Wildcard (2 page)

“Hurry,
Karl.”

“Mama, ca fait
mal a la main.”

She loosened her grip. His hand felt cold.
He couldn’t get sick, not now. “Please don’t call me that. I can’t
be your mother.”

“But I always-”

“You can’t think that way anymore.” She
wanted to stop, put her hands on his little shoulders and tell him
she was sorry. He should know that whatever happened, she loved
him. But she couldn’t do that here. They had to keep moving, trying
to outrun. “Come on.”

A narrow rue, there was only one man ahead
of them. She passed him and his cell phone sounded as she emerged
onto a busy thoroughfare. He answered it, then called to her
back.

“Madame? C’est bizarre, mais c’est a vous.”
He held out the phone to her. She took it, like news of a sister’s
death and the man moved away, politely ignoring the
conversation.

“I can hide you no longer.”

“Me?” She looked at the boy, who watched un
cocinelle, a red ladybug, on his arm. “Or us?”

“Both. I cannot keep your location secret if
you remain together.” The voice spoke casually, almost bored
sounding, and with an Errol Flynn flourish.

“How long do I have?”

“Separate. One, or both of you, must be in a
different city within three days.” The voice paused. “Three.” It
chuckled.

She squeezed her right shoulder into a
doorway which smelled of old urine and fast food, trying to block
out an unseen menace. The modern structure, built to look ancient,
dropped an angular shadow around them.

“Why are they after us?”

“After you? I would say him, really. Karl
will change things. Significantly.”

“How?”

“He possesses unique talents, one skill in
particular. You have your salient features also, but yours seem
more specific to a particular power. Two, really. I wouldn’t give a
fig for them.”

She stroked the boy’s hair nervously. “Who
are you?”

“Hmm. Call me Juniper.”

The passersby dotting downtown Grenoble
shone the spotlight of attention upon the tiny drama, razoring
focus on her anxiety, fear, and aloneness. The men glanced at her
beauty, the women at her pain. She looked at a blue slice of
September sky and gagged on a shred of hope.

“Can’t you get more time. A week?”

“No.” She heard what sounded like a knife
thunking into wood and vibrating.

“Why not?”

“Can’t be bothered? It isn’t my sphere of
excellence. The others are superior to me at that, Deeply
Named.”

“What? What did you call me?”

“Oh? You haven’t heard this. That is
interesting. Deeply Named. It’s your title. By the way, I have a
message for you. Would you like it?”

“Yes. Yes, of course I would.”

“Reach out with your left hand. No peeking.
Five four three two one.”

She felt an envelope touch her outstretched
hand, and accepted it. “From whom?”

“It might take some time for you to
understand what you find inside.”

“Is it from you?”

The voice made a throat clearing noise.
“Don’t read it until you and the boy are separated. Three days, or
they will find you.”

48 hours after, she walked through Grenoble
holding the young boy’s hand. He was wearing a black nylon
backpack, large for his size, and heavy, a bit, for his
strength.

“Would you like to get lunch, Karl?” She
wanted to say his name, though it was painful to do so. “At Les
Dalton? It’s still your favorite?”

“Oui. D’accord.” He was smiling, happy,
wearing a blue baseball cap. For luck, he said. Martha chewed her
lip.

“Aloneliness,” she whispered to herself.

He looked up at her.

“Qu’est ce que
ca veut dire?”

“Nothing. Just talking to myself. Speak
English, little rabbit.”

“What did you say?” He skipped his feet back
and forth, in the manner of children who want to move, but not to
move ahead. “What does aloneliness mean?”

“It doesn’t matter. Somewhere between
loneliness and alone.”

He considered the puzzle, turned his head
forward again, and bounced it from side to side in rhythm with his
feet. He had wide, bright eyes and an open expression, curious and
interested. Keenly intelligent, but not in a science/math way. Karl
engaged socially with a phenomenal ease. He would see a group of
children playing, and, almost invisibly, become one of their group,
though never the leader. Every time, they accepted him as if he had
long been a part.

