“She said that would likely be your response,” came Frank’s strident cockney tones. “But she said to offer you greetings from one practitioner of the trade to another.”
Noel sucked in a quick breath. “Did she leave a name and number?”
“Yes. Sun Hei-lian.” Noel memorized the number as Frank rattled it off.
“Thanks, I’ll call her.”
“How does she rate, and I don’t?” Frank complained, but Noel hung up on him and dialed Sun’s number.
“What do you want? And make it quick, because I’m not giving you time to trace this call,” Noel said when she answered.
It was the mark of a professional that she didn’t demur. “I need your help dealing with Weathers.” There was no hint that she remembered or even cared that one time they had indulged a three-way with Tom Weathers while Noel was in his female form.
“You know how I deal with things,” Noel said.
“And that I will not permit,” was the cold reply. “Everyone wants him to die, but I’ve discovered something—”
“He’s not such a bad guy,” Noel said sarcastically.
“He’s mentally ill. I’m pretty sure he’s schizophrenic. There’s another personality inside him—gentle, kind—I’ve been talking to that personality. If we can bring him out—”
“Getting Weathers on a couch is going to be a little tough.”
“Yes, it offers challenges. The best place to treat him would be the Jokertown Clinic. Your ace powers will enable me to get him there in an eyeblink. Before he can waken and . . . and . . .”
“Crush us like bugs?” Noel asked sweetly.
“It’s in your interest, too,” Sun said defensively.
“Why doesn’t your own service incapacitate Weathers and try to bring out this other personality?”
“We are rapidly approaching the point where they will decide he is too dangerous to live.”
Now that was alarming. Noel didn’t want Weathers killed yet. Not until the insane ace had taken care of the Nshombos for him. “And I take it you’d be the person to execute that order?” Noel asked.
There was a long silence, then Sun said, “And I won’t do it.” Her voice was low, passionate.
“Why not? God knows he deserves it.”
“Not if he’s sick. He should have the chance for redemption,” Sun said.
It was the last response he had expected, and he suddenly had Niobe’s voice echoing in his memory. Thousands of dead jokers, thousands of dead soldiers, a bunch of young kids with a river of blood on their hands.
But I didn’t kill them. I just killed one man. For the best of reasons. I couldn’t foresee what would happen, Noel thought.
The brutally honest part of his nature took up the debate. Some would argue that the only difference between you and Weathers is one of scale.
“Do you think that’s possible?” Noel asked, and suddenly it was terribly important to him what she said.
“Yes, yes I do.”
“You’re putting yourself at odds with your country and government,” Noel said softly.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There was again a long silence, finally she said, “I love the man he may yet become.”
Noel pulled on his lip and considered the Chinese woman. She was one of the few people Tom Weathers trusted. He realized he had solved the transfer of information problem. “I’ll help you, but I want something in return.” And he told her what he needed.
“So, yet more killing before he’s free?” Sun said bitterly.
“At least he’ll be killing people who richly deserve it, and it’s my price,” Noel answered.
She sighed. “All right. I will contact you when I’m ready.” She sounded unbelievably sad, and then Noel realized she had hung up.
He slowly put away his phone and considered. Of course he wasn’t going to trust Niobe’s safety to the questionable science of psychiatry. Weathers needed to die.
The question was, who did it?
Tuesday,
December 22
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The pilot’s name was Japhet. His face was crisscrossed with pink scars that shone against his dark skin. There was a rifle slung across his shoulder and he had a pistol holstered under his left armpit. Before Michelle’s card turned, he would have scared the shit out of her.
Joey had found a dead chimpanzee near the airstrip and raised it up. Japhet called it a bonobo. He didn’t seem surprised in the least by the zombie bonobo, not even when Joey carried it around like a baby.
“Stop playing with that zombie,” Michelle snapped. It gave her the willies. “It’s not helping. And it grosses me out.”
“Jesus, Bubbles, you are such a fucking pussy when it comes to slightly moldy flesh.” Joey made a kissy face at the bonobo. The bonobo made the same face back at Joey.
Japhet looked quizzically between them. “I still need one thousand U.S. to take you to Kisangani.”
“I can give you five hundred,” Michelle said. “And this watch.” Michelle pulled off her Bulova. It wasn’t very expensive, but it was pretty. Maybe Japhet would go for it.
Japhet gave the watch a skeptical look. “It’s not that valuable.”
“You can tell people it belonged to the Amazing Bubbles.” She held her hand out, palm up, and let a small bubble form in it. Then she targeted a can lying in the dirt about twenty-five feet away and let it fly. The can jumped and pinged as if it had been shot.
That made him smile. “You give me an autograph, too?”
“As many as you want.”
Ackroyd & Creighton Investigations
Manhattan, New York
Jay Ackroyd—Popinjay—leaned against his desk, arms crossed, a sense of world-weary amusement radiating off him in a way Bugsy had only dreamed possible. This, Bugsy thought as he finished his explanation, is what I want to be when I grow up.
The office wasn’t pristine. An old coffee cup was sitting on the desk, a pile of folders rose up on the desk. But there was a comfort in the man as he moved through the room, a sense of professionalism that said, Hey, I didn’t start the most powerful ace in the world on a killing rampage. That was you.
