Turn of the Cards

Chapter One

If the tall man had not been to an alien world, he would never have seen the danger.

Spring on the Damplein, with the North Sea sky above, blue arid astringent as the taste of peppermint, as if to cut the smell of the IJ docks beyond the rail yards. Mark Meadows said, “Huh?” and came back to himself with a sensation like a bubble bursting.

A newspaper had wrapped itself around his shins like an affectionate amoeba. He reached down, picked it up. It was a two-day-old copy of the international Herald Tribune in English. He glanced at the headlines. Governor Martínez was announcing victory in the War on Drugs. The UN was still debating whether the American suppression of the jokers on the Rox had been genocide — a twinge went through his soul at that. He’d had friends on the Rox, and it hadn’t been the fault of the poor jokers who had gathered there to defy an increasingly hostile nat world that he’d had to flee for his life.

Bloat, man, I’m sorry. K. C. was right. The Combine couldn’t let you go, and they were just too damned much for you. Requiescat in Pace.

In other news, the European Council was convening a summit on wild cards affairs. Nur al-Allah terrorists had bombed a free joker clinic in Vienna. The government of Vietnam declared it would keep the revolutionary socialist faith until the end of time, no matter that everyone else from South Yemen to the USSR was dropping it like a rabid rat.

It was as if he’d never left.

Mark would rather have his nails pulled out than litter; he wadded the paper into a back pocket of his secondhand khaki trousers. Now that he had been pulled back out of that remote place inside his head where he’d been spending so much time of late, he blinked in the thin noonday light. A lunchtime mob was squeezed in between the Palladian-style Royal Palace — with its green statues of mythological figures and its seven symbolic archways that led, symbolically, nowhere — and a lot of boxy old brown buildings with gabled roofs. The scene felt comfortable but just a bit drab, which struck Mark as a perfect microcosm of what he’d experienced of Dutch life in the few weeks since he’d returned to Earth.

People were looking up and pointing. He raised his head too. He had to squint against the sky’s brightness, but right away he saw what they were looking at: a slim figure, high above the Earth, flying without aid of an aircraft.

Where he came from, that was no big deal; flying aces were as regular a feature of New York’s sky as smog and traffic helicopters. The Europeans had less experience with such phenomena. They still got excited.

Mark shaded his eyes, tried to make out who it was. The suit seemed to be blue, hard to pick out against the sky, and it trailed a voluminous white cape. The getup belonged to no one he’d met personally, but it was familiar from countless TV broadcasts.

“Hmm,” he said. “Mistral. Wonder what she’s, like, doing over here?”

Nobody stepped forward to enlighten him. He noticed that something was going down on the Vischmarkt side of the square. He had some free time — very little but, in fact — and had been vaguely acting on an urge to wander down and check out the Central Station again. It was the product of the same daffy late-nineteenth-century romanticism that led Bavaria’s Mad King Ludwig to build the original of what Walt Disney would make into Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, all gingerbread and silly towers that its builder fondly believed was Renaissance. Just to Mark’s taste, in other words.

Curious, Mark dared the stream of lorries and buses and bicycles pedaled by puffing businessmen and Indonesians whose limbs and faces seemed carved of polished mahogany to cross the broad street called Damrak or Rokin, depending on where you were, that split the square in two. Speakers had been placed among the concentric rings that circled the white cement dildo of the war memorial. A young man with baggy paratrooper pants and his hair cropped to a silvery-blond plush was striding back and forth between them, hollering into a cordless mike. He was attracting a crowd, mostly young.

“What’s going on?” Mark asked the air in general. Amsterdammers tend to be reserved, but they’re also cordial, and have a seven-hundred-year tradition of taking strangers in stride. As Mark anticipated, one caught hold of the conversational line he’d thrown.

“The young man is a Green,” came a reply in an old man’s voice that made the Dutch-accented English sound gruff. “He is speaking about the wild cards.”

“Wild cards?” Mark frowned. He rubbed at his beard — it was growing in nicely, full this time instead of the goatee which had been his trademark for so long, and he wasn’t entirely used to feeling hair on his cheeks. Have things changed since I left? he wondered. “I thought the Greens were, like, an environmental party.”

The young orator was pointing after Mistral, about to vanish to the southwest. His exhortation had cranked up a notch in pitch and vehemence.

“They are.” The old man nodded precisely, once. He had a dark suit and dark Homburg and leaned on a dark cane. Time seemed to have reduced him to the bare essentials except for round red cheeks. With his snow-white Imperial he looked like a shrunken Colonel Sanders. “But they are a political party, and so they must have an agenda for everything.”