He learned French with no more difficulty
than tying his shoes. Karl was attractive and charming, but not in
a way that caused too much memory of him, which was good. Karl
needed to disappear. Rather, Karl needed to stay disappeared.

She had taught him much in the four years of
tutelage. Martha’s many trainings during her own childhood, matters
of espionage, modes of survival, languages and non verbal
communication if one did not know the language, means of very rapid
language acquisition, techniques to disappear, as much as he could
absorb, she taught. She invented games for him to play and learn,
so that he could stay alive, possibly even thrive, in their harsh
and bizarre milieu.

Finally, she understood
her destiny or perhaps her mission in life. She had shaped it in
the hours since the call. Her nerves, the fibers of who she was,
realigned as she oriented her mind to this goal, her true work. It
might and probably would consume her entire life, perhaps cause her
death, and require inhuman patience. Her existence might be spent
waiting, watching, then dying of old age, having done nothing. One
brutal act of separation lay ahead, before the waiting and hiding
began. Not began, but entered a new level,
aloneliness.

He was born to do so. Not dying, or ceasing
to be involved. But to be invisible and untraceable, seemingly
designed that way. It was an innate skill in him, one which she had
learned, been forced to learn, painfully, and was good at. But he
was impeccable, completely natural. He was invisible, not by being
separate, but by being part of. He had the touch of blending in,
fading into crowds, causing another’s focus of gaze to slide away,
just past the shoulder. The best way was not to cut their interest,
but rather slip it off like water. There were techniques: looking
over the other person’s shoulder, or back over one’s own, as if
something interesting was there, or ‘going beige,’ so that one was
not interesting, even dropping money surreptitiously to shift
attention away, or making the other person self-conscious by
staring for an instant at them. But Karl had that unteachable
skill, which Martha did not.

He could vanish.

In the larger circle of disappearing, Martha
had taught Karl more sophisticated technique: creating trails in
other cities, leaving multiple witnesses who were certain you had
gone to a false location, appearing on paper elsewhere by using
credit cards, hotel room records, and legal documents, paying
people to plant evidence, but making them think they were doing
something else. He was too young to understand it, but she would do
it for him. Eventually, he would understand. If he lived. If he
remained free.

Why so soon?
Painful irony, to leave him now, only to wait for
years. She had more to teach him, more to learn from him. He needed
love and had no one else to offer it. And so did she. It was not
fair, but fair was useless, probably dangerous.

They ate in one of the sizeable plazas in
Grenoble, a simple affair with square stone pillars creating a
covered walkway and a large, central open space made of large and
rough, rectangular stone tiles. She vaguely watched the low pulse
of the fountain. He ordered an American burger, fries, and a coke,
then attacked it. She got a salad and a milkshake. The taste and
smell nauseated and she couldn’t force herself to eat. Gripped in
the cold bright squareness of the steel chair, she could only sit
frozen and watch him recede. Each tick of the hand on the church
clock measured her last moments of sensibility. She had always
known the day would come. Technology could no longer be outrun.

She couldn’t tell him much
more of value. Most of it was explained in a note in his pack.
Places where money was hidden, the little she knew of his true
identity, what to say if he was caught. Never to mention her name
to anyone. She wrote everything except why, because she had no
answer for that. She couldn’t tell him what blocked their
happiness. She might not want to if she knew; the well might be too
dark. At the end, the most important – “Je t’aime toujours,”
I will always love you.

She had to believe he could stay hidden. He
knew how. Just tap into who he was and combine it with the training
she had given him.

She ached for more time, longed to see him
grow up. What a beautiful youth he would be, and she couldn’t share
it. They would never meet again.

She brushed something off his coat. “Let’s
play our game.”

“Which one?”

“Crowds. Blend into the crowd. I want to
play it longer this time. More than a few hours. Keep your pack.
Disappear.” She leaned over, lifted his chin with a finger and held
it.

