Ace in the Hole

  … and he knew that he was going to die, that he would be next, that he would follow Puppetman into the void behind those eyes …

  “You’re killing me!” Gregg spat with all the strength he had left, hoping that those eyes would blink or look away or turn …

  … and there was nothing left in his world but those eyes …

  The dark-clad back loomed ahead of Mackie like a narrow cliff. Mackie swayed. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a long, long time.

  Instead he raised his right hand, brought the buzz. He looked at his fingers, a pink blur. The sight gave him strength.

  He swung his hand in a flat sweeping cut.

  Spector could barely stay on his feet. His knees wobbled from the strain. He’d given Hartmann everything he had, and felt him go under. But the son of a bitch was staring at him, blinking. It simply wasn’t possible.

  Spector remembered the gun in his hand. He centered it on Hartmann’s chest. He heard a sound like a giant bee, and hesitated. He felt a grinding pain in his neck. The convention hall spun, over and over, then rushed up and slammed him in the face. His ears were roaring, but none of the sounds seemed to make sense. There was a body lying on the floor not far from him. It was Colin; at least, it looked like the joker. But he didn’t have a head. There were ribbons of tattered flesh on the neck where it had come off. All Spector could see were rushing feet.

  It had to be a dream. Like the one he’d had before, only worse. He felt sick and paralyzed, but at the same time strangely euphoric. He’d just close his eyes and bring things back under control.

  The head had rolled against the back of the podium. Feeling as if he were drifting on air Mackie limped toward it through roaring silence.

  Painfully he leaned forward. His body felt like a dry twig that broke in a new place with every few degrees he bent.

  He picked up the head, straightened slowly. He held the head up, to show to Gregg, to show to the herd of frightened sheep in white hats who trampled one another in their frenzy to flee him.

  “I’m Mackie Messer,” he croaked. “Mack the Knife. I’m special.”

  He brought the head to his face, kissed it full on the lips.

  The eyes opened.

  Spector felt something on his mouth. He opened his eyes. The hunchback was staring down at him, a mocking smile on his lips. It wasn’t a dream. The realization was like a fist in his chest, but he didn’t have a chest anymore. The little fucker had sliced his head off. He was going to die. After all he’d lived through, he was going to fucking die! Again.

  Spector fought through his panic and locked eyes with the hunchback. He channeled his pain and terror through his eyes and into the man who’d killed him. The world began to shake and blur. Spector felt the darkness closing in and tried to push it all into the hunchback. A familiar fear crept into Spector. He felt very alone.

  The darkness was complete.

  Mackie tried to pull his eyes away. The head’s eyes held them with black-hole suction.

  Something was shaking his soul to pieces. His body began to shake in sympathy, vibrating faster and faster, out of control. He felt his blood begin to boil, felt himself sweating steam from every pore.

  He screamed.

  The skin on the severed head’s cheeks crisped and blackened from the friction of Mackie’s fingers. The buzzing fingers met bone, began to shake the skull to pieces, to agitate the fluids within the rounded box of its cranium to the boiling point.

  But the eyes—

  The leather boy exploded. Sara dropped her head into her arms, felt wet impacts in her hair that would stay with her forever.

  When she looked again, there was nothing left of hunchback or head but red-and-black splashes steaming all over the podium.

  There was a dead moment.

  Then Gregg was pushing aside his blanket of Secret Service agents, struggling to his feet. The crowd had flowed back from the podium like mercury from a fingertip. Now it washed forward again with a roar that went on and on.

  That’s it. He’s president now. This guarantees it. The death of his ace assassin was no comfort. President Gregg Hartmann would have no need of German psychopaths to deal with his opponents.

  If we even get that far. Steele had hinted that Soviets would launch a first strike rather than see Hartmann inaugurated.

  Her head was a dead weight. She let it drop, and let the grief pour out in hopeless tears.

  Jack just tossed people out of the way till he found Tachyon, then picked the little man up and stuffed him securely under one arm. Gunshots cracked out; the stampeding crowd accelerated. There was wild but confused violence on the platform. Jack couldn’t see a thing.

