A Song Called Youth (67 page)

Steinfeld was talking about techniques for ducking the ship’s radar, avoiding its infrared scans. But this man Torrence wasn’t fully listening; he was staring at Karakos.

The Yank suspects me,
Karakos thought.

Karakos gazed back at Torrence with wide-open, clear, guileless eyes, smiling like a big brother.

He could see Torrence’s jaw muscles clenching.

“The ship is the
Hermes’ Grandson,”
Steinfeld was saying.

And Karakos thought,
It’s a sign. The messenger of the gods will be my messenger to the SA . . . 

And he must do something about the hijacking, of course. The
Hermes’ Grandson
was carrying supplies of all kinds to the SA. He could not permit it to fall to the Resistance.

“Ship-assault training commences at 1600 tomorrow evening,” Steinfeld was saying, rolling up his charts.

The others were going out. Except Torrence and Claire; Torrence waited to talk to Steinfeld. “How about we assign Claire shore correspondence duty for the assault on the ship,” Torrence was saying. Claire turned a glare at him. He ignored her. “I don’t think she’s ready to go back into combat just now. She’s had too much too soon.”

“Who the hell do you think you are, Torrence?” Claire demanded.

“The question of Torrence’s personal sense of identity is moot,” Steinfeld said dryly. “I had already decided that you are to do shore correspondence that night, Claire. Torrence’s suggestion was unnecessary. You’ve got good comm training, you’ll be most useful there.”

He tucked his satchel of charts under his arm and beat a hasty retreat, hurrying out into the hall.

Karakos pretended to follow. But he lingered in the hallway. He could hear very well from there; the door was not quite closed.

“Be realistic,” Torrence was saying. “You’re sick of killing, Claire; you’re not even sure the killing is the right thing to do. Those nightmares . . . when you’re shaky like that, you risk the other people.”

“Torrence”—her voice wavered between outrage and tears—“I don’t need you to tell me that I’m not ready for a mission right now. I know when I’m ready and when I’m not. And this stuff about risking other people is bullshit. You’re doing it to protect me.”

“Come off it!”

“I know you,
Hard-Eyes.”
Saying his nickname with that sneering undertone that meant the name carried some sort of objectionable freight of machismo. “I know your condescending, paternalistic bullshit.”

“That what you call caring about someone?”

That slowed her up for a moment. Two moments. But not three. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want you to care about me. But I don’t want you to make my decisions for me. You could at least have discussed it with me before going to Steinfeld.”

“Now you’re being childish. There’s a chain of command here.”

“Fuck that, it has nothing to do with you being a captain. You took it over my head because you like being in charge of me—of your girlfriend.”

“Fuck you, then,” Torrence said coldly, evenly. “Take care of yourself. You aren’t going to like it.”

He started through the door.

But Karakos had sensed that the argument was peaking. He was on his way down the stairs, thinking,
Maybe this woman Claire Rimpler is the way.

• 07 •

The New York City subways hadn’t changed much. They were still rackety, grimy, graffiti-ugly, plagued by aging equipment and vandalism. They were still undermaintained; they were still dangerous.

Corte Stoner was riding the subway that night for all those reasons.

The noise would cover conversation; the danger and discomfort kept most potential eavesdroppers away.

But Stoner was worried. He was worried about the two guys he was meeting here. He could see them through the window in the door to the next car down, two men lurching with the swaying of the rocketing train.

The husky black guy in the real-cloth gray suit was Stu Brummel, his wife’s brother (a leftist for a brother-in-law, for God’s sake!) He could understand the suit; it went with Brummel’s cover. He was a lawyer. But did he have to wear something so expensive? Real cloth? Was that even politically correct?

The little Spanish guy in the blue printout was the Nicaraguan, whom Stu referred to only as Lopez. Stoner had found him in CIA Domestic files, though: Carlos Lopez. Supposedly working in the SA, ranked lieutenant.

Brummel had told Stoner the rest: The NR had its Second Alliance moles. Despite all the SA’s promises, none of the Hispanics would become influential in the organization

The NR’s mole cultivated Lopez’s resentment and fanned it into outright rebellion by letting Lopez in on the Second Alliance’s long-term plans for Central and South America: complete subjugation.

