Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 57 Lampedusa, Thursday 12 July [Now]

More fucking flash guns than at the Oscars. Colonel Borgenicht kept his assessment to himself, while still regarding it as pretty accurate.

Originally he'd demanded that the event take place during the day and that numbers be limited. He'd been overruled on both counts. His attempts to go over the head of General Mayer, as he found himself referring through gritted teeth to the Professor, foundered when the five-star general he approached was overruled by Gene Newman in his capacity as Commander in Chief.

So Colonel Borgenicht found himself providing security for a Sicilian village emptied of most of its inhabitants and filled with the cream of the world's press, which wasn't exactly how the Colonel thought of the growling and surging mob roped off on one side of a picturesque nineteenth-century square.

After a quick once-over, he'd dismissed the female journalists. Mostly they were scrawny, dressed in black and utterly interchangeable, being short-haired, immaculately made up despite the heat, and thin as teenaged boys. His own tastes were more lush. The men came in two models, ponytailed and those, infinitely greater in number, who sported heads as cropped as any of his own marines.

These ones worried him.

Colonel Borgenicht existed to protect his President, his country, his men and himself in that order. The thought that the President might be killed while he was on duty had given the Colonel a sleepless forty-eight hours and reduced his social skills to zero. All that concerned him was getting through the next two hours.

The time had been chosen because Prisoner Zero needed to show the President the Milky Way. That was what General Mayer had told him. The lunatic wanted to show President Newman some stars. So the entire meeting was timed to coincide with the heavens breaking through the evening sky.

It helped, apparently, that the meeting was taking place on Lampedusa, where light pollution was still in its infancy; although, to make sure, most lights in the village were to be turned off at a preset time.

Colonel Borgenicht had wanted this meeting in broad daylight on American soil. Some place where he had complete control of who was let in. Better still, some place where he was not the most senior officer present. There were, it seemed, a number of good reasons why this was a bad idea. And he could tell, just by looking, how distasteful Petra Mayer found it having to put those reasons into words.

They'd been at breakfast in the officers' mess. (This is what a hand-scrawled note on its door called the place. A vending machine inside selling six kinds of flavoured water, and a row of rubber mats revealed its other identity as the hotel's T'ai Chi room.)

"It should be in the US."

Ripping apart her smoked salmon bagel, Petra Mayer ate the wedge of salmon, having first scraped off all traces of cream cheese. "Ma'am," she said. "You're meant to call me ‘ma'am’."

The Colonel was sure she did this only to irritate.

"It has to be in the US, ma'am."

The officers' mess was meant to be self-service, something to do with recent advances in democratic equality, but the Professor had discovered that spilling a few glasses of orange juice as she carried them to her table was enough to make waiter service suddenly materialize. Besides, she was a general. A very short, rather ill and temporary general, but still a general.

The Professor raised her cup. "Another coffee," she demanded.

Nothing else was said until this arrived and then she sat forward, indicating that Colonel Borgenicht should do the same. "Why," she said quietly, "do you think we're keeping the prisoner here?"

"Because it shows faith in our NATO allies." That was the first among many reasons trotted out by the Pentagon Press Office and the Colonel didn't believe it any more than the Professor.

"No," said Petra Mayer. "I mean really?"

The Colonel blew out his breath. He was having trouble seeing this small woman as a general. In fact, he had trouble seeing her as anything other than trouble. Her brief stint as the President's tutor he knew about. Her intelligence assessments of Beirut and all places similar was on a need-to-know basis, and he didn't.

"Questioning," he said.

Petra Mayer nodded. "Obviously," she said. "Take this man to the US and a whole different set of rules apply. You want that?"

Something was troubling Colonel Borgenicht. "I'd have thought--" The Colonel stopped, considered and wondered how to finish.

"That this is exactly what I would have wanted? Of course it is," said the Professor. "It's also exactly what the US can't risk. At least, according to the Attorney General." Petra Mayer stared at the Colonel, who now leant right forward to ensure their conversation remained private. "What do you think the verdict would have been if this had been tried in an open court?"

"I can guess," he said, after a moment's thought.

"Quite," said Petra Mayer. "You've seen the files."

"He made a confession."

"Indeed," said the Professor. "We're getting really good at letting others do our dirty work. That would be the first thing to go. Throw out his confession and what do we have? A lunatic who should never have been allowed out in public. Unfortunately he also happens to be a genius."

"So we retry," said the Colonel, his words almost a whisper. "Keep the court military."