  Jack bulled his way through the crowd, parting them like the Red Sea. Finally he and Tachyon stood in front of the massive white podium, but from his low angle they could see nothing.

  Whatever had happened seemed to be over. Gregg Hartmann rose from the crush of Secret Service and brushed himself off as he walked uncertainly to the microphones.

  “Damn,” Jack said. “We’re too late.”

  There were still people shouting and screaming in the hall; there was still panic as they stampeded for the exits or stared at the podium in frozen horror.

  Yet the impression Gregg had was somehow one of silence, of a frozen moment like a still photograph. He could hear his own breath, gasping and very loud in his ears; he could feel very clearly the hands of the Secret Service man on either side of him. He could see Jesse Jackson being herded off the podium, Ellen blockaded by a cordon of uniformed security, dignitaries on the floor or standing with hands to faces or running blindly from the scene.

  There was more blood and gore than Gregg had thought possible.

  And a strange, echoing void inside his head.

  Puppetman?

  There was no answer.

  Puppetman? he queried again.

  Silence. Only silence.

  Gregg took a shuddering breath. He allowed himself to be hauled to his feet, then shrugged away the restraining hands that wanted to pull him from the podium. “Senator, please—”

  Gregg shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s over.” And it was very clear what he had to do now. The path was laid out before him, a gift. Puppetman was gone, and the loss was as if some great, dark burden had been lifted from him, a burden he hadn’t even been aware that he was carrying. Gregg felt good. There was carnage and destruction all around him, and yet …

  Later. Later we’ll know.

  He straightened his jacket, tugged at his tie. He arranged the words in his mind, knowing what he would say. Please. Please be calm. This is what happens when jealousy and hatred are allowed to grow. This is the fruit we receive from the seed of prejudice and ignorance. This is the bitter feast we endure whenever we turn away from suffering.

  Words to salvage a presidency from ruin. Brave Hartmann, cool Hartmann, compassionate Hartmann. Hartmann before the eyes of a nation: a calming, competent leader in the midst of crisis.

  Gregg stepped forward to the mikes. He looked out to the crowd and raised his hands.

  Tachyon’s left arm was locked about Braun’s neck. His right lay across his chest. Blood stained the bandage over the amputated end. The pain from his broken ribs and his arm was so great that he couldn’t lift his head from Jack’s shoulder as the big ace cradled him in his arms.

  Jack had returned to his place in the California delegation. The Omni smelled like a slaughterhouse, the air conditioner unable to banish the sickly sweet odor of blood. The sharp scent of gunpowder still hung in the air, the smell of shit from the released bowels of the dead. Shock seemed to hold the entire convention.

  James Spector was dead.

  The hunchbacked assassin was dead.

  But Hartmann remained.

  Tachyon gnawed at his lower lip.

  The candidate broke free of the clinging Secret Service agents. Head back, shoulders squared, hands outstretched in benediction, a gesture of calm, or reassurance. r />
  He stepped to the microphone.

  And in that moment Tachyon knew what to do.

  Gregg began to speak, his gaze searching and pleading with the people in the seats. “Please,” he began, his voice calm and deep and compelling.

  And then …

  … Tachyon was in his head. The alien’s strong, insistent presence took Gregg’s struggling ego and pushed it backward, stepping in front of him even as Gregg resisted desperately and uselessly.

  “Please be calm … Hey, shut the fuck up and listen to me!” his voice shouted without any volition on his part, echoing throughout the Omni. He saw himself in one of the monitors above the floor, and he was smiling, smiling that oily, practiced campaign smile like nothing at all had happened.

  “Oops, got a little too vehement there, didn’t I?” He felt himself giggle, of all things, tittering like a child. Gregg tried to stop the laughter, but Tachyon was too strong. Like a helpless ventriloquist’s dummy, he spouted someone else’s words.

  “But you have to admit you did shut up, didn’t you? That’s better. Hey, I’m calm. Let’s all be calm. No panic in a crisis, not me. No way. Your next president doesn’t panic. Uh-uh.”

