tentacularthings, or their human inheritors. “Do you think they could have been intelligent, professor? Conscious, like us?”
“I’d say so.” Gould’s eyes glitter. “This one-” he points to a viewgraph-“isn’t alive as we know it.
Andthis one-” he’s found a Predecessor, God help him, barrel-bodied and bat-winged “-had what looks like a lot of very complex ganglia, not a brain as we know it, but at least as massive as our own.
And some specialized grasping adaptations that might be interpreted as facilitating tool use. Put the two together and you have a high level technological civilization. Gateways between planets orbiting different stars. Alien flora, fauna, or whatever. I’d say an interstellar civilization isn’t out of the picture. One that has been extinct for deep geological time-ten times as long as the dinosaurs-but that has left relics that work.” His voice is trembling with emotion. “We humans, we’ve barely scratched the surface! The longest-lasting of our relics? All our buildings will be dust in twenty thousand years, even the pyramids.
Neil Armstrong’s footprints in the Sea of Tranquility will crumble under micrometeoroid bombardment in a mere half million years or so. The emptied oil fields will refill over ten million years, methane percolating up through the mantle: continental drift will erase everything. Butthese people…! They built to last.
There’s so much to learn from them. I wonder if we’re worthy successors to their technological crown?”
“I’m sure we are, professor,” the Colonel’s secretary says brassily. “Isn’t that right, Ollie?”
The Colonel nods, grinning. “You betcha, Fawn. You betcha!”
The Great Satan Roger sits in the bar in the King David hotel, drinking from a tall glass of second-rate lemonade and sweating in spite of the air conditioning. He’s dizzy and disoriented from jet-lag, the gut-cramps have only let him come down from his room in the past hour, and he has another two hours to go before he can try to place a call to Andrea. They had another blazing row before he flew out here; she doesn’t understand why he keeps having to visit odd corners of the globe. She only knows that his son is growing up thinking a father is a voice that phones at odd times of day.
Roger is mildly depressed, despite the buzz of doing business at this level. He spends a lot of time worrying about what will happen if they’re found out-what Andrea will do, or Jason for that matter, Jason whose father is a phone call away all the time-if Roger is led away in handcuffs beneath the glare of flash bulbs. If the Colonel sings, if the shy, bald Admiral is browbeaten into spilling the beans to Congress, who will look after them then?
Roger has no illusions about what kills black operations: there are too many people in the loop, too many elaborate front corporations and numbered bank accounts and shady Middle Eastern arms-dealers.
Sooner or later someone will find a reason to talk, and Roger is in too deep. He isn’t just the Company liaison officer anymore: he’s become the Colonel’s bag-man, his shadow, the guy with the diplomatic passport and the bulging briefcase full of heroin and end-user certificates.
At least the ship will sink from the top down, he thinks. There are peoplevery high up who want the Colonel to succeed. When the shit hits the fan and is sprayed across the front page of theWashington Post, it will likely take down Cabinet members and Secretaries of State: the President himself will have to take the witness stand and deny everything. The republic will question itself.
A hand descends on his shoulder, sharply cutting off his reverie. “Howdy, Roger! Whatcha worrying about now?”
Jourgensen looks up wearily. “Stuff,” he says gloomily. “Have a seat.” The redneck from the embassy-Mike Hamilton, some kind of junior attache for embassy protocol by cover-pulls out a chair and crashes down on it like a friendly car wreck. He’s not really a redneck, Roger knows-rednecks don’t come with doctorates in foreign relations from Yale-but he likes people to think he’s a bumpkin when he wants to get something from them.
“He’s early,” Hamilton says, looking past Roger’s ear, voice suddenly all business. “Play the agenda, I’m your dim but friendly good cop. Got the background? Deniables ready?”
Roger nods, then glances around and sees Mehmet (family name unknown) approaching from the other side of the room. Mehmet is impeccably manicured and tailored, wearing a suit from Jermyn Street that cost more than Roger earns in a month. He has a neatly trimmed beard and mustache and talks with a pronounced English accent. Mehmet is a Turkish name, not Persian: false, of course. To look at him you would think he was a westernized Turkish businessman-certainly not an Iranian revolutionary with heavy links to Hezbollah and (whisper this) Old Man Ruholla himself, the hermit of Qom. Never, ever, in a thousand years, the unofficial Iranian ambassador to the Little Satan in Tel Aviv.