"And reach what verdict?" Petra Mayer stared at the crop-haired black officer. The man was built like the proverbial shithouse and had biceps that still, fifteen years after he was commissioned, betrayed the fact he'd started in the ranks. Petra Mayer had seen the Colonel's file. She knew about his divorce, last year's less than discreet battle against OxyC, a prescription analgesic better known to most of Dr. Petrov's clients as "hillbilly heroin."

The man had a high IQ fighting to escape the limitations of its uniform.

"It gets worse," Petra Mayer said.

The Colonel looked at her. "How can it get worse?" he demanded.

"The meeting's to be televised in real time," said Petra Mayer. "They're going to walk out there in front of the cameras, look at the stars and shake hands."

"Why?"

"Because it's part of the deal."

"Whose deal?"

"Prisoner Zero's."

"Jesus fuck." From the look on his face, it seemed Colonel Borgenicht finally understood that his certainties were coming unravelled over a cup of cold coffee in a hastily emptied hotel room on an island in the middle of nowhere.

The square was carefully selected. Although it was only chosen after several alternative locations had been considered and rejected; Camp Freedom was the first to go.

As this was Colonel Borgenicht's first choice he expected no less.

The camp was secure, wrapped tightly with razor wire and had high-powered searchlights set up at all four corners on scaffolding towers. Machine-gun encampments guarded the roads in and out. The very qualities that made it Colonel Borgenicht's first choice led to its rejection by Gene Newman.

Razor wire and searchlights said the wrong thing for his administration. They said fear of the world outside. Gene Newman wanted something warmer, more media-friendly. He wanted historic, elegant, statesmanlike...

The town hall in Lampedusa had to be dropped when the ruling Northern Alliance wanted to be part of the handshake. A seventeenth-century palazzo, now functioning as a five-star hotel on Punta Muro Vecchio, reluctantly went the same way, even though it had its own heliport, the terraced gardens were entirely walled and the Milanese manager loved the idea.

Astronomical insurance costs, claimed the owners. The real reason was more pragmatic. Palazzo Muro Vecchio had a wide and loyal Italian clientele who were none too happy with the way the Marrakech incident had been handled and the Swiss group owning the hotel took an entirely sensible decision to protect their investment.

This left Valera, an old white-walled villaggio near Punta Parise, at the western end of the island, beneath the shadow of Monte Alberto Sole. A press release from the White House revealed that the village variously had been Byzantine, Arab, Norman and Spanish. For much of the Renaissance, while condottieri set themselves up as princes in the north and southern Italy continued its war of attrition against the Barbary pirates, Villaggio Valera lay derelict, a home to goats and the occasional fugitive.

All of this changed in 1881 when what remained of the derelict village was bought by Baron del Smith, a cotton trader from Liverpool who'd fought alongside Garibaldi at the battles of Volturno and Aspromonte, been created baron by Victor Emmanuel II and then, five years later, been sent into exile by the same King for trying to introduce communal farming to Sicily.

The village was rebuilt to a plan drawn up by Baron del Smith's wife and the slopes around it divided into workable farms. Olive trees and lemon groves were planted, as were almonds and oranges. The experiment was a brave one but lack of adequate irrigation, the heat of a few bad summers and the mistrust of other landowners saw the village fall back into near ruin. By 1910 the almonds were being picked, sorted and husked by old women who spoke sadly and often of their sons making new lives for themselves in America.

President Gene Newman's great-grandmother was born in Villaggio Valera. In retrospect, it was an obvious choice.

"There'll be a gun on you at all times. You understand that?" Colonel Borgenicht's voice was tight. "We've got snipers in the bell tower and on the roof of the town hall."

Prisoner Zero smiled.

Part of Colonel Borgenicht wanted to beat the man's head against the nearest wall, the other bit wanted to get on his knees and beg the bastard not to fuck this thing up. Instead, he just nodded, as if Prisoner Zero had given him the answer he wanted.

"Yeah," said Petra Mayer. "You've told him that already."

They were standing beside the church. And at the opposite end of the square, behind waist-high metal barriers, waited the press, plus selected members of the public and Katie Petrov, Miles Alsdorf and all those who didn't rate being included in the Presidential entourage.

Colonel Borgenicht would have preferred the barriers to be higher, but then he'd have preferred the bit parts and media not to be there at all, which was obviously impossible since the entire meeting had been turned into one big press call.

He had snipers stationed at both ends of the square, a precaution helped by the fact that the town hall's roof was flat and the bell tower of the church was easily reachable by stairs from the inside.

A sniper in the ornate bell tower was responsible for the laser dot on the back of Prisoner Zero's head. It would have been simple to give laser sights to the man on the roof of the town hall opposite, but then Prisoner Zero would have had a rag dot visible in the middle of his forehead. And that would send out all the wrong signals, apparently.

