The Alejandra Variations (2 page)

The citizens around him seemed absorbed in a mysterious religious calm. The chanting from street corners, the bells of incense, the thumping of small, hand-held drums, were wholly alien to him, yet they stirred something within him. Despite the poverty that was everywhere around him, some unknowable vitality shined from the people's faces. The waiter had had it in his own face, and so did every person Nicholas now saw. The presence of faith, so rarely seen in the average person back in the States, was common here, and it touched him deeply.

He stumbled suddenly:
The
Prime Minister!

It came to him this time as a desperate shout:
Find the Prime Minister! Quickly!

The mass of humanity swirled around him. The voice had seemed filled with fear and concern. Its pleading held a terrible urgency he couldn't ignore. He had to find the Prime Minister of India!

He didn't know how to begin. He looked down the street.

There, in the midst of a gathering of pilgrims, stood a beautiful woman. Nicholas recognized her immediately. She was smiling directly at him as if she'd been waiting for him to see her.

"Oh, my God," Nicholas breathed. He lifted an excited hand into the air. "Rhoanna!" he shouted.
"Rhoanna!"

Rhoanna Martin stood wrapped in a wondrously adorned
sari.
A small, ruby-colored jewel glittered in the center of her forehead. Rhoanna. Thousands of miles from her home, and six years gone from his life.

"Rhoanna!" Nicholas yelled, cupping his hands to his mouth to give his voice force.

He ran toward her, pushing aside the merrymakers. Rhoanna waved to him and stepped down from the sidewalk.

"Nick!"

Nicholas Tejada stumbled, but caught himself before he fell. He was acting like a bumbling fool—but he didn't care. Rhoanna ran up to him, and he took her into his arms. She gave a squeal of delight.

"Nick!" she laughed. Wings of orange and fuchsia silk enfolded about him as she came to him.

His heart thundered in his chest as he felt her press firmly against him. He laughed. "I don't believe it. What are you doing here?"

He held her at arm's length, examining her almost as he would a precious sculpture. Rhoanna's green eyes glistened, reaching deep into his soul as she smiled at him. Her brown hair was tucked beneath a shawl of gossamer pink cotton; her skin seemed to glow.

Unabashedly, he kissed her full on the mouth as the eyes of a thousand strangers looked on. Rhoanna's delicate fingers tugged affectionately at the hair on the nape of his neck. He could feel her pelvis press hungrily against his upper thigh.

Nicholas!
the command rang out suddenly.
We must locate the Prime Minister before it's too late!
Nick jolted backward, his heart dancing like a wild beast in his chest.

Breathless, Rhoanna clutched his arms. "Nick, what is it?"

He was shaking. The world was beginning to spin around him and he couldn't stop it.

What is going on? he asked himself.

"Rhoanna…" he began, gazing deep into her eyes.

A siren pierced the air, and both of them froze, clinging to each other. On the street hundreds of Bombayites fell silent. The tall, poverty-ridden apartment buildings that surrounded them stood like trees in a desolate, almost defoliated, forest. The siren's ragged echo was like a living thing on the prowl.

He wanted to say to Rhoanna: "What are you doing here?" He wanted to say, with all of his heart: "What is the meaning of our being here like this?"

He wanted to say, more than anything, that he loved her. But the siren, now joined by a whole chorus of city-wide alarms, drowned out those thoughts.

He looked up, realizing that these were not the sirens common to civil authorities, but were the wails of civil-defense alarms. The crowd screamed almost in unison and began running in panic as they finally understood what was upon them.

It was an air raid—a
nuclear
air raid!

"Jesus Christ!"
Nicholas shouted, pulling Rhoanna close to a building. Holy men ran by, expressions of abject terror on their faces, having dropped their sculpted idols on the gritty sidewalk. The screams of the populace competed with the banshee wail of the air-raid sirens. The voice returned again, drowning out all other sounds:

Nicholas! The Prime Minister is in danger!

An elderly woman fleeing through the crowd collided with them. Everyone tumbled to the ground in the chaos. Before Nicholas could gain his feet, dozens of robed individuals were clambering over them in panic. Rhoanna was pulled helplessly out into the avenue.

