Zeitgeist (34 page)

“Where did this hit go down?” he said.

“I can show you.”

“We’d better go look,” Starlitz agreed.

They paid up, bought a dozen grape-wrapped dolmades and a gooey chunk of baklava for the road. They picked up Starlitz’s Japanese rental car in the shadow of a Lefkosa mosque. The mosque had once been a French Crusader cathedral; it was an offshore Notre Dame, retrofitted with minarets.

A pleasant forty-minute drive took them to a ruined village near the Green Line. The backwoods of Turkish Cyprus were dotted with little ghost towns. Their natural roads had been cut, their Greek inhabitants had fled in terror, and years of economic embargo had finally finished them off.

Viktor nervously directed them down a dirt road, overhung with untrimmed trees, toward an old textile mill. The mill’s corrugated metal sides were rust streaked, and the walls were thickly shrouded by thriving subtropical shrubbery. The place had the eerie, Faulknerian look of an abandoned cotton gin. “Why the hell would Ozbey come out here?” Starlitz said.

“I don’t know. But he comes here often. He brings his men, sometimes he brings his girlfriend.… I assumed they were processing heroin in there.”

“That would make sense.”

“What’s that burning smell?” Zeta said, lifting her chin from the toothmarked rim of her white valise.

Starlitz locked the two valises in the boot of the rental car and pocketed the keys. “You got a gun?” he asked Viktor.

“No, you?”

“I got an Iridium satellite phone,” Starlitz offered, hefting it from beneath the seat. Its tough case and monster battery gave it the heft of a blackjack.

“Let’s go buy some big guns!” Zeta suggested chirpily. “We’ve got lots of money.”

The little mill village had not been entirely deserted. There were trimmed orange trees here and there, stone walls still kept up, a couple of modest truck farms. Since it was broad daylight—late afternoon, breezy, partly cloudy,
full of wholesome Mediterranean clarity—it seemed ridiculous to skulk. Besides, an eleven-year-old girl attempting to skulk was among the most flaunting and melodramatic spectacles known to man.

Matters swiftly complicated themselves. A helicopter had tumbled out of the sky and fallen into the hillside woods, quite near the old industrial mill. This was no small helicopter. The aircraft was almost the size of a London double-decker, with big rubber landing wheels and a vast five-bladed rotor. The oblong hull was done in typically Soviet “sand-and-spinach” camouflage, but it had no national colors and no registry numerals.

“Hey, Dad, Dad, hey, Dad, don’t look inside there,” Zeta quavered. “Hey, Dad, what if there’s
dead people
in there!”

“Maybe you better go back to the car, honey.”

Zeta wasn’t having any of it. They crept silently into the trees and undergrowth. “Ooh, Dad, Dad,” she whispered, “what if it’s really gruesome. What if somebody got their arm cut off.” Zeta swallowed noisily as a damp wind rustled the treetops. “Ooh, Dad, what if there was like a cut-off guy’s arm in there. What if it was a dead guy’s arm, and it had like a really cool
watch
on it, but you couldn’t touch it because, ooh, ugh, yuck!”

Viktor stopped dead, clutching a branch. “Why did we bring her?”

“Hey, Dad,” Zeta babbled, “I couldn’t touch a dead guy’s arm if it was
cut off
. No way! Not ever! Yuck! Unless it had, like, a collector Beanie Baby in it. Like ‘Peanuts,’ the royal-blue Elephant Beanie Baby. That one’s worth like five thousand dollars!”

“Zeta, I’m trying to think.” Starlitz patted her scrawny back reassuringly. “Viktor, where the hell did this chopper come from? How could former Soviets fly this far south? Turkey’s crawling with NATO radars.”

“Syria,” Viktor said. He pointed due east. “Syria is very near.”

Starlitz considered this. His interior conception of the planet had just spun ninety degrees. “You’re telling me
that Hafez al-Assad … lets some confederacy that nobody ever heard of … launch paramilitary assaults … from Damascus airspace … against Turkish client states?”

“Wake up, old man. The Cold War ended when I was nine years old. Everybody hates everybody now.”

“Yeah, no, maybe,” muttered Starlitz.

The chopper lay in the crushed trees at a canted angle, its blades snapped like the dragonfly wings on the wipers of a high-speed car. The chopper had no obvious antiaircraft damage. The loss of a military craft this big, ugly, and powerful usually required heat-seeking missiles. Or multiple ack-ack ground-fire cannon holes. Perhaps its thirty-year-old, piece-of-shit, analog, Russian-made, Cold War engines had finally given out.

