Turn of the Cards

Chapter Five

The brown-haired young woman turned around in the driver’s seat of the Citroën and said, “Dr. Meadows. So good to see you again.”

She gave him a smile as chill and brittle as late frost and turned back forward to close her own door. Memory belatedly kicked in.

“Hey! I know you. You’re Mistral. I saw you”

He meant to say, I saw you in Aces High. But to do so would be to admit that he was Cap’n Trips, which he had some vague idea might prejudice his cause, even though he guessed just about everybody within reach of American satellite broadcasting knew it now anyway. Besides, she had said, “Good to see you again” … mostly he tripped on his tongue.

As he was doing so, the larger, blond member of the pair that had hustled him into the slope-backed French sedan slid in after him. “She calls herself Helen,” he said. “That’s Ms. Carlysle to assholes like you.”

The smaller, darker one got in the front passenger scat. There was something vaguely familiar about him. Maybe it was the nasty little pistol he’d stuck in Marks side and now stuck under Mark’s nose. Mark knew nothing about firearms, but he thought it was probably some kind of automatic weapon. He also had a suspicion that the little striations on its bullets that ballistics experts looked for under microscopes would bear a marked resemblance to those on the ones dug from victims of the notorious Damplein shooting two days ago. He closed his door. Mistral — Helen Carlysle? — let the clutch in and drove off.

“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this,” the dark man said. He had the crazy intensity that was so popular in movie cops these days. “You’re going to burn, ass-wipe.”

That didn’t sound right. “What for?” he asked, a microsecond before realizing it made him sound like a dweeb.

The thin, feral face flushed. “You killed my partner! You killed Dooley, and you’re going down for it big time.”

Mark blinked. “What are you talking about? I didn’t kill anybody.” Not on Earth, anyway. He had a hard time dealing with some of what he’d done on Takis, but it was no time to bring that up.

“What about all those people you sold your poison to on the streets?” Carlysle asked in a strained voice.

Mark stared at her. About the only crime he wasn’t accused of was trafficking. The two male agents turned a momentary look of disbelief her way, then turned back to Mark, obviously choosing to edit her question out of their personal realities.

“Tim Dooley, DEA,” the beefy blond said. “His partner. He was killed in a shootout in your lab in New York.”

“In my lab?” Mark was completely disoriented now.

“Over your fucking head shop,” the dark-haired one said. “Oh, excuse me. Your New Age deli.”

“A couple of years ago,” Carlysle said over her shoulder. “About the time you pulled your disappearing act from judge Conower’s courtroom.”

Mark had no idea what they were talking about. After Judge Conower’s surprise decision — adjudging both Mark and his ex-wife unsuitable parents and remanding Sprout to the custody of the New York juvenile justice system — Mark had sort of phased out of the world for a while.

“He was actually shot by a Narcotics Division officer from NYPD,” Carlysle said. “It was what you might call a slight misunderstanding.”

“That doesn’t matter,” the dark-haired agent snarled. “You’re just as guilty as if you’d pulled the fucking trigger. That’s what the law says, dude.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard in my life!” Mark blurted.

The agent shoved the muzzle of his machine pistol up Mark’s right nostril. “Don’t call me crazy!”

“Hey, Lynn,” the big blond agent said, reaching up as if to touch his partner’s arm, not quite daring to do so. “Take it easy. Don’t want to get blood on the upholstery, you know.”

The other man turned him a look of hatred so pure it rocked him back against the rear of the seat. Then he relaxed.

“Yeah, you’re right, Gary” he said, actually taking the gun out of Mark’s face. “We’re supposed to take good care of the little lady, after all. Not subject her to the sight of spilled brains.”

“You can knock off the condescending sexist crap,” Carlysle said.

Lynn laughed and tucked his piece out of sight beneath the windbreaker he was wearing today. They were driving southeast away from Leyden Square, along the Lijnbaansgracht. Trees and colorful moored houseboats ticked past.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Mark said.

“Jesus,” Lynn said, and turned away.

“Go ahead,” his partner said. “You’ll have to clean it up.

“Wait. My arm. My left arm hurts. Like, what’d you guys do —”

He slammed his right hand against his sternum and doubled over.

Lynn came around in his seat. “What? What the fuck?”

“Hey!” Gary said, holding up a hand to try to keep his partner under control. “Hey, knock that shit off.”

Mark uncurled a little. “My — my chest. Aaah!”

“Wait!” Carlysle cried, veering a little. “You don’t understand. Nausea, pains in the arm — he’s having a heart attack, dammit!”

“Oh, bullshit,” Agent Gary said. He pulled Mark upright.

“Hey,” the blond agent exclaimed. “He put something in his mouth!” His hand went under his sport coat.