The plan was simple.

President Newman would arrive by helicopter at a field outside the village. He would walk up the hill, rather than take a jeep. This was his choice and against the express advice of his Secret Service men. A side effect of this was that extra snipers had to be found to cover the lower slopes of Monte Alberto Sole, stretching the Colonel's resources even thinner.

He would walk along a short section of Via Smith, from which cars and pedestrians had been banned, and enter Piazza Solforino from the north, crossing the cobbles with the press and token public behind their barricades to his right. In the middle of the square he would stop and take a salute from Colonel Borgenicht, before pausing to examine the seventeenth-century bell tower silhouetted against the twilight.

Professor Mayer would then bring out Prisoner Zero, who was to be clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and unmanacled. To bring the prisoner to the President was, in Colonel Borgenicht's opinion, a very basic breach of protocol, since all those President Newman intended to meet should be ready and waiting.

The President had insisted, however. He didn't want any shots of an exhausted-looking Prisoner Zero standing beside an ill, elderly looking Petra Mayer.

"All you do is shake hands." If anything, the Colonel's voice was even tighter. "You step forward, shake hands, step away. Nothing else. And you don't speak until you're spoken to."

"It's going to be fine," Petra Mayer said. "We've been through all this." She turned to the prisoner, who looked almost normal in Levi's, Nike trainers, a Gap sweatshirt and two weeks' growth of hair. "You know what to do, right?"

Prisoner Zero smiled at the small woman with the three gold bangles and a beak-like nose. A crow, Malika would have called her, and in all probability would have been right.

"Well?" Colonel Borgenicht said.

The prisoner shrugged. Whether or not he knew what to do was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the darkness did.

President Newman's helicopter was small, single-bladed and pale blue with the President's seal fixed either side, on both doors. Since that model went into service only in black, camouflage or jungle green, Colonel Borgenicht imagined the craft had been given a rapid paint job. It also flew low over Villaggio Valera on its way to the field, which the Colonel was sure had not been in the flight plan.

"Shouldn't you be with your men?" Petra Mayer nodded to an honour guard who stood at attention in the twilight.

The Colonel knew Professor Mayer was trying to get rid of him. Most probably so she could talk to the prisoner in private.

"I'm going," he said, adding "ma'am" as an afterthought.

Prisoner Zero and the Professor watched the thick-set black officer march out to a prearranged spot, halt with what looked like a complicated stamp of his boots and come to attention.

"The President is entering the square." The voice in Petra Mayer's ear bead was clipped and military, and she watched Colonel Borgenicht nod to himself from his position in the middle of the square as he heard the same message. A ripple of tension ran through the crowd, heads turning and photographers surging forward as they realized what those wired for sound had already been told.

Gene Newman, looking relaxed in light fawn slacks, tan shoes and a summer-weight jacket, strode under an arch and into view, the First Lady half a pace behind him.

He was a Hollywood star who happened to be President. A brilliant mind, a sharp politician, an adequate husband. Most of all, he was a man of the people. Hands stretched out to him, voices called.

Stepping off the path that had been marked discreetly in chalk, Gene Newman reached the barriers and grasped the hand of an old woman, shaking it warmly. From first seeing the crowds until that moment, his eyes had been on a young Sicilian woman in her twenties, a small boy glued to her hips, his thin arms tight around her neck. She had a face straight from La Dolce Vita and breasts full enough to die for.

But the second the old woman behind the girl thrust out her own hand, all Gene Newman's attention locked on to her. "You have a beautiful village," he said, in Italian bad enough to disgrace a child, and around the grandmother, daughter and child, members of the European press practically cooed in delight.

He was brilliant, Petra Mayer had to give her old pupil that. Ruthless, intellectually arrogant in private and occasionally promiscuous but a good president all the same. He didn't talk to the girl next either, instead he pulled a stupid face at her child, then reached out and gripped the toddler's nose lightly between thumb and first finger.

The boy might have burst into tears or buried his head in his mother's shoulder, but this was Gene Newman and the kid just grinned as the President grinned back and a dozen flash guns fired in the dying sun. Only then did President Newman turn to the mother. His words were few and his Italian rudimentary, but he left her staring after him with something approaching open hunger.

The man could have kept a team of anthropologists in research papers for life on how power made middle-aged men unfeasibly attractive to women in their twenties.

"Ma'am," said Colonel Borgenicht, his voice tight in her ear. "You're on..."

This was Petra Mayer's signal to walk Prisoner Zero out into the middle of the square. The sniper rifle in the bell tower would be covering him from beginning to end and the man behind the sights was the best America had to offer, on special loan from the CIA. Whatever happened, that rifle would remain trained on Prisoner Zero's skull. If necessary, the sniper would shoot through anyone who got in the way.

