What the hell: it wasn’t like I had anything better to do, and if I distracted them here, it might buy the genii and the spies a little time. And with the assassin and whatever reinforcements he could dig up on their tail, they needed more than just time.
Besides. It had been a while since I had an audience. And the acoustics were fantastic. And it took my mind off the gnawing hunger in my gut.
I took a breath I wasn’t going to use, except for singing, and started up “I Gotta Get Drunk,” a Willie Nelson tune I never would have sung, back when I was a God-fearing man.
The irony hasn’t been lost on me, all these years.
When I looked up again, the Mage and the ghost were gone, and I was alone except for Satan and all his angels, in the shape of the ghost of my dead twin brother, whispering in my ear. You get used to it, after a while.
The American in the Belly of the Beast.
Somewhere in Hoover Dam. Summer, 2002.
The American ached all over, but that didn’t stop him from running. Not much could stop him from running, when he had a good reason—and being unarmed and encumbered with civilians, with a trained killer in pursuit, served as adequate impetus. At least he knew he could rely on the other spies to keep their heads in a crisis, but he really wished he had a gun.
Jackie led the rout. The American had been inclined to quibble at first, but Jack pointed out that he could see the ghosts and the American couldn’t, so the American pounded along beside his partner, taking advantage of their occasional pauses at intersections to chafe his wrists.
The second time they drew up, the Russian shot him a look and said in an undertone, “How’d you learn about the Kennedys?”
“I haven’t yet.”
“But you said—”
The American grinned at his partner. “I
guessed
. Even I can pick up a hint that broad. But you’re going to tell me the details, aren’t you?”
“It’s classified,” the Russian said. The American glared at him. The Russian shrugged. Behind them, Stewart and the widow slid into place, the Englishman right on their heels.
“Ready?” the Englishman asked, glancing over his shoulder. The widow leaned around the corner quickly, glancing both ways.
“All clear,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“Lower powerhouse,” Jackie said, moving forward. “Can you all swim? The water below the dam is rough, but—”
The American sighed. He should have known that he wouldn’t get out of this without getting wet. “Details,” he said in his partner’s ear, as they followed Jackie out into the cross corridor, watching the widow for hand signals and keeping their own eyes peeled as well.
The Russian snorted. They advanced single file, all four spies moving with machined precision. Jackie and Stewart kept up all right, but the American knew they weren’t serious combatants. It was in the way they moved, the way they had to think about the pattern the others just fell into, like schooled horses performing dressage.
Concrete and more concrete, and the growing hum of the generators. They weren’t descending any more, but moving fast and directly. They hadn’t run into any dam workers yet, which was good; the American suspected they weren’t where tour groups were supposed to be. He heard ringing ahead, though, growing stronger—a rhythmic pounding, over and over again.
“So,” the American said, oddly comfortable with the answer he was sure he was going to hear, “who shot JFK?”
There was a long silence. The American looked over his shoulder to make sure their tail was intact.
“Before I tell you that, I have to tell you about Oswald,” the Russian said, suddenly, so quietly that the American had to look at him to make sure his lips were moving.
“What about Oswald?”
“I was sent to stop him.”
“
Stop
him?”
“Of course. We’re not any more eager for Armageddon than the Americans are. Were. Whatever. An American president killed by someone who would appear to be a Soviet operative would be very bad for all of us, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out what that boob intended—”
“But you failed.”
“No, I succeeded.” Jackie had stopped at another cross-corridor. They were out of the body of the dam now; there were rooms on either side rather than just solid concrete in five-foot blocks. It meant slower going, because anything could be behind those doors, which meant keeping a focused watch to the sides, and behind. “Unfortunately, so did the assassin—”
The American looked at his partner in disbelief. “No.”
A brief curt nod was his answer. “But yes.”
“Wow—” Sunlight, then, just a glimpse of it through an office window.
“Down here,” Jackie said, reaching forward to catch the American’s sleeve. He opened a fire door and gestured them down a flight of stairs.
The American went, with one more glance over his shoulder. They ran downward on toetip like cats. Above, the steel door clicked lightly. “—Why?”
