A Song Called Youth (90 page)

“Italy is always fighting itself. Its internal chaos will make it easy for us. Within our organization, there is no chaos. But I suppose you should know there’s another method . . . a bigger picture . . . ”

Klaus looked at him expectantly. Watson wondered how much he should tell him. Well, Klaus was really and truly inner circle now. Still, he mustn’t tell him everything.

Watson went on, “I’ve been in conference with the Worldtalk people. We are going to create our own national leaders much the way we’re re-creating Rick Crandall. We’ll use video animation and computer-designed psychiatric models to create for each country a kind of . . . well, a false idol, the ideal demagogue for that country. He’ll look and sound like that country’s ideal leader, incorporating in his speech and mannerisms all the cultural characteristics of the quintessential Frenchman, Brit, Dutchman, German, Greek, Belgian, Italian.

“Of course, people have been doing this for years but not so literally. In America the political PR specialists do something equivalent, packaging their candidates, so their candidates seem to have all the right qualities for the average American’s taste. In public our man will only be seen in the distance. For security reasons all interviews will be done via screen. We’ll have to invent a private life for him. In one case we’ll be co-opting the public life of a certain national favorite—we’ll alter the man’s image to suit our needs. And the man himself will be entirely under our control. Extractors are marvelous things . . . we’re just beginning to explore their potential.”

Klaus shook his head in amazed disbelief. “It’ll never work.”

“Klaus, you underestimate the power of the Grid. The media is powerful—it’s what wrecked our work here in America, and in a remarkably short time. People will believe in our creations. They
believe
the men they see on TV and the Internet—and most of them never see them in person, really know very little about them.”

Klaus sat in silence for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. Perhaps you’re right. Still, we’re going to be observed: we want to eliminate the mongrel gene pools, the lesser races. But Europe is sensitive to genocide.”

“Much of it will be done . . . ” He hesitated. This was too sensitive to tell Klaus about yet. The virus was a very serious matter indeed. When you are contemplating the extermination of millions, you must be more careful than anyone has ever been before. “We will talk about that later. When the time comes . . . ”

The Island of Malta.

At three a.m., Karakos stepped out the back door of the villa, closing it carefully behind him. The sentry was on the other side of the house for the moment. Carrying his satchel, he turned, stepped into the darkness, took only one step toward freedom and safety. And then the darkness grew the shapes of men.

They moved in all around him, and he froze as one of them shined a light on him. It was Steinfeld. “When are they coming, Jean?” Steinfeld’s voice came out of the darkness above the glare of the light. The hurt in that voice was unmistakable.

“Who? What is—I was going to Valletta, to . . . well I have private matters . . . ”

“And you needed the bag you’re carrying? We’ll have a look in that bag. Please, Jean. Tell us when they’re going to come.” The light angled up to shine in his eyes. He looked away—but the other men switched flashlights on, to shine in his face, so many he could feel the heat of the beams.

“This is insane.”

“The SA has arrested Tellini.” Torrence’ voice. “We told you he was NR to see if he would be arrested. He was. They didn’t try to salvage him with extractors. I guess they bought the bullshit about our extractor techniques being too subtle to detect. They took him away and shot him, in front of his men. He was loyal SA. He was never really our mole. That means you told them our story about him.”

“I see,” Karakos said. “Disinformation.” His own voice sounded very far away to him. “And you acted your part very believably, Torrence.” There was a strange kind of relief in him, and it came as a surprise. He closed his eyes against the light, but opened them when Steinfeld said:

“I must insist you keep your eyes open, Jean. So you used the radio to tell them about Tellini and our people in Bari saw them take Tellini the Cutthroat away. And that is some good to come from this, anyway. And you’ve told them we’re going to Italy—so they’ll be here sooner. How soon?”

“It doesn’t matter if you know—you’ll leave in time, I’m sure, anyway. They are coming in two hours from now. Just before dawn. Now please. My eyes hurt.”

Steinfeld lowered his light, so the others lowered theirs too.

“Put the bag down, Jean.”

Karakos thought of running. Useless. He dropped the bag. “I won’t make any more transmissions for you. They have made me so I will not knowingly do anything against them.”