Mark grabbed the coat by the collar and yanked it desperately down Agent Gary’s back to his elbows, effectively pinning his arms. He changed.

The blond agent cried out in surprised fear as Mark’s skinny body expanded, filling the slope-roofed rear of the Citroën. Helen Carlysle looked up to her rearview, saw an immense gray-skinned man crushing Gary against the side of the car, and crashed into a Daihatsu parked facing the canal.

The gray man reared up, crashing up through the tinted-glass fastback. He climbed out of the now-stationary car with a squeal of tearing metal, dragging the terrified Gary with him.

Lynn had his Scorpion out and leveled across the back of the passenger seat. Carlysle knocked its barrel up in the air. “Don’t shoot! You’ll hit Hamilton!”

The gray man was backing away, dragging the agent with him as a bullet shield. He was big and muscular in a furniture-mover way. His skin was shiny. He wore what looked like gray Speedo racing trunks. His nose and ears were small, and there was no hair visible anywhere on his face or body.

Spitting curses like a cat in a sack, Lynn pulled the lever on his door, kicked it open when it balked. He jumped out on the sidewalk with his Scorpion up in a two-handed Weaver stance.

His partner recovered his senses enough to scream, “Don’t shoot!”

Realizing that the dark-haired agent was going to shoot anyway, the gray-skinned man turned and lunged for the canal, still holding onto Gary’s coat. The seams gave way, leaving the agent standing there in just the sleeves as his erstwhile captor, still clutching the jacket’s torso, turned and launched himself in a racing dive.

As he did, he shifted again. What hit the greasy green surface of the Lijnbaan canal was the sleek, gray form of a Tursiops truncatus.

The passengers of a red-and-white canal tour boat crowded against its glass wall to point and mouth at the spectacle of the dolphin streaking past with a vest of some sort draped over its rostrum. Then they tumbled over each other as bullets from Lynn’s machine pistol stippled the water’s surface like hail.

The Scorpion ran dry. For a moment Saxon stood on the brick embankment, yanking the trigger so furiously that the weapon bobbed in his hands, as if he were a kid pretending to fire a toy gun. Its pilot hugging the deck beside his passengers, the tour boat ran into a moored houseboat with a bump and grinding crunch.

Gary Hamilton was wandering in a tight if irregular little circle. A trail of blood ran down the side of his broad, square face from a cut in his forehead. He made small gestures with his hands and talked to himself.

Helen Carlysle was out of the car, showy vast cape swirling about her, staring in white-faced fury at the front bumper of the Citroën, which was well and truly locked with the yellow Japanese compact.

A black Mercedes glided to a halt behind the Citroën. The driver opened his door and stood up behind it. J. Robert Belew regarded Carlysle through Ray-Ban aviator shades.

“Another screw-up,” he said. Mistral threw her hands up from her sides.

Sirens were beginning to burble in the background.

“Tell Crockett and Tubbs to hustle their hinder parts into the car. If the Dutch pin this one on them, George Bush himself won’t be able to get ’em out of stir in this millennium.

“Oh — from now on you can consider this a Langley operation. And that’s official.”

It was a little suburb strung along the Amstel River somewhere south of town. Mark sat on the grassy banks with his knees up and his head down and spent some quality time just dripping and breathing.

After a phase-shift between one of his “friends” — the ace personas his color-coded powders summoned — and plain-vanilla Mark, his thoughts tended to fragment like a frightened school of fish. It took time for them to coalesce.

Why did I come to this hot, heavy world? was his first coherent thought. On Takis I was a hero, a prince. I had Tis, and safety, and Roxalana.

But Sprout wasn’t on Takis. Even if she didn’t seem a whole lot closer, right this minute.

He picked up the do-it-yourself vest Aquarius’s ace strength had made out of Agent Gary’s coat. He wasn’t at all sure why the shape-changer had hung on to it; usually Aquarius felt total disdain for material things, particularly manmade ones.

In his dolphin form Aquarius wasn’t fully human in intelligence, in any sense of the word; the processing power of his brain was largely used up by the environmental interface, hearing and taste and sonar-sense, the orientation of self in four dimensions: up/down, left/right, forward/back, flow. Dolphin-Aquarius was a more truly alien creature than any Takisian. At two removes from baseline Mark, as it were, it was difficult to discern his motives. It was tough enough making sense of his memories, incredibly sensual and rich but incomprehensible, like watching a Kurosawa film in Japanese.

Mark suspected the reason Aquarius had hung on to the jacket during his high-speed swim through the canals of Amsterdam to the river was that the thing was stuck on his snout.