“Okay,” Popinjay said slowly, like he was eating something he really liked the taste of. “So you want to figure out what the relationship is between the Radical and Mark Meadows?” He seemed to think the question was funny.
“The Radical’s on kind of a killing spree, you may have noticed. If Meadows is still alive, he may have the key to stopping Tom Weathers,” Bugsy said.
“You could look at it that way,” Popinjay said. “Here’s the thing, Mark Meadows and I were on Takis together, and—”
“Takis? Like the other planet, Takis? With the aliens that made the wild card?”
“That would be the Takis,” Popinjay said. “I was there. With Mark. That whole cadre of aces that hung out with Cap’n Trips? Jumping Jack Flash. Moonchild. Cosmic Traveler. They’re all him.”
Bugsy blinked. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Mark Meadows was Moonchild?”
“And Starshine. And all the rest.”
“And the Radical . . .”
“And the Radical. Mark is a pharmaceutical genius. Depending on which drugs he took, he became different people.”
“Yeah, okay,” Bugsy said, his hundred different bits of information falling into place at once. “That’s usually just a metaphor, you know.”
“Not for Mark. The Radical was the holy grail for him. He’d managed to get there once. The first time, as a matter of fact. Way back in the sixties.”
“People’s Park,” Bugsy said. “I got that.”
“It wasn’t really the same guy, though. Tom Weathers came later. That one was just the Radical. Ever since then, he’s been trying to get that particular high back. All the others were . . . well, I wouldn’t say failed attempts. But less than successful.”
Bugsy stood up, pacing slowly back and forth. “Aquarius. The were-dolphin guy?”
“Mark Meadows.”
“Starshine?”
“Mark. And Monster.”
“Jesus! The Radical was the Cock That Ate Chicago?”
Popinjay nodded, then grew somber. “They were all him. Or parts of him or things that he took out of the world and became. I was never really sure. But they were all named for songs, you know.”
“Songs?”
“Sure. Jumping Jack Flash?”
“It’s a song? I knew it was a Whoopi Goldberg movie.”
Jay Ackroyd shook his head. “All of them are songs. Listen to a good oldies station. You’ll find all of them there. Aquarius. Starshine.”
“Moonchild?”
“By King Crimson,” Jay said, “released in sixty-nine. Same year Mark became the Radical for the first time.”
“Vietnam was brought out of civil war by a pop song?”
“You could look at it that way,” Jay Ackroyd said. “The thing you have to understand about Mark Meadows is he’s a really good person. Yes, he saved Vietnam. He saved more than that. You remember the Card Sharks?”
“Was that the show on Cinemax with the girl in Vegas and the chimpanzee?”
“I was thinking more the conspiracy to kill every wild card in the world. They were holding Mark prisoner in China back in ninety-four. Guy named Layton was beating Mark to death. Mark swallowed a bunch of drugs. Who really knows what? And then . . . the Radical returned. I know what he’s become, but before all this happened, the Radical saved your life.”
“He seems to regret it now.”
“Yeah, I know. Whatever’s going on with Mark, it’s . . . complex. Seems like his ‘friends’ are aspects of his personality. Maybe they started out being external—part of the drugs, part of the world, whatever—or maybe they were always inside him. But the Radical was all of them together. Like a multiple personality disorder where there’s one persona who knows everything? Tom Weathers was the perfected image of Mark Meadows. He had all the powers of all the others. He was . . . he was what Mark wanted to be, but never was.”
“Well,” Bugsy said. “Holy shit.”
He left in a daze, taking the subway back to Ellen’s. He couldn’t get his head around Mark Meadows, sad sack icon of the summer of love, being not just Tom Weathers but all those other aces, too. Or the idea that the Radical—the same one from Paris—had saved the world once. Saved him, personally, and every other ace and joker in the world from the Black Trump. It changed things, but he wasn’t sure how yet.
He missed his stop and had to walk back five blocks through the cold December wind. When he got in, Ellen was sitting at the kitchen counter, the slightest frown showing between her eyebrows. He put down his coat.
“What did you find out?”
He told her all of it. Takis. Vietnam. The 1960s. Sprout and Kimberly Ann Cordayne and Mark Meadows, really nice guy. Monster and Jumping Jack Flash. And with every word, he found himself talking louder, gesturing wider, getting angry. “We’ve been fighting a hippie’s wet dream about Che Guevara! All of it, all of it, is the one guy’s psychodrama about not being . . . I don’t even know. Radical enough in nineteen fucking sixty-eight! Do you have any idea how many people have died because Mark Meadows wasn’t sufficiently cool?”
“Hundreds,” Cameo said. “Thousands.”
“And a couple dozen more last week. And next week, who the fuck knows?”
“And,” she said, “how does that help you stop him?”
Bugsy paused and raised his hands in a gesture that meant No clue. “And you know what,” he said, “it isn’t even that. It isn’t even that he wanted to be this bronzed Adonis. Do you know why he wanted that? To impress a girl. To get into Kimberly Ann Cordayne’s jeans. That’s what all of this is about. Back in sixty-I-don’t-even-know-what, little teenage Mark Meadows got a perfectly understandable boner for Kimberly in his French class, and now that same erection is blowing people up in Vienna. It’s the past, Ellen. The past is killing us.