Mehmet strides over. A brief exchange of pleasantries masks the essential formality of their meeting: he’s early, a deliberate move to put them off-balance. He’s outnumbered, too, and that’s also a move to put them on the defensive, because the first rule of diplomacy is never to put yourself in a negotiating situation where the other side can assert any kind of moral authority, and sheer weight of numbers is a powerful psychological tool.
“Roger, my dear fellow.” He smiles at Jourgensen. “And the charming doctor Hamilton, I see.” The smile broadens. “I take it the good Colonel is desirous of news of his friends?”
Jourgensen nods. “That is indeed the case.”
Mehmet stops smiling. For a moment he looks ten years older. “I visited them,” he says shortly. “No, I wastaken to see them. It is indeed grave, my friends. They are in the hands of very dangerous men, men who have nothing to lose and are filled with hatred.”
Roger speaks: “There is a debt between us-”
Mehmet holds up a hand. “Peace, my friend. We will come to that. These are men of violence, men who have seen their homes destroyed and families subjected to indignities, and their hearts are full of anger. It will take a large display of repentance, a high blood-price, to buy their acquiescence. That is part of our law, you understand? The family of the bereaved may demand blood-price of the transgressor, and how else might the world be? They see it in these terms: that you must repent of your evils and assist them in waging holy war against those who would defy the will of Allah.”
Roger sighs. “We do what we can,” he says. “We’re shipping them arms. We’re fighting the Soviets every way we can without provoking the big one. What more do they want? The hostages-that’s not playing well in DC. There’s got to be some give and take. If Hezbollah don’t release them soon they’ll just convince everyone that they’re not serious about negotiating. And that’ll be an end to it. The Colonelwants to help you, but he’s got to have something to show the man at the top, right?”
Mehmet nods. “You and I are men of the world and understand that this keeping of hostages is not rational, but they look to you for defense against the great Satan that assails them, and their blood burns with anger that your nation, for all its fine words, takes no action. The great Satan rampages in Afghanistan, taking whole villages by night, and what is done? The United States turns its back. And they are not the only ones who feel betrayed. Our Ba’athist foes from Iraq…in Basra the unholy brotherhood of Takrit, and their servants the Mukhabarat, hold nightly sacrifice upon the altar of Yair-Suthot; the fountains of blood in Tehran testify to their effect. If the richest, most powerful nation on earth refuses to fight, these men of violence from the Bekaa think, how may we unstopper the ears of that nation? And they are not sophisticates like you or I.”
He looks at Roger, who hunches his shoulders uneasily. “Wecan’t move against the Soviets openly! They must understand that it would be the end of far more than their little war. If the Taliban want American help against the Russians, it cannot be delivered openly.”
“It is not the Russians that we quarrel with,” Mehmet says quietly, “but their choice of allies. They believe themselves to be infidel atheists, but by their deeds they shall be known; the icy spoor of Leng is upon them, their tools are those described in the Kitab al Azif. We have proof that they have violated the terms of the Dresden Agreement. The accursed and unhallowed stalk the frozen passes of the Himalayas by night, taking all whose path they cross. And will you stop your ears even as the Russians grow in misplaced confidence, sure that their dominance of these forces of evil is complete? The gates are opening everywhere, as was prophesied. Last week we flew an F-14C with a camera relay pod through one of them. The pilot and weapons operator are in Paradise now, but we have glanced into Hell, and have the film and radar plots to prove it.”
The Iranian ambassador fixes the redneck from the embassy with an icy gaze. “Tell your ambassador that we have opened preliminary discussions with Mossad, with a view to purchasing the produce of a factory at Dimona, in the Negev desert. Past insults may be set aside, for the present danger imperils all of us.They are receptive to our arguments, even if you are not: His Holiness the Ayatollah has declared in private that any warrior who carries a nuclear device into the abode of the eater of souls will certainly achieve Paradise. There will be an end to the followers of the ancient abominations on this Earth, Doctor Hamilton, even if we have to push the nuclear bombs down their throats with our own hands!”