  Down on the floor, the exodus had stopped. The delegates were staring at him. His casual, amused delivery was more chilling and horrible than any screaming fit could have been. Above the sobbing and moaning behind him, he heard Connie Chung in the VIP section shout into her mike, “Get the cameras on Hartmann! Now!”

  Inside, he continued to fight uselessly against the bonds Tachyon had placed on his will. So this is what it feels like to be a puppet, he thought. Let me go, damn you! But there was no escape. Tachyon held the strings, and he was a practiced puppeteer himself.

  Gregg chuckled, glanced back at the carnage, and then shook his head as he turned back to the crowd. He held his arm straight out from his body toward them, his palm down and fingers spread wide.

  “Look at that,” he said. “Not even a tremble. Cool as a damn cucumber. So much for the old ’76 worries, huh? Maybe this is a good thing in the long run, if it puts all that business to rest.”

  John Werthen and Devaughn had come forward to pull him away from the mikes, and he watched himself flail his arms at them, pushing them away and grabbing at the mikes desperately. “Go away! Can’t you see that I’m just fine? Back off! Let me handle this.” John looked at Devaughn, who shrugged. Gregg tugged his hopelessly soiled suit coat back into position as they let go of him hesitantly. He gave that eerie smile for the cameras once more.

  “Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes.” He chuckled again and waggled a finger at the delegates. “This is not acceptable behavior and I won’t have it,” he scolded them as if talking to a class of schoolchildren. “We had a little problem up here but it’s over. Let’s forget it. In fact—”

  He giggled and bent down to the stage. When he straightened again, his forefinger was dripping with a thick, bright red liquid. “I want you to write ‘No More Violence’ a hundred times as punishment,” he said, and he reached out to the clear acrylic panel in front of the lectern and traced a large smeary “N” on it. The first loop of the “O” was barely legible.

  “Oops, out of ink,” Gregg declared gaily, and bent down to the stage again. This time he plopped something meaty and unidentifiable down on the lectern with a distinct wet plop. He dipped his finger into it like a quill pen into an inkwell. Someone was being noisily sick again behind him, and there were screams from down on the floor. He could hear Ellen sobbing and pleading with anyone who would listen: “Get him out of there. Please, stop him…” John and Devaughn came forward again, and this time they took hold of him firmly, one on each arm.

  “Hey, you can’t do this!” Gregg spluttered loudly. “I haven’t finished yet. You can’t—”

  It was over. At least it was over. Tachyon’s control dropped from him and he sagged in their arms, silent. Gregg tried not to see the horrified faces he passed as they escorted him backstage: Ellen, Jackson, Amy. He cursed Tachyon, knowing the alien was still there.

  Damn you for this. You didn’t have to do it this way. You didn’t have to humiliate and destroy me like that. Couldn’t you see that Puppetman was dead? Damn you forever.

  11:00 P.M.

  Tachyon lay in bed. They had wanted to put him back in the hospital, but he had fought that like a maddened creature, and Jack had kept him out of the hands of the doctors. He had allowed them to rebandage his stump, rewrap his ribs, but no more. He had even refused the pain pills. Because somewhere in this city was his grandchild, and Tach needed a clear head to find him. His brain seemed to be battering at the confines of his skull as he searched, but only darkness answered him.

  Pain took him, and he hung over the side of the bed and retched. The memory of those final chaotic minutes at the convention reared up and added to his confusion. Hartmann’s mind beating like a trapped and terrified animal at the iron confines of Tachyon’s mind-control.

  For an instant remorse gripped him, then slowly Tachyon raised the ugly ungainly stump, and studied it. Hate replaced the momentary flicker of regret. I’ll never do surgery again. Damn him to eternal wandering!

  His jaw set in a stubborn, bitter line, and he crawled from the bed. The Nagyvary lay in its case. City light filtered around the edge of the curtain and glimmered on the polished grain of the wood, danced on the strings. Gently he drew the fingers of his left hand across the strings, releasing a sigh of sound.

