Still, it’d been a kick in the head when he’d heard that Randy had AIDS-three. Every damn time they had a vaccine for the HIV virus, some other mutation of it cropped up, and the vaccine didn’t work on the new one. AIDS-three killed pretty fast. Anywhere between three weeks to six months of coming into contact with it. It took Randy two and a half months to develop significant symptoms. They kept him going for a while with antiviral treatments.
And Torrence was thinking about something Randy had said when he’d gone to visit him at the hospital. “I open my eyes in the morning, and for a minute or two I’m just here, waking up in a bed, stretching, yawning, looking around. Thinking about, like, what do I have to do today. It’s always a minute or two before I think of it… you know… remember that I’m dying…”
That’s how Torrence felt, after a fashion. He could get involved in New Resistance planning, in resistance work. And in Bibisch. He could forget his personal doom for a minute or two. But the shadow was never far from him.
He still heard the screams at Place Clichy. In reprisal for the crimes of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.
He blinked away tears, and laughed bitterly, thinking: Hard-Eyes. What a fucking joke.
Some of them died quickly…
For the crimes of—
Some of them took a while.
The terrorist—
Fountains of blood…
Hard-Eyes.
“Dan?” The creak of the boards under her feet. “Danny?”
“Hey, fuck off right now, okay, Bibisch?”
“I don’t like you to talk to me that way.” She knelt beside him. “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault—”
“Just don’t say that, okay?” Snarling it.
“You are making me ashamed with this sheet.”
“This what?”
“Sheet. Merde.”
“Oh: shit.” He laughed stupidly. “I don’t care if you’re ashamed. Leave me fucking alone.”
“You are a…” She searched for the American term. “Wimp. Pussy.”
“What kind of clumsy bullshit psychology is that? You think I’m insecure about myself? Call me what you want.”
She changed tactics. “You kill those people. They die because of you.”
“What?”
She slapped him. Grabbed his hair and jerked his head back.
“Maybe this time I spank you, ‘Hard-Eyes.’”
He pulled loose. “What kind of stupid game—”
She lunged at him, knocked him on his back, straddled him. “Kiss this, you—”
He was a switchblade, triggered. She was flung against the wall.
He saw a flashing red light. (Hearing the screams at Place Clichy.) He struck out—
Then he saw blood—the blood on his hands. He looked at her. She was motionless, leaning against the wall, eyes closed.
“Bibisch?”
She opened her eyes and smiled sadly. “Ça va. I’m okay.” Her lip had split, bled on his hands.
“Oh, Jesus, Bibisch, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. How you feel?”
“Me?” He felt relieved. He should be ashamed of feeling relieved, he thought. Self-disgust oozed like an oil slick over him. “Goddammit. Why’d you—God, I’m sorry. There’s no excuse. It’s wrong, hitting you. In a serious way like that. Your lip. I’m sorry—”
“You hurt me.”
“I’m sorry—” His shoulders shaking with it.
“It is wrong to hurt me. To hit women like that.”
“Yes.” Shaking with the flood of released guilt. “True.”
Torrence thinking: If Claire knew what he’d done just now. Hurt a woman. Not a little roughness in a sexual game. But he’d really hurt her, beaten her, taken out his rage on her.
Guilt seared through him like a lethal poison. Burning through him.
Purging him.
He sat up and stared at her. He was empty and tired. But suddenly, he felt some hope. “I…”
“You feel better.”
“Yeah. You did it on purpose?”
“Oui. Bien sûr.”
“You liked it, then?”
“Ah, no. Not at all. It was far too much. It scared me. Hurt me. No, it was not… No, I didn’t like it. But—” Her voice became husky and she looked at the window. “But—Je t’aime.”
And that’s when the moon came out.
“We think they’re back in Paris,” Rolff told Watson. “And there’s something worse. We interrogated a man who says the NR have an important TV reporter. It is a global company with a lot of syndication in the United States. Norman Hand. They’re going to try to get him out of the country—apparently he has some very damaging video. We think they’re going to take Barrabas and this woman along…” Rolff shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s this idiot Cooper’s fault.”
“Is that whose fault it is?” Giessen asked, almost innocently.
Watson ground his teeth so hard he could feel them chip. He sensed Giessen smirking at the other end of the conference table—Giessen not even having to point out that Watson didn’t have the city in hand. “Did you get a location?”
“No. We still don’t know where they are…”
“We can’t let this Hand get out. Or the others. It’s just unthinkable. I suppose Cooper is useless now?”
Rolff sighed. “He’s functioning. We’ve got control of his balancer. He babbled for an hour after he had his little breakdown… I’d like to kill him personally.”
“We need him still,” Watson said, adding absentmindedly, “but when we don’t—be my guest.” There was a moment of restless silence. Then Watson slammed a fist onto the table. “Bloody hell! Seal off the city!”
Rolff winced. “Just as things were getting back to normal here. The Party won’t like it.”
“The Party will do as it’s told. Seal off the city.”
• 09 •
Torrence knew something was wrong when the train stopped suddenly and noisily between Paris and Charles de Gaulle International Airport. The usually quiet train sinking down off its electromagnetic cushion, banging down onto the track with a clang and a spine-shivering scree-ee-ee…
Clack. And it was stopped.
It was two a.m.; Torrence and Bibisch, leaning on one another in a front seat of the first car, woke and jumped up at almost precisely the same instant. Bibisch hissing, “Merde, quoi—?”
Both of them reaching for their weapons.
Torrence snatching up his beautiful, his pristine, his compact and cunning, his oiled and shined-up AMD-65. A Hungarian assault rifle, developed in the late 1980s, widely purchased by the Arab nations in the 1990s. Old ordnance, like most of the NR gear and yet almost unused. It had been in protective storage for a generation, in Egypt. Part of a shipment of weapons Badoit had gotten to them just two days before. Torrence had only had one opportunity to learn its intricacies and test it out—in Lespere’s underground range. But he’d fallen in love with it immediately. It was a grenade-launching rifle, equipped with a shock absorber in the folding stock, forestock that reciprocated as the 7.62 x 39mm-caliber rifle was fired, and an optical sight. Torrence slung his knapsack on his right shoulder; it carried two antipersonnel PGR grenades and two antiarmor PGK grenades. Bibisch carried a Hungarian Spigon submachine gun—more importantly, she had charge of a US-made Stinger ground-to-air missile launcher.