Turn of the cards

Chapter Nine

Cool water caresses him like a lover, his sides, his belly, his back. He drives through it with a lover’s easy fervor, with rhythmic contractions of the muscles of back and stomach. There is pain in his side where his ribs were cracked when he was the small orange flying human, but in his exalted state he ignores it. He feels at once serene and charged with energy.

He tastes. He tastes his cousins, cleaving the water on all sides of him in a joyous, plunging roil. He tastes the Bulgarian freighter fifteen kilometers to the northeast, making for the Dardanelles and illegally dumping waste; and he tastes the sewage-and-chemical bloom of the land, near at hand on three sides. The taint is evil, more black and bitter than squid-spew. But it does not ruin the fullness of his pleasure, merely increases his disdain for what he is when he is not this.

And even that is small, distant, something his attention is easily drawn from. This form is quick in its emotions, anger and happiness alike. Infinitely changeable as the water all around.

He hears. He hears them around him, these Mediterranean dolphins, small yet fleet. He can barely keep up with them, and he can swim faster than a natural bottlenose. In his mind he has a marvelous image of them in many colors, a four-dimensional tapestry of where they are, where they have been, where they are going, each swimmer a different color, each one’s life line a sensuous curve extending to infinity.

He is out of place here, burly silver Pacific creature among lithe black-and-white Middle Sea shapes. But the others accept him, singing to him in their clicks and whistles with eagerness and love and even awe. For they know him, in that way of theirs that knows without much thought. He is at once one of them and one of the droll and sometimes dangerous land beings, a creature long foretold in their songs, belonging simultaneously to their darting, rushing depths and to the arid world above and beyond.

A school of small, furtive fishes darts past below, left, down, and away. Several of his escorts make as if to follow. But they come back to rejoin the chirping, leaping retinue, their wish to be near him overriding their desire to feed.

The Bulgarian freighter has a bent screw; he can hear. The Aegean is alive with craft today: freighters, sailboats, a hydrofoil mosquito-whining toward Lйsvos. He knows where each one is, for many kilometers around – even a Soviet Yankee missile boat, a deep, slow drumming, one of the new-generation nuclear subs the glasnost’ Russians hope the rest of the world will forget about, that carries in its long, round snout the capacity to sow the earth with temporary suns, brief and bright and deadly.

Some part of him behind his consciousness notes the fact and files it away; his conscious mind has little energy for facts. The torrent of sensory impression rushing in upon him occupies his mind to the full.

Off to the north-northeast he senses land: sonar picture of a small mass, taste and scent of sand and soil and land-borne vegetation without the taint of recent human habitation. Something inside him makes him turn his rostrum, reluctantly, toward the island. Soon he will change, first to the being with the form of a landling but the skin and smell of a dolphin and then to the full human, comically pale, skinny, and hairy.

The others shift course, but their song changes, becomes wheedling, cajoling, and their bodies bump against his in a near-erotic way as they try to urge him to turn away. But the human he will become, too shortly, cannot swim, at least as he and his kindred understand it. When the transition inevitably arrives, he must be within wading distance of shore. Or the pale-haired man – and he, and the rest of the beings his own life line is intertwined with in a dance even dolphins cannot comprehend – will die.

The air above is growing dark with approaching evening; in the west, sea and sky collide in a sheet of copper flame. He can feel the weariness come upon him, and the ache in his side throbs deeper, more insistently. It still takes all his will to keep drawing nearer to the land. The open Aegean water is dark and intoxicant as wine, the songs of his kindred more seductive than the Sirens And a different part of him, swimming down where light never reaches, would even welcome the fumbling and frenzy and final darkness f it meant not having to return to the prison of a land-borne human body.

But he swims for the island, picking up velocity as he does so until even his speedy cousins can barely keep pace. His sense of time is not exact. If he misjudges, his kinfolk will try to help him even in his floundering human form. But they’re as likely to nudge him farther out to sea as in toward land; they are aware, and their minds are ever-filled with brilliant, flashing imagery richer than any human can ever conceive, but they aren’t really very bright.

Staring out the window at the traffic and construction in Constitution Square, the woman in the high-laced sandals and belted white tunic laced her fingers together and flexed. Muscles popped out all over her bare arms, and stood out like flying buttresses on her neck.

J. Robert Belew lit his pipe and puffed happily. The Greek national ace had curly black hair, flashing black eyes, olive skin whose natural gloss was augmented by a fine coating of olive oil. The broken nose added character to her face without detracting from its striking handsomeness.

Hera would be a thoroughgoing babe, thought the unabashed male-chauvinist part of him, if the rest of her didn’t look so much like Lou Ferrigno with breasts.

Standing by a wall-sized map of Athens, Mistral gave him a quick dirty look for lighting up. Her cheeks were smudged, there were dark scorch-marks on her white cape, and her trademark uniform was in dire need of dry cleaning. Raised since birth to be overwhelmingly conscious of her public appearance, she was visibly suffering from her disheveled state. More’s the pity, he thought. You look incredibly cute.

The builders had tried their level best to give the offices of the new police headquarters the sterile, ergonomic look appropriate to the new European Community. The briefing room still stank of sweat, wool, and latakia. He faced her glare with total equanimity. If she had a magnanimous soul, she would think of his fine and subtle Virginia blend as air freshener.

Then the female American ace noticed her Greek opposite number’s dark eyes upon her. She lowered her own and turned quickly back to the map. J. Bob grinned around the stem of his pipe.

