It was a little suburb strung along the Amstel River somewhere south of town. Mark sat on the grassy banks with his knees up and his head down and spent some quality time just dripping and breathing.
After a phase-shift between one of his “friends” — the ace personas his color-coded powders summoned — and plain-vanilla Mark, his thoughts tended to fragment like a frightened school of fish. It took time for them to coalesce.
Why did I come to this hot, heavy world? was his first coherent thought. On Takis I was a hero, a prince. I had Tis, and safety, and Roxalana.
But Sprout wasn’t on Takis. Even if she didn’t seem a whole lot closer, right this minute.
He picked up the do-it-yourself vest Aquarius’s ace strength had made out of Agent Gary’s coat. He wasn’t at all sure why the shape-changer had hung on to it; usually Aquarius felt total disdain for material things, particularly manmade ones.
In his dolphin form Aquarius wasn’t fully human in intelligence, in any sense of the word; the processing power of his brain was largely used up by the environmental interface, hearing and taste and sonar-sense, the orientation of self in four dimensions: up/down, left/right, forward/back, flow. Dolphin-Aquarius was a more truly alien creature than any Takisian. At two removes from baseline Mark, as it were, it was difficult to discern his motives. It was tough enough making sense of his memories, incredibly sensual and rich but incomprehensible, like watching a Kurosawa film in Japanese.
Mark suspected the reason Aquarius had hung on to the jacket during his high-speed swim through the canals of Amsterdam to the river was that the thing was stuck on his snout.
There was nothing in the outer pockets but two rubbers and a pair of sodden ticket stubs to WWF wrestling in Madison Square Garden. The inside breast pocket rang all the bells. There was a passport in the name of Hamilton, Gary A.; a case of business cards, soaked beyond recovers identifying Hamilton as a marketing associate for Pepsico — weren’t they big Nixon contributors, way back when? — and a billfold.
Mark opened the billfold. There was two hundred and twenty-three dollars cash, Hamilton’s Ohio driver’s license — he’d been born in Youngstown in 1963 — and one American Express Gold Card.
Mark ran his tongue slowly over his lips, which felt dry in spite of his having just climbed out of the river. He was aware that he’d lit the FREE GAME light on the pinball machine.
Everything depended on how he played this one. His life, his freedom, his chance of seeing Sprout again. Everything.
He buttoned the wallet carefully in the back pocket of his khaki pants, walked to the quiet, tree-shaded street, and stuck out his thumb.
“This is Captain Leeuwebek,” the overhead speaker announced. “We will shortly be landing at Rome International Airport. The sun is shining, and the temperature is a pleasant twenty-one degrees. We will be remaining on the ground for forty-five minutes for routine maintenance before continuing on to Beirut. If you choose to leave the aircraft, please make sure the placard that reads, ’Occupied,’ is displayed on your seat. Thank you for flying KLM.”
The tall man seated over the wing of the big Airbus accepted a final complimentary glass of orange juice from the strikingly pretty Indonesian flight attendant. She let her eyes linger on him before traveling on. Like most humans, she had a fascination for the different, and he certainly qualified. He was at least half a meter taller than she was, for one thing, his unbelievably long frame encased in an obviously expensive three-piece suit, navy with an old-gold pinstripe. His features had that exotic Northern European sharpness; his hair was yellow, gathered into a neat little upwardly mobile ponytail at the nape of his neck. Most of all she liked his eyes; they were the blue of the noon sky over the Savu Sea, and they danced with what seemed genuine pleasure behind the thick round lenses of his glasses.
He was obviously a wealthy and important man. Perhaps he was a Wall Street stockbroker who would soon be indicted for a crime. She didn’t quite understand the current American fascination for turning their most successful citizens into criminals while sympathizing publicly with those who refused to work; it smacked to her of certain religious practices on some of the wilder headhunter islands back home. Oh, well; Westerners were all crazy. But at least this one was cute.
Mark Meadows looked quickly away from the flight attendant — you weren’t supposed to call them “stewardesses” anymore, and he tried to be scrupulous about that sort of thing — so she wouldn’t think he was forward. If she had told him pointblank what was on her mind, he would have thought she was trying to humor him, for some unknowable reason.
He sipped his juice and watched the greasy yellow River Tiber wheel below. Beirut was the place for him; he was sure of it. American influence had waned substantially there the last twenty years. Though the Nur al-Allah fanatics had been making their presence known of late, it was still a favorite holiday resort for most of Europe and indeed the world. Surely the premier party city of Africa would be a tolerant place, the sort of place a lone American fugitive could drop quietly from view.
Also, Lebanon had the laxest entry controls in the Med. The passport photo of young Agent Hamilton didn’t resemble Mark at all, but he figured all blond European types would look alike to Lebanese Customs. And no official body anywhere in the world looked too hard at a man in a suit and tie. Lucky Mark still remembered how to knot one.
The wheels touched down with a bump and a squeal. Mark looked around eagerly in hopes of seeing ruins or rustic Italian peasants or something, but like all airports Rome was built in an area that was predominantly flat and open. Off in the distance he did see some hills clustered thickly with houses, some of which may have been villas or may have been big blocks of cardboard government housing; you couldn’t tell, through the thick ground-hugging layer of heatwave-stirred petrochemicals.
The Airbus slowed and began to taxi toward the terminal. About two hundred meters shy of it the airplane stopped. The chief attendant came on the P.A. to announce that there would be a slight delay for the preceding flight to clear the gate.
Mark’s eyelids began to gain weight as if Hiram Worchester were playing games with them. His chin dropped toward the knot of his tie.
A change in the timbre of the conversation around him brought him abruptly back to himself. He blinked around, momentarily disoriented, and happened to look out the window two seats to his right.
A little utility car pulling a baggage trailer was just coming to a stop forty meters from the plane. There was no baggage on the cart, but there were half a dozen men, who began to spill off before the vehicle fully stopped. They wore the white jumpsuits and earmuff-style hearing protectors common to airport ground crew the world over. But even Mark, naïve as he was, knew that the stubby little submachine guns with fore-and-aft pistol grips were not standard aircraft maintenance equipment.
He unfastened his seatbelt, stood, and walked deliberately back toward the bathroom.
When the Rome police department’s elite antiterrorist unit kicked in the door five minutes later, there was nobody inside.
Chapter Six
Lynn Saxon stormed from the bathroom as though washed out by the thunderous noise of the toilet flushing. “I can’t believe these Roman weenies let him slip through their fingers.”
Gary Hamilton looked up from his Smith & Wesson FBI-special 10mm, which he had disassembled for cleaning on a copy of L’Osservatore Romano Belew had picked up at the airport. “What do you expect? They’re Italians.”
Helen Carlysle stood outside the open sliding door by the balcony’s wrought-iron rail watching the sun dissolve into the brown, toxic cloud that squatted over the Roman hills like a Japanese movie monster. Her hips were canted, her wrists crossed meditatively at the small of her back. The muggy air that crowded in past her like kids back from school and billowed the skirt of her lightweight dusty blue-and-gray dress smelled of diesel fumes, cooling asphalt, and garlic fried in olive oil.