The hope in Wally’s face was now transcendent and obvious. “So . . . you’re coming with me?”
Sure. I’m black, aren’t I? she wanted to retort angrily, but she only shook her head. “I still have work here. All the marshlands that need to be reclaimed before the next big storm hits here . . .” Alone. Out in the swamp. Alone.
Wally looked down at the table, dusted with the remnants of beignets. “I guess you make the plants grow a lot faster . . .” She saw him start to rise, his shoulders lifting. “Well, thanks for looking at those maps. That will help.” His face scrunched up stiffly, the stiff iron skin over his eyes furrowing. “So where’s this Tanzania place?”
Jerusha sighed. “Tanzania is . . .” she began. Stopped. He won’t last five minutes out there on his own. She realized that somewhere in the midst of this, she’d made the decision. What’s here for you? You’ve nothing. No friends, just Committee work. And when Michelle dies, now you’ll get the blame for that, not the Committee. You have a chance to save a life. . . .
“Oh, hell,” she said. “I’ll show you on a map on the way over.”
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
Michelle reaches a hand out in front of her face. Five fingers. That’s good. She pulls her legs up to her chest, reaches down, feels her feet. “That’s better,” she says. Even though she’s in the pit again, she’s happy about her feet and hands being back.
The spider pops down in front of her, points up to the edge of the pit. “Yeah, leopards, I know. I’m really the wrong person to try and scare with kitties.”
The spider grabs Michelle’s hair. Its body lengthens and grows and the four middle legs shrink into its torso. The mandibles slide back into its head and the eight eyes move toward each other until there are only two.
Sitting on Michelle’s lap is a little girl, maybe eight or nine. She wears a threadbare dress. The pattern is faded, and in the dim light of the pit it’s a mottled grey. The girl places her hand over Michelle’s mouth, then leans forward and whispers in her ear.
Michelle whispers back, “I can’t understand you.”
The girl pulls away from her, and a tear slides down her cheek. Michelle reaches up and wipes it away. “I’m sorry,” she says.
The girl puts her hands on either side of Michelle’s temples. The girl shuts her eyes and suddenly Michelle is slammed by a barrage of images.
Trees limbs whip her face as she runs. Vines grab at her legs, but she can’t stop. She can hear her own harsh breathing. Are they closer now? Close enough that they can reach out and . . . a claw rips open her back.
She shrieks. Warm blood wells up and burns. She trips and begins to fall.
Wait a minute, Michelle thinks. Claws don’t do anything to me. She reaches up and gently pulls the girl’s hands away.
The girl gazes at Michelle with such longing and pain it makes her want to cry. Michelle reaches out and touches her own hands to the girl’s temples, imagines pointing at herself, whispers, “Michelle.”
An image blossoms in Michelle’s mind. It’s the girl in her lap, but now she’s wearing a pale blue checkered dress. Her hair is plaited with a pretty pink headband. The girl points to herself and says, “Adesina.”
United Nations
Manhattan, New York
The United Nations perched at the edge of Manhattan like the guest at a party who really needs to leave now, but has just one more very important thing to say.
Bugsy showed his ID to the guards at the front who all knew him anyway, and took the brushed steel elevator up to the seventh floor. In the brief time that the Committee had existed, they had commandeered much more space than Bugsy would have expected the international bureaucracy to permit. Having a lot of superhuman powers probably helped with that.
Lohengrin’s office was on the western side, its windows facing out toward the skyscraper mosh pit of uptown. The hallways were filled with people in thousand-dollar suits looking harried. He nodded at the people who nodded to him and ignored the ones that didn’t.
It was getting harder and harder to keep track of who exactly was with the Committee. It seemed like every time he turned around, it was Let me introduce Glassteel. He can shatter anything made from hard metal. Or Noppera-bo here can mimic anyone’s appearance. Then Bugsy would shake hands (with Noppera-bo it had been particularly creepy since she’d taken on his face as soon as their fingers touched), exchange some pleasantries, and scurry off to someplace he could add their names into his database. Even so, he forgot the newbies more often than he remembered them.
Lohengrin, at least, was familiar. The long, blond hair actually looked really good with a dark grey power suit. Maybe a little tired around the eyes, but that went with the suit, too.
Bugsy closed the office door behind him and plopped down on the couch while the Teutonic God finished his phone call. “No,” he said. “I have nothing to do with the prosecution on a day-to-day basis. You’ll have to call the World Court. At the Hague.” He put down the handset with a sigh.
“Highwayman’s lawyers still giving you shit?” Bugsy asked.
“Captain Flint today,” Lohengrin said. CAHptain flEHnt. No one could do round vowel sounds like the Germans. Except maybe the Austrians. And the Dutch. “There was a time, my friend, that I believed this would be fulfilling work. There are weeks I spend fighting and fighting and fighting and at the end, I think I might just as well have stayed at home.”
It had been a long time since they’d gotten drunk and burned Peregrine’s house down. There weren’t many people Bugsy had actually known that long. Not that were still alive, anyway.
“Brokering world peace keeping you busy,” he said, his tone making it an offer of sympathy.
