs the sort that businesses rented by the month. Thick, velvety, dark-green drapes mostly covered the long window on the western side. The only decoration consisted of a display of antique weapons on the wall behind Copley’s balding skull: a lethal-looking old Heckler and Koch submachine gun, worth a couple of months of Lessing s salary, an Uzi, and one of the Ingram models, all three gleaming a menacing gold and black in the sunlight that crept in through a gap in the drapes. These weapons would be deactivated, the ready stuff stored elsewhere. Copley’s real protection would consist of stitch-guns concealed in the wall, probably a pistol under a pile of papers on the desk, and armed assistants within call. The colonel was paranoid enough to have bulletproof glass, poison gas, and a trap-door over an oubliette filled with spikes, but there were limits.

“Get down and kiss my hairy ass, recruit!” Copley chortled.

“And up yours with an umbrella, sir!” Lessing had served under this man in Angola. They had been friends, then.

“Wait’ll you get it in before you open it!” Copley bellowed merrily in return. He waved at the one chair before his desk. “What canldoy’all?”

Lessing took the indicated scat, feeling the beady muzzles of the hidden stitch-guns upon his back. He cleared his throat. “I’m pressed for time.”

“No drink?”

“No, thanks. Gave it up. India does that.” And Jameela had helped. An occasional cold beer was all he wanted these days. “So what do I do ya?” “Answer questions. Urgent ones.”

“Try me.” Copley poured himself a glass of something brown and pungent from a bottle behind his in-basket. “People say I’m thumbing. That so?”

The other’s blunt, ruddy face went shut, as though a book had been closed.

“Jesus, you do like it short and sweet!” The glass made a wet ring on the desk, and Copley rubbed at it ineffectually. He scrutinized Lessing’s face quizzically. “All right. So I’ve heard. Rumors… shit-talk.”

“It’s not true.”

“Nobody showed me no dead bodies. I never believed it. Man, you know me.”

“What did you hear?”

“Only that your squad was dying off too fast to blame on old age. Hjellming dead, Hollister popped at in Copenhagen… not like you to miss the bastard, Alan, if you are thumbing. You always was a good shot. Felix Bauer’s disappeared. Rose Thurley’s the only one still walking around, and people say that’s because you and her had something going.” He put on a lascivious little smile. “Not much for looks, but real expert, as many a regiment of satisfied sojer-boys can attest.”

“Forget that.” He knew where Bauer was, but he wouldn’t tell Copley. He was also glad Rose was safe, though he’d never had any desire to try out her non-military skills. He leaned forward and said, “None of it is mine. If somebody is thumbing my people, I want to know why. I want to know bad!”

Copley picked up a bottle-green file folder from his desk. “Want a job? A real job… not that beegee crap you’re doing now. Battalion going in for the rebs in Uganda. Second in command? Maybe captain, if the sponsors agree?”

Lessing waved the file away. “No, and I don’t want to join an Eskimo regiment in the Arctic or boss a legion of hula-dancers in Hawaii!”

“Or be a bouncer in an S-‘n’-M gay bar in Los Angeles?” Copley snorted up laughter the way an elephant sucks water through its trunk. “God, man, I don’t know a damned thing! People do talk. Come on, y’all surely got time for one drink at least.”

“No, really. Let me ask you this: what do you know about my last job? Who bought that spesh-op?”

Copley scratched an ear so freckled that it resembled a dried apricot. “Heard that Gomez got croaked, too, out in India. Heard that you might’ve been the croaker and him the croakee.”

“No way. I was… somewhere else. I can prove it.”

“Shit, who’s asking? But that means that whatever he knew is worms. I talked to Arturo Da Silva in Lebanon a couple weeks back. You know him? Friend of Gomez?”

“Yeah. Your point?”

“He said Gomez was bragging about something he’d set up. A lot of money, helicopters, guns, meres. Was that you?” “Could be. Who paid?”

Copley raised both shoulders in an expressive, Gallic shrug. He had become so French that he could make a living letting tourists take his picture over in the Montmartre.

