Firechild (34 page)

The bright voice changed.

“Soon, perhaps, the problems of you own little planet will no longer seem—”

“Perdóname!”
She had felt a fog of sudden danger growing thick and cold around her far body. “I can wait no longer. You have been
muy amable.
I wish I could stay here in your world with no land. But I feel great new danger to my own far body. I must go while I can.”

“Not yet,
hijita!”
Father-Mother begged her. “Not till you are stronger.”

“If I don’t go while my body lives, I can never find the way.”

“Wait!” Elder Brother seemed distressed. “Please, Little Sister! Wait till you are stronger, and we can guide you.”

“I have a guide,” she said. “In the new danger-light I feel where my body is.”

“If you go, we may never find you—”

“No le hace.
” She pulled free of his clinging wings. “No matter. I must find my work and do it.”

She flew away alone.

“Come back!” His calling voice grew faint behind her. “Come back, Little Sister! Come back if you can!”

The shining splendors of their city faded behind her, and then the dreadful beauty of that great wheel of light around the dark and dreadful pit that swallowed stars. Far from the power of its dark light, she felt her strength and courage draining away.

Again she was all alone.

She had let them take her too far. The thread she must follow was drawn too thin. The danger-cloud she had felt around her body was only a faint red fleck in the world of nothing else at all, but perhaps,
con buena suerte—

Perhaps, with luck enough, it could guide her home.

39

“Somewhere,

Dying …”

T
he airport lights were still out, but Anya heard more sirens coming. The car keys lost in the dark, all she could do was wait—and wonder. Besides Sam Holliday, who else could have known she wasn’t Keri Grant? Who had been clever enough, bold enough, to steal the general’s jet? Who else had got aboard it?

Patrol cars came roaring and skidding around her.

“Hey? Who the hell are you?”

Post security men were dragging her out of the car. Baffled and furious, they wanted to know who she was and who she had seen and what had brought her back from Maxon after midnight. Alphamega was missing! Clegg had exploded when he heard about it, more perturbed by the escape than by the theft of his jet. Her part in the break had to be explained. Still shaking, still bewildered, she whispered what she could about her whispering abductor, but nobody believed what she said.

Not till Holliday arrived. Grim-faced and edgy, he took her to his office to question her himself. Still she had no answers that pleased him or anybody. Something about the queer, breathless rasp of her captor had been half familiar, but she had seen the man only as a shadow in the dark and she found no name.

“I’ve no idea who it was,” she told him. “The guy knew a lot about me, but he spoke in a queer hoarse whisper and never let me see his face.” She shivered. “He really meant to kill me if I didn’t go along.”

Holliday seemed more sympathetic than anybody else, but the sun had risen before he let her go home. Her head throbbed. Groggy from fatigue and stress, she was still too jittery for sleep. Two aspirins didn’t help. She was stirring instant coffee into a cup when her phone rang.

“Grant?” The twangy Yankee drawl of her new Kremlin contact, sharp with impatience. “Where’ve you been?”

“A problem at the post.” That was all she wanted to say.

“Whatever happened, I want a full report.” His voice turned imperative. “I’ll pick you up for lunch.”

“Okay.”

She had to agree, though she disliked everything about him. A short, bouncy little man, he wore a neat black goatee and bore a ripe aroma of chronic flatulence never entirely disguised by the Burleigh burning in his underslung briar. Mysterious about his actual name, he signed himself and his books “T. Bradleigh Barlow.” A writer of what he called exposes, he had a contract with a small New York publisher for
The En-Gene Mystery: Omen of Doom.

With no quarters available at the post and General Clegg hostile toward his reputation for lurid sensation, he had set up his word processor in a little house in Maxon, just across the alley from Anya’s own garage apartment. They parked their cars on the same vacant lot. Playing a role of casual friendship, he took her out for occasional meals at Juan Wong’s Taco Chinatown or sometimes to the Norman Towers in Piedmont.

