The Second Saladin (49 page)

“I see,” said Miles.

“It’s not that I want to play the hard guy; it’s that—”

“Sure.”

Miles thought: Come on, altar boy. Come on, little
priest. Come on you stinking pimply suck-ass:
Do something! Say something!

“Just a minute more, okay, Mike? I just have to wrap this.”

“Miles, people are waiting and—”

“I’ll owe you one. I always pay off. I can help you. A lot. You know what I mean? I can help you upstairs. Cover for me.”

“Miles, I just can’t. I gave you a big break and—”

“Mike, just let me say one thing. I appreciate what you did for me. I really do. You’re a decent guy. I won’t give you any trouble.”

“Thanks, Miles. I really appreciate your co-op—”

“And I’ll go to your supervisor first thing Monday morning to tell him you violated security procedure, Mike.”

Miles smiled at him evenly.

“Form Twelve, Mike. I’m in here without a Form Twelve, Mike. You could be in big—”

“Goddamn you. You little—”

“Just back off, Jewboy. Just back the fuck off, and you get your career back. Otherwise, you’re on your way to Siberia.”

He glared at him in smug triumph. Miles could really be quite evil—he had the capacity for it—and he watched the tall young man buckle under the pressure.

“Five more minutes, Miles. Goddamn you, they said you were a prick!”

He rushed off into the dark.

Miles turned back to the screen. He could not escape it.

Enter six-letter security code here

Frenchy, you son-of-a-bitch. You old bastard.

Old Frenchy. Smart old Frenchy.

Then it arrived, from nowhere.

He commanded:

Fe Cowboy

He could see a labyrinth of pillars and acres and acres of the rawest space under a low ceiling. It was an abstraction too, an infinitely open-ended maze. Tunnels and chambers and warrens spilled everywhere in gloomy subterranean abundance. Every fourth or fifth pillar had its own lighted E
XIT
arrow, stenciled orange, three-quarters of the way up. Did Borges invent this place? Did Kafka? Did Beckett? No, of course not. It was any underground parking garage anyplace in America any time in the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s.

No trace of human motion met his eyes as they probed the aisles and ranks, though in any of a hundred or a thousand dark places, in shadows, in vent openings, in ducts, in stairwells—in any of them—a man could hide.

Danzig’s fear blossomed anew, exotic, an ice-blue orchid inside his chest. It seemed a phenomenon of his gastrointestinal system, crippling and weakening his own interior ducts and vents. He wanted to be sick and could feel bile in his throat. His heart was running hard. He fought for air and found it foul with ancient auto exhaust. He steadied himself. He wished he did not have to be so brave.

The first theory of modern statecraft—so basic, really, it never saw print—was that you paid people to be brave for you. A class of man existed for just such exigencies. Yet here was Danzig, no longer bold by surrogate, required himself to step into the arena.

I am not brave; few enough are. Soldiers sense this intuitively, as if they can sniff it. Civilian, they sneer in contempt, meaning: coward. Meaning also, in his case:
Jew. Kike. They were the elect: courage was their election. They held themselves apart, arrogant, hard. He’d seen the look in their eyes, in Chardy’s too; he’d been reading it in a certain Gentile set of eyes for half a century now.

Danzig stepped out, hearing the door hush closed on its pneumatic pump and click (lock?) behind him.

He stepped forward. His shoes echoed under the low ceiling.

“Chardy? I’m here, Mr. Chardy,” he called.

Ulu Beg could see him. He had a shot of close to one hundred yards, through a dozen sets of pillars, long for the pistol round that the Skorpion threw.

“You must be close,” they’d said.

He began to draw nearer. This was not difficult. The fat man was very frightened and kept yelling for Chardy and it was easy to stay in the shadows and yet feel the voice growing louder and louder. He began to count. He would count to one hundred.

A
sheen of images rose to fill the screen. Numbers.

Service Level Directory

3839857495………2094875903

2884110485………0594847324

And on and on and on.

He hit the scroll button and the numbers rolled up, a rising tide of integers that climbed to the top of the screen and then disappeared.

He kept the button down until the numbers didn’t move.

MO, it said. More.

He commanded more:

Yes, more, more. I want MO. Give me MO.

He descended through a sea of green numbers.

He felt he had to hold his breath. He dreamed he was swimming in math.

Am I going insane?

The marine imagery continued to dominate his imagination as the numbers gurgled past, and he had to FE MO into three more segments of the Service Directory.

And then it began to slow on him.

The numbers rolled sluggishly. The system was going to crash on him. The warning light would flash on, high on the wall: sorry, brain temporarily out of order. And it would all be over for Lanahan; he’d never find his way down here again.

Move, you bastards, move, come on, damn you. His finger on the scroll button was white-knuckled and taut with pain as he pressed. The numbers moved more slowly. They moved so slow he thought he’d die. He’d never make it.

Touch down. Sea bottom. He was way, way down and he saw nothing.

Nothing, he’d gone too far. He’d missed a line, the last line from the bottom.

The shoe fits.

Miles stared elationlessly at it. A tremor raced through him.

FE he instructed, and sent the line and the screen blanked out.

He waited for what seemed the longest time. Had he lost it? Had he fucked up, blown it? Had the Security people been alerted? Yet all was silent. No, it wasn’t. It seemed silent because he was breathing so hard, was so exhausted. Yet now, concentrating, he heard the tapping of
other operators on their terminals, the whine of their fans. Nobody stirred.

Words rose from the bottom of the screen, a slugline and then the message.

PAUL YOU BASTARD
, said Frenchy Short, horribly dead these seven years.