“What’s he saying?” Mark didn’t know much about the Greens except for what he read in Time and the Village

Voice or saw on the CBS Evening News, but he’d always had the impression they were pretty right-on. Still, whenever he heard people talk about wild cards and politics in one breath, he got that old familiar ice-water trickle down the small of his back.

“He says that the new Europe must make all those touched by the wild card wards of the state.”

“What?” His daughter had been a ward of the state for a while. Getting her out of kid jail — where she’d been thrown because the government disapproved of both her parents, not because she had done anything wrong — was the reason he was living undercover in a foreign land. One of them, anyway. “That — that’s discrimination. It’s like racism.”

“Indeed. It does seem that way. The young man assures us it is for everyone’s good. The jokers must be cared for in the interests of compassion, the aces must be constrained in the interests of public safety. In this way only can an environmentally pure Europe emerge.”

He shook his head. “I do not like this myself. The earnest young man has the right to say his piece, no true Amsterdammer would deny him. But I remember another group that wanted to single a particular group out for special treatment. They were very concerned with the purity of the environment; they were quite Green, in fact. This very monument commemorates their victims.”

“The Greens aren’t the only ones who, uh, have it in for the wild cards,” Mark said. He’d seen English-language telecasts of debates in the European Parliament in The Hague on RTL.

“No, indeed. It is a very popular point of view these days. Very progressive. The Eastern Europeans can turn on wild cards instead of Jews, now that the Soviet boot is off their necks, and no one will criticize them.” He looked at Mark closely. “Once again, you Americans lead the way.”

“It’s not something I’m proud of, man.”

“Good. Good for you.”

He held up a hand. “Wait. Listen: ’There is nothing natural about the wild cards. That is not their fault; they are innocent victims of an alien technology more monstrous than even American technology. But like Styrofoam or the products of gene-engineering, their access to our threatened biosphere must be supervised and carefully restricted.’”

“At least we’re easily recyclable, man,” Mark said.

His stomach dropped away toward the center of the Earth when the old man’s eyes caught his and held them and he realized what he’d said.

“I hope you have not correctly grasped the thrust of what that very sincere young man is saying,” the old man said, “but I very much fear you have.”

Feeling strange, feeling as if the Beast’s mark the fundamentalists said listening to rock ’n’ roll would give you was finally glowing to red life on his forehead, 666, Mark mumbled thanks and started away. The old man called him back.

“I hope you will forgive my saying so, young man, but you look just like the Jesus of the Calvinists, with your long blond hair and your beard,” the old man said. “Fortunately I am Catholic.”

Mark blinked and smiled sheepishly, as startled at being called “young” as by the rest of what the old man said. He was in his early forties, and he didn’t feel young.

Then purposeful movement caught the corners of his peripheral vision, and alarms rang in his skull.

On Takis the assassin’s knife is just part of the decor. You reflexively learn to pick it out of the background, the way an antique freak could spot a Louis Quinze chiffonier in the clutter of an Amsterdam spring market. Or you die.

“Get down,” Mark said to the old man. He turned to run.

“Hey!” A voice shouted behind him — American English, bright and brassy as a trumpet. “Hey, you son of a bitch, stop!”

That was it. The dogs were on him. He thought it would take them longer to sniff him out. He stretched his long legs and ran like hell.

“Motherfucker,” the slender dark-haired man snarled. His hand dove inside the summer-weight off-white jacket he wore without a tie.

His beefier, blonder comrade grabbed at his arm. “Lynn, no —”

The Czech Skorpion is a true machine pistol, which is to say it’s pistol-sized and it shoots full-automatic like a machine gun. Not appreciably accurate but nice and concealable, just the thing for chopping up people at handshake range. It was a popular number with the Euroterrorist set, like the West German Red Army Fraction before the Wall came tumbling down.

The Colt Scorpion is entirely different. It’s manufactured in America for use by various government agencies, which is to say the DEA. It looks like the Czech Skorpion, it works like the Czech Skorpion, and it fires the same round as the Czech Skorpion. But the Czech Skorpion is used by terrorists, and the American Scorpion is used by the good guys. No similarity at all.

The man called Lynn used his Scorpion the way they teach at all the better law-enforcement academies: you fire short bursts and sort of slash the thing around as if it’s a scimitar. People screamed and fell. A loudspeaker popped and died. The plush-headed young man in the para pants goggled and ran for cover behind the white pillar of the monument.

The Netherlands was a peaceful place, and proud of it. Though first socialism and then Greenthink had made them self-conscious about it, the Dutch still regarded trade as a more elevated calling than murder made legal, made sport. They lacked gunfire reflexes.

