Flashback

“Shut up, Sully,” said Coyne.

Putin continued walking toward Coyne until just Czar Vladimir’s powerful bare upper body and muscled arms and head filled the back of the shirt. Then just Putin’s face. Then just Putin’s narrowed eyes.

“God, he must be about a hundred and fifty years old,” said Monk, his voice hushed in the presence of the world’s longest-reigning strongman. And “strongman,” with Putin, could be interpreted literally as well.

“Just eighty,” said Val without thinking about it. “He was born in nineteen fifty-two… six years before my grandfather.”

“Shut up,” said Coyne. “Listen.”

Turning its head to squint more directly at Coyne, the Putin image said, “Moio sudno na vozdusnoy poduske polno ugrey.” Each syllable cracked like a bullet.

Coyne laughed wildly.

Val’s head snapped around. Does Coyne really understand that Russian shit? Was Billy the C’s mother Russian? Val couldn’t remember.

“What’s it mean, Coyne, huh?” asked Monk. “What’d he say?”

Coyne waved the question away. To the Putin eyes, he said, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, skol’ko eto stoit? Footbalka?”

Putin’s head and powerful shoulders suddenly came up and out of the shirt. Val jerked back a step. In some weird way, this was scarier than the Dahmer cannibal.

“Eight hundred thousand bucks,” said Putin in thickly accented English, smiling thinly at Coyne while shooting glances at the other boys. Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin, Sully, Monk, and Gene D. stepped back with Val.

“New bucks,” added Putin. Then smiling even more thinly, he asked Coyne, “Are you trying to hang noodle soup on my ears, droog?”

“Nyet,” said Coyne with another manic laugh. “Davajte perejdjom na ‘ty,’ Vladimir Vladimirovich.”

“Poshjoi ty!” snapped the Putin AI, laughing nastily.

Risking a brush-off from Coyne, Val said, “What’s that mean?”

“It means Fuck you,” said Coyne. His laughter was strangely like the Putin AI’s.

“What did you say to him?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Coyne turned to the bearded hajji. “I’ll take the Putin shirt.”

The hajji scanned Coyne’s NICC and looked at the boy with something like respect. The teenager with the bandolier folded the T-shirt and was getting out a paper bag to put it in.

“No, I’ll wear it,” said Coyne. Unbuttoning the blue flannel shirt he was wearing and tossing it toward the trash, the tall boy tugged on the new black T-shirt. Val noticed the 9mm Beretta tucked into the back of Coyne’s jeans, but he wasn’t sure if anyone else did. Coyne didn’t seem to care.

“Some krutoj paren’,” said the Putin face that now filled the front of the shirt.

“What’s that mean?” whined Monk.

“Tough guy,” answered Coyne. Pulling the fabric of the shirt up a bit so he could look down at the face, Coyne said to Putin, “You’re kljovyj blin, old dude. Real coolshit. And a real shishka. Now shut up while we finish our shopping.”

The gang of eight guys spread out so as not to be so conspicuous. Also, they were interested in different things.

Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin, and Sully went off to see the new games pirated in from Japan, Russia, Consolidated Korea, India, and the other high-tech countries. Gene D., still blushing fiercely at being called pimply by the Dahmer AI, stalked off by himself. Monk followed Coyne when the leader walked down the row of stalls to browse expensive—nothing under a million bucks—new VR and other optics. Alone, Val slumped along the stalls, ignoring the cries from the vendors and the shoves from the crowd—not worrying that his pocket might be picked since he had no cash today anyway and had left his NICC at home.

One long table presided over by two hajji Afghans wearing Taliban government clothing was heaped high with fatigue jackets, combat boots, and cheap body armor from American soldiers. Dinjin and the other younger kids, who still liked to wear such crap, loved to say that this surplus stuff was all taken from dead U.S. soldiers in China and South America—and usually there was at least one blasted and bloodstained piece of dragonarmor to support such a theory—but Val was old enough to know that most of it was just stolen from the U.S. Army fighting as mercenaries for Japan and India during the long and corrupt logistics trip to the shifting front lines.

For a guy now sixteen and staring at conscription just eleven months and a few days away, Val wasn’t in the least tempted to wear castoff U.S. Army or marine clothing. He’d get his real boots and uniform and fatigues and subdural bar code soon enough.

Billy Coyne’s older brother, Brad, had his parents buy him out of the draft. Then Brad had gone on to join the Aryan Brotherhood and ended up in a sort of uniform anyway. Plus a lot more efficient body armor and with cooler guns than the poorly equipped U.S. soldiers were using to fight warlords and Hugonistas. (It was Brad’s story that made Coyne even more respected and accepted as a leader of this pathetic little white-boy flashgang, Val knew.)

When Val had told his grandfather about Brad—at least the part about Brad and Billy’s folks buying his way out of the draft—and then asked whether his grandfather could do that for him, Leonard had just stared at him as if he’d gone insane.

Sometimes Val felt sorry that he’d first thought of killing his grandfather when Coyne showed him the Beretta. After all, Val knew that the old man didn’t mean to be a total asshole. He was just trained that way as an academic.

Val had just come to an expensive table where different types of roll-up and fold-up and other flexible and micro-thin 3D-high-def displays were being shown off. Since this table was also being run by hajji “importers”—Val had long since realized that the Open Air Market was the safest place in Los Angeles to be today since there was zero chance of a suicide bomber setting his vest and himself or herself off here—they had the displays tuned to the inevitable English-language Al Jazeera stoning and beheading death channels, but they were also showing various 9-11 ceremonies around the country and around the world.

Several of the feeds were from the relatively new Shahid al-Haram Mosque which had been built on the so- called Ground Zero or World Trade Center site in New York. Val thought that the mosque was beautiful, a sort of taller, more elegant and jet-black Taj Mahal. Right now New York’s mayor, the U.S. vice president, and New York’s chief imam were taking turns saying hopeful things near the hole where that stupid World Trade Center had once risen and then the 9-11 Memorial and a new Freedom Tower had been attempted before both had been destroyed in turn.

It made sense to Val that the site should be the place for North America’s largest mosque to rise. No one’s going to attack a mosque. (Although the Greater Islamic Republic, which was Shi’ite, Leonard had explained to Val, might do so, since the Shahid al-Haram Mosque was Sunni.) Leonard had also explained to Val that Shahid al-Haram meant something like Martyrs of the Holy Place, which evidently had irritated some old-think right-wingers and die-hard American hegemonists.

But some weeks ago, Val had come into the tiny TV room in their basement apartment to find his grandfather watching some show praising the Shahid al-Haram Mosque—and two hundred other huge, new mosques currently being built or just completed in the United States (not counting the Republic of Texas, of course, which was not part of the U.S. and was not mosque-friendly)—and damned if old Leonard wasn’t blubbering silently. What the fuck was that about?

His grandfather had been embarrassed, telling the shocked and equally embarrassed Val that he only had a head cold, but it had started Val thinking—What if Leonard goes Alzheimer’s on me? What do I do then?

But a day later, over a rare shared microwave-zapped dinner, Leonard had gone all teachy and preachy on