After Jerusha left with the kids back toward Tanzania, Wally started working his way west, farther up the Lukuga. She erased their tracks with new plants, while Wally went out of his way to leave the most obvious trail he could. He ripped down everything in his path; he tore branches and leaves; he stomped his feet, pounding perfect footprints into the soft earth; he littered his trail with banana peels, mango rinds, granola-bar wrappers, and even the occasional smear of peanut butter. He did his best to make it look like he was a whole bunch of people.
His clues wouldn’t last long in the jungle, especially the food. But they didn’t have to. Just until folks came to investigate the sudden destruction of the Nyunzu lab. They’d follow his path because it was the only path to find. He wondered, too, how long it would take Jerusha and the kids to get to Lake Tanganyika.
Twin pangs of worry and loneliness fueled another surge through the thick growth along the river. He kept as close to the river’s edge as he could manage. That way he could be spotted from a passing boat. And he kept an eye open for the barge that carried supplies of the wild card virus.
Dusk fell. As it did every evening, the sounds of the jungle—what little he could hear over the constant crash, crack, crunch of his passage—changed. The noise of life, raucous and loud, birdcalls and primate vocalizations and other things he couldn’t begin to identify, gave way to more subtle things: the buzz of insects, the gurgle of a stream, the whisper of a breeze through the foliage, the rustle of leaves as something slinked past. With practice, he’d be able to tell the time entirely from the jungle noises.
Though he didn’t need it, he built a fire that evening. The biggest he could manage. It took a lot of work, because everything was so damp. But it was visible, he hoped, from quite a ways. He got the idea by trying to think like Jerusha. She was smart, and always had good ideas.
She would’ve been proud of him.
She’d kissed him.
Another pang. Oh, nuts, Jerusha. Please take care of yourself. ’Cause I gotta see you again, when this is over.
The Grinzing
Vienna, Austria
The grinzing was a pretty, old-fashioned, and rather rural section of town situated in the foothills. It was like a welcome mat for the Vienna Woods, and with its array of small weinstubes, Biergartens, and restaurants it was a perfect place to end a ramble through those woods. It was very late, but the small green lamps still glowed at several restaurants, indicating they were open.
Noel’s contact had named a particular Weinstuben. It wasn’t the most savory-looking establishment, but then, Noel reflected, his contact wasn’t all that savory. After dinner Noel begged off coming right to bed and instead taken a shower. As he’d hoped, the combination of a late night, late dinner, and pregnancy had Niobe sleeping deeply. She hadn’t even stirred when he let himself out of the room.
One customer, an older man, sat at a corner table. A carafe of white wine was in front of him, and a Wiener schnitzel the size of a place mat hung off the sides of a plate. Potatoes and a basket of heavy brown farmer’s bread completed the carb-loaded meal. It took a minute for Noel’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. Once they had he studied the man’s features—thin face with a network of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, a ropy neck, and swollen knuckles, a symptom of creeping rheumatoid arthritis—yes, it was definitely Ffodor Mathias, aka Karolus Kowach, aka Nicolao Tholdy, aka Blackhole.
He was wanted by Interpol, known to the Silver Helix, he’d been convicted five times, but he was a hard man to keep locked up, given his ability to bend light waves and make himself invisible. He bent them using gravity. Which meant he could also make heavy objects light and light objects heavy.
When you were planning on stealing a crapload of gold he would be a useful man to have along.
“So, what’s the job?” Mathias asked without preamble as Noel slid into the chair across from him.
“Liberating the state treasury of the PPA.”
“I want ten million dollars,” Mathias said.
Noel threw the Wiener schnitzel in the Hungarian’s face.
Once Mathias clawed away breading and grease he found himself looking down the barrel of Noel’s .40 caliber Browning. “Okay. Now that we’ve established what you want, let’s discuss what you’ll actually get.”
“I’m old,” Mathias whined. “I need to get out of this game.”
“Three million, and you can pretend you’ll actually retire,” Noel said as he stood up.
“You ruined my dinner,” Mathias complained.