“If we knew that,” the Russian said, vaulting the last three steps, “I suspect we’d have a much better idea what’s going on than we do. And before you ask why I never told you”—the American stopped with his mouth open—“because I didn’t realize it had bearing, and because I am not permitted to speak of it in any case.”
“So why now?” They flattened themselves on the right side of the door at the bottom of the flight while Jackie, Stewart, the widow and the Englishman descended the stair. Jackie lifted his eyepatch, and peered through the chickenwire-reinforced glass in the door.
The American felt the Russian’s shoulder rise and fall. “Well, if I’m not real, and the assassin’s not real—”
“—if he’s not real, how did he manage to assassinate a president?”
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m justifying myself.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not—”
“The powerhouse looks clear,” Jackie said, and swung the door open before the American could stop him. He heard the widow’s sharp intake of breath, saw the Englishman move to yank Jackie aside. Breaths held, waiting for the spit and ricochet—and nothing happened, except a thunder of machinery echoing up the stairwell, making the American flinch and wish for the discarded hearing protection.
“Okay,” the American said with a sigh.
“Okay,” the Russian answered. “That took a year off my life.”
“Sorry.” Jackie, in a small voice.
“Just don’t do it again,” the Englishman said. “Right, I’ll go first.”
“And I’ll be in Scotland before you,” the widow answered, and crouched, one hand on the floor.
The Englishman barreled through the open door as the American held it wide, peering around the edge. The Englishman’s body stretched in a controlled dive. He rolled and came up in a crouch, body shielded by the massive blurring column of a turbine shaft, a polished steel tree trunk spinning at hundreds of revolutions per minute. Only two gray-painted railings and a sharp step up isolated it from the floor, and seven more like it spun down the length of the cramped, resounding room. The widow followed a split second later, a scuttling dash that put her back to back with her partner, about a yard apart.
The American took a breath and assessed the situation. The railings arced wall to wall; to travel the length of the generator room, they’d have to duck under them and rush past the green and orange-painted housings and shaft fittings. Close to the rotating turbine shafts. He turned and yelled to Jackie—“We need to go all the way?”
“John Henry says so. He found a fire exit. Take us to the surface and we can swim for it.”
The Russian rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “It’ll be rough water.” He let his eyes flick to the American, who was trying not to think about how his shoulders still felt like the muscles had been laced with lead.
“If he can do it, I can do it.” He pointed to the Englishman with his chin. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Age before beauty,” the Russian said, and grabbed the edge of the door.
The American ran.
As he dove into cover, he estimated that the most exposed portion of their transit would be around the middle of the powerhouse. And there were cuts—indentations—in the side walls that could conceal a gunman, or just about anything smaller than a tank, really.
The widow was suddenly behind him—he hadn’t even heard her move—and then Stewart, with an awkward skittering rush.
Dammit
, he thought, realizing that his partner intended to go last.
“I’m going on ahead,” he said in the widow’s ear, and the widow nodded.
“Don’t get strung out—”
“One shaft only.” Which made the widow laugh, as he’d intended.
“I’ll back you,” she said. Her face was serious, lips firm, and he had no reason at all to doubt her capabilities.
“Let’s do it—”
“Wait!” Jackie, falling heavily beside him, but a second too late. He was already committed.
He didn’t vault the railings as gracefully as the Russian would have managed—or, for that matter, as the widow did—but he made it to the next turbine without breaking anything or getting shot. That cold prickle of anticipation hadn’t left the back of his neck, however: an animal’s knowledge of a trap.
He trusted his instincts. They—and his partner—were all he had. The widow joined him. When he looked over, he found her tucking a strand of hair behind one ear with her fingertip, her gaze trained over his shoulder, the single line of a frown creasing her pretty forehead. “Where do you think he is?”
She shrugged. “Waiting. Or rather, lying in wait.”
He checked back the way they’d come, saw a flash of bright hair and a limp and knew the Russian was clear of the stairwell. A black business suit flapped, unbuttoned, the sleeves pushed up. Jackie dropped over the railing and crouched beside them, unsteady in his slick-soled dress shoes. The American reached out and caught his elbow, steadying him.
