“Yoo-hoo!” someone said. She pushed through to us. She had hair. Very faintly, Jed’s crumbling Book of Uay’s Names seemed to read that they called her Ashley 1. She was holding a phone, which I guess she’d spotted us on.
“Come on,” I said to Michael. “We’re going to go talk with Lindsay and I want to ask you both something. Okay?”
“Uh, okay,” Michael said.
“You are so great,” A 1 said to Marena, talking loud above the noise of the crowd. “You actually decided to make it!” She’d met Tony Sic, but she didn’t recognize me, although that didn’t mean much because she was as dumb as a bag of squashes. Two bags. “So, great, great, great,” she went on, “let me show-”
“Thanks,” Marena cut her off. “Listen, could you find Lindsay for me?”
“Uh, okay, he’ll be thrilled you made it-”
“It’s really important. Seriously.”
“Sure.” She held her phone up to the crowd and waved it around. “Okay, I got him,” she said. I looked over Marena’s shoulder at the screen. It turned the real architecture behind it to a wire-frame model of the room with little security-tag dots floating around.
“Okay,” A 1 said, “Lindsay’s this pink dot with the L.”
“Great,” I said. It meant he was over behind the Tree of Life, under the giant display screen. Marena clocked him herself and led me left and down a flight of stairs on the left out onto the floor and around a tableful of barbecued emu skewers and would-be primevally menacing ice sculptures and into a darkened area behind a row of dichromatic halogen spots. Michael and Ashley 1 followed along.
“That’s Bob Costas over there,” she whispered to me.
“Who?” I asked.
“There.”
“Huh.”
“You know, the great many, many award-winning sportscaster,” she said. “He’s here with John Tesch.”
“Oh, right, that’s, yes,” I said. “That’s a big deal.”
“Exactly,” Ashley 1 chirped, brightly. “Defini tive ly. Great, great, great.” She went back to pointing out all these people you’d never heard of. Well, at least, I’d never heard of them. In the old days we would have said they were mouse-uayed people pretending to be felines. Here I guess we’d just say they were irretrievably B-list. I caught up with Marena, but some ditzy-grinned lady had buttonholed her.
“Uh, Tony?” Marena said. “Michael? You guys know Peggy Noonan, right? Peggy Noonan, Tony Sic.” The woman held her hand out.
“Hi. Wow, the Leni Riefenstahl of speechwriting,” I blurted out, before I quite knew what I was saying. “It is nice to meet you, but your hand has too much blood on it.” She froze for a split-beat. “Your old boss had my parents killed.” Noonan turned and stalked off. Jed would never have had the nerve to say that, I thought.
“Thanks a lot,” Marena said. “It wasn’t Jed who said that, was it?”
“No,” I said. “But I support some of Jed’s causes. Jed is an old friend.”
“You’re such a self-righteous cornball,” she said. “You’re dis-fucking-gusting, I mean, I don’t love her, either, but for crying out bloody tears.”
“What’s going on?” Michael said. “The last thing I heard you were in real trouble.”
I mumbled something.
“There he is,” Marena said. Lindsay was about thirty steps femaleward of us, standing under the Tree of Life, ringed by a bunch of what looked like investors. You had to hand something to him, he had this whole vast private- army black op going on right at this moment and he was standing here shmoozing like he didn’t have a care in the world. A waiter held a tray out at us.
“Is that celery?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, they’re white chocolate sticks,” he said.
“Oh, great.” There were ten of them. I took nine.
“No, thanks,” Marena said.
“Come on, have one,” I said.
Lindsay had on a gray summery jacket and I dug the Bug Bom with two dots-the gray-covered one-out of Marena’s handbag. It wasn’t a great match, either, but it would have to do. I wanted to go right up to him, but Marena said it looked like he was going to send them on their way pretty soon.
“Okay, let’s hang back for a beat,” I said. I ate a chocolate stick.
There were two identifiable security people standing behind him. One of them I hadn’t seen before, a big classy-bodyguard type in a black tie with an earphone. The other was that commando woman from the Creep, Ana Vergara. She was in leggings and a close-fitting black huipil and looking almost attractive, for a hired enforceress. She hadn’t spotted me yet, but she would.
“Do you know that they’re all, I mean, the police,” Michael said, “they’re all looking for you?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “I know, I’m too fast for them.”
The covey of investors laughed-what was the funny part? I wondered-nodded, and turned toward the entrance to the playing field. Other people were hanging around, too, waiting to talk with the great man, but Marena pushed through and tapped him on the shoulder. He seemed genuinely happy to see her, although of course he wasn’t. She said something to him-I hoped it was what I had told her to say-and he turned around, to his left. Ana had spotted me now, but she expected me to stay where I was so Lindsay could face me, and instead I had just enough time to move around to his right and clap him on the back. Beneath the cashmere, the silk lining, the Sea Island broadcloth, and the Jesus jumper, his trapezius muscles were surprisingly hard against my fingertips. “Hail, fellow, well met,” I said.
Lindsay kept turning. He hadn’t felt the bug yet, since it was just held on with Velcro. When he recognized me he was pretty smooth, his expression didn’t change, but he didn’t say hello. He just stood there, waiting for Ana and whoever to take care of it, seeming relaxed, his look radiating that he was a big guy and I was a little guy and big guys just don’t get fucked with. He was wearing an American-flag lapel pin and a dressier bumblebee pin, this one with yellow sapphires.
“Chief, don’t move,” Ana said. She’d spotted the bug, and she knew what it was. I squoze the button in my pocket that activated its little hooked legs. Lindsay felt them digging down through his jacket and into his flesh and jumped a little.
“Ow,” he said. His arm jerked backward, but the Bom was correctly positioned right in his acnestis, that is, that place in the small of the back where few people can scratch.
“DO NOT MOVE,” I said, more or less quoting from the Special Boat Service manual.
He didn’t.
Brian D'Amato
The Sacrifice Game
(110)
A na and the other guy had already grabbed me but I had my hands in my pockets and went on. “I have placed an explosive device called a Bug Bom on your back. As you may know, if you or anyone else tries to remove this device, it will detonate automatically, firing neurotoxin into your flesh.”
“ On the ground, now, ” Ana said.
“I am holding down the SUSPEND FIRE button,” I said. They already had me down on the Travertine floor. “If I get shot in the head, or trip and fall, or anything, my thumb will release it. Or
if you don’t GET OFF ME NOW!”
I gave Lindsay a friendly little zap. He gasped-and-twitched, but not so much as I would have thought.
“Marena, what’s he doing?” Lindsay asked.
“My guess is that he’s serious,” Marena said.
They still hadn’t let me up. On the other hand, they weren’t trying to pull my hands out of my pockets. Maybe they already had a procedure for dealing with these things.
“Let me up now,” I said. They didn’t. “All right, watch this,” I said. “Michael?”
“What?” Michael said.
Marena figured out what was happening, but by the time she got around to Michael’s back I’d already pressed his button. I was afraid that with all the quilting on his collar, and without the bug’s hooks in, the pellets