“- estimates property damage at upward of four million drachmae,” Colonel Kallikanzaros was saying beneath his Saddam Hussein mustache. He was a big man with droopy eyes and a face that seemed to have been laid down in several successively smaller slabs. He sat with his big hands propped above the tabletop by arched fingers, as if he were touch-typing. “We have damage caused by excessive and unnatural heat to our single most prized national monument. We have one gunshot wound, treated and dismissed, and two National Police officers with second-degree burns, likewise treated and dismissed. Finally, we have one Bureau of Antiquities employee in a neck brace, who claims an angel of God told him to sue the United States government.”

He folded his hands together. “Your fugitive ace jumping-jacks Flash suggests more to me a devil, but perhaps the workman felt it would prejudice his case to say that a demon told him to sue.”

He was a fine one to be talking about devils. He was an ace, too, or so rumor had it. A shape-changer, though he kept the details of his powers – if any – as carefully obscure as did his German counterpart, the famed counterterrorist ace Wegemer. His name was really a nickname, which referred to some kind of mythological imp or other. Belew had noticed that if you looked at him sidelong, in just the right kind of light, his outlines shifted subtly, took on a disturbing quality, like those pictures made up of microgrooves that changed when you turned them in your hand.

“How the hell did some blue-collar dickweed understand English?” Lynn Saxon demanded. He looked younger without his mustache, which had been the only part of him of any consequence actually burned off in J. J. Flash’s attack. “We’ve got the dossier, and J. J. Flash no more speaks Greek than my ass can whistle ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’”

“Jeez, Lynn, that’s something I’d like to see,” his partner said.

“Shut up, Gary.”

“Far from being a noxious plant, Mr. Ipiotis is a very skilled worker, highly educated,” the colonel said briskly. “He learned to speak English in school, as many of our children do. Our educational system is quite advanced, Mr. Saxon. How many American children learn Greek?”

“Why should they? Who the fucking hell speaks Greek?”

Helen Carlysle had taken a seat at the table. She cocked her forearm and opened her hand as if flicking water off the fingers at him. “Agent Saxon, you are being highly unprofessional”

“Put a rag in it, babe. You don’t talk to us about professional; you’re just a rich civilian on a ride-along, you got that? And while we’re on the subject, sweetheart, you’re the one who lost him.”

Hera turned from the window and growled low in her well-muscled throat. She was not one of the Greeks who knew English, but she could read tones of voice well enough. Saxon went dead pale. Hera had once arm-wrestled New York-born Israeli ace Sharon Cream in London for the title of World’s Strongest Lady Ace. The match had gone on eleven hours and sixteen minutes before both parties agreed to a draw. And Sharon Cream had destroyed a Syrian T72 main battle tank barehanded in the Golan Heights in 1982…

Kallikanzaros held up a weary hand. Hera colored – she did that readily, and rather prettily to Belew’s eye – and walked over to stand with her back to the door.

“Hearts and minds,” the mercenary murmured.

“What did you say?” Saxon demanded, glaring at him through his bangs like a crazy man in elephant grass.

“Just an old Special Forces saying.”

“Yeah, well, I got one for you, too, old man: ’Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds’ll follow.’”

The colonel cleared his throat. “We gave you our complete cooperation,” he said, “and the result has been a complete debacle. The Interior Ministry is in a roar-up. And though our media are better disciplined than yours, enough has happened that we cannot prevent embarrassing questions from being asked in the newspapers and on the television. I must therefore ask what your intentions are now.”

Hamilton looked at his partner, who had gotten up and was staring out the floor-to-ceiling louver blinds at the atherosclerotic traffic on the Syntagma. “I guess, hunker down and start scouring the city section by section until we run him down,” the blond agent said, “We still got this advantage, that Meadows does tend to stick out in a crowd.”

“He won’t be here,” Helen Carlysle said.

Saxon half turned from the window. Sunset light spray-painted his narrow face with shadow strips. “Look, will you just butt out and let the people who know what they’re doing handle this from here on in?”

Hera laced her fingers again and cracked her knuckles. It sounded like target shooting with a nine-millimeter. Saxon jumped.

“It is impossible that he should have left the city” the colonel huffed. “We are watching the roads, the airports, the harbor, everything.”

“It’s impossible for a man to fly and shoot fire from his hands, too, Colonel,” Belew said mildly. “Or change the shape of his body, for that matter.”

He flicked his eyes to the American woman. “How do you figure this, Ms. Carlysle?”

She took a deep breath. “He’s run every time we’ve caught up with him.”

Belew shook out his pipe and tamped it with a little fold-up silver tool he carried in his pocket. “Not the very first time, in Amsterdam.”

Color flamed up on her high cheekbones, but she controlled herself “He just thought that was a, a fluke, an accident. And it was, in a sense. Once he realized we were going to persist, were going to be able to track him down if he stayed in Amsterdam, he took off. Why should he behave differently this time?”

Belew staffed some more tobacco in his pipe, put it back in his mouth, and relit it, studying Carlysle the while. She faced him with her head thrown back, flushed and defiant.

“I think she’s got a point, gentlemen.”

“Oh, horseshit,” Saxon said. “Colonel, we want more help. We want to take this town apart.”

“Agent Saxon,” Belew said, “maybe I should remind you that this operation -”

“Screw you, and screw the CIA,” Saxon spat. The colonel’s eyebrows shot up. “Hamilton and I are still DEA, and we’re still on the case. We’re going to do this the right way. Got that?”

Helen Carlysle was visibly knotting with anger. Murmuring low in her throat, Hera crossed to her, put her big hands on the American’s trapezius muscles to either side of her neck, and began to massage her with the carefully controlled power of those armor-crushing hands. Mistral’s eyes bounced back and forth in her head like tennis balls, seeking escape.

Belew laughed and spread his hands. “Confucius tells us that ‘the superior man does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything; what is right he will follow.’ Have it your way, boys.”