But such was not the case. Starlitz hoisted himself up the grainy, paint-peeling, armored wall of the toppled aircraft, and discovered that someone had deftly shot the helicopter’s pilot in the head. The pilot had been killed with a light-caliber small arm, derisively small civilian bullets that had somehow pierced through military bulletproof Perspex, and through the pilot’s armored radio helmet. Then the chopper had obligingly coasted into the hillside and the crash had killed the copilot.

“It just can’t be,” Starlitz muttered, sliding down and spitting thoughtfully into a shrub.

But there was much worse to come, for the dead chopper had only two corpses inside it. A workhorse chopper like the Mi-8 could carry up to twenty-four troops. The pilot had landed his troops successfully. When shot down, he had been coming back in a desperate effort to
rescue
his troops.

The walls of the silent barn had grown distinctly uncanny. “Stay here on lookout,” Starlitz told Zeta. “If you see any locals showing up, whistle real loud, then look cute and act lost.”

Someone had emptied an AK clip into the broken padlock and chain on the factory door. Starlitz and Viktor crept inside the place.

The abandoned factory radiated fatal theater. Ozbey had set the place up as some kind of paramilitary training gym, a handy place to keep the good old superspy reflexes trained. There were weight-lifting benches, barbells, and big broken sheets of bullet-stenciled mirror. Workout bags dangled next to green army cots and padlocked gunmetal lockers. There was a private pistol range. There were a few dead bales of vintage Cypriot wool here and there, looking distinctly bogus and decorative, but the cavernous, overlit factory resembled nothing so much as a rust-spotted Disneyland thrill ride. Massive cranes overhead featured conveniently dangling hooks. There were working conveyor belts still in place. Exposed rafters with handy spools of rope. Giant hollow cargo drums, most of them graphically stenciled with rapid-fire bullet holes.

Someone had driven a flying sports car through the wood and sheet metal of the far wall, leaving a perfect, airborne cartoon outline of a car’s silhouette.

An utterly bizarre event had occurred within the structure. It could not be properly described as a firefight. Actual firefights could not possibly lead to one guy killing fifteen armed soldiers. This had not been a battle, but some kind of heroic, semiotic ballet.

The assassins had apparently shown up in good faith. They were traditional, Spetsnaz-style “diversionary troops,” rapid-deployment heavies who were trained to eliminate enemy leaders. They wore tropical camo, helmets, and flak vests. They carried serious, soldierly, functional, AKS-74 full-auto assault rifles, a plethora of belt-mounted hand grenades, big spooky silenced pistols, head-mounted burst-transmission radio sets.

One of the squad, a young dead man with a particularly surprised and unhappy expression, was equipped with an SA-7 antitank launcher.

Starlitz and Viktor migrated from corpse to corpse in a dual silent vigil. The dead men had not merely been killed, but killed in particularly extravagant and spectacular ways. They had been blown backward through disintegrating boards. Flung headlong into collapsing stacks of
tumbling barrels. While firing their assault rifles helplessly into midair, they’d been blinded with paint and shot dead. One of them had died swatting and stumbling in a full-body burn.

Actual dead people in conventional gunfights tended to have a certain classic, sack-of-meat, Matthew Brady, battlefield look. These dead guys had died in fabulous, balletic sprawls: tumbled onto their backs, their booted legs picturesquely propped up; spinning in midair to crumple to earth like broken puppets; knocked against walls with their necks slumped at theatrical dead-guy angles.

Amazingly, a couple of the assailants had come back to life, or at least regained consciousness, in the latter stages of the event. Ozbey, somehow deprived of the unerring handgun that had killed most of the others, had climactically beaten them to death with his feet and fists.

With a stricken expression Viktor bent and plucked up loose ropes and a scarf of orange chiffon. He sniffed at its perfume, and silently caught Starlitz’s eye.

So it had been a trap all along. There were
two
of them. Ozbey had had Gonca Utz inside the place. But no, it was worse than that; the
bad guys
had seized the girl. Ozbey had rescued her.

Ozbey and the girl had left the scene together, triumphantly, in the very same sports car that had previously flown through the air and smashed entirely through the wall. The rocketing car hadn’t lost any of its glass, not so much as a paint chip. But its burnt-rubber tire tracks were all over the place.