“Yes. The extractor.” Steinfeld was silent for a few moments. They could hear the sawing of cicadas, the muted rumble of the sea. “I had hoped to take you back to the States, perhaps restore you to yourself with our own extractors. But we could never be sure of you—we couldn’t know for sure we’d taken out everything they put in. So . . . ”

“I understand.” Karakos felt airy, distant from things. No fear at all.

Steinfeld came toward him and took his arm, and they walked off into the night together.

“Where will you go?” Karakos asked.

Steinfeld told him, because in a few moments it wouldn’t matter what Karakos knew. “Now, we go on the assault. Sicily. While most of their forces are here, attacking our empty base. Afterwards, Haifa. Israel. The Mossad have set a base for us up there.” Steinfeld sounded as if he might cry. But his grip on Karakos’s arm was like a beartrap. “You know, I hate these extractors, Jean. Look what they force us to do. And what do they leave us—what are we to believe in? We can’t even believe in our enemies. There is no trust at all now. And can I even trust myself? Who knows, maybe someone put me under an extractor once and told me I believe what I believe. If beliefs are so malleable, then we are nothing but computers in flesh, and that is a very ugly thought, Jean.”

“I think . . . I think there is something more. Even when I do the SA’s work—and I admit I could never have done anything else, once they changed me—but even then, there was a . . . a kind of shadow of something. Maybe cast by my soul. A taste of regret, of longing for . . . I don’t know.”

“It is a great relief to hear you say that, my friend.” Steinfeld stopped walking. They stood together in the middle of a field, and Karakos looked up at the stars. He heard Steinfeld cocking his pistol. Steinfeld said, “Thank you for restoring my faith in the soul, Jean. Thank you, and I’m sorry . . . ”

Then came the father of all thunders, and the starry night up above them poured icy cold down into the hole Steinfeld’s gun made in his friend’s head, and filled his mind with forever.

Torrence found Claire sitting in the kitchen, sipping from a little porcelain bowl of tea she held in both hands. She was wearing her fatigues and boots, her rifle leaning up on the table beside her, ready to go. They were short-handed; no one would be staying behind this time. She didn’t look at him when he came in. He stood awkwardly in the doorway. He looked at the night-blanked windows, and then at the bulb over the wooden table, and then back at Claire. She still wasn’t acknowledging him.

“Claire . . . I’m sorry about Lila.”

She sat the bowl down hard enough to make it slosh onto the table. “Is Karakos dead too? Was that the shot I heard?”

“Yes. Ask Steinfeld. He was . . . ”

“I know!” She glared at him. “And you told me so.”

“Look, that’s not what I’m . . . ”

“Bullshit. You’re glad she’s dead. And he’s dead.”

“You really rate yourself highly. Glad Lila’s dead? She was one of the best. We’d be better off losing
you.”

The words had come out of him on a wave of anger, and he regretted them.

She went red. But her shoulders slumped and her face crumpled. He went to stand beside her and she turned and she was in his arms like a stone falling into a well.

“I’m sorry, Dan. She was hard to lose.”

The shouting of the NR and the droning of helicopters brought Bonham awake. He sat up in fear—sounds at night did that to you when you lived with these bastards.

He went to the window; there was an iron grating over it. Bonham had been arrested earlier that night, and brought here and given a sedative. They had insisted he take it. And they locked him away. He was still muzzy from the sedative but it had nearly worn off and all that noise . . . and now he saw what made it. A number of big helicopters and two cargo trucks. They were just slamming the doors on the trucks, which went grindingly away almost immediately. The NR were getting into the copters . . . and Claire was with them.

Bonham pulled on his clothes, then went to the door and tried to open it. Still locked. There was a piece of paper on the floor, a corner of it still under the door. He picked it up, turned on the light and read the message penned in big block letters on the ruled paper. It was from Claire.

We are leaving you here. The SA is coming. Try to break out and you might survive. Some of us wanted to execute you, so this isn’t so bad. The people you betrayed on the colony are free now, and you were never one of us, and you don’t know anything else that could hurt us so Steinfeld said you could live. Good luck.

Claire

“Good luck,” he muttered. “Thanks, bitch.”