“I’ve got to know.”

“Can’t help you. Honest to God.”

“Bullshit. You’ve never been honest to God.” Lessing changed the subject. “What do you hear about my boss, Herman Mulder? About Indoco?”

Again that flat, closed stare. What drug was Copley taking that made his eyes look like lead marbles?

“Nice old guy. Works hard. Stays out in India when he could be sitting on his ass in a hot tub in Palm Springs, surrounded by Banger chickies and snufflin’ up white lightning. He’s one of Indoco’s directors, and he’s on the board of half a dozen other corporations to boot. Rich and important, but loves India too much to come home.”

Copley could have read all that on the front page of Indoco’s company newspaper. Lessing snarled, “More!”

Copley ran a thumb along the edge of the green folder. “That’s about it. Look, Alan, let me send you on that Ugandan job. Seriously.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a good deal. Not much danger and lots of perks.” “Crap.”

“Okay, then. I like you. I’d rather shanghai you than see you thumbed. Hollister thinks you tried to unzip him, and now him and his buddies are going to do you first.”

“I won’t turn my back in the shower, all right? Now, one last chorus: who paid for our spesh-op? Who’s thumbing my squad?”

Copley twisted uncomfortably, groped for his drink, and turned the glass around and around in freckle-blotched fingers. “That particular job is like an artillery range: big signs all over saying ‘Keep Off Or Get Your Head Popped.’ No shitty, little emperor or jumped-up military dictator waving his two-inch dink this time.”

“If it’s big, there are only four choices.” He held out his fingers one at a time. “American, Russian, Israeli, or Chinese. Plus friends, relatives, and allies of any of the above.”

Copley looked still more unhappy. “Or a faction inside one or more of the same.” He waggled both hands, palms down, in front of him. “All done, Alan; ’nough said. I’d only be guessing. Try Da Silva.”

“What for? He’ll give me even less.” Lessing held up his four fingers. “My four choices. If you know, Terry, for God’s sake just say which.”

Copley looked down at the backs of his own hands, the color of raw meat. Then he extended the index finger of his left hand. Just one finger.

American, then. Or some group within the United States, possibly government, possibly not. It tied in with what Hoeykens had said, and it looked bad. But it still didn’t tell him much: several American agencies and factions had enough men, arms, and money to start their own countries. Why would they need a squad of mostly foreign meres to pull off Marvelous Gap? Too many internal watchdogs? The press? Political shenanigans? Some crazy Pentagon or CIA plot to take over the government? Copley’s answer only led to more questions! It also did not explain what the Israelis wanted with Lessing, nor who had burglarized Indoco.

Lessing got to his feet as nonchalantly as he knew how, said his farewells, and left.

The street smelled of gasoline. Traffic was a tangle at this hour, and the crush of pedestrians was almost claustrophobic. Dust rose from the drills of a pavement repair crew fifty meters away. He took careful note: that would be good cover for stitch-guns, silencers, or even a shotgun blast! He set off in the opposite direction, toward the Boulevard Victor Hugo, to look for a taxi.

He had absolutely no idea what to do next.

Somebody was following him: a motion, a flash of color glimpsed out of the comer of an eye. He entered a tobacconist’s shop, bought a pack of cigarettes he would never smoke, and managed a look around.

No one.

He emerged and hailed a cab. It was busy and went on by, two delicate young men smiling out the rear window at him. Nothing to do but walk on.

He sensed pursuit again. It was just a breath upon his spine, but this sixth sense was one he had mastered well. If he hadn’t, his bones would have been bleaching among the rocks out in Angola or Syria long ago.

A big, brick archway opened into the blank wall of an older building. He ducked inside and peered back. A girl, a Banger, wobbled along the curbing behind him on heels so high as to be stilts. She looked sixteen; her sharp, wise, little features were caked with make-up; a long, magenta-dyed braid bounced against bony shoulder blades; and her tiny breasts were covered with two squares of sparkle-tape the size of bandaids. Heavy junk jewelry clanked and jingled at her throat, in her hair, and all along her right arm.