“Don’t go,” Jackie said. “I’ve asked Doc to scout.” He looked strange with his eyepatch flipped up—right eye, in its paler triangle of flesh, aswirl with city lights and colored mist, like a time-lapse image of a nebula, left eye dark and worried and human. The American had expected scars, a hollow socket, not this vortex of lights and possibilities.
Jackie looked up and squinted, as if at somebody who would have been standing more or less in the gray-painted railing, and frowned. “Doc says he’s here, all right.”
“Show me,” the widow said, as the Russian leapfrogged up to them and flattened himself on the damp steel floor. Jackie leaned over her shoulder and pointed, keeping his head low. “See that junction box there?”
“Yes,” she said. There was something cold in her voice, something the American didn’t like. He’d heard it before, somewhere: a tone he knew and feared. She turned and looked at him. “How far do you think his plot immunity would hold? And what would happen if something broke it?”
“His?”
“Or someone else’s.”
The American looked over at the Russian. The Russian was staring at his hands, rubbing a thumb across broad knuckles.
“I think if the . . . the genre expectations fall apart, they fall apart for all of us,” the American said, very slowly. “I think we’re all linked. If we weren’t before, the assassin’s hunt for the rest of us has tied us together.”
“So if he kills one of us, his own immunity should go by the wayside,” the widow said.
The American nodded. “I’ll go. He wants me alive.”
“No,” the widow said. “I think his plans have changed.”
“What do you mean?”
“He—” she paused, swallowed, eyes front, focused on the shadowed niche where the assassin waited. Where he had to be. “He blew up a plane. Our plane,” she clarified, after a moment. “All souls.”
“Christ,” somebody said, very quietly. A moment later, the American identified the voice as his own. The athlete and the scholar were one thing; the American mourned them, but he mourned them as warriors. They had been volunteers.
Civilians were something else.
All souls.
“Hold that thought,” she said, and pressed herself down on the floor, belly-flat, and began to wriggle forward. The American grabbed after her ankle; she was out of reach too fast.
“Christ,” he said again, in a very different tone, but Jackie’s hand was on his shoulder, holding him back, generous mouth compressed in a frown as he watched the widow slither under the railings.
“She’s just as qualified as you are,” he said, and the American sat back on his heels with a groan.
“My partner will kill me if anything happens to her.”
“Your partner’s unlikely to kill you,” the partner in question said. “But he may be sorely put out. You couldn’t have stopped her.”
“He has a
machine gun
—”
“I know,” the Russian said, his hand tightening ineffectually on the gray latex paint of the railing. He turned, met the American’s stare, and shrugged helplessly.
“It wasn’t my idea, all right?”
“Yeah,” the Russian answered, after a minute, looking away. “I know it wasn’t. So what do we do?”
“Back her play. And hope he’s not insane enough to take his chances with ricochets in here,” the American said, a little helplessly, and slithered under the railing himself, on the opposite side of the smoothly rotating turbine shaft. The others would follow him. Well, he was certain of the Russian, and he wasn’t too worried about Jackie. The genius of Las Vegas might be a civilian, but he wasn’t lacking intestinal fortitude.
The cold steel plates under the American’s hands and forearms were spotlessly clean and dry. Rather than the grit and oil expected of a mechanical enclosure, every surface here was scrubbed like an operating room. The American crawled forward, head low, watching the widow’s boots as she slithered under the next set of railings and paused in the shelter of the shaft housing, poking her head up enough to eye the distance and angle to the niche Doc and Jackie had identified as the assassin’s point of concealment. She dropped again, wriggling forward—angled away from the assassin’s hiding place and not toward it. Abruptly, the American understood her plan.
Even with superior firepower at his command, it wouldn’t do the assassin much good to pick off one or two of them and alert the rest to his presence. They still had him outnumbered, and he couldn’t be sure he had
all
their weapons, and the possibility that they would turn the tables remained too great. So he’d let the widow go past, the American guessed, and wait until the rest of the spies, Jackie, and Stewart were closer, and their guard was down—and he could take them all, more or less, with one well-aimed burst.