The Revival (9 page)

THE RUSSIANS WITHDRAW, TAKING WITH THEM
the guy Donna patched up with spit and cello-tape—and how sexy is that, by the way?

I mean Donna's skill, not the taped-together Russki.

We take safer positions and watch as the Russian squad is followed by an equally dangerous-looking crew of what appear to be Chinese commandos—at least, judging by their quick, hushed monosyllables. Which, if you count the Brits and our American cousins together in one mission, raises the total number of world powers currently tootling around New York looking for the biscuit to four. From a strategic point of view, this is not good.

If I were a betting man, I'd reckon that back at HQ they aren't too pleased about the possibility of the US nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the pugnacious Russians or the godless Chinese commies. This all smacks to me of the possibility of Escalation, of carrier groups and amphibious assault units on the way, of a very large consignment of Shit heading at terminal velocity toward an equally outsize Fan. Judging by the direction the commandos are heading, there will be the proverbial hot time in the old town tonight. The old town being Grand Central, last-known location of the ever-elusive footy. And then? Who knows. Perhaps the global balance of power changes. Or the world ends.

I call Titch up on the walkie to let him know about the Russians and the Chinese but get no response, which either means he's busy or he's dead. It's very hard to imagine anything or anybody killing such a specimen of size and ferocity, so presumably he has better things to do than talk to me.

Though a habitually ungrateful sod, I'm genuinely thankful that Titch has let me take on this side mission, as opposed to, say, crushing my head between his beefy hands à la Gregor Clegane. Perhaps he knows that I'll protect Donna if I can.

Who am I kidding? Donna's the one who'll have to protect me.

We pick up our journey westward, slushing through the snow and shell casings. To our right is the tundra-like expanse of this huge, godforsaken park. To our left, over the trees, mountainous buildings rise, as if all the tallest bits of London from its oil-and-oligarch stage had been crammed together in a small space and had reproduced like rabbits.

We reach the west edge of the park, demarcated by gray stone walls, and head uptown. Wild dogs, a charming feature of the neighborhood, look at us with gustatory curiosity. The snow, mostly unturned by travelers, is silvery and glistening. There's a hush over the whole ruined island.

I observe Jefferson and Donna as they amble along, silent but companionable. They're together again—but something's up between them. Not just the obvious history. I mean something toxic, a crack I can wedge myself into.

I pry my eyes from the objectionable sight of the two of them together and look around at the buildings. This must have been a fun city at some point—so much sheer density, so much life and commerce in such a small space. Now it's a stinking cyclopean mausoleum. Again I ponder my 100 percent terrible, not-even-so-bad-it's-good decision to come here.

Not that it was
entirely
my choice, of course. A couple of years ago, when I was apprehended by the Reconstruction Committee at the tender age of eighteen, it was made very clear to me that if I did not do the proverbial One Last Job for my esteemed employers, I would be expected to carry water for them for the rest of my days, until I was a Very Old Rab, an even more deeply compromised Rab, a thoroughly de-souled and bitter and worn-out Rabindranath Tagore Tandon. My handlers back home, Welsh and the intelligence gang, are on the surface a pleasant lot. But beneath the velvety smoothness of the public-school-accented talk, one can feel the clenched iron fingers of political zealotry. They're much more committed than any of the flakes and the sport protesters and the guitar-bothering communards I was running with. For all their polish, Welsh and his lot are dangerous animals.

I look around at the heavily armed hormone factories I'm surrounded by. Jefferson and Donna. Kath and the little psychos she has trailing at her heels. And I feel very out of place.

Young Rabindranath is not a zealot. Guileless, unassuming, gentle Rab, who would not hurt whatever it is that malicious flies hurt, let alone a fly, has never felt overly attached to any particular set of principles.

That does not, mind you, mean that I am
un
principled. Rather, I am
over
principled. I am, to quote your national bard Whitman, “large, I contain multitudes.” I can see both sides. For me, life is not just not black-and-white; it is not gray, either. It is a rainbow whose colors and intensities shift as it falls upon different ethical and contextual landscapes.

I'm only a part of this mess at all because the Reconstruction Committee convinced me it might be time to give a little thought to the idea of Political Stability.

Admittedly, this was after they'd apprehended me whilst I was attempting to download encrypted files detailing the Reconstruction Committee's kill list onto a Wi-Fi disk.

“Some part of me is pleased,” said Welsh on our first meeting, as he set down his cup and saucer and pulled the government-issue chair over to the metal table, “to see that Trinity has kept up its tradition of treachery. Continuity is a good thing. But only a very small part of me. The rest of me wonders, Rabindranath, what we are to do with you.”

What indeed? I was given a choice between languishing in very unpleasant lodgings at His Majesty's pleasure for the foreseeable future, or doing a good turn for the Reconstruction Committee. So I made the only decision I could. Which is to say, I spilled the proverbial beans. I flipped. I flopped. I turned.

Enough with the booing and hissing! How is it my fault? I was not made to be a hero. I was made to live well and to appreciate the finer things, the look on a girl's face at peak moments, the heady buzz of just enough but not too much to drink, soft summer evenings on the River Cam.

So, one fateful day, Welsh, my handler at MI5, found a job suited to a boy of my talents: to seduce a young American girl, fresh from the plague zone, newly arrived on our shores.

At first, the very idea was a shock. We had been informed, or misinformed rather, that there was no cure for the Sickness. This justified the death penalty for any travel to the plague zone (so reminiscent of the prohibition against travel to Talos IV, the planet inhabited by psionic manipulators in the renowned, rejiggered pilot of the original
Star Trek
, first known as “The Cage” and then known as “The Menagerie”).