She didn’t resemble any kikibird he’d ever known.

He looked closer. She carried neither percussion instrument nor pocket radio tuned to the howling rhythms of the Banger stations. Her translucent-silver, plastic miniskirt was visibly dusty, however: she had been standing near Copley’s building and the street repair crew for some time. She could have been waiting for Lessing to come out.

He’d give odds that she was the tail.

He moved further into the archway and stopped, loosening his pistol in its shoulder holster. Too bad he didn’t have a silencer for it. The girl would have to come to him here, and any friends must enter the passage behind her. He would be in shadow; they would be temporarily blinded and also silhouetted against the light from the street.

The girl pretended to sec him for the First time. She wiggled her hips crudely and suggestively, and said something in French. She was obviously a regular hooker, whatever she was involved in now.

Lessing could see no one near enough to rush in or shoot from the street. Behind him the archway opened into an arcade, an enclosed central court several stories high, roofed over with a multi-panelled skylight. A score of boutiques and touristy, little shops beckoned all around the ground floor. They would provide excellent cover and escape routes if necessary.

The Banger girl pointed to the hand he now held near his jacket lapel. She smiled and shook her head so that her braid flew out, jangling with silver chains and charms. Again she spoke in French.

“No French,” he said. “English.” He recalled Mrs. Delacroix’s remark about Americans and their sad lack of foreign languages. No time to regret his education now!

She held her own hands away from her skinny thighs, dangled her bulky purse by its strap, and made an exaggeratedly innocent face. “No French? Noril… No… mugging, monsieur.” She pronounced it “moo-geeng.” Under other circumstances Lessing would have laughed. “No danger. Fun!” One hand came back to pull her little miniskirt and skimpy panties aside, revealing the dark triangle of pubic hair beneath. “Hundred new francs, monsieur?”

What the hell? He was fairly sure she had more in mind than a quick trick. He watched her warily. “No, thanks. Busy.”

She gave him a lopsided gamine grin and sidled forward, one hand caressing the pale skin of her belly. He shook his head strenuously and held his ground. He still saw no one in the street and no one behind himself in the court.

“No French, monsieur? Maybe you speak… how?… Pah-koff? Pah-couve?”

He had expected it. He retreated easily, on the balls of his feet, ready to fight, dodge, or run. The shops in the arcade were crowded, inviting. “Pacov? What do you know of Pacov?”

“Come. Come wiz’ me. I show you. You see a man, speak.” She glanced sideways, to her right.

“Then I get killed. Correct?”

Badly plucked brows came down in a frown. “Keeled? I not speak much English. You come. Pacov. No moo-geeng. We go your place afterward.” She was a child, an illiterate, hungry child, but he couldn’t afford to pity her — not now.

On the western, sunny side of the internal court the tablecloths of a cafe showed checkered red and white amidst signboards and potted shrubs. He pointed and spoke slowly: “Not come. We go there. Restaurant… cafe. You telephone man. He come here, speak.” He pantomimed the use of a telephone.

“Eh? Non. No telephone. No… number. I not know.”

“We go anyway. We sit, drink. He will watch. He will come to us.” Lessing had no idea how much she understood, but she gave him only a single, suspicious, street-smart glance and then walked ahead of him to the cafe.

He should have anticipated the reaction. The maitre d’hotel pursed thin lips, and a few of the more affluent diners murmured in outraged wonderment. Lessing hadn’t realized: a tall, hard-faced, thirtyish American male in tandem with a cheap Banger hooker, a child barely into her teens! He had just done more to wreck the American image abroad than a planeload of screeching, spinster school teachers!

The girl gave the maitre d’hotel a saucy wink and sat down, making sure that her bare thigh was visible all the way up to her hipbone.