Miles read on, to the punchline, and found out who ordered Frenchy Short to blow Saladin II and why.

Miles stood, clearing the screen, sending Frenchy’s message back to the serene depths where it would be safe forever. He knew he had to reach Chardy now—and fast.

Danzig thought he saw something move.

His heart jumped.

“Chardy! Chardy, I’m here!”

He ran through a set of pillars, through a shadow—to nothing.

“Chardy! Chardy! Where are you, Chardy?”

His echo boomed around the chamber and back at him. His breathing was rushed and hard. The pillars offered a hundred crazy perspectives, each yielding a wall, a far-off duct, a doorway, a ramp, a shadow. Yet no human form stirred. The smell of combustion was rich and rancid and the atmosphere seemed to burn his skin. He fought for more oxygen.

“Chardy! Chardy!”

Then Danzig saw a figure half-emerge—freeze—pull back into a shadow.

At that moment the scope of his betrayal became evident. A great hate filled him—the urge to kill. Kill with his hands. But kill whom? He didn’t know. Then came the terror. It was total and almost annihilating. And next: a suffocating self-pity. He had so much to
do
, to
give
, to contribute. If only he could tell the man, make him see, reason with him.

But Ulu Beg stepped fully out of the darkness. He wore jeans and was fair and tall and seemed—strong. Danzig had no other word. The man stared at him. He had his pistol.

Danzig began to run. He ran crazily from pillar to pillar, back into the chamber, through terrific heat.

“Help me,” he screamed.

He looked back once and could see no one, but he knew the man was there. Ahead the world tipped precariously, spun out of clarity as tears or sweat filled his eyes. He sobbed for breath and the air would not come. He ran for the door and knew he’d never make it. But he did.

He was there. The door was locked. Danzig slid weeping to the floor, clinging to the warm handle, pulling weakly, and the man came out of the shadows and stood not far off. He stood straight and pulled the bolt of his gun.

“No, please, no,” Danzig cried.

Then the lights vanished. Danzig cowered in the darkness. A thousand red E
XITS
glowed.

“Ulu Beg,” cried Paul Chardy.

Ulu Beg answered with a burst of gunfire.

Bluestein looked at him sullenly.

“All right,” he said. “Now get out of here.”

Miles didn’t even see him.

He rushed down the corridor, and turned in his necklace to the guards. He had to wait a century for the elevator. Finally it arrived and he stepped in. The trip up was swift and silent.

He headed down the last hall, moving swiftly, keeping his eyes down, passing guards. But just before a turn, he heard footsteps He recoiled in panic, backing, testing knobs. One gave—there was always some careless bastard, you could count on it—and Miles slid in. A dark room, some kind of office anteroom encased him.

Outside, the steps grew to a clatter. He recognized the voices—men from his own operation. Now what the hell were they doing here? What was going on? He knew he could not face them, and let them pass, hearing their excited jabber. When they’d gone he bolted, raced through Badge Control, signed out, and bounded into the parking lot. The air was cooler now. He shivered, looking for the van. It was supposed to be right here. What the—

The van was gone.

Oh, Christ, he thought.

But a car wheeled up to him and a door flew open and he recognized some of the Bureau people.

“Where’s Chardy?”

“Get in, for Christ’s sake,” somebody commanded.

“Where’s Chardy?”

“Get in, goddammit. Danzig’s flown. There’s a flap.”

The news staggered him. He could see Danzig having finally broken; he knew he should be there. Danzig alone, confused, walking the streets. There’d be a huge mess-up at Operations.

He jumped in.

“I’ve got to reach Chardy. Is he on a radio net or something?”

“Everybody’s on the net tonight,” somebody up front said, and reached back to hand him a microphone. “You’re Hosepipe Three. Chardy’s Hosepipe One. Our headquarters is Candelabra.”

Miles snorted. The Bureau’s idiotic games. He pressed the mike button and, feeling silly, said, “Hosepipe One, this is Hosepipe Three. Do you read? Are you there? Paul, are you—”

The response was instantaneous and furious.

“Hosepipe Three, this is Candelabra, get the hell off the air, we need this channel!”

“Screw you, Candelabra. Hosepipe One, this is Hosepipe Three. Chardy. Chardy, it’s Miles, goddammit!”

But there was no answer.

Ulu Beg waited for his eyes to adjust to a dark that was less than total. Signs glowed on pillars; one far door was ajar, throwing a long slash of light through the chamber. Shadows fell away from this streak of light across the cement and he knew that to step into it would be to die.

But he did not care. Only Danzig mattered.

“Ulu Beg, listen to me.” The voice rang through the low space.

But Ulu Beg did not listen. Instead, lying flat on his stomach, the silenced Skorpion in the crook of his arm, he slithered ahead like a lizard.

Had Danzig moved? Ulu Beg guessed not. He wasn’t a man for much motion, no matter what the circumstances. He looked for a sign of the man but could pick nothing out in the dark.

“Ulu Beg,” Chardy shouted, “it’s a Russian game. This fat man means nothing.”

Ulu Beg slithered ahead.

“Ulu Beg. The Russian, Speshnev, killed your sons.”

Ulu Beg crawled ahead. He would not listen. But a memory of his sons came over him again, now at this ultimate instant. His sons: their smell, which he had loved so, gone. Their delicate lashes, their perfect fingers, their soft breathing, their quickness and boundless energy—gone. The memory convulsed him. He heard Speshnev instructing him in Libya: “Danzig killed your sons, betrayed them, made them die.” He’d had a photograph of the bodies. “Look. From an office in America ten thousand miles away he decreed death to the troublesome Kurds, death to your boys.”