Well, here I am now, on the surface, as it were, of Talos IV. The planet of death and doom. The smoke of a thousand fires climbs the sky. Carrion birds circle the air like it's a roller rink on half-price day.

The good news was, not only have the intrepid scientists of the Reconstruction developed a vaccine for the Sickness but some bunch of post-apocalyptic street urchins in New York had developed their own home-brew version. The bad news was, a stable population in America completely gazumps the British authorities, who had planned to resume their colonial tendencies and begin anew in the Old New World after mourning the dead for an efficiently appropriate period of time.

So—my mission was to insinuate myself into the trust of the escaped tomboy. She was to be placed at Trinity College Cambridge under an alias. Unbeknownst to said dystopian nymphet, I was to befriend and if possible
befriend
her, and report back any findings to my puppet masters.

Donna proved to be quite a vexing assignment, what with her haunted, postlapsarian grief, her stubborn loyalty to absent tribe and paramour. What was I to do? She was too much of a coil even for me to unravel.

I complained to my superiors, and they came up with an idea guaranteed to set her fully adrift and leave me as the only harbor in her grief: They killed off her friends. Or at least they made Donna
believe
that her tribe had been killed. It was most likely that they
had
died anyway, given the hurly-burly that I understood the United States to be. At any rate, that was the cut that finally brought her down; it was also, ironically, to be my comeuppance. I didn't expect that, in witnessing her suffering, her deep and unalloyed pain, I would fall for her.

That is my embarrassing revelation: that, after all this, I have to admit that I am, unfortunately, in love with Donna. Presumably hopelessly, as she has taken the news that I was playacting rather hard.

Hard? Diamonds are hard. This is something else.

Spare a kindly thought for poor Rab, dusting flecks of broken window off his natty camo anorak, wondering how he's going to manage to get out of this alive. How was I to know that I would fall in love? Nothing in life had prepared me for such an accident.

Which is why I find myself off-piste, as it were, creeping through muck and snow behind a granite wall, on an utterly pointless mission to rescue some damsels in distress. Not even damsels I'm interested in. Utterly arbitrary damsels, useless damsels, may-as-well-be-blokes damsels. But what can I do? I'm in love.

And she's in love with someone else.

The posse stops for a breather, and Donna and Jefferson stop orbiting each other for a nanosecond. As soon as Donna is out of earshot, I stroll over to him.

“My name is Rab,” I say, holding out my paw.

Jefferson looks at it and smiles, as if I've just swept off my plumed hat with a spiral flourish as I bowed low to the ground. He grasps it in his filthy, calloused mitt.

“I know,” he says. “Donna's friend.”

He doesn't say “friend” in any particularly provocative way. But it definitely puts me on the qui vive.

“Nice place you've got here,” I say, gesturing at the stinking wreckage of a city.

“Do you think so?” he says.

“No. Sorry. I was being ironic.”

“I figured. It used to be something.” We walk on a bit, the wall to our left, the ground dipping and rising. Donna is looking over suspiciously but wants no part of this conversation, it seems. “I went to England once. When my brother and I were little.”

“Changing of the Guard? Madame Tussaud's?”

He shakes his head. “The John Soane museum. Brick Lane. Clerkenwell.” He even says it right, “CLARK-en-well.” He shrugs. “My parents were weird. I liked the salt beef bagels.”

I really want to dislike this guy, I do.

“Anyway,” he says, “thank you for helping Donna. She's… she's unique. Isn't she?”

I want to say something clever and deflating. But all I can say is “Yes.”

He fishes around in a bag. Hands me a pistol.

“This is a dangerous place. Not smart to go unarmed,” he says. He waves off my protests. “Oh, I have plenty. Give it back to me when we're done.”

“When are we done?” I say.

“Don't know,” he says.

I look at the gun. Wakefield and the others,
my side
, did not trust me to carry one. And they want me to kill the boy who's offering me one of his own.

Those are my orders: At all costs, sparing no harm to my companions or myself, ensure that any nuclear capability represented by the football is mitigated or, failing that, any and all copies of the launch codes are destroyed—including those in the memory of anyone I encounter. That last article, as I have been realizing, enjoins me to kill anyone who has had even the briefest contact with the football, since they might have been
capable
of memorizing the codes. Which means that Donna's young swain Jefferson is on the chopping block. Wakefield would have done it if he had time and occasion to do it out of Donna's sight, I expect; or maybe they don't want blood on official hands. They're like that.

Can
I
do it? That sort of business is somewhat outside my experience, but they did teach me, back at Central Office, how to end things quickly and painlessly, at least according to them, using little more than the nifty little dagger they've given me. It looks like a letter opener, only triangular in cross section. I believe it is meant to produce a puncture wound that refuses to stop bleeding. Physically, I can do it. But morally?

I know I should hate him, but Jefferson has his points. If I'm the summer blockbuster, the tentpole of guys, he's good counterprogramming, the indie darling. If he and I had lived down the staircase from each other, he'd have made a great wingman, and might even draw off a few of the starry-eyed girls whose intuitions about my callowness were borne out by catching me in a compromising position or two.

And I daresay Jefferson has done a lot of things
right
, if right and wrong are the sort of thing you care about. But at any rate, there were no moral riders attached to my Faustian, Bondian contract to kill.

And now the boy who's supposed to be my target is giving me the tool to do the deed. This is not emotionally convenient. Time and tide may require me to murder him, which does not sit well. For one thing, I find myself liking him. For another, I find it galling that my actions could be mistaken for those of a jilted rival.