Firechild (36 page)

“I can’t forget.” Clegg’s voice sharpened, bitterly sad. “I can’t help what life has made me. I’ve been proud of you, Tim. I always hoped you’d be a better man than I am. But now—” He sighed, as if very tired. “I called you here for something more than my own confessions. Tell me—” His voice broke again. “Tell me, have I a traitor son?”

“Sir?” Tim stared. “Sir?”

“Or perhaps a stupid dupe?”

“I hope not.”

“This Ostrov woman—” Contempt chilled his voice. “A confessed Russian spy. You led me to believe you had turned her. We have evidence now that she turned you.”

“Turned
isn’t quite the word.” Hands wide, Tim moved closer. “I told you what she is. A Russian agent, but she shares my own concern to see that Enfield doesn’t happen again. When I confronted her in Kansas City, we discussed the creature Alphamega. We agreed on a common duty to make certain, as certain as we could, that no nation can ever make military use of the EnGene technology. As we saw the dilemma, Alphamega has to be eliminated. We joined our resources to dispose of her. If that’s treason—”

He shrugged.

“Your story.” Clegg’s voice had hardened. “Far from what the CIA is hearing now. This new evidence makes you pretty clearly a traitor or a fool.”

Tim stood waiting, searching his bleak face.

“The CIA—”

Clegg’s angular frame had sagged, and he shuffled slowly around the big glass-topped desk to his chair behind it and sat there for half a minute, breathing heavily, before he continued a little more calmly.

“The CIA has caught another spy. A miserable little rat named Barlow. He writes lurid nonsense he calls documentary exposes. He’s confessed that he allowed himself to be recruited by the KGB while he was in Russia working on a book. I met him here when he wanted to come on the post to photograph the ruins of Enfield and interview survivors for another trashy expose. He seems to hate me now for the way I turned him down.

“A pompous little pup, with the gall to threaten me. He has heard about the Cato Club, maybe from his red friends. Enough, he claims, to do yet another expose. He says he’s going to call it
The Catonian Cabal.
All about how I’m scheming to overthrow American democracy and set myself up as a tinhorn dictator. Unless I let him off the hook.

“I told him to go to hell.”

“Good enough for him.” Tim tried to grin. “But that shouldn’t trouble you. The club has a good grip on the media. It has always been able to stifle such critics.” He peered again into his father’s face. “What has Barlow to do with me?”

“Enough to hurt you.” Clegg’s voice turned graver. “He knows you’re my son. Ruining you, he hopes to damage me. He’s claiming now that his actual business here has been to control Ostrov for the KGB. He’s giving his own account of Alphamega’s getaway.”

“Was he involved?”

“He doesn’t admit it, but what he knows or guesses is enough to impress the CIA. A whole chain of ugly evidence—or else very damaging coincidence. Investigating Bard, the guard who sold us out, they learned that he used to drive off the post to meet somebody at that Chinese-Mex place in Maxon.

“Barlow says this contact was another Russian agent. A
Marieleño
called the Scorpion because of his skill with a knife. He seems to have been here in Enfield before the disaster, employed with Bard on the En-Gene security force and probably reporting to Ostrov. The CIA has identified him as a man who vanished from a cheap hotel in Piedmont on the night of getaway, leaving an old pickup truck and not much else.

“According to Barlow, he masterminded the getaway. He seems to have placed the explosives that blacked out the post on the getaway night. He got Ostrov to smuggle him through the gate. She drove him to my jet. Torres, the Mexican alien, got Alphamega out of her interrogation cell and Bard drove them to join the Scorpion. They all took off together.

“Barlow thinks the KGB was waiting for them somewhere in Mexico, ready to begin their own investigation of Alphamega. He says Ostrov tricked us into releasing Belcraft to let them get him into their own hands for whatever they hope to learn. The whole object of the plot is to kill our chance at the EnGene weapon and give it to the Red Army.

“An ugly scenario.”

“Don’t believe it,” Tim begged him. “It’s the same nasty mix of half-truth and clever horror stories Barlow serves up in his books. Anya talked to me about both men, Barlow and the Scorpion. She despised Barlow—”

“He says she’s a skillful actress, able to play any role.”