“Karl, you must disappear.”

She had been forced to learn psi-techniques
as a child. Though she hated them, she used them on him frequently,
planting knowledge and tactics which his young mind could not
understand, but would be useful later. Now this one: disappear.

“What?” He didn’t understand. Or he did and
didn’t want to. He wanted to pretend they were just playing one of
their spy games for a little while longer. She let him play because
she needed to pretend, too, just for one moment more.

“Go, disappear. Into the crowd.”

She dug her nails into her palm, using pain
to drive against the tears.

“Where do we meet? When do we meet?”

She couldn’t lie, couldn’t tell the truth.
“Look in your bag in one hour. There’s a note.”

He pulled up his shoulders, a little boy who
needed to be a man. “Anything else?”

“No, little rabbit.” She raised her head,
then exhaled with a steady push to cut the anguish for another
second. She looked back at him, put her hands on his face, and bit
her lip. “There’s nothing else.” She choked the words out.

“Are you OK, mama?”

She nodded with a weak smile, and he turned
to walk away.

“Wait. Come here.” She hugged him, kissed
his head, and held the kiss for a long minute. Thankfully, he
hugged her back and asked no more questions. She spun him around
quickly so that he wouldn’t see the welling in each eye. “Go,” she
said, with a false cheer and a slight push. “Don’t look back.”

He turned and left, humming, then
disappeared into the crowd.

“Go, Karl,” she whispered.

Juniper had to die. Difficult, Dartagnan
knew, and unfortunate, but unavoidable. Dartagnan had no reason for
lying to Martha and telling her he was Juniper. He did it on a
whim. It meant nothing to her anyway. He liked the wrongness of it.
Juniper would never have manipulated a human in such a specific
way. Where Juniper operated in power structures; Dartagnan dealt
with individuals. And he desperately wanted to meet them, but he
couldn’t - not yet.

Dartagnan had many human Named, and
manipulated their lives for the purpose of study and curiosity. He
loved to create heroes, get strange couples together, encourage
people to try things they would not otherwise, sabotage people’s
dreams and watch, then create unexpected opportunities when the
people were at their worst.

He once tortured a child to death and forced
the parents to watch in separate rooms. He served them coffee and
tea, but would not let them leave the room with a large glass
window looking into the chamber and giant screen televisions
showing the details of the suffering. He studied the parents after
that, recording their divorce in minute detail and biographically
writing their lives. He found it fascinating.

He actually considered the
Dartagnan aspect, his primary face, to be that of a Romantic. He
loved nature, theoretically. Free expression, high, beautiful
things, the common man, lofty ideals. He strove to master paradox
as part of his persona. And to be more human seeming. He had read
all the books ever written by humans. He wondered if he could be
human and longed for it. He would gladly give up all his power to
understand humanity first-hand. It seemed impossible, but he knew
impossible was the specialty of his type, especially
…him
. He knew if he
found the right combination, he might manage it without being
destroyed.

The quest had led him to develop Dartagnan
as a sort of lost human type. The great thinkers of the past, the
Renaissance man, and the swashbuckler all rolled into one. A super
being. Which was easy for an M-E. Except that people related to him
as if it were a farce. Which it was, to him. But he knew they took
him seriously. He played this, felt it to be ironic and
paradoxical. He was a serious force in human existence, yet he
managed to be taken comically much of the time.

It was his masterpiece.

He studied humour. He created funny
interactions between people, manipulating life like a situation
comedy. Two people, one fat and friendly, the other a silent loner,
wrecked cars and got in a fight. Dartagnan saw it on a home video
humour program and created situations where they repeatedly met
afterwards. He would put both of them on the phone together, then
listen as they yelled at each other for it. He got the fat one
fired and then got the loner’s company to hire him. They had to
work together in a small building, and he gave both of them large
pay increases, but created other financial problems for them so
that they would not leave the job. Dartagnan recorded it all. He
wondered if it was funny, perversely decided never to ask a human
for a ruling on the matter.