The waiter arrived, pudgy and pallid-faced. The girl said something in a supercilious tone, and he slammed two menus down and flounced away. She pointed to an entry in the wines and alcoholic beverages section of the menu, but Lessing shook his head. When the waiter returned Lessing ignored his young companion, said “coffee,” and held up two fingers. The man departed again.

Two china cups of coffee appeared, muddy and black and full of chicory, much as they served it in India. Lessing paid, and they drank in silence. He turned his chair so he could see both the double door to the kitchen and the crowded shopping court in front of the restaurant. He also fumbled Wrench’s spit-shooter out of his jacket pocket, palmed it, and covered his hand with the stiffly embossed, red-plastic menu cover. The wall clock read 4:13. How long would he have to wait?

Soon, he told himself, soon. Be patient. The opfoes would tire of waiting for little Miss Banger-Baby here, and then they would come looking.

The clock said 5:32 when the man entered the court. Lessing picked him out at once: a tall gentleman of fifty or so, greying and stooped, distinguished-looking in a baggy, charcoal-grey suit and one of those painfully conservative British ties that are so dark as to look like ribbons of black crepe. Something about the long, horsey face and aggressive bearing struck Lessing as un-British, however, the man was probably American, Canadian, or even Australian.

The new arrival took his time, wandering from stall to stall, examining boxed candies, cut flowers, toys and souvenirs and sunglasses. He looked at his wristwatch twice before making up his mind. Then he tramped directly across the open court to the cafe, slid into the chair opposite Lessing and the Banger girl, ordered cafe au lait, and waited until the waiter had gone.

He began without preamble. “Long time finding you.” The accent was harshly nasal, an American Midwestern twang much like Lessing’s own original dialect.

“Who’s hunting?”

“None of your business.” He spoke to the Banger girl in fluent French, then grimaced at Lessing. “Hard to get decent help these days.”

“Who are you and what do you want?”

“I can answer some of your questions, Mr. Lessing. And you can answer mine.” He pointed at the menu. “If you’ve got a gun under there, forget it. Do you see those high galleries opposite us? Up above the shopping floors?”

God, what a stupid mistake! With a good rifle and scope, even a passable marksman on one of those balconies could put a bullet up whichever of Lessing’s nostrils this kikibird chose! He cursed himself, but it was too late to fix things now.

Lessing said, “Fine. A stalemate, then. Your man pops me, my finger tightens, and my gun goes off. Then you Iearn whether your ribs’ll deflect a 9-mm slug.”

The agent spread blue-veined, well-manicured hands. “No harm meant, Mr. Lessing. No violence. We want Pacov, and you know where it is.”

“Idem’ J know.”

“Look, your own employer is out to thumb you. Other people want you brought in and questioned. They’ll thumb you, too, when they’re done. We can protect you, see that your part in this gets buried in some file or other, put you back in India where you can go on with your life.”

Lessing sensed the man was lying, at least so far as his own employer was concerned. If Mulder had wanted him dead, then dead he would be. On the other hand, “employers” also included those who had hired him to get Pacov in the first place. They might well be out to unzip him. He said, carefully, “I can’t help you. Not if my life depended on it”

“Oh, it does, Mr. Lessing, it does. Believe me. When I say we want Pacov, I mean that very strongly. We will have Pacov. Now who funded your operation? Where is Pacov?”

This man knew nothing, then: less than he did himself. He decided that honesty was the best policy— until events indicated a change. “I came to Paris looking for answers. I haven’t found any. The man who took Pacov from me is dead: Gomez, out in India.”

“Gomez can’t help us then, can he, Mr. Lessing? But we don’t think you’re telling the whole truth. Recently you flew to Guatemala, then to South Africa. We want to know whom you saw in those countries and why. My… principals… are convinced that on one of those two stops you handed Pacov over to those who hired you to get it, Mr. Lessing. You used Gomez as a ruse. He died for nothing.”

“I suppose you… your people… thumbed him?”

“No, not our doing. Your employers again, those who sent you to Marvelous Gap. They want you thumbed, and everything connected with you gone too… vanished, disappeared, never existed.”