“Water rights. Human rights abuses. The slave trade. I come in every morning, and I find something new and terrible. And every afternoon, I find why we can do nothing direct. Nothing final. I am becoming tired,” Lohengrin said, then sighed. “What do you know about the Sudd?”
“Their second album sucked.”
Someone in the next office ran their shredder for a second. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Lohengrin said.
“Yeah, not really. No.”
Lohengrin nodded like he’d just won a bet with himself and leaned forward over his desk. “The Muslim government of the Sudan has taken steps to join their nation to the Caliphate.”
“Ah,” Bugsy said. “That’s a bad thing.”
“No,” Lohengrin said. “That’s the background.”
“That’s not the problem?”
“No.”
“Ok-ay.”
“The People’s Paradise of Africa,” Lohengrin said, “under the leadership of Dr. Kitengi Nshombo, has accused Khartoum of enacting a policy of genocide against the black tribal population of the south and west Sudan.”
“Got it. Genocide. Problem.”
“No,” Lohengrin said.
“Genocide not a problem?”
“Genocide isn’t happening. It is an excuse. The PPA has manufactured evidence and generated propaganda to make a case for the invasion of the Sudan. Its forces are making incursions across the border, and the Caliphate has mobilized to defend Sudanese national territory. Yesterday there was a battle in the Sudd. A terrible battle.”
“And that’s the problem, right?”
“Yes,” Lohengrin said. “In the bigger picture, that is the problem. But it gets worse. The PPA forces are being led by Tom Weathers. The Radical.”
Bugsy sat up straighter. “Hold it,” he said. “Same guy who tried to set off Little Fat Boy and nuke New Orleans last year?”
“Same guy, ja.”
“I don’t like him much, you know. He tried to kill me. I mean, I don’t like the Caliphate much either. They tried to kill me too.”
“Tom Weathers tried to kill many hundreds of thousands of people,” Lohengrin said.
“Yeah. And I was one of them.”
“The PPA
has been a destabilizing influence for years. Now they have begun to use aces to further their own political agenda.”
The silence was a hum of climate-controlled heating and the distant ringing of phones. Lohengrin looked serious and waited for Bugsy to work through the implications.
“World war,” Bugsy said. “Only fought with aces. Meaning probably the Committee.”
“And a great many dead people,” Lohengrin said.
“What about getting Little Fat Boy back in play? A fourteen-year-old nuke with a personal grudge against Weathers should rein the PPA in, right?”
“Ra,” Lohengrin said. “His name is Ra now, and no. So long as Old Egypt is not attacked, the Living Gods are determined to stay out of the conflict.”
“How very Swiss of them.”
“There is a further problem with Tom Weathers. We’ve always known that Weathers had more powers than most aces. Insubstantiality. Strength. Ultraflight. Heat beams. We know he was involved in the battle in part because these powers were in play. But other powers have been reported as well. The wave of darkness? The terrible mauling of the bodies?”
“You think he’s like the Djinn?” Bugsy said, sitting forward on the couch. Nothing took the humor out of a situation like the Djinn. “You think Weathers is picking up new powers.”
“I do not know,” Lohengrin said. “New powers. Or new allies. We know little about the man himself. Where he comes from, how he drew the wild card, what his weaknesses might be. What exactly his powers are. That is what I want you to uncover, Jonathan. Tom Weathers is likely the most powerful ace in the world, he is starting a war, and I know nothing substantial about him.”
“And so,” Bugsy said, “who the fuck is the Radical?”
Unnamed Island
Aegean Sea, Greece
“Daddy!”
The woman who came flying at him across rocky soil tufted with pale green grass was tall and slender. Despite the fact her handsome face was clearly middle-aged, it showed few lines. Her hair, long and blond, had begun by slowly evident degrees to turn to silver. Yet her manner was that of a seven-year-old girl.
A very happy one. She caught him in a hug that for all his superhuman strength still almost overbalanced him. She was just four inches shorter than his six-two.
He kissed her. “Sprout. Hey, sweetie.” He tousled the long straight hair. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too. Can we go to the park soon?”
“Aye, that’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Clark, emerging from the modest field-stone cottage behind her. “It’s not fit for her to spend all her days cooped up here alone, with no one for company but an iPod and a dried-up old biddy like me.”
“I wouldn’t call you dried up, Mrs. Clark,” he said, past the woman’s cheek, wet with happy tears.
“You’d not dare.”
“You got that right.”
This was true. The caretaker was a middle-aged to elderly New Zealander, half Maori with a crisp Scots brogue. Her coloration and build were those of a brick wall; her tight bun of curly hair was nearly the same hue. Sprout loved her. She treated Sprout with patient cheerful firmness and took absolutely not ounce one of shit from anybody else. Not even Tom.
Which was fine. It was what he paid her for. Fantastically well, he vaguely gathered. Unlike most of the self-proclaimed socialist revolutionaries he met, Tom had no interest in money whatsoever; it was one of the reasons he always wound up getting pissed off at the posers, and then there was trouble. Dr. Nshombo—more often Alicia—always gave him whatever he asked for. Most, in fact, went toward keeping his daughter well cared for and as happy as possible in a succession of the remotest locations Earth provided.
