return.” And he told her what he needed.
“So, yet more killing before he’s free?” Sun said bitterly.
“At least he’ll be killing people who richly deserve it, and it’s my price,” Noel answered.
She sighed. “All right. I will contact you when I’m ready.” She sounded unbelievably sad, and then Noel realized she had hung up.
He slowly put away his phone and considered. Of course he wasn’t going to trust Niobe’s safety to the questionable science of psychiatry. Weathers needed to die.
The question was, who did it?
27
Tuesday,
December 22
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The pilot’s name was Japhet. His face was crisscrossed with pink scars that shone against his dark skin. There was a rifle slung across his shoulder and he had a pistol holstered under his left armpit. Before Michelle’s card turned, he would have scared the shit out of her.
Joey had found a dead chimpanzee near the airstrip and raised it up. Japhet called it a bonobo. He didn’t seem surprised in the least by the zombie bonobo, not even when Joey carried it around like a baby.
“Stop playing with that zombie,” Michelle snapped. It gave her the willies. “It’s not helping. And it grosses me out.”
“Jesus, Bubbles, you are such a fucking pussy when it comes to slightly moldy flesh.” Joey made a kissy face at the bonobo. The bonobo made the same face back at Joey.
Japhet looked quizzically between them. “I still need one thousand U.S. to take you to Kisangani.”
“I can give you five hundred,” Michelle said. “And this watch.” Michelle pulled off her Bulova. It wasn’t very expensive, but it was pretty. Maybe Japhet would go for it.
Japhet gave the watch a skeptical look. “It’s not that valuable.”
“You can tell people it belonged to the Amazing Bubbles.” She held her hand out, palm up, and let a small bubble form in it. Then she targeted a can lying in the dirt about twenty-five feet away and let it fly. The can jumped and pinged as if it had been shot.
That made him smile. “You give me an autograph, too?”
“As many as you want.”
Ackroyd amp; Creighton Investigations
Manhattan, New York
Jay Ackroyd-Popinjay-leaned against his desk, arms crossed, a sense of world-weary amusement radiating off him in a way Bugsy had only dreamed possible. This, Bugsy thought as he finished his explanation, is what I want to be when I grow up.
The office wasn’t pristine. An old coffee cup was sitting on the desk, a pile of folders rose up on the desk. But there was a comfort in the man as he moved through the room, a sense of professionalism that said, Hey, I didn’t start the most powerful ace in the world on a killing rampage. That was you.
“Okay,” Popinjay said slowly, like he was eating something he really liked the taste of. “So you want to figure out what the relationship is between the Radical and Mark Meadows?” He seemed to think the question was funny.
“The Radical’s on kind of a killing spree, you may have noticed. If Meadows is still alive, he may have the key to stopping Tom Weathers,” Bugsy said.
“You could look at it that way,” Popinjay said. “Here’s the thing, Mark Meadows and I were on Takis together, and-”
“Takis? Like the other planet, Takis? With the aliens that made the wild card?”
“That would be the Takis,” Popinjay said. “I was there. With Mark. That whole cadre of aces that hung out with Cap’n Trips? Jumping Jack Flash. Moonchild. Cosmic Traveler. They’re all him.”
Bugsy blinked. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Mark Meadows was Moonchild?”
“And Starshine. And all the rest.”
“And the Radical…”
“And the Radical. Mark is a pharmaceutical genius. Depending on which drugs he took, he became different people.”
“Yeah, okay,” Bugsy said, his hundred different bits of information falling into place at once. “That’s usually just a metaphor, you know.”
“Not for Mark. The Radical was the holy grail for him. He’d managed to get there once. The first time, as a matter of fact. Way back in the sixties.”
“People’s Park,” Bugsy said. “I got that.”
“It wasn’t really the same guy, though. Tom Weathers came later. That one was just the Radical. Ever since then, he’s been trying to get that particular high back. All the others were… well, I wouldn’t say failed attempts. But less than successful.”
Bugsy stood up, pacing slowly back and forth. “Aquarius. The were-dolphin guy?”
“Mark Meadows.”
“Starshine?”
“Mark. And Monster.”
“Jesus! The Radical was the Cock That Ate Chicago?”
Popinjay nodded, then grew somber. “They were all him. Or parts of him or things that he took out of the world and became. I was never really sure. But they were all named for songs, you know.”
“Songs?”
“Sure. Jumping Jack Flash?”
“It’s a song? I knew it was a Whoopi Goldberg movie.”
Jay Ackroyd shook his head. “All of them are songs. Listen to a good oldies station. You’ll find all of them there. Aquarius. Starshine.”
“Moonchild?”
“By King Crimson,” Jay said, “released in sixty-nine. Same year Mark became the Radical for the first time.”
“Vietnam was brought out of civil war by a pop song?”
“You could look at it that way,” Jay Ackroyd said. “The thing you have to understand about Mark Meadows is he’s a really good person. Yes, he saved Vietnam. He saved more than that. You remember the Card Sharks?”
“Was that the show on Cinemax with the girl in Vegas and the chimpanzee?”
“I was thinking more the conspiracy to kill every wild card in the world. They were holding Mark prisoner in China back in ninety-four. Guy named Layton was beating Mark to death. Mark swallowed a bunch of drugs. Who really knows what? And then… the Radical returned. I know what he’s become, but before all this happened, the Radical saved your life.”
“He seems to regret it now.”
“Yeah, I know. Whatever’s going on with Mark, it’s… complex. Seems like his ‘friends’ are aspects of his personality. Maybe they started out being external-part of the drugs, part of the world, whatever-or maybe they were always inside him. But the Radical was all of them together. Like a multiple personality disorder where there’s one persona who knows everything? Tom Weathers was the perfected image of Mark Meadows. He had all the powers of all the others. He was… he was what Mark wanted to be, but never was.”
“Well,” Bugsy said. “Holy shit.”
He left in a daze, taking the subway back to Ellen’s. He couldn’t get his head around Mark Meadows, sad sack icon of the summer of love, being not just Tom Weathers but all those other aces, too. Or the idea that the Radical-the same one from Paris-had saved the world once. Saved him, personally, and every other ace and joker in