  Rage filled him. Snatching out the violin, Tachyon swung it hard against the wall. The wood splintered with a horrible brittle sound. Several strings broke with sharp jarring notes; a musical scream of pain.

  His final swing pulled him off balance, and Tach instinctively threw out his right hand to catch himself. Screamed. Black spots danced before his eyes, and suddenly he felt hands on his shoulders. Someone lifting him.

  “You damn fool! What now are you doing?” asked Polyakov, depositing him back in the bed.

  “How … how did … you … get in?”

  “I’m a spy, remember?”

  The worst of the agony receded. Tach touched his upper lip with his tongue, tasting salt. “This isn’t very good tradecraft,” said Tachyon.

  “We needed to talk.” George was rummaging about Tach’s discarded clothes until he found the flask.

  “You could have just left,” the alien whimpered, and hated himself for his weakness. “Slipped away to Europe, the Far East … begun again. And left me to face the inharmonious music.”

  Polyakov gulped down brandy. “I owe you too much for that.”

  A tiny, bitter smile touched Tachyon’s thin lips. “What? You don’t believe in Gregg’s tragic breakdown?”

  “I believe that he had a little help.”

  A sigh. “It was damn close.”

  Polyakov grunted. “More exciting that way.”

  Tachyon accepted the flask, and took a sip. “You don’t like exciting. You like subtle and efficient. George, what are we going to do? Share a cell at Leavenworth?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m not too proud to beg. Help me, please. My devil’s stepchildren, my grandson, what will become of them if I am incarcerated? Please, please help me.”

  The mattress squeaked and shifted as the man seated himself. “Why should I?”

  “Because you owe me, remember.”

  “We’ll probably never see each other again.”

  “I’ve heard that before, too.”

  The Russian took another swallow of brandy. “How are you going to control Blaise?”

  “Make him love me. Oh, George, where has he gone? Where can he be? What if he’s hurt and he needs me and I’m not there!” His voice rose shrilly. Polyakov pushed him back against the pillows.

  “Hysterics won’t help.”

  Tach pleated the edge of the sheet, stared with strained eyes into the oblivion of the far wall.

  “Let me ease your mind on one point. I’ve already c
alled the FBI, and offered to roll over in exchange for your immunity.”

  “Oh, George, thank you.” His head fell back wearily against the pillows. “Good-bye, George. I would offer to shake hands, but…”

  “We’ll say good-bye the Russian way.”

  Polyakov bear-hugged him, and pressed hard kisses onto each thin cheek. Tachyon reciprocated in the Takisian fashion with a kiss to the forehead and lips.

  The Russian paused at the bedroom door. “How do you know you can trust me?”

  “Because I am a Takisian, and I still believe in honor.”

  “Not much of that around.”

  “I take it where I can find it.”

  “Good-bye, Dancer.”

  “Good-bye, George.”

  Chapter Eight

  Monday July 25, 1988

  8:00 A.M.

  “YOU’RE FINISHED, POLITICALLY,” DEVAUGHN said. His tone was almost jolly; Gregg wanted to smash his fucking face in. With Puppetman it’d be easy.

  But Puppetman’s gone. Dead.

  “I’m not quitting, Charles,” Gregg retorted. “Have you gone deaf? This is just a goddamn minor setback.”

  “Minor setback? Christ, Gregg, how can you say that?” Devaughn rattled the papers he’d brought. “The editorials are screaming. USA has a poll saying that eighty-two percent of the American public thinks you’re nuts. ABC and NBC did overnight phone polls showing that you’re now trailing Bush by sixty percent. CBS didn’t even bother with that; by their poll, an even ninety percent of the public thinks you should flat out resign the nomination. As do I.”

  Devaughn did another turn of the deserted headquarters room.

  “Jackson’s really pissed, even if he’s smoothing it over for you,” he continued. “The committee wants your resignation in writing this morning. I told them I’d get it.”

  Gregg slumped in his chair. The television was replaying his—Tachyon’s—breakdown again. Gregg got up and very calmly went to the set.

  He kicked the picture tube in.