Most of the crowd was just standing and staring, not realizing where the sudden loud sounds were coming from or even what they were. The tall man took instinctive advantage of this, darting this way and that through the crush like a frightened earthbound crane, his shoulder-length gray-blond hair flying a head above the crowd but not offering any kind of shot, even for someone calm enough to draw bead.

The man with the Scorpion wasn’t. His dark eyes burned like drops of molten metal, and beans of knotted muscle stood out inside the hinge of either jaw. The veins and bones of his hands seemed about to burst through the skin as his partner wrestled them and the machine pistol into the air.

“Lynn, Jesus, take it easy,” the big blond kid gasped. “There’s gonna be hell to pay if you cap too many natives.”

Lynn tore away from him with a wordless curse, raised the weapon again. Their quarry had darted behind the white cement demilune that backed the monument pillar and vanished.

The good burghers were belatedly getting the message that something was very wrong, and diving to the pavement to join those who were rolling around clutching themselves and screaming. “You son of a bitch, Gary,” Lynn raged, swinging the Scorpion both-armed in front of him like José Canseco in the on-deck circle. “You let him get away!”

“Yeah,” Gary said, hauling on the sleeve of his Don Johnson pastel sport jacket. “Now we’d better think about getting away before the cavalry comes.”

He dragged Lynn, still screaming, through a now-panicked crowd. The Amsterdammers didn’t seem to be paying them any attention, as if they didn’t associate the two Americans with the abrupt irruption of noise and pain. They dodged across Damrak/Rokin and down the street that ran along the north side of the square, to a silver and blue cicada of a Citroën parked in front of the Nieuwe Kerk.

A figure dropped down from the sky to meet them. Her slim form was encased in a uniform of blue and silver. A parachute-like cape deflated around her shoulders as she touched down. Her hair was brown.

“You missed him,” she said in a flat voice.

Lynn slammed his scorpion back into its shoulder holster. “If you’d been down low covering us instead of showboating way the hell up there in the wild blue yonder, he never would’ve gotten away.”

She gave him a haughty look. She was well equipped for it, with the kind of narrow nose and fine features that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a glamour magazine, and hadn’t. There were dark circles beneath the green-hazel eyes, though, and a haunted look within them.

“I had no idea you were going to move so quickly. I thought we were going to set this up carefully and then move. Forgive me if I don’t quite have the hang of your methods.”

“Lynn saw the sucker,” the blond agent said. “It just kind of set him off. There’s history between them, y’know?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” the ace said. “I’d figure that going off prematurely would be one of your friend’s difficulties.”

Lynn gave her a look black and hot as the flank of a potbellied stove. Then he turned and kicked the Citro’s door. “He’s just a hippie. A fucking burned-out hippie. How the hell could he make us?”

“Somebody must have told him,” his partner said. “Somebody turned us over.”

“These damned Dutch uncles. They don’t have the stomach for the War on Drugs. They’ve been jacking with us since day one.” He shook his head. “If I hadn’t cut loose on him the second I spotted him, we’d never” The sirens had tuned up, their little voices rising and falling like a computer-simulated doo-wop group. The woman’s face went white. “You trigger-happy halfwits!” she snarled. “You just sprayed a crowd with bullets?”

“He’s an ace,” the bigger man said defensively. “What do you want Lynn to do, Ms. Carlysle, let Meadows have first crack at him? A good man’s already died on the trail of this puke.”

“Shot accidentally by NYPD,” the woman said, “as a result of his own carelessness.”

“You fucking bitch.” Lynn started forward as if to strike her.

A whistling rose around the agent. A cloud of dust swirled upward to surround him. His dark hair began to whip in his face, and his clothing to flap as if he were caught in the midst of a whirlwind. He opened his mouth, but suddenly seemed to have no air to speak with.

His partner laid a hand on his arm. “Lynn, take it easy. She didn’t mean anything.”

The whistling stopped. Lynn fell back against the car, briefly and resentfully touched the base of his throat with his fingertips.

“I’m quite capable of taking care of myself, Agent Hamilton,” the woman said. “Your being so quick on the draw is going to cause us serious problems with our hosts.”

Lynn had recovered enough to show her a smirk. “So what? They can’t touch us. We’re DEA.”

“If innocent people died”

“Hey, baby, we’re in a war,” Lynn said. “In war, people die. The sooner these fat-ass Dutchmen wake up and smell that cup of coffee, the sooner they’re gonna fit into this new Unified Europe thing.”

Mistral Helene Carlysle gave him a final angry look and got into the driver’s seat. The two agents piled hastily in after her. They squealed away from the ancient church as emergency vehicles flooded the square behind them.