Lopez was flipped, had changed sides, but the NR had kept him in place in the Second Alliance; he worked as an intelligence funnel for Smoke and Steinfeld.

Brummel wasn’t New Resistance. He was a “post-Maoist,” a believer in a democratic socialism who borrowed some of Mao Tse-tung’s theory—the kind of guy, Stoner thought, Mao would have purged.

Brummel considered the NR politically tainted, suspect, to be contacted and used only when necessary. Which is why he’d contemptuously told Stoner too much about Lopez.

But, hell, Brummel could be up to anything. Maybe he was going to deliver Stoner into the hands of men who’d take Stoner hostage, demand money from the government for his release. Maybe he was a cold motherfucker who’d decided that his sister—who didn’t approve of his activities, after all—had to be sacrificed for the revolution.

Or maybe he was on the level. Maybe . . . 

As the train roared around a turn in the tunnel, racing to meet the line of lights in the ceiling, Brummel and Lopez came into Stoner’s car, looking around.

It was after midnight; they were alone.

They stood close together in the center of the cold, trash-strewn, otherwise empty subway car, holding on to the grimy chrome stanchions, forced by the train’s motion into an absurd, jerky dance, lurching to the percussion of the wheels, shouting to be heard; shouting what would get them arrested in other places.

Stoner looked at the two men and felt a long, slow, sickening wave of disorientation go through him. Something in him shrieked silently,
What am I doing?

And he told himself,
I’m doing it for Janet. For Cindy. And because I have to survive.

But still he felt like he was two men inside and one of them hated the other one.

“You sweep your house again?” Brummel asked. His expression was always the same: sullen amusement.

Stoner nodded. “Found a bug in each room. And I’ve picked up a tail. Pretty sure I lost him today.”

Lopez, a fox-faced man with shiny, short-clipped hair, small eyes, and a way of snapping his head around to look eagle-intensely at each man who was talking, said, “But you are not completely sure?”

“Sure as anyone can be. Which means, not completely.”

“We’re okay here, Lopez,” Brummel said. “You bring it, Stoner?”

Stoner snorted and shook his head. “I’m not going to hand files over to you guys till I know what I’m getting in return.”

“How we know we trust you?” Lopez asked, smiling, raising both shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Could be you want to penetrate us. You could be a plant for CIA Domestic.”

Brummel nodded. “Possibility exists.”

Stoner gave Brummel a look of exasperated appeal, said, “Come on, I’m your sister’s husband. She’d never set you up.”

“But you might
use
her to set us up, man. Maybe your career ain’t going so well. Maybe your bossman don’t like you being married to a nigger—so you got to prove yourself. You could be using extractors on her, twisting her mind around. CIA scumbags capable of anything. No, man. You got more to prove than we do.”

Stoner hesitated. It seemed he had to give them something . . . 

Maybe he ought to blow this whole thing off. Grab Janet and Cindy, head out on his own somewhere.

The Company would find him if he tried it on his own. He needed an underground route that someone had already set up.

The decision hovered on the edge of his will, just out of reach. And the lights on the train went out.

The three men ignored the blackout. The lights went out on the subways all the time. Light from outside strobed the windows as the train shot past the tunnel lamps, flickering Brummel’s face in and out of darkness. On, off, on, off; light, dark; trust and no trust; trust and no trust; on, off . . . 

Then the train’s interior lights came back on.

Stoner made up his mind. “I’ll get you something that no plant would give you,” Stoner said. “They’ve taken me off the SA/NR stuff, but I can still access the files on library console; I’ve still got high clearance. I’ll get you something . . . ”

But not his ace in the hole. He’d keep that back till he really needed it: the fact that there was an Second Alliance agent planted in the European NR. Someone close to Steinfeld himself. He’d hold on to that as a final bargaining chip. Maybe never have to tell them about it at all. It went against his grain, his years of training, to give them even an iota of classified stuff. And he was going to have to give them a hell of a lot more than an iota.

It made Stoner feel sick inside.

He had no naïve ideas about who the good guys were. The SA had basically taken over the CIA; the Second Alliance yobbos were racists and true fascists. But that didn’t mean their opposition was “good.” Working for an intelligence agency, you got real skeptical of anyone who thought they could clearly identify the “good guys.”

