One customer, an older man, sat at a corner table. A carafe of white wine was in front of him, and a Wiener schnitzel the size of a place mat hung off the sides of a plate. Potatoes and a basket of heavy brown farmer’s bread completed the carb-loaded meal. It took a minute for Noel’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. Once they had he studied the man’s features-thin face with a network of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, a ropy neck, and swollen knuckles, a symptom of creeping rheumatoid arthritis-yes, it was definitely Ffodor Mathias, aka Karolus Kowach, aka Nicolao Tholdy, aka Blackhole.
He was wanted by Interpol, known to the Silver Helix, he’d been convicted five times, but he was a hard man to keep locked up, given his ability to bend light waves and make himself invisible. He bent them using gravity. Which meant he could also make heavy objects light and light objects heavy.
When you were planning on stealing a crapload of gold he would be a useful man to have along.
“So, what’s the job?” Mathias asked without preamble as Noel slid into the chair across from him.
“Liberating the state treasury of the PPA.”
“I want ten million dollars,” Mathias said.
Noel threw the Wiener schnitzel in the Hungarian’s face.
Once Mathias clawed away breading and grease he found himself looking down the barrel of Noel’s. 40 caliber Browning. “Okay. Now that we’ve established what you want, let’s discuss what you’ll actually get.”
“I’m old,” Mathias whined. “I need to get out of this game.”
“Three million, and you can pretend you’ll actually retire,” Noel said as he stood up.
“You ruined my dinner,” Mathias complained.
Noel threw a handful of bills onto the table. “Buy another. I’ll be in touch.”
17
Saturday,
December 12
Noel Matthews’s Hotel
Vienna, Austria
“Where have you been?” Niobe’s arms were folded across her chest and her expression was thunderous.
“I couldn’t sleep, I took a walk-”
“Do not lie to me, Noel Matthews! Are you back working for the Silver Helix?”
“No, God no, you know I’d never do that after… after…” He had a sudden image of the tiny smears on the floor of his parents’ house, all that remained of the tiny ace children he had sired with Niobe.
Niobe sank down on the couch, and her arms were lowered to clasp her belly. Alarmed, Noel stepped forward. “Are you-”
“I’m fine,” she snapped. “I just can’t stand it when you lie to me. What are you doing?” He hesitated. She stood up abruptly and grabbed her suitcase out of the closet. “Either we’re partners and you trust me, or we’re not and you don’t, and I’m not going to raise a child in that kind of atmosphere.”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“Well, don’t. ”
They stared at each other for a long time.
So he told her. Not everything, but enough to give her the shape of his thoughts and plans about the PPA and the Nshombos.
He found himself pacing as he talked. “The truth is, this is going to be a bitch. I have some idea of the security measures, but by no means all. It has to look like the Nshombos looted the treasury or they’ll just blame Siraj or Britain or the U.S.” He threw his hands in the air. “It would be a good deal easier if I could just kill them.”
“The way you killed the Nur?” Niobe asked. Noel nodded. “And look what that led to. Thousands of dead jokers, thousands of dead soldiers, a bunch of young kids playing hero with a river of blood on their hands. Please, don’t fix things by killing people anymore. You’re not the bad guy. Let the bad guys do the killing.”
And an idea began to grow. It would be tricky, but when had tricky ever bothered him? If he could pull this off there was no chance of the Nshombos becoming martyrs, or the West or Siraj being blamed for their deaths. He grabbed Niobe by the shoulders and pulled her into a long, deep kiss.
“What?” she gasped when he finally released her.
“You, my darling, are a genius.”
He loved it when she blushed.
On the Lukuga River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Wally woke to find the fire still smoldering. The damp wood sent up a roiling column of smoke. It drifted over the jungle like an ash-grey arrow on the bright blue sky, pointing straight at Wally. He couldn’t think of a better way to announce his location, so he took his time with breakfast.
It worked. The whine of a distant motorboat echoed up the river. Wally screwed the lid back on a plastic jar of peanut butter and dropped it into his backpack alongside the bananas and mangoes Jerusha had grown as a parting gift. Then he hunkered down in the brush and waited.
Soon enough, a small PPA patrol boat zipped around the bend. No kids on this one; Wally breathed a sigh of relief. The soldiers followed the smoke straight to the edge of his makeshift campsite. They landed their boat on the riverbank not far away.
Five minutes later, it was Wally’s boat.
As much as he hated to, he left a couple guys still standing, so that they could report what they’d seen: a metal man, heading deeper into the PPA in a stolen boat.
Nyunzu
Tanganyika Province, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Nyunzu stank of rotting bodies and shit. The foulness overwhelmed even the stench of burning and the river Lukuga’s primitive smell. Leopard Men and soldiers moved among smashed cages of wood and mesh. Mud-brick walls and tin roof panels fallen in on themselves and smoldering. A small forlorn-looking tractor, from which a powerful arm, probably a backhoe, had been wrenched-recently, because the steel at the break gleamed bright, rather than being crusted with rust like dried blood. And everywhere twined and stood and sprouted an inexplicable profusion of plants, as if the secret ace lab had been built by a mad gardener.
“Well,” said Tom, arms akimbo, staring eye to eye at a man’s head wedged into the fork of a branch of a mango tree that stood unaccountably in the middle of the ruined compound, “these counterrevolutionary motherfuckers are into beheading. Might be Muslims. Forty or fifty.”
“There were only two, sir,” the commando said.
Tom scowled. “Shit.” Aces. “That’s a bummer.”
At Tom’s feet Leucrotta crouched on spindle shanks, making whining sounds low in his throat. He was developing a tendency to show doglike behavior even in human form. Beside him the two spookiest little kids on Earth, Ghost and the Hunger, stood gazing at the devastation with big blank eyes. Their presence amid all this horror didn’t bug Tom. He was starting to get behind the beauty of the kid-ace trip. Terrible beauty, yeah. But beauty.
Two men in brown-and-green Simba Brigade camouflage approached, pulling a third between them. He was unarmed, bareheaded, his blouse torn open, his trousers stained. He stank of piss and shit, presumably his own. His escorts spoke to him in the local lingo.
“They say this one survived the attack, Mokele-mbembe,” one said. “He speaks of a woman who killed with plants, and a metal man that nothing could hurt.”
“Sounds like aces, all right,” Tom said. They even sounded familiar somehow. He could call Hei-lian; he carried a satellite phone, for which only she and the Nshombos had the number. A different phone and number every day. Otherwise the imperialist NSA could track him and some CIA pencil-neck in Virginia could fire a tank-busting Hellfire missile at his head from a remote-controlled drone.
The Leopard Man went on. “He says the metal man went north along the river. The woman took the young volunteers and headed east toward Tanzania. She made the jungle grow up suddenly to cover their trail.”
Nice try, thought Tom. “Ghost, you can track a fart through a feedlot. You go get the metal man.”
She looked at him with her saucer eyes and nodded, slowly, once. Tom turned to the Leopard Man. “You get hyena-boy and the Hunger. Take some soldiers along.”
“What shall I do with the patriotic volunteers?”