Blades of Winter (27 page)

Our prisoner is still zonked. Patrick and the medic both pull on surgical gloves and begin to check him out. The Med-Tech cuts the enemy agent’s pant legs off while Trick looks for booby traps and weapons. He finds a pair of pistols, three small throwing knives, four sets of ID, and a plastic box full of different colored pills.

The Med-Tech can’t help but notice the pile of stuff Trick has found. She comments, “Your friend travels heavy.”

Patrick keeps searching. “Yeah. It’s like he works for us.” This gets a grin from the Med-Tech while she sets splints on Lousy Driver’s legs. We hear a nasty, crunchy squishing sound as she straightens them out. Our special guest groans but doesn’t wake up. Trick rummages around in the dude’s mouth and feels for suicide capsules, secret messages, whatever. The Med-Tech reaches into a little cabinet and pulls out a device that looks like a space-age plastic clothes iron. She plugs the gadget into a monitor on the wall of the ambulance and hovers it over the assassin’s body. A black-and-white image on
the screen displays strange blobs and shapes, some of them moving.

I notice the ambulance has stopped. Since nobody gets out, I assume we’re waiting to see if anyone has followed us. For the first time I notice how bad our captive smells. He must have let loose in his pants from all the excitement. I wish we could open a door, but I know we need to be ready to move at any moment.

“Hey,” I ask Patrick, “what happened to Badr?”

“He vanished.” My partner shrugs. “I watched you run after the car, and when I looked back for Badr, he was already gone.” Trick gently bites his lower lip as he works. “I guess he didn’t like the café’s service.”

As we talk, the Madrenaline fades out of my bloodstream and my hangover returns with a vengeance. The flock of stinkobirds flying from this putz’s pants is accompanied by the return of the head-pounding gorillas. Suddenly the ambulance feels very hot and stuffy. My stomach heaves, and I groan. That horrible prepuke taste leaps to the top of my throat. I hold one hand over my belly and the other over my mouth while I peek out the back windows. I don’t see anyone outside. My gut clenches like it’s caught in a vise.
Fuck it
. I push one of the back doors open, lean out, and ralph what’s left of my coffee and croissant onto the street.
Splat!
I slam the door shut. Then I drop down to a squat on the floor and hold my hands to the sides of my head.

I hear the Meddie say, “Scarlet, are you okay?”

I moan but don’t say anything as I rub my temples and dredge up one of the prayers they made me memorize at St. Bony’s.

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having overdone it last night, and I detest all the booze I drank because I dread the loss of my lunch and the pain of puking my guts out. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to avoid the cheap stuff, to never again mix grain and grape, and to make sure I eat something beforehand. Amen
.

Trick’s voice says, “She’s probably motion sick from that jump off the tower.” Count on my partner to cover for me even though he knows I’m hung over.

To hell with it
. If the Good Lord wanted me to suffer like this, he wouldn’t have given me painkillers. I dose some Overkaine and immediately feel better. Even though the drugs make my fingertips and toes a bit numb, it’s worth it. My stomach is still jumpy, but the gorillas hammering on my head have vanished. I stand up and lean against the wall to watch the Med-Tech wave her sensor device around the rival agent’s body. The monitor displays more strange shapes. Dense things like bones show up brighter than soft things like muscles and organs, which are rendered in varying shades of gray. The Meddie moves her sensor over the guy’s midsection, and we see a small white hard-edged shape with a suspiciously manufactured look to it.

“Ah hahh,” she exclaims.

“Found something?” Trick asks.

The Meddie answers, “Yeah, under his rectus abdominis. It’s his No-Jack.” A No-Jack module is a locator beacon and distress signal transmitter. It can be triggered manually or, if you get knocked out, it’ll activate by itself. Nowadays everybody in the field has one of these, including me and Patrick.

The Med-Tech pulls out a scalpel. She slices the skin below Lousy Driver’s chest while Patrick uses wads of gauze to soak up the blood. She carefully cuts her way through the muscle until we can see into the competitor’s guts. It’s fascinating. I’ve examined the insides of people before, but not while they were still alive. How cool!

