Noel tuned out the boring loop of threats and demands. He wondered how Niobe was feeling. How she was doing. Fourteen and a half weeks. A week and a half-ten days and they would be at that magic sixteen-week mark. Out of danger. On their way to a child.
“I may change the date. I need this done quickly-”
Noel interrupted. “Look, we can do this right or we can do this fast. You don’t get both. Oh, and we also can’t do it cheap. I need money. Enough to look like a credible first deposit at the bank.”
“I want it back.”
Noel just gave him a look. “Isn’t it a small price to pay for the Caliphate?”
On the Lukuga River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
It wasn’t long after Wally stole the PPA patrol boat that he first noticed the itchy feeling between his shoulders, like he was being watched. He reminded himself that this was a good thing. That he wanted the PPA to watch him, keep tabs on him. Because more people following Wally meant fewer people following Jerusha and the rescued kids. The more the PPA watched him, the less it could watch her. Its soldiers couldn’t be everywhere at once.
All true. But it was a creepy feeling, all the same.
He paused for a lunch break only when he couldn’t ignore the growling of his stomach any longer. His canteen was empty, too, so it was time to pull aside. Wally went ashore in a shaded cove hidden by a bend in the river. He hauled his gear a few dozen yards into the jungle. After fishing out two more chlorination tablets, he returned to the river with his canteen. Chlorine made the water taste terrible-like he’d fallen into a swimming pool and accidentally taken a gulp-but he’d insisted that Jerusha and the kids take both biological filtration bottles. Wally was distracted, still thinking about Jerusha, when he returned to the spot where he’d stashed his gear.
A flash of something pale caught the corner of his eye while he packed his canteen away. He looked up, expecting to see a bird or maybe even a monkey.
And that was when he saw the ghostly little girl. She emerged from the jungle without making a sound.
“Holy cripes!” Wally dropped the canteen and scrambled backward on his hands and feet.
She looked to be eight or nine years old. She wore a pristine white dress, like something a little kid would wear to church. Incongruously, Wally wondered how she kept it so clean in the jungle. But then he noticed that her passage didn’t disturb the underbrush. She passed right through it, and she didn’t cast a shadow. Like a ghost.
The girl stared at him with wide eyes dark as a moonless night. She held her hands behind her back. The only sound was the gurgling of water from the canteen.
Wally’s heart hammered away at the bars of its iron cage. It felt like forever before the tightness in his throat receded enough for him to speak. He struggled to form a coherent thought. “Where the heck did you come from?” he managed.
The girl didn’t answer. If she heard him at all she showed no sign of it. All she did was stare at him with those cold, cold eyes. She didn’t even blink.
“Holy cow, kid. You scared the stuffing out of me.” Wally regained his feet. He took a step forward. She backed up. “Are you lost?” Another step. The girl backed up again, receding into the jungle. “Hungry?”
The last thing he noticed before she disappeared completely was that her feet didn’t touch the ground.
Wally’s appetite had fled. Like the rest of him wanted to do. He abandoned thoughts of lunch. Instead he picked up his gear and forced himself to walk back to the boat rather than run. The itch between his shoulder blades was painful now, like a hot nail in the back.
He put miles and miles between himself and the little girl before nightfall made it impossible to go any farther. And even though he knew it was silly, he was careful to pitch his tent on the opposite side of the river from where he’d stopped for lunch. He forced himself to eat, even though his appetite hadn’t returned.
Wally tossed and turned in his sleeping bag for what felt like hours. When he did manage to drift off, dark and disturbing dreams haunted him. He slept fitfully.
He snapped wide awake just before dawn, after a particularly vivid dream about somebody trying to slit his throat. But he was all alone in the jungle.
Mackenzie District
Northwest Territory, Canada
“You’re losing it, man,” the hippie asshole said. Behind the thick round lenses of his specs his eyes wavered like blue drops of ink refusing to quite dissolve in water. Tom longed to punch in that weak face, oddly ascetic as it was, with the gaunt cheeks and wispy goatee and an air of general sadness that infuriated him the more. “You can’t hide from it much longer.”
He and the other floated in a sort of fluffy Void in which only they had color and form. “So what? So fucking what? You think you can take your body back? That shit’s gone forever, Meadows. If I lose it we all die.”
“If that’s so,” his enemy-the only thing he feared-said calmly, “that wouldn’t be so bad. Because you’re losing control of your power, too.”
He laughed. “I’m the most powerful ace on fucking Earth. Who’s going to do anything to me?”
“It’s not what others do to you. It’s what you do to the world. The whole human race. You’re turning into an extinction-level threat.”
He laughed again, a bit more wildly. “If I wipe out humanity, who the fuck’ll miss us? All your hippie friends these days say humanity’s a plague.”
“What about the oppressed?” his gentle inquisitor said doggedly. “What about your Revolution?”
“Hey, maybe I fulfill the historic process by ending history. Shit happens, man.”
“But if people make shit happen,” Meadows said, “others can stop them doing it.”
“Ha! You and what army?”
Tom became aware of shapes seeming to swim around them. His eyes couldn’t resolve them as anything more than vaguely human-shaped blurs of color: grey; an orange that flickered like the reflections of flames; a disc half moon-silver and half black, with S-curved demarcation; a black infinitely deep, shot through with tiny parti-color points of light that did not illuminate the darkness.
“You forget whose friends they were to start with,” Mark said.
“They’re mine now. You got nothing, you weak, lame puke. You are nothing. And I’m tired of your shit.” With a force of will Tom drove himself upward and out.
Abruptly he was sitting upright in a bed, cold air pricking his skin where sheets and layers of heavy blankets had fallen away. A faint smoke smell and heat of banked coals emanated from the fireplace. Big snowflakes beat like giant moths against the window of the cabin in the Arctic pine forests of Mackenzie District in Canada’s Northwest Territory, almost as remote as the mid-Pacific.
He had come alone. He needed to try to get his head straight. Sun Heilian was starting to look at him funny. She was too damned smart, that woman. She’s just a woman, a voice told him. The world’s half full of them.
Tom shook his head and rubbed his face, where for some reason beard bristles never grew. “She loves Sprout,” he said, “she loves me .” And he thought, Who’s laughing? Who’s that I hear? And inside him was colder than outside the log walls of the cabin.
19
Monday,
December 14
Helsinki, Finland
“I don’t really want to be crawling through a computer screen in the security office,” Jaako Kuusi, aka Broadcast, mumbled around a mouthful of creamed herring.
Noel placed a spoonful of caviar, some chopped egg, and chopped onion on a cracker. “Well, how else can we do it?” He took a bite and the sharp taste of fish and salt brought an explosion of saliva to the back of his mouth.
“There’s a guy in the States. I kept track of computer aces for our service.”
Noel nodded. Jaako did occasional freelance work for the Finnish secret service, and he and Noel had crossed