“And that girl? The one with the funny laugh and the enchanting tits that got Mark’s hopes up? She’s gone. She doesn’t even exist anymore. I’ve seen her, and she looks like somebody’s grandma who just got out of a methadone clinic. Even if he was exactly the guy who would have rocked her back in sixty-eight, it doesn’t matter. That girl’s gone. She’s dead. And people are still dying in order to fucking impress who she used to be.”
“Bugsy—”
“It’s sick, Ellen! It’s sick, and it’s wrong, and it’s straight-out pathetic. He’s holding on to this idea of who he’s supposed to be. This idealized image of who he thinks she would have wanted, even though she doesn’t want that, and he can’t ever really be more than Mark Meadows’s psychological failures in a fucking Halloween mask. And so he’s turned into this twisted, empty, evil, sad-ass version of himself and hurting a bunch of people who had nothing to do with it.”
“Hey—”
“It’s like a poison. It’s like he drank too much of the past, and now it’s poisoning us.”
He stopped. Somewhere in the rant, he’d started crying. He leaned against the wall, wiping the tears with the palms of his hands.
When Ellen spoke, her voice was soft. “We aren’t still talking about the Radical, are we?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
WHERE THE HELL IS Japhet?
He said he needed to go to the village and pick up some supplies, but Michelle thought he was taking too long.
She’d had another dream about Adesina while she dozed off waiting for their pilot. Another pit dream, more vivid than before. The smell was even worse, something Michelle hadn’t thought possible, and the compulsion to get to Adesina was becoming overwhelming. It was like a radio station coming in clearer the closer you got to the signal.
Joey was cradling the chimp on her lap, while it stared up at her with its dead eyes. Michelle thought she might hurl. The bonobo was beginning to stink. The heat wasn’t helping things.
“I need to get bigger,” Michelle said suddenly. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us at Kisangani. Could you raise a couple of zombies and have them pound on me?”
Joey made a circle in the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “There’s always dead bodies, Bubbles. How many do you want? There are hundreds here.” Her voice started to have a singsong quality, and that was worse than the nonstop swearing.
“Just a couple.”
It took a few minutes, but soon a couple of decrepit zombies came shambling up the dirt road.
“I don’t know,” Michelle said. “They don’t look like they’ll do much.”
“They’ll be fine,” Joey replied.
The zombies began to hit Michelle. She’d taken much worse pummelings, but they did make her plump up like yeasty dough.
“Okay,” Michelle said. “I’m good for now. I don’t want to add a lot more weight to the plane.”
Michelle was going to say more, but she’d just seen Japhet coming up the road, carrying two string bags loaded with fruit and brown paper-wrapped packages.
When he got closer she said, “Did you get everything you need?”
He nodded. His mouth was pulled into a tight line. “We must leave quickly. When I told a friend at the store that I was taking some people to Kisangani, he got a funny look on his face. It seems there have been men looking for strangers—American strangers.”
“What did he say?” Joey asked her. When Michelle translated the conversation into English she said, “This could be a world of hurt coming.”
“You’re probably right,” Michelle replied. Then she spoke again to Japhet. “Can we leave now?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I’m going to need more money. I won’t be able to come back here for a while.”
“Fine,” Michelle said. It would wipe out
the rest of her cash, but there was no other choice. “Can we help you load?” He nodded and pointed to several boxes sitting near the single-engine prop plane. When he climbed into the plane and started the engine, it sputtered to life in a way that didn’t fill Michelle with confidence.
Michelle and Joey were loading the last of small cargo boxes when Japhet jumped from the plane, yelling something Michelle couldn’t quite make out over the engine noise. Then he pulled the pistol from his holster and started firing. Michelle turned around. Bounding up the dirt road, kicking up dust, came seven huge leopards.
“Shit! Go!” Michelle yelled at Joey. She pushed her toward the plane, then spun and let a barrage of bubbles fly at the leopards. These were rubbery, nothing lethal about them. But they would hurt like hell. She didn’t want to kill the leopards, but animals didn’t normally behave this way. What the hell was going on?
The bubbles hit two of the cats, one in the shoulder, the other in the leg. They went down and rolled over and over in the dusty road. But the other five kept running toward the plane.
Michelle saw that Joey was still outside. Japhet grabbed her arm and yanked her toward the open plane door. Michelle felt claws sinking into her back and she was slammed into the side of the fuselage. She bounced off the plane, spun around, and saw another leopard leaping at Joey as she scrambled into the plane. Its claws raked down the back of her leg. The zombie bonobo leaped up and grabbed the leopard’s head, then started gouging out its eyes.
The other leopards were on Michelle. They clawed and bit her, but that only made her fatter. She created bubbles the size of soccer balls and sent them into each cat’s chest. The leopards popped up into the air. As the first one hit the ground, she heard Japhet’s pistol. The leopard screamed and then turned into a naked man.
Michelle scrambled, grabbed Japhet, and yelled into his ear, “Stop shooting. They’re people.”