He looked around the room. The bedframe was all there was to use. He pulled the mattress and boxframe off, disassembled the metal frame, and took one side of it in his hands. He began to batter at the door.

The Island of Sicily.

The Israelis were committed. “Everything short of declaring war,” they told Steinfeld. “And yes—your request for back-up in a preemptive strike has been granted. We can give you eight Z-90 fighter-bombers and two escort air-to-air fighters.”

The Mossad’s surveillance satellite had given them the details of the SA’s European HQ. It was shaped like a skewed four-leaf clover. (“Or an iron cross,” someone said), with four broad approaches, between the ancillary buildings, to the main operations building. It was eight miles east of Palermo on the Tyrrhenian Sea; was protected with radar, and with satellite surveillance, and with missile emplacements; with cannon and a no-man’s-land of mines and concertina wire.

The SA’s aviation unit sent its squadron out at four a.m. The Israeli radio listening posts picked up the departure codes identifying the copters accompanying the jets. And the radiomen of the six NR transport copters accompanying the Mossad’s complement of fighter planes knew those codes. The six transport copters had been repainted to resemble SA copters. As they approached the base, the SA radar techs demanded they identify themselves. The transports gave the SA code.

“You’re back early,” one of the SA radiomen said.

“Yeah, we’re ahead of schedule.”

The helicopters moved in at five hundred feet; the fighter bombers were behind them but rapidly catching up. Two minutes more. More questions from SA control. A visual check confirmed the copters were the right type, but the planes seemed to have the wrong configuration. And they couldn’t be
that
much ahead of schedule. Still, they’d had the right code.

“No,” said the XO, hearing all this a little too late, “that was the departure code. The return code was . . . ”

But by then the bombing had already begun.

Malta.

Another island, other bombings. The SA hitting four places on Malta where the NR had been an hour before; buildings that were lit up as if they were occupied. Inviting themselves to be targets . . . 

Empty buildings.

At one of those places, the old villa, Bonham ran from the building, his hands bleeding, seeing the VTOL jets coming in to strafe, the bigger jets diving and letting missiles go that sang neatly into the barn—the barn throwing itself into the air in a fountain of fire.

Bonham screaming, waving his arms, “You idiots, don’t! Don’t! I’ll work with you, I’m not one of them—you morons, you cretins, you jerks, there’s
no one here!
This is a
decoy!”

A chopper was coming in, swinging its minigun toward Bonham. Bonham ran toward it, waving his arms, shouting hysterically, “There’s no one—”

The minigun round that caught Bonham in the center of the chest was big as his thumb, and coming hard at a range of only forty-eight feet. So his chest quite literally exploded under the impact, and he was dead before he could mouth another syllable.

Sicily.

They were descending into flame. They came down into a sea of molten air, churning with cinders, swirling with the orange and red and yellow fires.

Dan “Hard-Eyes” Torrence jumped from the chopper, fell six feet to an ankle-jarring impact on the asphalt of Entry Three, and turned to shout at the others, getting them off and running, leading them onto the road and into the tunnel of roaring light.

Weapons in hand they sprinted between sheets of flame that sucked the oxygen away, flame bannering and billowing from the windows of the big square barracks and wooden office buildings and pressboard mess halls and computer bunkers; flame reaching above them in sheets four stories high, rearing like some mythical entity, a god of the elements. At intervals parts of the buildings were smashed, flattened outward in rings of embers and burning timbers where concussion and incendiary bombs had struck.

Torrence looked over his shoulder, saw Claire and Danco, Willow and Carmen and four others running behind him, gasping, firelight tiger-striping their faces. He turned and, running, carrying his assault rifle with his maimed hand—the finger stumps aching—fumbled in his shirt for his dark glasses, unfolded them and put them on. It didn’t help much. Entry Three was a forty-foot strip of asphalt, melting on the edges, running straight to the heart of the SA’s European HQ.

They ran down the middle but the heat sucked the perspiration off them, made their skin ache and rasp in their clothing; successive walls of smoke left them choking, gagging as they ran, inhaling cinders, feeling their nostrils coating with ash, beginning to cough up blood, lungs searing with every white-hot breath.