“True.” Tim nodded. “That’s part of what makes her a competent spy. But I’ve learned to admire her as a fine human being. Loyal enough to Russia, but even more concerned to save mankind from what hit Enfield. I suppose she had to play along with Barlow to keep the KGB off her neck, but she must have let him know she hated him. Perhaps he’s trying now to even a score with her.

“She talked to me about the Scorpion. It’s true he was her contact at EnGene before the disaster. But he tricked her afterward—conned her out of thousands of dollars she paid him for documents he said he’d stolen from the lab. In fact, he may very well have been the man who forced her to drive him to the jet, but I can’t think she was ever part of this fantastic plot.”

“Not so fantastic to the CIA.” Clegg’s grim voice was edged with accusation. “They’re convinced that you’re part of it, and they’ve warned me that my own career’s in danger.” Clegg pointed a wavering finger. “You can’t deny that you got Ostrov onto the base and put her next to Belcraft.”

“Please, Dad!” Tim gulped to smooth his voice. “That’s Barlow’s method. Appeal to paranoia. He picks a few facts and invents frightening implications. He’s a merchant of terror, selling his books by crying wolf at everything.”

“I’ve tried to argue that.” Clegg sighed and shook his head, leaning with both elbows on the desk as if overwhelmed with trouble. “They don’t listen. They’re debating now whether to arrest you at once or to leave you free long enough to lead them to your accomplices.”

“Give me time!” Whispering, Tim frowned into his stark face, searching for reason. He found a firmer tone. “Barlow has them terrified, the way he tries to terrify his readers. Afraid of the Russians and more afraid of that biological killer. But his plot is pure fiction—it has to be! Just look at the facts.”

“If I knew the facts—”

“Here they are.” Tim bent urgently across the desk. “Anya has gone, to Mexico to kill Alphamega. She has Belcraft with her for a guide and Harris for the killing. Aside from Barlow’s fairy tale, we have no hint of any Russian agents waiting for military information. I’ve seen Anya’s reports, and she seems pretty certain of success.”

“I’m not—”

“Wait! For both our sakes. With Alphamega dead— proven dead—everything will change. Barlow’s story will collapse into what it is, another wild lie meant to save his neck. There’ll be no actual case against me— or anybody.”

Slowly, as if his joints were painful, Clegg came to his feet.

“I hope so.” Hoarsely breathing that, he shook his haggard head. “Son, I do hope so.”

Blindly wavering, he extended his lean arm across the desk to search for Tim’s blindly reaching hand.

42

After the

Crash

Ranko Barac was a boy again, back in Montenegro, chasing a crazy black goat that had darted out of the herd. It zigzagged craftily away across the rocky slope. Sometimes it stopped to stare back at him with wild yellow eyes, but it always shook its horns to mock him and scurried off again.

The old grandfather would be furious if it got away. Desperate to catch it, he stumbled on the rocks and fell into a thicket of poison thorns that stung like hornets. He got up with blood on his hands and raced on again. He was gasping for breath. A pain came in his side. He hated the goat and the ugly country and everybody he had known.

This Kras was ugly, treeless country, full of caves and pits and snakes, good for nothing but the crazy goats he had to herd. He hated his father for never coming back from Santiago, and hated his mother for sending him here when he didn’t want to come.

He had loved his father once. A lean, proud man with sharp black eyes and a thick black beard and a rich tobacco smell, he used to sing strange Croatian songs when he was drunk and happy and at home, but all that was too long ago. His father was never at home after he was older, always away on affairs for the nation he would never talk about. You couldn’t love a father who left you and never came back.

He had loved his mother more. She was a dark, quick little woman, always working or talking or laughing or crying, never still at all. He’d thought she loved him, till after his father never sent for them to come to him in Chile. That was when she got the divorce so she could marry the pig-jowled Georgian whose factory made
defitstny,
illegal jeans for the black market.

He never liked the way the fat-faced Georgian puffed his long black cigars and bragged about his long black Zhiguli and all the easy comforts of living
nalevo.
“On the left.” When they quarreled, he called the man Pig Face. The man tried to whip him. He took the whip and broke the Georgian’s arm.