Noel threw a handful of bills onto the table. “Buy another. I’ll be in touch.”
Saturday,
December 12
Noel Matthews’s Hotel
Vienna, Austria
“Where have you been?” Niobe’s arms were folded across her chest and her expression was thunderous.
“I couldn’t sleep, I took a walk—”
“Do not lie to me, Noel Matthews! Are you back working for the Silver Helix?”
“No, God no, you know I’d never do that after . . . after . . .” He had a sudden image of the tiny smears on the floor of his parents’ house, all that remained of the tiny ace children he had sired with Niobe.
Niobe sank down on the couch, and her arms were lowered to clasp her belly. Alarmed, Noel stepped forward. “Are you—”
“I’m fine,” she snapped. “I just can’t stand it when you lie to me. What are you doing?” He hesitated. She stood up abruptly and grabbed her suitcase out of the closet. “Either we’re partners and you trust me, or we’re not and you don’t, and I’m not going to raise a child in that kind of atmosphere.”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“Well, don’t.”
They stared at each other for a long time.
So he told her. Not everything, but enough to give her the shape of his thoughts and plans about the PPA and the Nshombos.
He found himself pacing as he talked. “The truth is, this is going to be a bitch. I have some idea of the security measures, but by no means all. It has to look like the Nshombos looted the treasury or they’ll just blame Siraj or Britain or the U.S.” He threw his hands in the air. “It would be a good deal easier if I could just kill them.”
“The way you killed the Nur?” Niobe asked. Noel nodded. “And look what that led to. Thousands of dead jokers, thousands of dead soldiers, a bunch of young kids playing hero with a river of blood on their hands. Please, don’t fix things by killing people anymore. You’re not the bad guy. Let the bad guys do the killing.”
And an idea began to grow. It would be tricky, but when had tricky ever bothered him? If he could pull this off there was no chance of the Nshombos becoming martyrs, or the West or Siraj being blamed for their deaths. He grabbed Niobe by the shoulders and pulled her into a long, deep kiss.
“What?” she gasped when he finally released her.
“You, my darling, are a genius.”
He loved it when she blushed.
On the Lukuga River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Wally woke to find the fire still smoldering. The damp wood sent up a roiling column of smoke. It drifted over the jungle like an ash-grey arrow on the bright blue sky, pointing straight at Wally. He couldn’t think of a better way to announce his location, so he took his time with breakfast.
It worked. The whine of a distant motorboat echoed up the river. Wally screwed the lid back on a plastic jar of peanut butter and dropped it into his backpack alongside the bananas and mangoes Jerusha had grown as a parting gift. Then he hunkered down in the brush and waited.
Soon enough, a small PPA patrol boat zipped around the bend. No kids on this one; Wally breathed a sigh of relief. The soldiers followed the smoke straight to the edge of his makeshift campsite. They landed their boat on the riverbank not far away.
Five minutes later, it was Wally’s boat.
As much as he hated to, he left a couple guys still standing, so that they co
uld report what they’d seen: a metal man, heading deeper into the PPA in a stolen boat.
Nyunzu
Tanganyika Province, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Nyunzu stank of rotting bodies and shit. The foulness overwhelmed even the stench of burning and the river Lukuga’s primitive smell. Leopard Men and soldiers moved among smashed cages of wood and mesh. Mud-brick walls and tin roof panels fallen in on themselves and smoldering. A small forlorn-looking tractor, from which a powerful arm, probably a backhoe, had been wrenched—recently, because the steel at the break gleamed bright, rather than being crusted with rust like dried blood. And everywhere twined and stood and sprouted an inexplicable profusion of plants, as if the secret ace lab had been built by a mad gardener.
“Well,” said Tom, arms akimbo, staring eye to eye at a man’s head wedged into the fork of a branch of a mango tree that stood unaccountably in the middle of the ruined compound, “these counterrevolutionary motherfuckers are into beheading. Might be Muslims. Forty or fifty.”
“There were only two, sir,” the commando said.
