The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (44 page)

Oleg’s mistake was to stand back and watch the fun, and by the time he realized, to his amazement, that Bolshoi was actually being physically overpowered, the advantage had been lost. Being attacked by a dog is a terrifying experience, and in many cases people are simply helpless before the power and rage of the animal, but in some cases people are actually the victims of their own fear, and either freeze or try to run, which allows the dog to press home its attack unopposed.

No male mammalian enjoys being kicked in the bollocks. It is guaranteed to take the wind out of the stiffest sail, and Bolshoi was no exception. His primal instinct was to leap at Khuy’s throat, which he duly did, but in doing so he exposed his hairless, shiny nuts to an incoming size-fourteen Russian Army-issue steel toe-capped ammo boot. As the air gushed out of Bolshoi’s lungs Khuy grabbed his neck in a steely grip, and began to literally tear his throat out. When Oleg’s brain finally managed to process the information that Bolshoi was being manhandled, and that Khuy was about to rip his head off and shit down his neck, he pulled out his piece, but Khuy swung the struggling, snarling animal between himself and the gun, forcing Oleg to jig backward and forward trying to get a clear shot. Using Bolshoi as a shield, Khuy was able to reach behind his back, out with his own Roscoe, and was about to let Oleg have it in the guts, gunslinger-style, from under the belly of the squirming dog.

That was when the artillery started going off. Khuy figured that some of the shooters might have actually been concealed in the room. The fact that a couple of killer slugs had plugged the dog and saved his life was clear, but what was not clear was who was shooting at whom, and why. He had been left for dead, and there was no one to tell him the real story of what had gone down except the silent, spent slugs.

But it was a start. Every puncture tells a story, as they say. Maybe, he admitted to himself, his judgment was being clouded by how much he wanted and needed Fanny to be innocent, but when he found the shooters, he would know, one way or the other.

Who uses Russian guns and Russian ammunition? Russians. Or Americans in Russia using dodgy weaponry. And what kind of Americans would know how to come by dodgy weaponry? Rich, double-crossing
suka mandas
like Endless Lee. And who uses American sniper rifles and ammunition? American snipers. And how many American snipers could reasonably be expected to be operating in Moscow at that particular time? The correct answer would be two: Low Roll and Hard D. And who would be in a position to know and influence the aforementioned assassins, convince them to change objectives, and have a motive for doing so? Yup—nephew Hyatt. Maybe it was going to be easier than he thought.

Khuy Zalupa’s assessment of the situation was pretty much on the money as far as it went. But it still didn’t explain where the Italy-shaped pool of blood had come from.

***

Hyatt wasn’t in a quandary. He was in a ZiL limousine. And the ZiL limo was heading down the official police and military-only lane of the freeway at one hundred and ninety-three kilometers an hour. He would have been going at two hundred and seven kilometers an hour, which was the absolute optimum-condition top speed of the vehicle, but Hard D’s lard ass weighed so much that it took some of the lung capacity out of the motor.

Hyatt was a genius, but he was still a young man, which meant that the damage to his pride and his ego were bothering him more than the loss of a priceless artifact and a potentially civilization-changing piece of technology. Which meant that the expunging of one Monsoon Parker, esquire, was more important to him than the recovery of the aforementioned incalculably valuable objects. If he had exercised a little maturity and stopped the car, it is entirely feasible that Low Roll and Hard D could have brought the Cessna down with a little intelligent concentrated fire, and a proper calculation of trajectory and lead distance, but not even Low Roll and Hard D could be expected to shoot down a moving plane from the back seat of a wildly careening ZiL, especially as ZiLs are renowned for their shit suspension and Hard D was wedged tighter than Queen Latifah’s Tampax.

There is something slightly ridiculous about young people using profane language. It’s a bit like seeing a young guy with a beard—kind of pretentious. Anyway, after Hyatt had exhausted his limited repertoire of cuss words, and the Cessna had buzzed away over the treetops, Hyatt turned to his passengers.

“
Did you get him?”

“
Hard to say,” said Hard D.

“
What does that mean?”

“
It means the plane is full of fuckin’ holes, but whether we plugged anybody inside is impossible to say unless we see the crash site,” said Low Roll.

“
I thought you two were supposed to be able to shoot.”

“
You should have stopped the car like we said.”

“
He was getting away!”

“
He fuckin’ is now.”

“
Well, you two clowns better do something about it.”

“
Hey, son. If you want a demonstration of our fuckin’ shootin’ ability, you goin’ the right way about gettin’ it.
Capisce
?”

Hyatt suddenly realized the vulnerability of his position. “Er. Yeah. Sorry, guys. I’m a bit emotional. Let’s, er, let’s pull over somewhere. Maybe get a bite and a drink while I think this thing out.”

***

Guilty. Monsoon Parker was familiar with the word. Anyone who had heard the judge say it that many times had to be. But Monsoon was only familiar with the term in the legal sense. In the emotional sense, it meant about as much to him as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Which was why he was not feeling particularly guilty about abusing Maria Federovnaya’s hospitality. Sure, she had bathed him and tended to his wounds and smothered him in her huge, fluffy bosoms and sucked him off and let him bang her several times (even though it had been like throwing a wiener into the Grand Canyon and he could swear that there had even been an echo), and she had fed him and bicycled fourteen miles into the village to buy him a bottle of vodka, and she’d showed him the jeweled dildo that God had sent her from heaven, and had, all in all, been an all-around good sport who did not deserve to get clubbed over the back of the head with her own dildo when her back was turned and have her bicycle stolen.