There’s all kinds of activity: blood vessels pulsate, muscles twitch with each breath. But my unhappy tummy heaves again. It’s not in the mood for this grisly view. I look up at the ceiling for a moment and take some slow breaths to help my stomach settle down.

The Med-Tech tells Patrick, “Spread that for me, will
you?” Trick places one of his gloved hands on the incision and uses his thumb and forefinger to hold it open. The gross flesh-squishing sound makes my stomach start grumping again, so I turn my hearing down. The Med-Tech peers around inside the enemy with a little flashlight.

Patrick spots it first. “There it is, near the fifth rib.”

“I see it.” The Med-Tech uses a forceps to reach under our patient’s abdominal muscles and snare the module. She lifts out an inch-long lozenge. It’s about the size of the first joint of my thumb.

“It looks like a big gnocchi,” I say as the Meddie deposits it into a tray. “What are we gonna do with it?” Trick tells me we’ll have one of Jacques’s agents carry the locator beacon out of town. They’ll transport it someplace quiet and wait to see who shows up. Meanwhile we’ll pump our captive for info right here in Paris.

Or I should say Patrick will do it. He doesn’t trust me around prisoners anymore, so he keeps Lousy Driver under sedation until we return to ExOps’ Paris headquarters. I start bitching at my partner. Who says I’m a hotheaded kid who can’t control herself? As we ride across town, I review some of my old Job Numbers and realize that sometimes I am hotheaded and that I’m not always very good at controlling myself. Okay, fine, Patrick. You do the interrogation. I’ll take myself out shopping. I could use the fresh air anyway.

Now this is more like it. Paris is gorgeous! It’s a trip just to stroll the broad tree-lined boulevards, weave past the sidewalk art dealers, and peek into the shops. And the food! I’ve never had such good bread. The French complain that things have gone downhill since the war, but I don’t know what they’re talking about. This is great.

The baking sun is directly overhead, so I pop into an air-conditioned department store called La Samaritaine to get a quick break from the midday heat. The store bustles with well-dressed weekend euroshoppers. Two women are at the register, paying for their stuff. One woman writes a check while the other holds a half dozen shopping bags. They turn and walk toward the door, but the woman with the bags doesn’t get any help from her companion. Some friend, I think to myself. The empty-handed woman gets to the door and waits for her overburdened pal to hold it open for her. Jesus! I’ve got half a mind to—

The woman with the bags turns and backs into the door to open it. When she does, I see her face. There’s a big Star of David tattooed around her left eye. They’re not friends out shopping together. It’s a well-off German woman and her Jewish slave. The slave woman drops one of the bags, which gets her a slap in the face and a sharp rebuke from her mistress. The Jewish woman’s face remains neutral, like she’s trying to be invisible. I grit my teeth and make myself continue into the store, but I feel hotter now than I did outside.

I wander into the women’s section and let the cool air wash over me. I see a couple shopping across the main aisle in the men’s clothing area. The woman is piling things onto the man’s outstretched arms. I can see from here that the pants she’s choosing are way too big in the waist for the skinny guy she’s with. She leads him off to another department, and he turns his head to the side so he can see where he’s going. Around his eye is another star.

“Guten Tag.”

I jump at the sound of a man’s voice. It’s a nicely dressed older fella. His name tag reads “Pierre.”

“Bonjour,”
I reply.

He instantly switches to perfect French and indicates the display of scarves I happen to be standing next to.
“Pour vous, mademoiselle?”
For you, miss?

I say,
“Non, m’sieur, pour ma mère.”
No, sir, for my mother.

The man helps me check out some scarves for Cleo. Washington, D.C., gets pretty windy, and Mom likes to wear something to keep her hair from blowing around. I find a turquoise scarf with thin white stripes for only ten marks. Cleo loves any piece of clothing from somewhere else, and this color will complement her dark red hair. Pierre rings up the sale and folds the scarf into a small shopping bag.

We both say
“Merci, au revoir”
as he hands me the bag. I leave the store with my eyes down and think about all the Jewish people trapped in Europe. I’m not used to feeling so helpless about something. Once I’m outside, I try to distract myself by reading the signs and posters.

