Nodding down to the revolver he was holding, Axl smiled. ‘I think we already did.’
Rinpoche grinned at the Colonel. ‘Missing you already.’
It tipped itself backwards off the stone sill, wings suddenly spreading and growing. By the time Colonel Emilio reached the open window, the animal was already riding up into the air currents, Cocheforet spreading small and isolated beneath it.
The Colonel and Axl reached a simple compromise. Probably the only one not to involve Uzis, revolvers and one of them actually having to shoot the other rather than just talking about it. PaxForce wouldn’t interfere with Axl’s mission, whatever that was, if he didn’t interfere with theirs.
By then Axl had already insisted that, in his opinion, there was no Pope Joan or Father Sylvester on Samsara and never had been. Joan was digital dust in backed-up newsfeeds. Unfortunately Axl didn’t sound convincing, even to himself.
And Axl left out what Rinpoche had said to him. One, because he wasn’t sure it had ever happened and two, because, even if it had, he needed time to process the data.
‘So, you’re just at Cocheforet for the sightseeing?’ Colonel Emilio smiled and smoothed his moustache, then patted his hair into place and winced as his hand met the bump left by Axl’s revolver. He stopped smiling.
His scalp was so thick, Axl realised it had bruised but the blow hadn’t even produced blood. Next time he was going to have to hit the man harder.
‘Yeah,’ said Axl, ‘that and my health. The Cardinal thought I needed to take the air.’ He nodded down to the guns he’d piled safely on the floor while the others were fuguing, inviting Colonel Emilio to take back his Uzi. The fact Axl had a revolver clutched firmly in his hand made it that much easier to make the offer.
‘Okay,’ said Axl, ‘you remember how it works. You leave Kate and Mai alone and I leave you three alone. Mess with Mai or Kate and you get an instant lead implant. No warning.’
The Colonel looked at Axl, eyes burning. ‘You are the Cardinal’s man?’
Axl nodded.
‘Then maybe you aren’t as smart as you think…’ Red-faced and furious, he hovered on the edge of some indiscretion, some truth he wouldn’t be able to take back. And what was really interesting was the sudden flicker of doubt that stopped him going over the edge and the way both Wireframes and the fat sergeant tensed up as they waited to see what the Colonel might say.
He said nothing.
‘What about the Cardinal?’ Axl asked.
‘You know,’ said Colonel Emilio calmly, as if he’d never started the previous conversation. ‘There’s just one thing puzzles me.’
Only one… ? Sweet fuck, thought Axl, knowing there’d never been a day he wouldn’t have been delighted to say the same. ‘Really, what’s that?’
‘Just who are you betraying? I mean,’ Colonel Emilio’s smile was cold, ‘obviously you plan to betray someone. But is it Kate or the Cardinal?’ He paused, shrugged and pulled at his moustache. ‘I just thought I’d ask.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
Zazen/Sunyata
Ice grated over rock, reversed and looped into digital fuzz. Sonars blipped under bleak overlays of dolphin funeral cries. Every note was degraded, flat. Emptiness within emptiness. There was no chord he recognised. Nothing that he’d ever heard before. Even the snare line was gone, the noise ugly and a-rhythmic. This was what you got if you fed anger and disgust through a backing track. A meshing of cognitive and aural dissonance.
The Colonel’s question had eaten away what little chance Axl had of sleeping. Crawling through the back of his mind like a king snake, it had disturbed cerebral undergrowth better left untouched, leaving behind its trail of slime.
There was a bed still made up for him on the first floor. A mattress and a blanket but, unlike the Inn this time both were clean. All the same, Axl chose to spend that night sat on a wooden chair in the monastery dining room, watching his spinning timecode count itself down and keeping one eye on the overgrown slope down to the village.
All the doors into Escondido were locked. Windows that had shutters were closed and bolted, Axl knew, he’d done it himself watched by a suspicious Clone. Only the window in the dining room by which he sat and brooded was still open.
He would kill the Colonel. The man was as good as dead…
Axl was still silently raging-at himself, at Colonel Emilio and at the Cardinal when Kate gave a tentative knock and pushed her way into the huge room to find Axl slumped in a chair, the cold barrel of his revolver resting parallel to his face. Salt tears ran unnoticed down his cheeks as he stared at mist that filled the valley and hid the pitiful village below.
‘The last of them just left.’ Kate said it like she couldn’t believe her own words, which she couldn’t. ‘They’ve set up a new HQ in the village.
‘How did you do it? I mean, why did you… ?’ She wanted to reach out and take away his gun if he’d let her. Touch his hand or shoulder, anything to stop the track of tears etched like acid into the dirt on his face. But she was afraid of Axl; and she knew he was afraid of himself.
So instead Kate just pulled up another chair and folded her arms, tucking her restless hands into the grey shahtoosh she wore over shirt and chinos. A cold breeze blew in through the open window to make the wall tapestries of multi-armed gods ripple and sway. She hardly noticed. Nothing that had happened made sense. First the man had given her back the lost memory beads, then he’d driven PaxForce out of her house and now he was crying like a desolate, child, his face so bleak it could have been cut from ice. But if his hollow face was cold, his voice was empty of everything, even echo.
‘You want to know why?’ He asked. Inside his head the king snake was stirring and Axl was too tired to face it down.
Kate nodded. Yes, she did. She didn’t operate well in the dark. Besides beyond that, she needed to know. Kate was coming to believe he really was on her side, whichever side that was. She just didn’t know why.
‘There was a man…’ He told her, then stopped his story before he even really got started, correcting himself. The person hadn’t really been a man, more a boy. Except that wasn’t relevant, not really.
Axl ran through different ways of telling Kate why the Colonel had left quietly and decided events only made sense if he went back to the WarChild. Everything he’d become came out of that.
The shit that went down before WarChild wasn’t part of the story, or even him. Not now. That chapter had just been about another wrong kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Killer Kid. The moniker was chosen by a machine. Though the CySat PR who plucked it out of air laden with cigar smoke gave the impression it was just another flash of brilliance which had dropped into his mind. This was around the time Axl decided, he was going to take the psych tests and that if he passed he was going to sign their contract.
‘Do you remember WarChild?’
She did, though she’d probably only seen it on repeats. And Axl didn’t expect her to approve.
‘Remember the round-faced blond kid with the Russian gun?’
‘The Killer?’
Of course he was a killer, Axl thought. That was what the child was trained for. No one had told him it was wrong. So when his CO was shot on IMF orders, the kid didn’t go after the eleven-year old Guatemalan who pulled the trigger, he hit the officers of the local IMF committee that processed the order.