On those drives, he had received her reports and delivered new instructions from the Center. She disliked being alone with him in the car. Trying to play the same sort of romantic rogue he had tried to write about in novels nobody would publish, he pushed himself upon her until she looked him in the eye and told him she would kill him if he touched her again. Afterward he appeared to enjoy the harsh messages he brought her from Moscow.

At noon today, she let him pick her up. Juan Wong’s place was only half a dozen blocks down the highway. He parked there and turned, scowling through his heavy-rimmed glasses, to talk in the car. Somehow, he had already learned as much as she knew about the escape. Trying to blame her for anything he could, he still appeared pleased with the trouble he foresaw for her.

“So you’ve fumbled again.” Nodding, he paused to relight the briar. “I’m afraid we’ll have to find a more competent agent to complete the mission.”

“Not yet,” she told him. “I’m still the agent in place.”

“A double agent.” Puffing, he squinted critically through the smoke. “Sometimes we must use them, but we never trust them far. In this situation—” He paused to puff again. “You say you were kidnapped and forced to drive that guy to the plane. Which looks pretty odd. How do I know—how does the Center know you’re playing straight?”

“You’re a courier.” She sniffed at his odor. “Nothing more. You have no authority over me.”

“I forward reports.” He smirked. “My own as well as yours. I tell you now that I can’t continue to express any confidence whatever in you or your mission.”

“Reporting on me is not your business.”

“It will be.” He blew smoke in her face. “When the Center begins to see through your ploys. Look at this Holliday. You claim you trust him because he’s Clegg’s son. On the face of it, a pretty ridiculous reason. The Center has never really understood why he should defect to you.”

Though he had the air conditioner on, she rolled down a window.

“He didn’t.” Her voice was carefully even. “What we have is a very limited alliance. Clegg was fighting for control of a biological weapon. Holliday and I agreed that the world will be a better place with no science of the sort that killed Enfield. The secret of what happened seems to exist only in that synthetic monster. We agreed that she ought to be destroyed.

“That’s the situation as I explained it to the Center. I believe the matter was debated in high circles. Perhaps even in the Politburo. Certain persons were reluctant to abandon our own battle for the weapon. They were told, however, that we had very little chance to beat the
Glavni Vrag.
Better erase the secret than let them get it. The final consensus was to support my present mission. To eliminate that genetic creation.”

“With what results?” Rasping the accusation, he stopped to turn the air conditioner higher. “You have let some unknown group kidnap the creature and disappear with her. God knows who they are or where they took her!”

“God?” She grinned at him. “Or Lenin?”

“Comrade, your own predicament is too grave to joke about.” He stabbed the pipestem at her. “You have wasted our resources and our time, achieving less than nothing. Unless I can report something more positive within a very few days, the Center is prepared to send a separate force to kidnap Belcraft for our own interrogation.”

“Here in America?” She let her eyebrows rise. “That wouldn’t be easy.”

“Neither was Stalingrad.” He might have been quoting the lurid spy novels he couldn’t sell. “Mother Russia is desperate. Comrade, have you let yourself forget the unsolved mystery of what killed Enfield? A holocaust that could spread to all the world. You are rolling dice for the life of all mankind.”

Forcing a smile for another driver parking beside them, he was moving to get out of the car. With no appetite, she made him drive her back to the apartment.

“Play your own game,” she told him. “I’ll play mine.”

Watching him drive away, she shrugged and let her thoughts drift back to Saxon Belcraft. Perhaps the world’s future would in fact depend on her own loaded dice. Perhaps it wouldn’t. She had trained herself not to fret too much over uncertainties she couldn’t control. Whatever the case, she enjoyed her game with Belcraft.

As a sex-armed missile of the KGB, she had been targeted on various men, none so exciting. Old Jules Roman had been the only one she liked or respected. She enjoyed his devotion and the luxury he lavished on her, but he had been decades past his prime before she captured him. His occasional attempts at sex had been humiliating failures. She had always pitied him, and his final disposition in Moscow seemed almost an act of mercy.

Belcraft was a far more tempting target, young and vigorous enough, entirely likeable. His naivete sometimes amused her. All he knew was medicine and the rural Ohio in which he had grown up, a world so different from her own that she found it hard to imagine, but so near the rural Indiana she claimed for her birthplace that she always felt afraid to talk about Keri Grant’s fictitious childhood.

