“He ought to wear jodhpurs and carry a riding crop,” Wrench whispered to Lessing. “Bureaucrats: the true enemies of the human race!”
Chairs squealed on the cement floor. People collided, jabbered, and rushed off to pack. Mulder plodded grimly into the house, Mrs. Mulder flittering behind, trilling at him about her precious furniture and knickknacks. The Fairy Godmother had long since discovered that chinaware and brass statues made acceptable substitutes for non-existent children.
Lessing had little worth taking: a single valise and his gun-case. The one other thing he dared not leave behind was hidden in the factory: his cache of Pacov. But how could he reach it with Subramaniam’s officious doggies guarding the gates? He couldn’t just abandon the stuff. Some blundering maintenance man would find it, and then there would be deaths indeed: deaths like those in Russia, deaths that put earthquakes and volcanos and the Black Plague and even Hiroshima to shame! He had to assume that it was Pacov that now stalked the world. And he himself had helped to raise it from its tomb and give it life!
Alan Lessing: Doctor Frankenstein!
No, damn it! He refused to accept the guilt! Why should he? He was not responsible! It was not Alan Lessing who had ordered those canisters scattered across Russia; he had not released invisible murder upon the world! He was only the delivery boy, just weapons-transport, like the crew of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb. Hell, he was less than that! He was the postman who unknowingly delivers a parcel with a bomb inside. So he told himself.
Wait a minute: just what did he think he was doing at Marvelous Gap in the first place? His employers hadn’t sent his team there to steal a new technological gewgaw or some piddling trade secret! A spesh-op like Marvelous Gap wasn’t mounted for peanuts! He should have guessed, of course, but he hadn’t let himself think about it. The comparison with the Enola Gay was accurate, therefore, but the “innocent postman” excuse clunked like a lead five-dollar piece.
But was he responsible? He had no idea his objective was so monstrously lethal — and he would never have believed anybody would be insane enough to use it!
As Wrench said, they hadn’t bought that one at Nuremberg either.
There had not been time to assimilate the enormity of what had happened; now it was beginning to hit home. He felt shaken, sick, empty in the pit of his stomach, like a kid who sets a school wastebasket on fire for a joke and then watches the building bum to the ground with his friends inside.
Whoever had unleashed Pacov, the world was now altered forever. Nothing would ever be the same again.
The flat was empty when he entered, as impersonal as a hotel room between guests. A few hours ago it had been a home of sorts; now it was a stop-over, a bus station lobby. He would have sworn that the place even smelled different. He collected his kit from the white-tiled bathroom, then emerged to stand aimlessly in the middle of the sitting room. The fireplace was dank and charred; it reminded him of Syria, of a house shattered by artillery fire, of a broken doll and a smashed chair. For want of anything else to do, he picked up his Aladdin’s lamp. There was room in the suitcase, and he stuffed it inside.
Jameela’s clothes were gone, her closet door ajar. Desolation washed over him: it would be like her to vanish quietly, without a scene, without a long good-bye.
He fingered the nubbly tan fabric of the sofa. Just last night she was there. He knew it even before her jasmine scent reached his nostrils. He turned to find her in the doorway.
“So?” She had a knack of summing up a whole lifetime in a single word.
“So I go.” He sucked in the empty-house smell. “You coming?”
“How can I? The Americans won’t take me.”
“They would if you were my wife. We could say you were… that we didn’t have time to collect our documents. Mulder and Wrench will back us up.”
She was silent. Then she said, “No. I can’t leave my family.”
“Damn your family!” he exploded. “Talk about us!”
She hesitated again. “No, Alan. You don’t understand. We are not so… so individual as you. To us a marriage is more than a bride and groom, a husband and a wife. The families must be involved, social obligations met, people satisfied.”
He snarled an obscenity.
“Please. Try to see.” She put her fingers to his cheek. “Maybe later, when things are calm again.”
His fists were clenched so tightly they hurt. “Don’t you see? Things never will be calm again! After I leave we may never even meet again! Mulder’s talking about going back to South Africa with Mrs. Delacroix and Liese…”
“Yes, Liese. The American woman with the South African passport.”
This was no time for jealousy. “Yes, her. Back to South Africa, or maybe to that resort… what’s its name?… on Ponape in the South Pacific.”
“Not to the United States?”
“No. Mulder says that would be pointless. He has nothing in the States. He says we can’t do any good there, not now, not under the… the circumstances. He still wants me as his bodyguard.”
“Most of Indoco’s cartel is out here, in what you call the Third World. My father says that Herman Mulder is a powerful man in many countries.”
“Your father is right.” This was the first time she had mentioned her father in this context. “What’s Mulder got to do with us?”
“He is your boss.” Jameela stood nose to nose with him, her long-lashed eyes watching him levelly. “He is the owner of the SS diaries, is he not?”
“You know about that!”
“We know.” She stressed the pronoun slightly. “My father knows. A few others high up in our C.I.D. Not Subramaniam. He’s a small fish.”
The diaries again! It was too late to worry about such irrelevant things now. The whole world was upside down, and Mulder’s secrets were less important than tomorrow ‘s breakfast, than gasoline for Mrs. Delacroix ‘ airplane— than the guns Lessing had just packed away.
He couldn’t resist a question. “The two men who broke into Mulder’s safe?”
“Ours. Arabs, I think. Not very good thieves. They weren’t supposed to hurt anyone. And you weren’t supposed to hurt them. They were ordered to bring the diaries out to be photographed, to give the government of India leverage against Indoco. Then they were to put them back. That business with your friend… Mauer? Bauer?… put you too much on the alert.”
“Your people knifed him?”
“No. We still don’t know what that was about.” She flung him a brooding look. “It had to do with you though, didn’t it, Alan?”
He scowled. “Yes… possibly… hell, I don’t know! But not with Mulder’s diaries.”
It was her turn to frown. “I… I didn’t want to become involved with you, Alan. That wasn’t in the plan. I do want to go with you… you don’t know how much.”
“Then come. Your job’s over. Mulder’s leaving, and there’s nothing more to report. We get married; later we make your father and your mother and the rest of your family… all of India, damn it… understand!”
Her features softened. “All of India? It will be hard convincing all of India that we… my father, my family, my Shi’i co-religionists, the Sunni Muslims… should even continue to live. My people came from Iran and the Middle East as conquerors, but we stayed to work, to serve… to partake. We became Indians. We are Indians. We were outsiders, like the Greeks and the Aryans before us, but now we are Indians.” She saw his puzzlement. “Why do I talk of this now? Because of Subramaniam and his ilk… zealots like those who attacked you in the bazaar yesterday. To them, we Muslims are as alien as you are. We are polluted and unclean. Sooner or later we must fight a civil war.”