It was the only way he knew of keeping her safe from that teleporting puke. Until he hunted him down and killed him, of course.
“I could use a day’s shopping as well, I admit,” Mrs. Clark said. “Time to myself and a few necessities for the child and me. Maybe tomorrow, Mr. L?”
She didn’t even try to pronounce the name he gave her, which was Karl Liebknecht. Among the things he paid her so well for was not to wonder about such things as why his daughter sometimes called herself by the last name Weathers, and other times Meadows. Or why the daughter looked older than her father. Her main concern was that there was no funny business between her employer and her charge. Once he had convinced her of that, she was content to live in isolation with her charge, so long as she got the occasional day off in civilization. And in between had a sufficient supply of mystery novels.
“Tomorrow?” his daughter said, blue eyes shining eagerly. “You promise?”
He nodded. “I promise.”
Sprout hugged him fiercely. “I wish I could stay with you, Daddy.”
“Someday you can, sweetie. Someday. But I got some things to take care of first.”
Noel Matthews’s Apartment
Manhattan, New York
Niobe was sleeping, worn-out by the emotional upheaval of the past few hours. Noel wandered around the apartment they had rented while they underwent the fertility treatments. It had come furnished with sofas and chairs designed more for magazine covers than the human body. They had tried to personalize an impersonal space by putting up lots of framed photos—most of them of Niobe’s “children”—the little aces who had lived and died like mayflies. Noel found the pictures depressing, but they were important to Niobe so he never said a word. His own efforts had consisted of leaving magazines piled on the glass coffee table and used teacups on the side tables. Niobe had also crocheted an afghan to throw across the black leather and chrome sofa.
Three more weeks and we can really go home. Noel entered the kitchen and set about brewing a pot of tea. He realized he was hungry and set out a muffin. His back felt tight. He hadn’t worked out in weeks and hadn’t attended a karate class in months. The fact that he had been complacent suddenly alarmed him, and he decided to get back to the gym.
He snapped on the TV in the kitchen, headed to CNBC for the latest financial news, and found himself passing through CNN. He caught a quick flash of the Presidential Palace in Baghdad and a grim-faced Prince Siraj surrounded by security rushing up the steps. Siraj looked old. Shockingly old.
I need your help. . . . I really do need your help.
His old friend’s words echoed filled with sadness, reproach, and might-have-beens.
Noel pulled out his phone and dialed. “What exactly do you want me to do?” he said.
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
Michelle was in that strange room again. Juliet and Joey were there. But her mother and father were gone now.
Her throat was still brutally raw. She could barely swallow, much less try to speak. Her arms and legs were as useless as her throat.
And the power was like napalm in her veins. Drake, she thought. Oh, God, Drake. What happened? Did I kill him? Did Sekhmet kill him? Tom Weathers? Was that wound from the medallion worse than it seemed? And how am I not dead? How are we all not dead?
“Wha . . .” Her voice was a rusty hinge. Her throat felt as if it were being stabbed by a knife when she swallowed.
Juliet started crying, and Michelle wanted to comfort her. To tell her it was all right. Whatever had happened to Michelle had clearly hurt Juliet. Juliet didn’t even have any tats scrolling across her body.
Michelle closed her eyes. Maybe if she went back to sleep, she’d wake up later and everything would be all right.
Saturday,
November 28
Presidential Palace
Baghdad, Iraq
The Caliphate of Arabia
The scent of dust, dried lemons, and saffron seemed to pierce not only his sinuses, but his heart.
Noel staggered, and rested his hand against the stone wall. It was hot to the touch. He drew in another deep breath and more scents were added—kerosene from countless cookstoves, the wet smell of donkey, incense from the nearby mosque. The sun beat down on his head and warmed
his shoulders. He could almost feel the cold fogs of New York and England leaching from his pores. Yes, he thought somewhat ruefully as he stepped out of the alley, the hem of his robe brushing at his heels. I am one of those desert-loving Englishmen.
The music of spoken Arabic fell like glittering notes all around him, but the point of the conversations were dark and somber. Too many fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons had marched off to the Sudd, and too few had been heard from again. Speculation ran wild in the streets.
As he walked by the palace he kept touching the dark glasses that disguised his swirling golden eyes, and he kept the tail of his keffiyeh across his face. Not that he expected to be recognized. When he’d developed his new male avatar he had made certain that Etienne was clean-shaven. But golden eyes were always going to be a problem.
Noel knew this city almost as well as he knew London. He had lived a second life here as Bahir, the Sword of Allah, the Caliph’s ace assassin. He had even taken a wife, whom he’d put aside for barrenness last year. It had been entirely his fault. He was a hermaphrodite, and basically sterile. It hadn’t been easy for Finn to find a few viable sperm. Luckily the little fellows hadn’t had to make their way upstream all on their own.
What would have happened if he and Gamal had undergone the fertility treatments? But thank God they hadn’t. She had been just another pawn as he served as an agent for the British Secret Service. That was another life, a life he’d left behind.