There was nothing in the outer pockets but two rubbers and a pair of sodden ticket stubs to WWF wrestling in Madison Square Garden. The inside breast pocket rang all the bells. There was a passport in the name of Hamilton, Gary A.; a case of business cards, soaked beyond recovers identifying Hamilton as a marketing associate for Pepsico — weren’t they big Nixon contributors, way back when? — and a billfold.

Mark opened the billfold. There was two hundred and twenty-three dollars cash, Hamilton’s Ohio driver’s license — he’d been born in Youngstown in 1963 — and one American Express Gold Card.

Mark ran his tongue slowly over his lips, which felt dry in spite of his having just climbed out of the river. He was aware that he’d lit the FREE GAME light on the pinball machine.

Everything depended on how he played this one. His life, his freedom, his chance of seeing Sprout again. Everything.

He buttoned the wallet carefully in the back pocket of his khaki pants, walked to the quiet, tree-shaded street, and stuck out his thumb.

“This is Captain Leeuwebek,” the overhead speaker announced. “We will shortly be landing at Rome International Airport. The sun is shining, and the temperature is a pleasant twenty-one degrees. We will be remaining on the ground for forty-five minutes for routine maintenance before continuing on to Beirut. If you choose to leave the aircraft, please make sure the placard that reads, ’Occupied,’ is displayed on your seat. Thank you for flying KLM.”

The tall man seated over the wing of the big Airbus accepted a final complimentary glass of orange juice from the strikingly pretty Indonesian flight attendant. She let her eyes linger on him before traveling on. Like most humans, she had a fascination for the different, and he certainly qualified. He was at least half a meter taller than she was, for one thing, his unbelievably long frame encased in an obviously expensive three-piece suit, navy with an old-gold pinstripe. His features had that exotic Northern European sharpness; his hair was yellow, gathered into a neat little upwardly mobile ponytail at the nape of his neck. Most of all she liked his eyes; they were the blue of the noon sky over the Savu Sea, and they danced with what seemed genuine pleasure behind the thick round lenses of his glasses.

He was obviously a wealthy and important man. Perhaps he was a Wall Street stockbroker who would soon be indicted for a crime. She didn’t quite understand the current American fascination for turning their most successful citizens into criminals while sympathizing publicly with those who refused to work; it smacked to her of certain religious practices on some of the wilder headhunter islands back home. Oh, well; Westerners were all crazy. But at least this one was cute.

Mark Meadows looked quickly away from the flight attendant — you weren’t supposed to call them “stewardesses” anymore, and he tried to be scrupulous about that sort of thing — so she wouldn’t think he was forward. If she had told him pointblank what was on her mind, he would have thought she was trying to humor him, for some unknowable reason.

He sipped his juice and watched the greasy yellow River Tiber wheel below. Beirut was the place for him; he was sure of it. American influence had waned substantially there the last twenty years. Though the Nur al-Allah fanatics had been making their presence known of late, it was still a favorite holiday resort for most of Europe and indeed the world. Surely the premier party city of Africa would be a tolerant place, the sort of place a lone American fugitive could drop quietly from view.

Also, Lebanon had the laxest entry controls in the Med. The passport photo of young Agent Hamilton didn’t resemble Mark at all, but he figured all blond European types would look alike to Lebanese Customs. And no official body anywhere in the world looked too hard at a man in a suit and tie. Lucky Mark still remembered how to knot one.

The wheels touched down with a bump and a squeal. Mark looked around eagerly in hopes of seeing ruins or rustic Italian peasants or something, but like all airports Rome was built in an area that was predominantly flat and open. Off in the distance he did see some hills clustered thickly with houses, some of which may have been villas or may have been big blocks of cardboard government housing; you couldn’t tell, through the thick ground-hugging layer of heatwave-stirred petrochemicals.

The Airbus slowed and began to taxi toward the terminal. About two hundred meters shy of it the airplane stopped. The chief attendant came on the P.A. to announce that there would be a slight delay for the preceding flight to clear the gate.

Mark’s eyelids began to gain weight as if Hiram Worchester were playing games with them. His chin dropped toward the knot of his tie.

A change in the timbre of the conversation around him brought him abruptly back to himself. He blinked around, momentarily disoriented, and happened to look out the window two seats to his right.

A little utility car pulling a baggage trailer was just coming to a stop forty meters from the plane. There was no baggage on the cart, but there were half a dozen men, who began to spill off before the vehicle fully stopped. They wore the white jumpsuits and earmuff-style hearing protectors common to airport ground crew the world over. But even Mark, naïve as he was, knew that the stubby little submachine guns with fore-and-aft pistol grips were not standard aircraft maintenance equipment.

He unfastened his seatbelt, stood, and walked deliberately back toward the bathroom.

When the Rome police department’s elite antiterrorist unit kicked in the door five minutes later, there was nobody inside.