Their flesh creeping, Starlitz and Viktor silently exited the building. There was nothing to say. This was a crisis beyond description. No mere words, in either Russian or English, could alter the fatal, unnatural tang of the enormity they had just witnessed.

Birds twittered in the trees. Zeta, who had been patiently keeping watch, looked at Starlitz and went pale at the sight. “Dad,” she said plaintively, “Dad, what happened in there?”

Starlitz struggled to speak. There was nothing. He had no words. He would never have words again.

Starlitz heard his satellite phone ring. Starlitz found that he was able to move his hand. He was able to push the answer button. He was able to emit one ritual utterance.

“Hello?”

“Deus ex machina.” The voice on the phone had a distant, flattened tang. The sonic highs and lows had been clipped off through compression.

“What’s that?” Starlitz asked.

“Try to say it. Speak aloud. Say ‘deus ex machina.’ ”

“Why?” Starlitz asked warily.

“Because that is my story line, man. ‘Deus ex machina,’ the spook in the machine. You’re stuck in the thematics, Starlitz. You’re in a crisis of the master narrative. You can’t go forward, can’t go backward, no way out. That is your situation on the ground there. So then, the god comes down out of the divine sky-car and saves your bacon. And that’s me. That’s where I have to come in. You with the story yet?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“So here I am, man.”

Starlitz scratched his dazed and sweating head. “This is Tim from ECHELON, right?”

“Yep! I’m here in the flesh!”

Starlitz looked around himself. Viktor was staring at him with puzzlement, existential horror, and vague dawning hope. Zeta was looking fixedly into the trees with her jaw slack and her shoulders hunched.

“I don’t see any ‘flesh’ here, Tim.”

“Look up,” Tim suggested.

Starlitz examined the blue sky. Satellite surveillance? Could that be it?

“Look down.”

Starlitz looked at the earth. Motion detectors? Seismographs?

“Look all around.” Vidcams?

“Your pants are falling down,” said Tim triumphantly.
“Left caret grin right caret. Semicolon hyphen right parenthesis.”

“Hey, Dad,” said Zeta. She pointed hesitantly into the empty air. “Who is this guy? What does he want?”

“What does he look like?” Starlitz parried.

“He looks like Bill Gates, sort of. If Bill Gates had thicker glasses and a shitty government job.”

“Ha ha ha,” said Tim through the phone. “What a sense of humor. Let me shake your hand, little girl. You can call me Uncle Tim.”

“He says he wants to shake your hand,” Starlitz said. “He says his name is Tim.”

“Well, okay, I can hear him,” said Zeta. She clasped the empty air and shook it vigorously. Then she winced in disgust as invisible fingers tousled the top of her head.

“Moments like this make it all worse while,” Tim recited mechanically into the phone. “Protecting America’s vulnerable youth from the threat of international terrorism. That’s what I’m all about.”

“What the hell is going on?” Viktor demanded suddenly. “What is that ugly black shadow out of the depths of the forest?”

“He says he’s come to help us,” Starlitz said.

Viktor jumped a foot, clutching his backside with a shriek. Suddenly Viktor’s wallet hung in midair, yawning open and disgorging business cards and various forms of currency into the tall grass.

“Hey!” Viktor demanded, clenching his fists. “Tell it to stop!”

“Tim,” Starlitz said into the phone, “my associate’s kind of upset that you’re going through his private business affairs there.”

“Fuck him,” Tim said cheerfully, in the same flat voice. “What’s he gonna do about it? This Russian punk’s got no fucking options.” Tim tossed the wallet aside. “He’s broke. And he’s small time. He’s not of major surveillant interest.”

A look of frantic desperation entered Viktor’s eyes. He wasn’t taking this at all well.

“Viktor, chill out,” Starlitz said. “Let me pass you the word, man. This is ECHELON.”

“Did you say ECHELON?” said Viktor.

“Ever heard of it? Shall I spell it for you?”

“Of course I’ve heard of ECHELON!” Viktor protested. “ECHELON is the legendary capitalist global surveillance system. It’s the worldwide signals intelligence directorate! ECHELON is the crown jewel of the antiprogressive Dark Forces!”

“Uh, yeah. That would be the alleged phenomenon.”

“ECHELON is run by the UK, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. It uses undersea-cable taps, and surveillance satellites like ‘Aquacade,’ ‘Rhyolite,’ and ‘Magnum.’ It taps the Internet through its major routing centers and does comprehensive word searches on e-mail traffic.”

“Hey, shut up,” Tim protested over the satellite phone. “That’s all totally classified.”