David Hewson (23 page)

But
the voices...

You can hear me, Kaspar. Loud and clear. What did Dan the man say that
time
?

The
voices wouldn't go away. They sat on his shoulder, whispering, like
cartoon demons.

What'd he say, boy
?

The
same thing, Kaspar recalled. Twice. Thirteen years apart. When they were
working on the Babylon Sisters, he'd established a routine with Deacon. They'd
meet in the Pantheon, Deacon and he, sit together in a quiet corner. No one
could eavesdrop on them in a place like that. And just once Deacon had let slip
some doubts.

Say it
.

Kaspar
spoke the words out loud, "Did you meet the man from the Piazza
Mattei?"

It
was November 1990. A month before they were due to go in. Kaspar hadn't
understood a damn word. He'd told Dan Deacon so. There wasn't time
to bring anyone else in on the act. It was dumb. Insecure. And a part of him
had, at the time, had to quell some rumbling suspicion, some little whisper
inside that said Deacon seemed to be checking him out on something.

Then
the conversation had gone awkward, went dead. For thirteen long years, until
Kaspar had his cord round Dan Deacon's scrawny throat in Beijing, trying
to strangle some last, cathartic confession out of him.

It
never came. Dan Deacon just shook his head and said...

What?

"You
should have met the man from the Piazza Mattei."

And
he'd tried to. Later, when he'd got free, though it all went wrong,
damn near got him caught.

There
were two ways to find a secret. You could look for it out in the plain light of
day. Or you could keep chipping away at what you didn't know, waiting for
the truth to emerge from the lies. A certainty was growing inside his head,
solid, reliable, like the patterns on the floor of the ziggurat all those years
ago. It had to work. Otherwise the voices would never go away.

How long we got to wait, Billy K
?

"I
don't know," he whispered between gritted teeth.

The
old black voice kept rising up to bait him. Kaspar didn't like
remembering things. Remembering got in the way. There were more important
matters to consider. Money, for one thing. Without it he was impotent. All the
crucial tasks... buying airline tickets, finding fake passports, weapons,
tools, information. Without money they just didn't happen, and he was
running out, fast.

Since
coming back into the world, fleeing that burning jail outside Baghdad,
he'd salted away $35,000 in seven different bank accounts in the UK,
France, Italy and the Bahamas. Small sums always, originating from some equally
small crime, then turned into cash and paid in through a street moneychanger. It
was more than enough for his needs, if only he had easy access to it. That
wasn't simple. After 9/11 the American and European authorities had
started to change the rules about foreign exchange movements. When the first
transaction rang alarm bells and he'd been forced to leave San Francisco
in a hurry he'd used the Net to pick up information about how the new
world order of money control worked. They watched cash movements as much as
they could. They tried to heavy-hand information out of the small foreign banks
that allowed just about anyone to open an account. Even with legitimate
institutions, quite modest movements of money now attracted attention. It was a
constant challenge to transfer a few hundred dollars around here and there,
always to another ghost account to hide the trail if someone latched onto what
he was doing. The result: only a trickle of cash came safely into his hands
each week and he needed another source of income to cover sudden, unexpected
expenses.

Like
equipment. Three bugs and a receiver alone had cost him two thousand euros,
almost all the ready money he had, from some crook out in Testaccio. With the
block placed on his funds by the bureaucratic banks that left him virtually
broke.

He'd
used the grubby Internet cafe in the Piazza Barberini before. It was big enough
for him to be anonymous. All he need do was pay for a few hours online, type in
a fake Hotmail address to validate it, then access his accounts, try to shift a
little cash around, do some research, read the news, from CNN to
La Stampa
,
keep ahead of the pack. The place was perfect. You could sit on a PC all day
doing anything. No one asked a damn thing. When he was done he just hit the
reboot button and the machine wiped out every last keystroke, every place
he'd been. It was more anonymous than a phone, more secure than a
personal meeting, a place that seemed designed for what he wanted. Once
he'd even picked up a woman there, a Lebanese housewife e-mailing back
home, and stolen her handbag as she waited for him to emerge from the bathroom
of one of the fancy Via Veneto cafes across the road.

Today
the place was almost empty, the piazza close to deserted. Snow continued to
paralyse the city. He'd read on the Net about the problems the
authorities faced: a lack of ploughs since none had been needed for twenty
years, an unwillingness by municipal workers to tackle jobs they'd never
had to face before. The bus lines were running a quarter of their normal
schedule and at a tenth of their usual capacity. The subway was largely
unaffected, but in Rome the subway went mainly to the places people
didn't work anyway. It was as if a cold white coverlet of torpor had
fallen from the sky and now sat on the city, daring it to move.

There
were opportunities here, surely. If only he could understand how best to use
them.

He'd
found some hair dye in Monica Sawyer's bathroom, washed it in, waited,
washed it out, used her dryer, looked at himself in the mirror and liked what
he saw: grey turning chestnut. Just to make certain, when he went out he bought
a tube of fake tan and a pair of cheap sunglasses from a shop in Tritone. Change
was good. It helped keep him on his toes, made him work to fit inside a new
skin, forget who--what--he really was.