"Rhoanna!" he yelled. But despite his efforts, it was impossible to reach her in the crush.

One of those big, unwieldly British buses came barreling out of nowhere. Nicholas jumped backward onto the sidewalk to get out of its way. As he regained his balance he looked for Rhoanna—but she was gone, sucked into the flood of miserable humanity.

"Rhoanna!"
he called.

The sirens filled the air like seawater around a school of fish—tiny, frightened fish being swept away by currents over which they had no control.

It's coming, Nicholas! Find him! Please!

Everything seemed to hit him like a wall of seething floodwater. He turned and vomited into the narrow gutter.

Shaking, the bitter taste of gastric juices in his mouth, he stood up, his head spinning with fear. Deep within him he knew this was the end. The Bomb was going to fall—and he'd lost Rhoanna again.

He looked up into the musty sky of India for the threads of contrails from Russian bombers—or would the aircraft be of Chinese origin, arcing in from the east and not the north? Perhaps they were Libyan. It didn't matter.

A man stumbled into him and Nicholas went down, slamming his head against the brick lining of the curb. The man—an old beggar with hardly any clothing upon his shriveled body—rolled over, clutching his chest; then rose, propelled by his desperation, and vanished into the crowd.

Nicholas slowly came to his feet. The blow had knocked some sense into him. He walked out into the avenue, staying clear of the panicked natives. He took his steps gingerly, carefully, walking almost like an automaton. There was no escaping it. On the very last day of his life, he knew what he had to do.

When he reached the seashore he found it deserted, although tension was still in the air as if suspended upon each mote of dust that had been stirred up by the feet of the celebrants. The sirens still wailed deep within the canyons of the city behind him. Upon the steps that led to the dirty waters of the Arabian Sea there was no one to be seen. Above him, angry gulls drifted in the heat, crying out their own confusion.

He stood on the broken cement steps that led down to the water's edge. Sandals, clothing, and flowers lay strewn haphazardly about. A fractured idol of Siva lay staring sightlessly into an uncaring sky. The sirens wailed like the voices of godlings lost in the shadowy halls of Bombay's decaying cityscape.

Out in the bay floated a few ships—sloops or junks. Their crews were oblivious to what was happening. Nicholas squinted through the tainted, almond-colored light, watching the waves pulse toward the shore in a glistening of silver.

Nicholas,
the inner dweller in his mind cried out.
Help us!
We need to know for sure!

"Stop it!" he screamed finally, grasping his head in his hands. "For the love of God, stop!"

"Nick!"
came an impassioned call.

This time it was a human voice crying out, not his inner dweller.

He turned swiftly and saw Rhoanna standing like the battered statue of a Hindu goddess, her arms outstretched, on the balustrade of a weathered hotel. Fainting, she fell against a marble pillar and slid out of sight, leaving behind her a trail of smeared crimson.

"Rhoanna!"

Everything came together in his mind: the sirens; the voice; the junks at sea.

The nuclear device did not fall from the belly of a sinister bomber at sixty thousand feet, as the sirens had led him to fear. Instead, it came bubbling up from the yellow Arabian Sea, like a child spawned from an evil Nereidian womb in the deepest crevice of the ocean.

Monstrous, it climbed on rubberized treads up onto the carved, ornamental steps of the holy shoreline. It was heading right for him.

This ocean-borne steel demon was twice the size of a great white shark, and had a head full of deadly plutonium. Water slid down its slime-dark hull and drooled on to its efficient undercarriage. It looked for all the world as if it were smiling.

That smile was the last thing Nicholas Tejada saw in this life.

The whole universe suddenly burst with a light brighter than the interior of the brightest supernova in the heavens—as skin, then muscle, then bone, vanished in a terrible explosion. There was no smoke of burned flesh. No ash. Nothing.

There was only the roar of light and a single, last gasping breath on his lips.

"Rhoanna," he whispered—and was gone.

Chapter Two

IN THE DARKNESS of an unimaginable afterlife, Nicholas heard voices—voices that lured him slowly back to the proverbial land-of-the-living. He fought off the limbo that unpleasantly enshrouded him and homed in on the voices that were conferring at the other end of reality.

