She looked at the thornbushes, at the seed pods they carried.
She took several.
People’s Palace
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“And I say it must stop.” President-for-Life Dr. Kitengi Nshombo didn’t raise his voice, but it seemed to crack like a rifle shot. “This personal indulgence of yours has thrown away years of the goodwill we have worked so hard to build.”
“The French fashion magazine even canceled its photo shoot after Paris.” Alicia sniffled into a handkerchief. “I was so looking forward to that.”
Her brother gave her a grumpy look, then turned his ire back to Tom. “It was bad enough when you disrupted the peace conference with no apparent provocation: the world media now treats Siraj as a victim. But now, with you doing more damage to Vienna than World War II-”
“I’m taking the battle to the imperialists. In a way they’ve never felt it before.”
Nshombo shook his large, shiny, close-cropped head. The hair had begun to turn the color of iron. “The media have begun to paint you as a madman. And that brush stains our revolution!”
His anger turbocharged Tom’s, which already didn’t need it. “Fuck that, man!” he shouted. “Who cares what the running-dog media say? That’s a load of uptight bourgeois bullshit and you know it.”
Slowly, Nshombo blinked. “Concern for our global reputation is not bourgeois propriety. It is practicality. Purely practical! You are indulging your personal passions to the detriment of the Revolution.”
The president’s office was big and grand, with a desk as huge as his sister’s was tiny, in jet-black African ironwood with potted palms at either end. Huge gaudy African nativist paintings jostled for space with important-looking photos on the paneled walls. The Spartan Nshombo, whose only real weakness in life was the Dandie Dinmont terriers he raised, looked more out of place here than his sister would’ve in chubby leopard mode. But Alicia had insisted in taking a hand in the interior design. The office of the President-for-Life of the People’s Paradise had to look like one, she claimed.
“Now, boys,” said Alicia herself. She sat in a precariously dainty chair by one of the palms. “Please, boys. Be nice. Everyone wants to be nice, now.”
Tom didn’t want to hear it. “You’re going soft, man,” he told Nshombo. “You’ve been away from the frontline struggle too long.”
Nshombo slammed a hand down on his desk with a gunshot noise. “ This is the forefront of the real struggle, right here. I direct the Revolution. It is up to you to carry out my designs.”
“Then stand back and let me carry them out, man. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“Boys,” Alicia sobbed, wringing her hands. Her eyes, huge and soft and brown and swimming with tears behind the lenses of her bat-wing glasses, implored him. “Brother, our Tom has a real grievance against this arch-colonialist assassin, non? We should not hinder him.” The handkerchief came out and dabbed her eye.
Dr. Nshombo’s brow furrowed.
Though his eyelids rasped his eyes like files and the blood ran through his veins as if it had broken-glass edges, Tom didn’t forget what a good ally Alicia was. Quite. He turned and paced a couple of steps away from the gleaming black mass of the desk.
“Very well,” Dr. Nshombo said with a little exhalatory gust. “But you must bring this campaign to a close very soon. Or else let it go.”
“Let it go?” Tom’s eyes flashed.
Alicia stood up to lay a soft damp hand on his arm. “Tom, please.”
He nodded spastically. “All right.”
He left.
Has it all started to go to your head, Kitengi? All this loot and luxury? he asked himself as he stalked tall, echoing corridors. Or-wait. You’ve got Alicia’s Precious Moments ace babies now. Is it possible you think you no longer need me?
He stepped outside, gazed up at the stinging tropical sun, and cracked his knuckles. Don’t make that mistake, Comrade Nshombo. Or a hard rain is gonna fall.
Lucerne, Switzerland
“… Outfitting quite an expedition,” the clerk said in that strangely guttural yet singsongy German that was unique to Switzerland as he ran the reader across the tag on another climbing harness.
“Ya, genau,” Noel said shortly. He didn’t really want to get into a discussion of mountains he’d climbed with a garrulous rock climber. His cell phone vibrated in his coat pocket. “Entschuldigen,” he murmured to the clerk, and stepped off to the side. It was his theatrical agent, Frank Figge. “Whoever it is, tell them no,” Noel said as Frank was drawing breath for his first word, “unless they want their audience massacred when Tom Weathers shows up.”
“She said that would likely be your response,” came Frank’s strident cockney tones. “But she said to offer you greetings from one practitioner of the trade to another.”
Noel sucked in a quick breath. “Did she leave a name and number?”
“Yes. Sun Hei-lian.” Noel memorized the number as Frank rattled it off.
“Thanks, I’ll call her.”
“How does she rate, and I don’t?” Frank complained, but Noel hung up on him and dialed Sun’s number.
“What do you want? And make it quick, because I’m not giving you time to trace this call,” Noel said when she answered.
It was the mark of a professional that she didn’t demur. “I need your help dealing with Weathers.” There was no hint that she remembered or even cared that one time they had indulged a three-way with Tom Weathers while Noel was in his female form.
“You know how I deal with things,” Noel said.
“And that I will not permit,” was the cold reply. “Everyone wants him to die, but I’ve discovered something-”
“He’s not such a bad guy,” Noel said sarcastically.
“He’s mentally ill. I’m pretty sure he’s schizophrenic. There’s another personality inside him-gentle, kind-I’ve been talking to that personality. If we can bring him out-”
“Getting Weathers on a couch is going to be a little tough.”
“Yes, it offers challenges. The best place to treat him would be the Jokertown Clinic. Your ace powers will enable me to get him there in an eyeblink. Before he can waken and… and…”
“Crush us like bugs?” Noel asked sweetly.
“It’s in your interest, too,” Sun said defensively.
“Why doesn’t your own service incapacitate Weathers and try to bring out this other personality?”
“We are rapidly approaching the point where they will decide he is too dangerous to live.”
Now that was alarming. Noel didn’t want Weathers killed yet. Not until the insane ace had taken care of the Nshombos for him. “And I take it you’d be the person to execute that order?” Noel asked.
There was a long silence, then Sun said, “And I won’t do it.” Her voice was low, passionate.
“Why not? God knows he deserves it.”
“Not if he’s sick. He should have the chance for redemption,” Sun said.
It was the last response he had expected, and he suddenly had Niobe’s voice echoing in his memory. Thousands of dead jokers, thousands of dead soldiers, a bunch of young kids with a river of blood on their hands.
But I didn’t kill them. I just killed one man. For the best of reasons. I couldn’t foresee what would happen, Noel thought.
The brutally honest part of his nature took up the debate. Some would argue that the only difference between you and Weathers is one of scale.
“Do you think that’s possible?” Noel asked, and suddenly it was terribly important to him what she said.
“Yes, yes I do.”
“You’re putting yourself at odds with your country and government,” Noel said softly.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There was again a long silence, finally she said, “I love the man he may yet become.”
Noel pulled on his lip and considered the Chinese woman. She was one of the few people Tom Weathers trusted. He realized he had solved the transfer of information problem. “I’ll help you, but I want something in return.” And he told her what he needed.