From the look in the eyes of the Colonel when he told her this, Petra Mayer knew he meant every word.

"Time to go," Prisoner Zero said brightly, pushing himself away from the church wall, and Petra Mayer did her best not to look shocked.

Marzaq al-Turq, sometimes living as Jake Razor and now answering only to Prisoner Zero, stepped into the square and began his walk across the dusty cobblestones of Piazza Solforino. Camera flash burnt his eyes and the weight of history hung like a yoke around his shoulders but he barely noticed.

"Look this way..."

"Over here!"

"Hey, Jake..."

Prisoner Zero could hear the demands of the press over the beat of his own heart and he could taste nightfall in the air and smell dog shit, diesel, a distant fire and the stink of sweat that rose from his body. A scrawled echo of the only day that had really mattered in his life.

All the things he'd hoped to develop from Jake's notes remained unfinished. He didn't understand the shape of time, not really. All he had was a matrix of multi-dimensional intimations filtered through a three-dimensional brain, a flicker book masquerading as film.

He was no closer to finding the missing name of God.

"The missing name of what?"

The question came from a man standing in front of him. Gene Newman, President of the United States, the man who refused to sign a space accord with Beijing and the person Prisoner Zero had been instructed to kill.

"You have to take America into deep space," Prisoner Zero said. "You can't let China go it alone."

"That's what this is all about?"

"I think so."

"But you don't know?"

Prisoner Zero shook his head.

"I can't sign the accord," said the President. "Not the way things are in China at the moment. You know how many people Beijing has in prison camps?" He was on firmer ground here. Gene Newman was always on firm ground when it came to statistics.

The man looked at him.

Gene Newman sighed. "That's different," he said.

Around them people were looking anxious. Well, Colonel Borgenicht, the First Lady and Petra Mayer were looking anxious and they counted as people.

Cameras were flashing, voices shouting. But all the President's attention was on one emaciated figure in front of him. Prisoner Zero didn't look a threat to anyone. He looked like someone trapped in a life where genius was not enough.

"You can change history," said Prisoner Zero. As he moved closer to the President than he was meant to get Colonel Borgenicht began to glance between his Commander in Chief and the bell tower.

The Colonel was anxiety made flesh.

"We should put that man out of his misery," said the President. "We'll talk about the other stuff later. Let's do the shake." He spoke as if Prisoner Zero regularly did camera calls. As if the world's gaze came naturally to them both.

"You okay?" he added, watching Prisoner Zero sway. The last thing President Newman needed was for the man to collapse in front of the cameras. He could see the papers now. TORTURED PRISONER COLLAPSES AT FEET OF PRESIDENT. That would be one of the politer headlines.

"Sure," said Prisoner Zero.

"Then let's get this over with."

The President reached for a shake, cameras whirring, before Prisoner Zero even had time to take the hand offered. "We faked your signature," said the President, trapping Prisoner Zero's hand between both of his. "And backdated the appeal. Petra has explained that to you, hasn't she?"

"You...?"

"Look into the lenses," President Newman told Prisoner Zero, "shake my hand and smile." And the prisoner did just that. He shook the offered hand, turned to the press and gazed into a bank of cameras, overtaken by a firestorm of flash.

Mulberry bushes, a stream almost wide enough to be called a river and, over it, a tiny bridge formed from a perfect quarter circle, painted red, green and gold.

A boy running.

Prisoner Zero wasn't too sure where that was happening until he heard Colonel Borgenicht's voice bark in his ear. The order was for everyone, President Newman was to be protected.

The boy slid to a halt in front of the President, dropping to one knee and pointing his Leica at the man. He had a badge around his neck which read "Presse" and his grin was wide, his eyes dark. He reminded Prisoner Zero of someone and Prisoner Zero was still wondering if that someone was him when Gene Newman held up his hand.

"It's okay," he said, to no one in particular. "Give the kid some room... Where are you from?"

The boy thought about it. "Xingjian," he said.

Gene Newman laughed. "I meant which paper?"

"El View."

"Not one I know." He shrugged. "Sorry."

The boy looked about twelve. No, the President caught himself. Eighteen, twenty... Half his own staff looked like children these days.

"You want us to shake again?"

The boy nodded.

"Okay," Gene said. He thrust out his hand to Prisoner Zero. "Let's give the kid what he needs."

Light, such as Prisoner Zero had never seen.

A click of the camera, a flash and then somewhere very distant a grown man screamed; but the sound of Colonel Borgenicht's outrage was already fading and Prisoner Zero was not its cause anyway.