Now
he stood in the toilet of the Net cafe working the tan into his face. It was a
little exaggerated, a little too dark. That was good. It meant people
wouldn't look at him too hard. The glasses fitted only loosely. He peered
at himself in Monica Sawyer's hand mirror, hunching up his shoulders like
a punk. This was better than the hair dye alone, much better. Now he could pass
as an idiotic hustler, the kind of man who hung around outside tourist
restaurants trying to coax the unwary inside with a menu and the promise of a
warm, Roman welcome. The kind of man most people would want to avoid.

Then
he went back into the deserted main room, sat at a dusty PC out of sight of the
moron at the counter, who just might be smart enough to register the change in
his appearance, and started wasting time until his head cleared.

How long
?

The
damn question and the old black voice wouldn't go away and now he knew he
couldn't stop himself looking, couldn't help himself when it came
to punching the keys, trying out the combinations. All this was new when he
first got out. It was amazing how much the world had changed in little over a decade.
And it was useful too. A stored global memory you could log into anywhere,
provided someone sold the key.

He
pulled up Google and typed in "Desert Storm."

So
much stuff, so much of it wrong, just the hindsight you got from the media and
the old, old lies. But the dates were there and the deadline: 15 January 1991.

Get your sorry Arab ass out of Kuwait by then or we come kicking
.

Yeah.
That happened. Except you didn't wait for January to come, did you? War
was about planning, preparation. You placed a few markers to make sure the bets
fell your way. At Christmas you slung two camouflaged Humvees underneath a
couple of Black Hawks, loaded up two teams of "specialists"
who'd been locked in training in a secluded villa out beyond Orvieto for
weeks. Then you dropped the vehicles and the crew somewhere in the desert
outside Babylon, pointed them to where the friendlies were supposed to be
waiting and never said--
never
--that good and bad were
relative in the desert, depended on which way the sun was shining, how many
dollars you had stashed alongside the M16s, the rocket-propelled grenades, and
the radios that could bring those same Black Hawks storming back to save you
anytime you wanted.

Remembering
.
Kaspar hated remembering. So he hit the other Google button, the one marked
"groups," the one that took you straight into crazy territory, all
those anonymous Usenet pits where anyone was anyone, could say what they liked
and always be out of reach, untraceable, faceless, nameless, flaming each other
night and day all around the world, just wishing there was something you could
put in a mail message that would harm the other person--physically,
permanently--like a demon biting its way out of the screen.

He
liked these places more than anything. You could say your mind and no one ever
got payback. You could type in "Desert Storm Babylon Bill Kaspar"
and see... what?

A
list of episodes from some dumb science-fiction series spawned out of
Star
Trek
. He'd tried it a million times when he first got free. It was
always the same. Until this September in Beijing. Something had happened then.
Something that had set him on his present path.

Nothing
ever got erased on the Net. The message, the solitary first in a thread marked
"Babylon Sisters," was still there.

The
Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the
ziggurat. Let's get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion
time for the class of "91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming
or not?

It
was signed:
[email protected]
and, seeing it again, remembering
the way it first goaded him in the Internet cafe on the other side of the
world, Bill Kaspar thought he might go crazy, just pick up the fucking screen
there and then and throw it across the empty room, stomp on it till there was
nothing left but shattered plastic and glass.

The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory
.

They
were saying he was dead now, that he'd been Dan Deacon, too. They lied,
always, and maybe that was one good reason the voices wouldn't go away.

He
closed his eyes, squeezed hard, tried to think, tried to remember, calm
himself. He hadn't risen to the bait in Beijing. He'd been too
shocked to see it there. Now, increasingly, there was nothing to lose.

He'd
read the Bible during all that time in the wilderness, stuck in the stinking
jail in Baghdad. The Bible was the only book they allowed him. It was a new
experience. When he'd first got his orders, first seen that crazy code
name for the unseen figure who created and bankrolled their little project, he
hadn't got the reference. The Book of Revelation provided it.
The
Scarlet Beast, the Whore of Babylon. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled
with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries
.

Nine
bodies in the ground now and the voices kept screaming at Bill Kaspar, telling
him he still didn't have a face he could believe in, a real name,
anything.

Thought you knew the guy, white boy? Or did you screw up there too
?

"Like
fuck I did!" Kaspar yelled out loud, and stomped a big fist on the grimy
desk, sending the Japanese teenager two seats along scurrying into the corner
to find another machine.

Unable
to stop himself, he typed in a reply and knew immediately that this was what
they wanted. Some spook just up the road or in Washington somewhere, some
stupid little geek masquerading as the FBI, gawped at a screen, waiting for a
fish to wriggle on the line.

Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum
, he wrote.
I've waited long enough
now. "Bill Kaspar" my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There
will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don't meet
.

You
hunt. You get hunted. You wave to each other from across the canyon, wondering
who gets to taste whose blood first. And when.

He
logged off, set the PC to reboot, ran a comb through his hair and took one last
furtive look at himself in the reflection of the PC screen. Then he walked out
through the side door, avoiding the front desk, out into the freezing street,
thinking about distances, measuring the space between this tacky office block
and the big building in the Via Veneto, spanning the icy air between them in
discrete units in his head.

The
bug worked for half a kilometre, maybe more. It was made almost entirely from
plastic, which was supposed to let it through any standard scanning system. The
little battery was designed to keep it running for a week. By his reckoning the
embassy ought to be just in range. To make sure, he crossed the empty road,
watched a bus struggling over the slush, then walked a couple of hundred metres
up the hill before taking out the earphone of the receiver and popping it in so
that it looked as if he were listening to football on a little radio.