“The trips were for my Indian employer… Indoco. They had nothing to do with Pacov.”

“Well, there’s something odd about Indoco, too, Mr. Lessing. Odd. But not our business now. Later, perhaps.” He straightened up. “Still hesitant, then? Still unwilling to help us? What if I told you that I represented your government, the United States of America? The legal owners of Pacov… and the only thing standing between this lovely scene,” he waved at the bustling shoppers, “and the murder of much of this planet”

“You’d have to show me proof. You might very well be working for any of a dozen other teams.”

“Lean do that.” The man sounded increasingly nervous, his words curt and hurried. He glanced around, up at the galleries, back at the entrance archway.

“Don’t bother. As I told you… honestly… I don’t know who my employer was. I don’t have Pacov now, and I don’t have a goddamned clue where it is.” He permitted himself to bend the truth just a smidgin: his samples were still safely hidden in Indoco’ s Lucknow factory. He had checked.

The other reached into his jacket pocket. Lessing thought he was about to bring out identification, but instead he flipped a packet of snapshots onto the checkered tablecloth “Here you are, Mr. Lessing, ‘feelthy peectures,’ real French postcards.”

Lessing looked.

He could not help it.

The top one showed a woman, completely nude, her limbs spreadeagled and bound to a rivet-studded surface. There was a box with a sort of crank in the bottom righthand foreground, and thin wires led from this to her vagina, to her anus, and to sharp-toothed alligator clips biting into the soft flesh of her inner thighs, her breasts, and her belly.

The woman’s mouth was open; her eyes bulged; her forehead was beaded with the sweat of unendurable torment

The face was Jamecla’s.

Lessing blinked and shuddered, cold fear washing over him like a bucket of ice water. He almost cried out, almost shot the man before him with the spit-shooter hidden beneath the menu. The hell with the rifleman up on the balcony! Then he realized that the photograph had been doctored, the face superimposed. The white streak in the woman’s tangled locks was the sweatband Jameela wore when she exercised. The background beneath her head was not the metal torture-table but the hedge beside Indoco’s tennis court, airbrushed out but not completely matched. Her expression was not one of agony but of excitement and strenuous exertion.

It was a picture Lessing himself had taken during one of Jameela’ s morning tennis matches! These bastards must have stolen it when they ransacked Lessing’s apartment during that last riot at Indoco!

“You son of a bitch…!”

The agent looked apologetic. “It’s not real. Not this time. We don’t want to make it real, Mr. Lessing. But you must understand that we are in deadly earnest Look at the other shots. If we can’t come to an agreement, we’ll let you choose which of our games Miss Husaini gets to play first.”

Lessing let the menu cover slide an inch or so along his out-stretched arm. He was very tempted, whatever the cost.

The kikibird saw the motion and put three fingers up to his cheek. “I drop my hand and my gunman kills you dead, Mr. Lessing. Why can’t you be reasonable?”

Lessing jerked his chin at the pictures. “That’s reasonable?”

“She was an agent for others, Mr. Lessing. She knew the risks.”

“You’re no American. Not using those techniques….”

The man smiled. “Times change, Mr. Lessing. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes quite thinkable today. Well, maybe we are not a regular U.S. agency, but we’re friends with some of them, Mr. Lessing: very close friends.”

Lessing had seen torture before, out in Angola and in Syria. Every nation used it to some degree. It did not so much horrify him as make him furious. He didn’t know whether his anger stemmed from the photographs themselves, from the callous involvement of Jameela, or from the way this urbane kikibird had played on his emotions with the doctored pictures. He said, “Now you get nothing. Nothing at all. No way.”

“No dramatics, please. We can turn the photographs into reality. Indeed, we were planning a live demonstration for you, starring little Amalic here…” he glanced over at the Banger hooker, who was staring in horrified fascination at the photographs “…but she didn’t bring you to the party.” He extracted money from his coat pocket with his free hand and pushed a wad of it at the girl. “Go home. Allez vous!”

She didn’t touch the bills but scrambled up and fled.

