A knock on the door. It made him shudder. He picked himself up with the sense of assembling scattered pieces.
"Come on in."
It was Osprey, pumping a feathered fist in the air. "Yeah! You'd think that stiff-necked son of a bitch never heard of "good cop/bad cop." And you should've seen the boss! She worked him to perfection. Perfection."
He blinked huge, golden eyes. Beetling eagle brows frowned. "But she's starting to act, I don't know, a little weird. She's still an ass-kicking little lady, but man, maybe you better talk to her about taking some time off."
"I'll do that," Mark said, in what he hoped wasn't as much a croak as it felt like.
He folded himself into his swivel chair. "What's eating at you, boss?" Inmon asked, perching on the edge of his desk.
A two-time Joker Brigader, Mark's comrade-in-arms in the fight to liberate South Vietnam, Osprey had proven himself a shrewd and resourceful warrior. But sometimes Mark thought he had a tendency to let natural optimism get the better of him. It had to be a powerful sense of optimism, after all; it had survived the wild card turning him into a creature fit to frighten children, not to mention Thai colonels playing at diplomat.
Osprey was not as capable as Mark's former spymaster, security chief, military advisor, and friend J. Robert Belew had been. Then again, Mark suspected hardly anybody was, outside the movies. Belew was long gone. Ordered into exile by Mark himself.
He gave his head a prissy-tight little shake - and was immediately uncomfortable; That had too much Traveler in it.
I'm not gonna beat myself up over that one any more, he told himself. Yes, he had allowed himself to be manipulated into unfounded suspicion of his friend and advisor J. Bob; yes, he had flown into a rage in the aftershock of having killed the man he hoped would be the guru he'd been seeking since his belated face-first fall into the hippie subculture. He had tossed his right-hand man out of the whole country - and had only just managed to avoid ordering him shot out of hand, just like any fascist Third World dictator with aviator shades and gild bird crap on the bill of his hat.
But he hadn't just been in Ferdinand Marcos-emulating mode. The fact was, he couldn't trust J. Bob, not indefinitely. The merc himself had told him not to. J. Bob was a right-winger and a super-patriot, and he had his own agenda - which could not be relied on to run parallel with Mark's clear over the horizon into infinity. The break was coming, was needful; and though not for the best reasons, Mark had done the best thing, by making it clean.
He sighed. "I just wonder if it's ... worth it, man." Right or wrong he missed J. Bob acutely now; J. Bob knew about his "friends." Not being able to share the truth of his masquerade with anyone - even his closest remaining friend - weighted him down like a backpack anvil. "What we're doing here."
Osprey shook his head in disbelief. "Not worth it? Listen, man. Think of all we've done. We've given the wild cards a place where they can be free and pretty much safe. We've given the Viets something they wanted for a long, long time, which was mainly to be left alone. There's starting to be an economy here in the South; people are starting to make stuff, and to trade.
"The traffic is flowing South, not North; shit, everybody says it's just a matter of time before the boys in Hanoi throw in the towel and petition to join us. You've kept us on good terms with the Chinks without sellin' us down the river. And with all this shit about the Card Sharks breaking in the news and all, the way you and J. - and the Major was the first ones to make a stand against them, it's makin' us all look like heroes. Nothing like a little attempted genocide to rehabilitate us wild cards in the eyes of the world."
Mark found himself nodding. He thought J. Bob was raving when he first told Mark they were up against a branch of a worldwide conspiracy to exterminate the wild cards, way down yonder in Vietnam. But J. Bob had been right. As usual. Now the Sharks were exposed, discredited, and on the run.
"We ain't an 'outlaw state' any more," Osprey said. "People are startin' to think what we're doing here is pretty right-on. And old President Leo, he don't like wild cards much - but he don't have a personal hard-on for your skinny white butt like George the Shrub did. When the polls tell him to back off the 'Nam, he listens up."
He laid a hand on Mark's shoulder. Mark felt the tips of his talons, needle-sharp, gently prodding his flesh through the blue chambray of his shirt. Power under controclass="underline" that was Osprey.
"Mooncnild's the boss," the joker said in a quiet voice. "But not to take nothing away from her, you're our point-man. Always been. We'd never have made it this far without you. I hope you stick it out."
"Wherever it takes us?"
"That's affirmative."
Mark reached up to grip the claw briefly. "Thanks," he said. "I'll do my best."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Billy Ray was pissed, absolutely and totally. He'd been quarantined, put under observation twenty-four hours a day by a bunch of white-coats who looked at him as if he were some kind of interesting, but ultimately disgusting, bug. When they weren't sticking him with a needle to draw blood, scraping his tongue with a popsical stick, or knocking him on the knee with some fucking little rubber hammer, they were asking him to piss in a bottle or do even more disgusting things with other bodily fluids. Worse, the TV set didn't even get cable and by the end of the week Ray was so wound with pent-up energy and frustration he was ready to explode.
The only positive thing was that so far he'd showed no sign of having the Black Trump. The doctors at first considered this a minor miracle since Ray had been trapped on a plane with Crypt Kicker, breathing the same air for an hour or so before he'd realized the ace was infected. Then it dawned on the dome-heads that Bobby Joe Puckett wasn't your ordinary type of guy. He was already dead, for one thing, and one of the scientists postulated that maybe he didn't breathe, "as we know it," therefore he didn't pass the contagion on to Ray. They were pissed that Ray had kicked the body overboard rather than bringing it in for study.
But that was okay. Ray was pissed, too.
He had way too much time on his hands, and very unlike himself, spent a lot of it brooding. He had always thought of himself as, well, invincible. More than once he'd taken wounds that would've killed most men, from the time the pack of werewolves had gnawed on him to the time Mackie Messer had unzipped him from crotch to sternum. But he'd always come back. He was the toughest bastard on the planet. Nothing could bring him down. Nothing, apparently, but a bunch of microscopic bugs too small for him to see. It bothered him. It bothered him a lot.
It was still bothering him when someone knocked on the door and came in without waiting for him to say anything. That was another thing that bothered him. The fucking doctors were always doing that, knocking and then coming right on in. But this time it wasn't a doctor.
"Hello, Ray," he said as he entered the tiny quarantine chamber. "How're we feeling?"
In Bush's day the Special Executive Task Force had been headed by Dan Quayle, but Quayle (thankfully) had had little to do with day-to-day operations. Department heads had had free rein, but as it turned out that hadn't worked so well, either. Barnett's election had changed things. His VP, ex-General Zappa, had been given other duties and to show what a swell guy he was Barnett had turned the SETF over to one of "them." Of course, the "them" he'd turned it over to was the most unwaveringly conservative, boringly whitebread of "them" possible.
"Hi, Nehi. We're feeling just fine."