He intrigued her with the mystery of his contacts with Alphamega. What sort of thing was the creature? How had she come to rule him so totally? How had she made herself matter more to him than his medical practice and even his life?

Belcraft himself was another puzzle. She had lived in a world of cynics, and she had been moved to surprise and sometimes to pity by his fascinated belief in her tales of Keri’s vagabond years in Europe. Spinning them, watching his innocent envy of the imaginary worlds she was describing, she found herself afraid she might come to like him too much. Sex with him was the best she had known, even on that hot night when the air conditioning died.

“You know, Anya, I’m falling in love.” He told her that next morning, coming naked out of the shower and erect again with the recollection. He looked at her oddly, shaking his head. “I just woke from a funny dream. I thought you’d turned into Alphamega.”

Sitting up in bed, she uncovered her breasts to divert him from her own trembling tension.

“Have you been bewitched?” She tried to seem merely malicious. “Even after last night, you’d really like to exchange us?”

“She haunts me.” He sat down beside her, soberly staring at nothing. “At that first glimpse, crawling out of the ruins, still only a little pink worm, she took hold of me. I don’t know how she did it. Or what she is. Or what Vic designed her to be. I’ll probably never know. I do know there will never be anybody like her.”

“Does the dream—” Trying not to seem too eager, she stopped to smile at his jutting penis. “Does it mean she’s still alive?”

“Just a dream.” He shrugged and drew her toward him to kiss her nipples. “No message. With no trace reported, I suppose she’s probably dead.”

She saw his penis wilting.

The following night was equally hot, but the air conditioner kept on purring and she found his pent-up vigor undiminished. Talking with a boyish sort of candor about whatever crossed his mind, he had begun revealing a wry wit he had always felt to be dangerously unbecoming in a serious young physician, showing a brain so keen that sometimes she trembled with a new terror of detection.

They woke together in the cooler-seeming dawn, and she hoped he would want her again. Instead, he slid out of her arms to sit bolt upright in bed.

“Another dream.” She was uncovered, but he frowned blankly past her. “The sort Clegg calls a sending.”

“A vision?” She tried not to seem unduly anxious. “Do you think that’s possible?”

“Nothing I can understand.” He shrugged uneasily. “I thought she was calling me. She is terribly hurt and in desperate trouble somewhere.”

“Somewhere?”

“That’s the problem.” His frown bit deeper. “I saw her in a sort of cave. There was a rock roof above her, with rough timbers supporting it. Day was just breaking, gray sky outside. She lay on a pile of juniper branches—I could even smell them. That Mexican she calls Panchito was with her, trying to give her water.

“She’s paralyzed. Unable to speak or even swallow. What she really needs is help from Vic. She came to me because I’m Vic’s brother and a doctor and because in another dream or vision or whatever it was she thought I had helped her diagnose and heal Panchito. He had suffered broken bones and internal injuries in the fall of what she called
el avión—”

His breath caught.

“That must—that must have been the general’s jet! Down somewhere. Panchito hurt and dying, the way she was. With whatever medical knowhow she thinks she got from me, she was somehow able to save him, but she doesn’t understand her own body well enough to heal herself. She was hoping I’d learned enough from Vic to help her.”

His whole body drooped in dejection.

“Of course Vic hadn’t told me anything useful. The dream was over when I had to tell her that. She had no strength to hold me any longer.” His staring eyes looked stricken. “Keri, she’s somewhere, dying …”

“And you don’t know where?”

“Mexico.” He spoke slowly, frowning in thought. “That’s where Torres would want to go, and I did get a clear impression that the crash was there. If it happened after the fuel had run out on their flight from Enfield, we have at least a suggestion of the distance. The cave suggests mountains. An area high and dry enough for juniper.”

Silent for a moment, he looked hard at her.

“All pretty vague. Not much to go on, unless I get another message. But Meg needs me. Terribly! I’m afraid I couldn’t do anything, but I’d give anything to get there. If I could possibly escape—”