Tom scowled. “Shit.” Aces. “That’s a bummer.”
At Tom’s feet Leucrotta crouched on spindle shanks, making whining sounds low in his throat. He was developing a tendency to show doglike behavior even in human form. Beside him the two spookiest little kids on Earth, Ghost and the Hunger, stood gazing at the devastation with big blank eyes. Their presence amid all this horror didn’t bug Tom. He was starting to get behind the beauty of the kid-ace trip. Terrible beauty, yeah. But beauty.
Two men in brown-and-green Simba Brigade camouflage approached, pulling a third between them. He was unarmed, bareheaded, his blouse torn open, his trousers stained. He stank of piss and shit, presumably his own. His escorts spoke to him in the local lingo.
“They say this one survived the attack, Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” one said. “He speaks of a woman who killed with plants, and a metal man that nothing could hurt.”
“Sounds like aces, all right,” Tom said. They even sounded familiar somehow. He could call Hei-lian; he carried a satellite phone, for which only she and the Nshombos had the number. A different phone and number every day. Otherwise the imperialist NSA could track him and some CIA pencil-neck in Virginia could fire a tank-busting Hellfire missile at his head from a remote-controlled drone.
The Leopard Man went on. “He says the metal man went north along the river. The woman took the young volunteers and headed east toward Tanzania. She made the jungle grow up suddenly to cover their trail.”
Nice try, thought Tom. “Ghost, you can track a fart through a feedlot. You go get the metal man.”
She looked at him with her saucer eyes and nodded, slowly, once. Tom turned to the Leopard Man. “You get hyena-boy and the Hunger. Take some soldiers along.”
“What shall I do with the patriotic volunteers?”
Tom shrugged. “They’re of no further use to the People’s Paradise, Lieutenant.” He turned to the survivor. “Oh, and as for you, numbnuts . . .” He looked to the Hunger and jerked his head at the man. The soldier howled as the boy sank sharp teeth into his leg. “You have the honor of performing one last service for the Revolution: you get to show your comrades the penalty for letting it down.”
Somewhere in the Jungle
Vietnam
Billy was a joker. He looked like a desiccated monkey, thin strips of dark flesh still clinging to old bone. His eyes seemed almost deflated, and he smelled like a bowl of chicken soup someone had left out for a week.
He drove like a man on fire. “This your first time in Vietnam?” he said as the jungle whipped past their Hummer.
“Yes,” Bugsy said, his hands digging into his knees as Billy whipped around a corner Bugsy hadn’t known was there.
“Great country. Had some hard times. That what you here for? Something about Moonchild?”
“More about a friend of hers. Mark Meadows.”
“The nat,” Billy said. “I never met him. Heard about him, though.”
“He was an ace.”
“Really? What could he do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ace with no powers, eh?” Billy said. “Sounds like a nat to me.” The dead monkey spun the wheel again. The Hummer groaned and screamed like a dying animal. Bugsy closed his eyes, then opened them again. If they were clearly going to hit a tree, he could bug out. A few dozen wasps getting crushed would be a lot easier to recover from than his brainpan sailing through the windshield.
“Yeah, I was Joker Brigade right up until I was in the resistance against it,” Billy said. “That was a fucked-up scene. We all came here because we bought into the whole line about Vietnam being a haven for victims of the wild card.”
“Lot of aces?”
“Some, I guess. Mostly it was jokers and joker-aces. Place got really fucked up. Bad shit happened out there, man. Really bad shit. It was the Rox that did it. Jokers saw the Rox get wiped out, figured that was what the whole world was going to be like. Lot of angry freaks out here in the jungle with guns. No one said it, but we all kind of understood it was about revenge. All except Moonchild.”
“You knew her?” Bugsy said.
Something the size of an orange hit the windshield with a soft thump and an inhuman shriek. When it bounced off, it left a streak of blood. Billy turned on the wipers as he drove. “Saw her a few times, that’s all. She turned it all around.” Billy’s voice was almost reverent. “She was the one that pulled all the good guys together. She was the soul of this fucking country.”