Getting around Paris requires you to read two languages. Trick warned me about this on the flight. Most cultural communications are in French: things like billboards, concert posters, and restaurant menus. You see German written on anything official like road signs, news bulletins, and government vehicles. The Germans
run the large institutions, but the small stuff is still
très français
. Of course, politically speaking, France doesn’t exist anymore. It’s all Greater Germany now, although the cities and towns have retained their French names and most of the genuine Frenchies still speak French. The only government-run part of Paris still in the original language is the famous Metro subway system. All the train directions and fares are listed in French. Maybe the
Übermenschen
are more romantic than we give them credit for.

One thing the Germans are
not
romantic about is Europe’s population of Jewish people. The Krauts have kept them as slaves since the mid-1940s. I’ve read that the Jews are mostly used for heavy labor in factories and on farms, but the few slaves I’ve seen here in Paris seem to work as domestic servants for rich people too important to wipe their own asses.

As I tour around the neighborhoods, I overhear a few old French dudes gripe about how their kids use slang that combines German and French. They talk about it like someone pissed in their soup. Being an American, I could give a damn. We don’t even bother to have our own language. We just mangle the one we got from England.

You can sense the tension around here if you listen for it. The French are still pissed off, or maybe embarrassed and frustrated is more like it. I’ve heard the war referred to as “The Disgrace.” They blew it pretty bad. How many other countries have lost a major war in only six weeks? Trick told me that all hope for the United States to save their
derrières
got wiped out when the Germans invaded Great Britain. Without a nearby base, we were never gonna bounce the Krauts out of Western Europe.

So we did what powerful states have always done. We signed a fistful of toilet paper, shook hands, and smiled for the cameras. Then we waited. Decades later, Europe still simmers with resentment and suffers the occasional minor rebellion because the Germans didn’t have the
foresight to exterminate the native populations like us Americans did.

The French, therefore, are still here. They still cook great and they still dress well. They also still gripe about their occupiers or, as they say,
les Boches
. Except for the whole sovereignty thing, I’m not sure what the Froggies have to complain about. Due to the lightning speed of the Wehrmacht invasion, France came through World War II relatively unscathed, unlike England, Wales, and Scotland, who all got the shit bombed out of them. If you’re going to lose to the Fritzes, it’s better to do it fast.

I mull over the history I learned at school while I relax in a café overlooking the Seine. They have plenty of seats outside, but after nearly getting run over earlier today, I prefer to sit indoors. I watch an older French guy glower at a couple of German businessmen who are flirting with their young French waitress. The older guy leaves in a huff. A minute later, a girl about my age takes his seat. She picks up a menu, but I can tell she doesn’t read it. Her eyes move around the café. My spy senses kick in.
Get ready
. The chick looks my way and blinks at me with a pair of big dark lenses that cover her eyes and then retract back into her brow.

I leap out of my seat, knock my table over, and send my coffee flying. I’m halfway across the café before the girl even starts to react. Li’l Bertha loads up with little bullets—we are indoors, after all. I’m right on top of Mystery Girl when she disappears—poof!—like someone turned off a TV. There’s a trail of tipped-over furniture and pissed-off café patrons that leads directly from my chair to where I stand in front of an empty table with a big gun in my hand. The waitress shrieks. It’s time to skadoodle.

I zip back to my table, grab my La Samaritaine bag, and run out into the street with my vision and audio Mods at full strength. I try to see and hear everyone around me, searching for threats. There isn’t anything unusual. Well, except for me. The regular citizens on the
street are understandably alarmed at the sight of a hopped-up girl brandishing a big-ass firearm in broad daylight. I put Li’l Bertha in her holster and make myself walk normally so I’m not so conspicuous.

What the fuck was that?
Am I imagining things? That couldn’t be my hangover. Have I done too many drugs? Maybe I hit my head extra hard and don’t remember it. I should see a Med-Tech, but I remember my father used to tell me that if they thought you were slipping, they’d take you out of the field. With all the biotic shit I’ve had installed on my person, I can’t do a desk job, cooped up in some crappy office all day. My Nerve Jet glides some Kalmers into me, then Patrick comms in.