That was when he learned about his mother. She took Pig Face to the hospital and came back to scold him and send him here to his grandfather in the ugly Kras. Because she loved Pig Face more than she loved him.

Panting after the black goat, he came to a deep limestone sink. The goat sailed high over it and stopped on the other side to bleat and shake its ugly horns and grin at him with strange yellow eyes. He tried to jump, but the pit was too wide. He fell sprawling into a tangle of brush full of rocks and thorns and dust and spiders.

His breath was gone and his side ached more and the walls were too steep to climb. He couldn’t get out. The goat stood on the rim, bleating with a wicked glee. He lay there a long time, afraid of snakes in the rocks, wishing he could kill the goat, hating everybody—

Till he heard his grandfather calling.

The old man stood tall against the sky, throwing rocks at the goat. One hit the goat in the ribs. The bleating stopped. It ran away. His grandfather lowered a rope and called for him to climb it. He knew then that he loved his grandfather, but the calling was very strange.

Instead of the old man’s wheezy Serbo-Croatian quaver, what he heard was Alphamega’s child-voiced Spanish.

“Aqut! La cuerda!”

He was reaching for it, but that strangeness woke him from the dream. The rope was gone. He remembered the way he had ducked and caught his breath, waiting for the crash. When he could move his head, he found twisted pieces of the jet all around him. He lay on hard ground, and the pain in his side was real. Twisting to look, he found the handle of his own knife. The point had gone through the thin sheath and into his chest.

He lay there a long time, as helpless as he had been in the dream. Hot sun blazed on him. Moving hurt his head and breathing hurt his chest. The pain from his side spread like a poison through all his numb body. His head couldn’t turn enough to let him look for Alphamega or the Mexican. When he tried to call, the coughing seemed to drive the knife deeper. All he could hear was the cawing of a crow.

The crow came closer. Afraid of what it would do, he found strength to reach the knife. It came out of his side when he pulled and fell to clatter on loose metal. The crow cawed and flapped farther away.

He had no strength to do anything else. He felt the blood still coming, hot and sticky on his ribs when he breathed, but he had no way to stop it. Flies buzzed around his sticky hand. The sun blazed hotter. When a breath of wind came, it carried bitter dust that made him cough again. When he felt sleep coming back, he wanted it to take him far away. He felt glad when he thought he wouldn’t wake.

But then he dreamed again, again of Alphamega.

“Amigo, no!
You must not die!”

“I hurt too much,” he told her. “I have no strength to live.”

“Por favor,
you must try,” her bright voice begged him. “Because we need you, and because I feel the love in you. I see you shining with the color of hope.
El Erudito
Sax will help me find where you were hurt, and we can help you heal yourself.”

That couldn’t be, he tried to say, because Belcraft wasn’t here to help her with anything. They had left him a thousand miles and more behind, locked up with Clegg’s interrogators in the prison hospital. But he found no strength to speak again.

Yet, somehow, some part of Belcraft did come to help Alphamega, though not in any visible way. When he looked around him for her, all he could find was a bright shadow dancing in the air. It was thinner than mist, but it wrapped him with kindness.

Somehow, it was Alphamega. He felt her reaching into him. Belcraft showed her where to go and what to do. She stopped the pain where the blade had been. She reached deeper, turning deadness into life.

“Adiós!”
he thought she whispered.
“Vive!”

And the brightness was gone.

He woke again, suddenly strong enough to lumber to his feet and shout at the crow perched now on Frankie Bard. The crow cawed at him, defiant as the yellow-eyed goat in that first dream. The body lay sprawled where accident had tossed it, dead as Frankie deserved to be, already swelling and stinking in the heat. He threw a scrap of metal at the crow and stumbled through the scattered fragments of the jet, looking for the others.

Torres lay near Frankie, flies crawling over the black streak of blood that had come from his nose. Part of a broken wing lay on his legs. Fresher blood oozed from a slash across his throat. The caved-in chest was moving, and his breath was a slow rasping snore, but he was going to die.

Beyond him, beside a seat torn out of the airplane, Alphamega lay very flat and very still. Her eyes were closed. Loose in the dust, her fine bright hair made a golden halo. Her body felt cold when he touched it, with no pulse he could feel. There was no blood he could see. He thought she must have died when they hit the ground.