He tried to clear his throat, realizing that he was very, very thirsty. He also realized that he had a throat to clear.

With a foot in each world, he made the leap toward the better one. "Water," he said hoarsely.

His throat felt as if someone had poured sawdust down it and had followed that with sand. "I need some water," he muttered to anyone who might be listening.

He slowly opened his eyes and found that he was lying in the white cotton folds of a comfortable hospital bed. But if this was a hospital room, it wasn't like any he'd known before.

It resembled a luxury-hotel suite but one designed for invalids. The bed was large. Across the room were a few plush chairs and some tall, leafy green plants. There were no other beds. This was a private suite for VIPs. Directly opposite him was a wall of stereo and video equipment. And above him—set into the bed's headboard—was a sophisticated monitoring computer, from which depended several wires and tubes that were attached to him, keeping him alive and full of the proper juices. He hardly noticed the dull pain in his hand from the IV unit.

There were no windows.

His feelings told him that he was somewhere underground. The walls resonated
solidness
, a sense of profound impenetrableness which effectively kept the outside world at bay.

He looked toward the door and saw two people conversing. One of them was quite tall. He wore a stethoscope around his neck, but the rest of him belied the standard took of a physician. The man wore a gray T-shirt that had stenciled across its chest, "Property of UCSB," and the rest of him was comfortably attired in tennis shoes and Levis, worn and faded in all the expected places.

Then Nicholas recognized the individual standing next to the doctor.

"Salazar," Nicholas said in a somewhat stronger voice.

It was reassuring to see Melissa Salazar waiting for him to regain consciousness. On the other hand, a number of things mitigated against his euphoria on discovering that he was still alive. The first was the fact that he was underground. The second was the idea that the director of the Pentagon's Project Foresee had decided to supervise his recovery in person. If Melissa Salazar wanted to be present to pick up and dust off one of her special Strategics, then something rather dreadful was up.

Salazar and the casually attired doctor turned and walked over to Nicholas's bed.

"Welcome back to the real world, Nick," the man said. "I'm Dr. Massingale. How do you feel?"

He proceeded to take Nicholas's pulse, gazing up at the computer screen on the console above him.

"I'm thirsty as hell," Nicholas said.

The doctor laughed comfortingly. He poured Nick a glass of clear, sparkling water.

"Go easy, now," the doctor insisted.

Beside him, the director of Project Foresee was silent, a look of concern on her face.

"You've been through a lot," Massingale said. "But you're going to be all right."

Nick drank the water slowly but steadily. He trembled as his body took in the refreshing liquid. Handing the glass back to the doctor, he settled back into the huge comfort of the pillows.

Melissa Salazar leaned over him. "How do you feel, Nick? You OK?"

"I feel like shit four ways to Sunday, is how I feel."

The director of Foresee smiled wryly, her dark brown eyes friendly. Melissa Salazar, fifteen years Nicholas's senior, had not a single gray hair on her head, although her eyes always seemed weighted by nights of little or no sleep and days of unbearable tension. Like the doctor, she was casually dressed, which was unusual for her. She wore a mid-length skirt, a cotton blouse, and boots, which suggested that she hadn't had time to dress in her usual businesslike manner. Another bad sign, Nicholas realized. Melissa Salazar earned the money to dress well, and dress well she did.

But not at the moment.

"Sorry I screwed things up, Sal. I just couldn't find the Prime Minister. I tried. I really did."

Dr. Massingale punched data into the computer board above the bed. Melissa smiled. A faint hint of her perfume could be discerned despite the hospital's antiseptic smell.

"Actually," she began, "you did a better job of locating the possible source of the attack than we'd hoped. We had a devil of a time getting you out of Mnemos Nine, though, after you pinpointed the location of the bomb. The bomb wouldn't have gone off right at your feet if we'd gotten you out of the system when we were supposed to. We're the ones who should do the apologizing, not you. It must have been quite a scare."

Scare
was not quite the word for what he had felt, which was maybe why he could feel the presence of some sedative in his body. The shock had been substantial.