“Now, as to Pacov. Who’s got it? We want the whole story.”

Lessing felt the same chill calm that he experienced in combat “You have all you’re going to get from me. If you’re so mere-smart, you know that’s how it works. We go through brokers, do jobs, and go home. No identities, no connections, no politics, no involvements.”

“Like our little French whore, huh?”

“That’s it: leave the money on the bed.”

“You went to see Colonel Copley.”

“I’ll say it again. I got nothing.”

For the first time the agent’s face showed anger. “God damn you, Lessing! You didn’t just hand Pacov over to some anonymous buyer like a bag of cocaine on a street corner! We can take you in… get you out of Paris—”

“For some happy sessions in your basement?”

“You’d sing a lot sweeter with a barbed catheter up your cock and electric needles in your testicles!”

Lessing began to get up, slowly and with care. “It’s time for my dinner, and you’ve already spoiled it.”

“Sit the hell down!” The kikibird almost forgot to keep his fingers pressed against his cheek. Lessing tensed to hurl himself aside, but he didn’t think that would save him, not if the marksman was any good at all.

He let the menu fall away from his hand and opened his fingers a trifle to let the black plastic tube of Wrench’s spit-shooter peep through. He kept his thumb pressed against the open end.

“This,” he said conversationally, “is Pacov-2. You asked for it; you got it.” The agent probably knew that Pacov-2 came in black plastic tubes. Lessing was gambling that the man hadn’t actually seen the stuff: the spit-shooter was only about half the diameter of the Pacov-2 cylinder.

The man goggled at it. “You’re lying…!”

“No. I saved myself a dose or two for insurance. I’m sure you understand. Last night, as soon as I arrived, I cracked a globe of Pacov-1 down the toilet. Now we see whether there has to be an incubation period between Pacov-1 and Pacov-2. You been posted here in Paris for a long time? Your wife and kiddies with you? Do torturers have wives and kiddies?”

For a moment the other sat as though stunned. Then he stood up. “You would do that, Mr. Lessing? Pacov… to Paris?”

“Larger scale than the poor girl in your photographs, but essentially the same thing. Yes, killing you might be worth Paris. It sure as hell is worth my life… to me, anyway.”

“You’ll die with the rest!”

“No way. You see, I injected myself with the antidote before I left India.” It was a whale-sized red herring; as far as Mulder’s people knew, there was no antidote for Pacov.

The agent continued to gape, and his fingers started to come down again. Lessing grated, “Keep them up there. As I said, you can thumb me now, but I’ll still have time to crack Pacov-2 all the hell over you. Nothing would give me more pleasure.”

“Your own government, Lessing! That’s whom you’re betraying!”

“Bullshit. If my own government is using you, then it’s down to the bottom of the barrel, and it deserves what it gets! I don’t believe you anyway.” He had an idea. “Take your wallet out of your pocket and toss it down on the table.”

Grimly, the other complied.

The wallet spilled out French, British, and American money; the pockets held international credit cards and drivers licenses made out in several names, all bland and colorless and false: Mark Leebens, Peter E. Hartmann, Harry Rosch. There were calling cards and business cards, too, all different and quite impersonal; no photographs, no personal notes or addresses.

He sensed a presence beside him and shied away, ready to continue his Pacov bluff or to shoot, whichever was necessary.

It was a man, the young European from Copley’s waiting room.

“Let us take care of him for you now, Mr. Lessing.” The voice was high and boyish, the accent German. “This person works for a private agency, in close touch with Israeli State Security. We’ll deal with him.” To the older man he said, “You can take your fingers away from your cheek, mein Herr. Your little bird up in the balcony will not sing any more.”

“And who the goddamned hell are you?” Lessing snarled. Should he feel relieved, or was this just another frying pan? A new and hotter fire?

“The name doesn’t matter. You want to see more of Paris, Mr. Lessing, or are you done here? We have a taxi waiting, the red, white, and black sedan outside: Mulder’s Taxi Service.”