“You bring us something we can really use,” Lopez said, “we get you out of the country, set you up good.”

Stoner nodded. The train screeched into a station.

“We’ll be in touch,” Brummel said, turning toward the opening door.

But both doors leading out onto the platform were occupied. There were eight men standing in the doorways, four in each. And there were knives in their hands.

Men? Almost men, mostly boys. Eight black teenage boys in fragments of military uniforms, bits and pieces, trophies stolen from some of their prey. A drunk serviceman on leave makes an easy victim. Air Force flight jackets with Orbital Army patches, Naval Moonbase patches; fatigues, khakis, dress trousers incongruous with combat boots; goggles, diver’s masks, Army-issue medinject units; Marine Corps ties worn as sashes. Helmets from five services; cunt caps and sailor’s caps. One green beret. The tougher the service, the more prestige in taking the trophy off a serviceman.

As if choreographed—maybe they rehearsed it to scare us, Stoner thought—the eight gang punks stepped left foot first, into the car.
Stomp:
Their boots came down together. The subway car hooted, and the doors closed behind them. The train began to move.

Stoner thought,
I’m stupid.

He’d followed instructions, which meant he’d come unarmed, and it was going to end stupid.
Caught up in a scheme to ditch CIA Domestic and you don’t watch where you’re going, you fall into bullshit like this.
Like a man running cross-country from bloodhounds, looks over his shoulder, doesn’t see he’s blundering into a barbed-wire fence. Tangled, slashed, bled to death.
Stupid.

The one in the stolen green beret was brandishing his Navy Seabee knife. Blued seven-inch blade, leather-banded grip, iron end-knob. Bluing worn off the blade’s razor edge, catching light where it had been recently honed; small nick four inches up the blade.

The details of the knife were forever imprinted in Stoner’s mind.

Run? He glanced over his shoulder at the door into the next car.

“Forget it,” the guy in the beret said. The knife in his hand waved in the air with a sawing motion imparted by the swaying of the car. The train hissed and grumbled and cracked.

Stoner said, “What we got, you can have. This is your turf and we respect that.”

“Then why you bring this suck-ass nigger in the suit whichoo?” Green Beret asked. His head was tilted a little to one side.

The other gang punks moved into an orderly semicircle around the three men.

“I don’t like no suit-nigger on my train.”

Stoner glanced at Brummel. Brummel was impassive. He wasn’t going to bring up the Brotherhood. Rub them even more the wrong way with that.
Ohhhh, he’s political,
huh?
Thinks he’s more righteous than us, zat tight, huh?

“Take money,” Lopez said, digging into his wallet.

“Money isn’t enough,” Green Beret said. His pupils were expanding, shrinking, expanding, shrinking, in waves . . . 

Which drug was it? Stoner wondered.

“Money onna outside, money onna inside,” said a boy in goggles, holding up a polished surgical scalpel.

“Organs pay better,” said a guy in a Marine Corps helmet, grinning. He held up a satchel clinking with jars. The satchel was open, and Stoner could see the bluetinged organs glistening in their preserving syrup.

Stoner felt cold and hollow, like he was a fire-gutted tree cooled to fragile ash. Kick the gutted tree and it falls over, crumbles.

Janet. Cindy.

And then a number of things happened, way too quickly.

The door to the next car banged open behind Stoner; someone back there pushed him aside and ran at the gang; someone else behind the first someone, following close, and Stoner saw them both as he fell back against the vibrating metal wall: two Second Alliance cops, hired by the Transit Authority to patrol the cars, both in armored suits of gray-black cloth, flat black, striated armor reminding Stoner of fencing vests and mirrored helmets, RR sticks upraised, the one in the lead with his machine pistol out, amplified voice booming from his helmet: “YOUR CHOICE IS STOP WHERE YOU ARE OR DIE. I REPEAT, STOP OR WE
WILL
SHOOT YOU SICK LITTLE ASSHOLES!”

The gang scattered, turned to run, one of them pulling a pistol, firing over his shoulder, the sound of the gunshot lost in the screech of the brakes as the train pulled into another station; the round catching the cop square in the chest but even at close range ricocheting from the armor, smacking through an ad in a ceiling panel that read,
The only security is full security!