Monsoon was still not feeling guilty as he boarded the train using the ticket that he had paid for with the money he had stolen from Maria’s purse, nor as he sipped the vodka or drank the piss-warm but still welcome beer that he had bought with the same money, nor as he looked out of the window and saw the endless pines march away into the distance and the roseate snow on the peaks of the mountains as the sun sank behind them and the shadow marched across the valley to engulf the train and the lights came on.

Nor did he feel guilty as the darkness outside transformed the train window into a mirror and he saw his image grinning back at him from inside his warm and cozy first class carriage, which he had bribed the conductor to make sure that he had all to himself all the way to Saint Petersburg.

But he did begin to feel a slight uneasiness at the way his reflection was looking at him. It was weird, but it was as if it was accusing him of something, and no matter how he adjusted his features, he could not get that look out of his eye.

He drew the curtains and sat back, drinking from the bottle and enjoying the gentle rocking of the train and the soporific clatter of the wheels on the tracks, and he began to feel as if he were in a giant womb, the womb of the world, and the earth mother had clasped him in her bounteous arms and everything was going to be fine, and he would sleep in Elysium and wake up in Saint Petersburg, and who knew where he would be next week, and what difference did it make, because when you have all that money one place is pretty much like another and you can have anything that you want. He fell asleep with that beautiful thought in his mind, and was surprised and annoyed when someone shook him roughly by the shoulder and woke him up, because he had paid that lying commie son-of-a-bitch porter to make sure that nobody bugged him, but he did not become truly alarmed until he looked up and saw that he, himself, was standing over him looking down at him.

Monsoon was not the bravest soul on the planet, but he was entirely too old to be frightened by nightmares, and he told his image so, and he told his image to fuck off and leave him alone.

The image assumed a thoughtful expression. “So you think I’m a dream. How interesting.”

“
Listen, pal, the only thing I’m interested in is going back to sleep. Beat it.”

“
But if you are not asleep, how can you be dreaming?”

Monsoon had to admit that, for a figment of imagination, the image had a pretty good point. He decided to humor it. “So if you’re not a dream, what are you, ace?”

“
I’m you. For now, anyway.”

“
Full of shit is what you are.”

“
You really don’t get it, do you?”

“
Get what, asshole?”

“
I’m not a dream. I’m the R3.”

“
Say what now?”

“
The R3. Remember what Hyatt told you? I evolve. I’m an idea. A state of mind. I’m here because you believe I’m here.”

“
But that’s where you’re fucking wrong, pal. I don’t believe that you
are
here.”

“
But you do. You just don’t think that you do. It’s the Chameleon Fallacy.”

“
Oh, here we go with that lizard shit again.”

“
Listen. Hyatt and Sebastian were talking out of their asses. Facts are not knowledge. The Chameleon Fallacy is the fallacy that knowledge exists in the first place. That reality is the same for everybody. It’s relative. Look up into the sky. What do you see? God? Jewels? Firefly farts? Immense balls of flaming gas incalculable distances away? Uncountable billions of atoms? Distant civilizations? Thirteen billion years of time? Look in your pants. What do you see? A dick and two balls, or conglomerations of protons and neutrons, a nothingness of improbably minuscule distances held together by quantum mechanics, with fucking quarks zipping through them? Looks like a dick, right? Feels like a dick, right? It isn’t a fucking king snake—must be a dick, then. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“
Dicks?”

“
No, asshole. Perception. The universe is different for every creature that lives in it and that has a mind. To a mind the truth is a flux. What is true today is not what will be true tomorrow or what was true yesterday. Belief. It’s a load of bollocks. It’s ideas buzzing around between synapses like mad bees in a honeycomb that keeps changing shape so the poor bastards can never get back to where they started from and it drives them nuts.”

“
Okay. So you seriously expect me to believe that this is not a dream. Then what happens if someone else walks in here right now? What do they see? Two of us?

“
How the fuck should I know?”

“
What do you mean?”

“
I mean, you fucking tell me. I didn’t start this shit. I’m just here. For now, anyway.”

“
So what if I throw this fucking gizmo out of the window?”

“
It won’t make any difference. We are assimilated. The R3 which is me has absorbed your you-ness which is you.”

“
So what happens now?”

“
I dunno. Let me know how it works out.”

Monsoon suddenly found himself alone.

When he woke up, daylight was coming through the windows and someone was knocking at the door.

As Monsoon sat at the heavy rustic table, after the conductor woke him and told him to change trains, enjoying a light breakfast of vodka and lukewarm weasel piss beer, and trying to avoid making eye contact with the waitress who was the approximate size and configuration of a fur seal and possessed of a similar odor, and who was giving him the come-on, he was surprised to hear his phone ring. He didn’t have a phone. He scrabbled in the bag where the noise was coming from and was further surprised to see the R3 glowing gently, and the name “Alphonso Nightingale” moving slowly across its surface like one of those old-fashioned Times Square advertisements.