only worked on inorganic matter, and had a range of only about fifty feet. But all he had to do was look at something made of stone or metal and snap his fingers, and about two pounds of it went poof.
Tom jumped down beside the Mummy. Smiling down at the obsidian eyes that glittered impassively from the stretched-out bandages, and trying his best to ignore the yellow pool around her feet as her kidneys desperately processed the extravagant overload of water she’d sucked into her tissues, he put an arm around her. “No offense, honey,” he said, “but you’re gonna be a load.”
Around the corner of the building, invisible to Tom, past high white walls but clearly not from the roof, something big blew up. Like a Russian-made BTR armored car. Wrecker was definitely living up to his name.
Tom grinned. Was gone.
10
Saturday,
December 5
Somewhere South of Kalemie, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
It would have been easier to keep to the shore as they moved north, but after the run-in with the PPA gunboat, Wally suggested they stay inland so as not to be seen from the lake. Jerusha agreed. It did hide them from the lake, but since they also had to avoid the roads, it meant slow going as they trudged through a solid wall of vegetation.
Wally took the lead. He tried to hack his way through the thickest bits. It wasn’t as easy as it looked in the Tarzan movies. He hadn’t realized that swinging a machete took so much technique. The hardest part was turning his wrist to make another slash on the backswing. And every swing had to be coordinated with a step of just the right size, so that he didn’t overextend the next swing. A few times he even managed to hit himself on the follow- through.
He made up for the lack of technique with brute strength. His knife hand went numb from the constant smack and vibration of mistimed or misplaced swings.
Wally ignored the growing tingle in his hand. Kalemie was so close. Just a few more miles to Lucien, and then everything would be okay.
Hack. Rip. Slash. Rip. Hack. They hadn’t been going more than half an hour before his face, chest, and forearms were splattered with little bits and pieces of green vegetable matter.
Here he was, adventuring in the middle of Africa, complete with pith helmet and machete-just like the games he and his brother had played as kids. But it wasn’t very fun. In fact, it wasn’t fun at all.
TV couldn’t convey just how wet, how humid, it was in the jungle. That wasn’t counting the rain, which, as Wally had quickly learned, sometimes came down so hard and so fast that it hurt. He wondered how Jerusha put up with it. Nor did the old movies convey the sickly sweet smell of constant decay that enveloped him like a fog. Not to mention how sticky it made a guy, cutting through all these plants.
And in the movies, Tarzan always rescued his friends in the nick of time. But if Wally had learned one thing from his time with the Committee, it was that real life offered no such guarantees. Rebels and Leopard Men… What happened, Lucien? What’s going on at that school of yours?
Wally glanced over his shoulder. Jerusha had fallen back a respectable distance, to avoid the rain of debris. She didn’t say anything, but he wondered if it upset her that he was hurting so many plants.
He fell into a meditative rhythm, replaying the lake crossing over and over again. Wally hadn’t entirely understood just how far out of his depth he was on this trip until the gunboat showed up. In fact, he wouldn’t have made it that far if not for Jerusha.
Wild card powers aside, she at least could talk to folks in French. He couldn’t even do that. It hadn’t occurred to him that communication might be a problem; all of his foreign travel experiences had been carried out through the Committee, where he and DB were always surrounded either by translators or folks who spoke English. Plus, Lucien had pretty good English for a little guy, so Wally had figured everybody here did.
And then, when the PPA boat had shown up, Wally had done… nothing. He’d been no help at all. Jerusha had taken care of the whole thing in a few seconds. Even her aim was great. Almost as good as Kate’s.
She didn’t need his help at all. But he sure as heck needed her.
New York Public Library
Manhattan, New York
“Yes! oh, yes yes yes yes yes! Fucking A, yes!”
The inhabitants of the reading room raised their collective heads, considered the young man capering wildly at his carrel with amusement or uneasiness or disgust, and then went back to their business. Bugsy nodded apologetically to the guard, and sat back down. “I am too cool,” he said under his breath. “I am the man. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Ain’t nobody better than me.”
Three huge bound volumes were stacked before him. The first was a volume of ancient arrest records dating from the end of 1970 to the beginning of seventy-one. The second were summaries of small claims court proceedings from the same period. The last, bound in black leather like an ancient grimoire, were the documents for the New York City Family Court for the eighties.
The ruling that Bugsy was poring over, that had inspired his delight, was a custody battle between one Kimberly Ann Cordayne and her estranged husband Mark Meadows. He shifted in his seat, his grin almost ached. He took a legal pad and a pen, marked do not reshelve-i’ll be right back on the top page, and laid it across the opened book. Then, just to be sure, he popped half a dozen wasps free and set up a little perimeter guard on the books before skipping out of the reading room and pulling out his cell.
Ellen wasn’t answering, so he called Lohengrin’s office number. The man’s secretary said he wasn’t in, but offered to take a message or drop Bugsy to voice mail. He opted for voice mail.
“Lohengrin!” he said, grinning. “Lohengrin, you great quasi-Nordic war god! You huge example of German technology run amok! I am the coolest guy you know. Seriously. I have plucked the Sunflower out of a haystack. Kimberly Ann Cordayne, aka Sunflower. Arrest record like a small-town phone book starting with petty crap in the late sixties and going up-I shit you not-to suspected membership in the Symbionese Liberation Army. Married some poor schlub named Mark Meadows back in seventy-five, got divorced in eighty-one. Knock-down, drag-out custody battle over a retarded kid goes through eighty-nine. Wound up with the judge ruling both parents unfit and giving the kid to the state. And the girl was named… wait for it… Sprout!
“So unless there’s a bunch of other Special Olympians named Sprout born right around seventy-seven, this is the same one Tom Weathers got his panties in a bunch about last year when he tried to nuke New Orleans. Now I don’t know if this Meadows creature is the bio-dad, or Sunflower was bumping uglies with the Radical all through the seventies or what, but I am on the case. On it.
“So… yeah.
“Um. I get anything else, I’ll call you back.” Bugsy dropped the connection, smiled a little less widely at the cell phone, and went back to the reading room.
The next seven hours brought little information about Sunflower Cordayne, but Mark Meadows turned out to have a fair paper trail. The implication from press clippings and court documents was that he was some kind of ace with the nom de virus “Cap’n Trips,” but what exactly his alleged powers were was never made explicit. Instead, he ran the Cosmic Pumpkin Head Shop and Organic Deli (renamed the New Dawn Wellness Center sometime in the late eighties) on the border between Jokertown and the Village and hung out with a raft of better-known aces. Jumping Jack Flash. Moonchild. Aquarius.
When Moonchild got herself elected the president of South Vietnam, Meadows got himself named chancellor, only to bite the big burrito when the presidential palace went up in a fireball. And supposedly his daughter Sprout died with him. Right about the time Tom Weathers showed up in East Asia, kicking ass and taking names in a list that was still growing today.
Bugsy closed the books and rubbed his eyes. The windows were all dark now, and the breeze coming in from the east smelled like taxicabs and the Atlantic.
There were a number of good scenarios. Tom Weathers shows up in sixty-nine, hooks up with Sunflower.