“What about other aces?”
“What about ’em?”
“When Moonchild was fighting the good fight, didn’t she have any help?”
“Oh, yeah. We had some powers working for the good guys. There was a little asshole called Cosmic Traveler. Total douche, but he got a lot of prisoners free. There was this fire guy took out a bunch of enemy airfields. Some kind of were-dolphin called itself Aquarius fucked up the river patrols real good. And here we go.”
The Hummer broke out of the underbrush and skidded to a halt, gobbets of mud and weeds flying from under its spinning wheels. Two men on motor scooters shouted at them. Billy leaned out the window and jabbered back, gesturing with one skeletal hand. The men made gestures that Bugsy assumed were rude and continued on their way.
In the backseat, Ellen yawned and stretched. “Are we there?” she asked sleepily.
“End of the road for today. I’ll get the archives to you tomorrow morning,” Billy said. He was either grinning at her or his mouth was trapped in the death’s-head rictus. Either way, Ellen smiled back at him.
“Thank you very much,” she said as Bugsy stepped shakily out of the car.
“The rooms are ready,” Billy said. “Just go on in, turn right, and go up the stairs. I’ll get the bags taken care of. No troubles.”
Bugsy walked into the little way house, his legs feeling weak as spaghetti. The great battles of Vietnam had been fought throughout the country, but the final one that broke the New Joker Brigade and put Moonchild in position to reconstitute South Vietnam had been here. And so when the archives had been crated to honor the fallen leader, this was where the government had decided to build the academic and cultural temple.
It was also the best guess for where to find something—a pen, a chair, a ceremonial robe—belonging to her chancellor, the late Mark Meadows.
Bugsy went into the room and lay on the bed, staring up at the faux-bamboo roof. The mattress felt wonderful. Ellen came in behind him, but went straight back for the bathroom.
The more he looked at it, the more plausible it was to Bugsy that the Radical had figured into the events in Vietnam. He was beginning to think Weathers might even have had connections to the Rox War. It was pretty clear that Weathers had been employing the powers of the aces that surrounded Moonchild. And then the notably, vocally pacific Moonchild got taken out, and the Radical came onto the world stage.
I
t was too convenient to be coincidence. The question was whether the Radical had been stealing the powers, or if there had always been a cabal of aces working with him behind the scenes like a sort of Committee of Evil Wild Cards. He had to agree with Billy that Meadows seemed more like a deuce or a nat than the ace he claimed to be, but he could very plausibly have been the mascot and front man. Once Ellen channeled him, they’d know a lot more.
The shower went on in the bathroom, and a moment later he heard the rush and splatter of water against skin. A beetle the size of a hummingbird buzzed in through the open door, and Bugsy chased it out again with a few hundred wasps.
Billy appeared in the doorway, three suitcases bumping along behind him. He looked at Bugsy, at the bathroom door, and shook his head. “Here’s the stuff. You kids rest up, and I’ll be back in a couple hours, get you some dinner.”
“Thanks,” Bugsy said. He wondered whether it was appropriate to tip one’s UN-provided translator, or if that would just be condescending.
“I got to tell you, man, the world has changed since I was your age,” the zombie chimp said. “Makes me think I was born too early.”
“Yeah?”
“In my day, a hot-looking woman like that with a joker? Would never have happened.”
Bugsy frowned, trying to think of any jokers Ellen had dated. The penny dropped. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting up. “You think I’m a joker?”
The chimp nodded to the green insects swarming in and out of Bugsy’s skin.
“What would you call it?” Billy asked.
The Santa Cruz Islands
Solomon Islands
“You call yourself a father?” the pinched, reproachful voice asked in his dream. Tonight Mark Meadows wore faded bell-bottom jeans and a sunburst tie-dye T-shirt with a picture of Jerry-fucking-Garcia on it. “You’re putting children in danger. You’re helping turn them into killers. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“They are warriors,” Tom said. “Warriors for the Revolution. They stand for something. I stand for something. You’re just a drug-soaked old hippie.”