A Song Called Youth (123 page)

And Torrence was thinking about something Randy had said when he’d gone to visit him at the hospital. “I open my eyes in the morning, and for a minute or two I’m just here, waking up in a bed, stretching, yawning, looking around. Thinking about, like, what do I have to do today. It’s always a minute or two before I think of it . . . you know . . . remember that I’m dying . . . ”

That’s how Torrence felt, after a fashion. He could get involved in New Resistance planning, in resistance work. And in Bibisch. He could forget his personal doom for a minute or two. But the shadow was never far from him.

He still heard the screams at Place Clichy. In reprisal for the crimes of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.

He blinked away tears, and laughed bitterly, thinking:
Hard-Eyes.
What a fucking joke.

Some of them died quickly . . . 

For the crimes of—

Some of them took a while.

The terrorist—

Fountains of blood . . . 

Hard-Eyes.

“Dan?” The creak of the boards under her feet. “Danny?”

“Hey, fuck off right now, okay, Bibisch?”

“I don’t like you to talk to me that way.” She knelt beside him. “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault—”

“Just don’t say that, okay?” Snarling it.

“You are making me ashamed with this sheet.”

“This what?”

“Sheet.
Merde.
”

“Oh: shit.” He laughed stupidly. “I don’t care if you’re ashamed. Leave me fucking alone.”

“You are a . . . ” She searched for the American term. “Wimp. Pussy.”

“What kind of clumsy bullshit psychology is that? You think I’m insecure about myself? Call me what you want.”

She changed tactics. “You kill those people. They die because of you.”

“What?”

She slapped him. Grabbed his hair and jerked his head back.

“Maybe this time I spank
you,
‘Hard-Eyes.’ ”

He pulled loose. “What kind of stupid game—”

She lunged at him, knocked him on his back, straddled him. “Kiss this, you—”

He was a switchblade, triggered. She was flung against the wall.

He saw a flashing red light. (Hearing the screams at Place Clichy.) He struck out—

Then he saw blood—the blood on his hands. He looked at her. She was motionless, leaning against the wall, eyes closed.

“Bibisch?”

She opened her eyes and smiled sadly. “
Ça va.
I’m okay.” Her lip had split, bled on his hands.

“Oh, Jesus, Bibisch, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. How you feel?”

“Me?” He felt relieved. He should be ashamed of feeling relieved, he thought. Self-disgust oozed like an oil slick over him. “Goddammit. Why’d you—God, I’m sorry. There’s no excuse. It’s wrong, hitting you. In a serious way like that. Your lip. I’m sorry—”

“You hurt me.”

“I’m sorry—” His shoulders shaking with it.

“It is wrong to hurt me. To hit women like that.”

“Yes.” Shaking with the flood of released guilt. “True.”

Torrence thinking: If Claire knew what he’d done just now. Hurt a woman. Not a little roughness in a sexual game. But he’d really hurt her, beaten her, taken out his rage on her.

Guilt seared through him like a lethal poison. Burning through him.

Purging him.

He sat up and stared at her. He was empty and tired. But suddenly, he felt some hope. “I . . . ”

“You feel better.”

“Yeah. You did it on purpose?”

“
Oui. Bien sÛr.
”

“You liked it, then?”

“Ah, no. Not at all. It was far too much. It scared me. Hurt me. No, it was not . . . No, I didn’t like it. But—” Her voice became husky and she looked at the window. “But—
Je t’aime.
”

And that’s when the moon came out.

Paris. SA HQ.

“We think they’re back in Paris,” Rolff told Watson. “And there’s something worse. We interrogated a man who says the NR have an important TV reporter. It is a global company with a lot of syndication in the United States. Norman Hand. They’re going to try to get him out of the country—apparently he has some very damaging video. We think they’re going to take Barrabas and this woman along . . . ” Rolff shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s this idiot Cooper’s fault.”

“Is that whose fault it is?” Giessen asked, almost innocently.

Watson ground his teeth so hard he could feel them chip. He sensed Giessen smirking at the other end of the conference table—Giessen not even having to point out that Watson didn’t have the city in hand. “Did you get a location?”

“No. We still don’t know where they are . . . ”

“We can’t let this Hand get out. Or the others. It’s just unthinkable. I suppose Cooper is useless now?”

Rolff sighed. “He’s functioning. We’ve got control of his balancer. He babbled for an hour after he had his little breakdown . . . I’d like to kill him personally.”

“We need him still,” Watson said, adding absentmindedly, “but when we don’t—be my guest.” There was a moment of restless silence. Then Watson slammed a fist onto the table. “Bloody hell! Seal off the city!”

Rolff winced. “Just as things were getting back to normal here. The Party won’t like it.”

“The Party will do as it’s told.
Seal off the city.
”

• 09 •

Torrence knew something was wrong when the train stopped suddenly and noisily between Paris and Charles de Gaulle International Airport. The usually quiet train sinking down off its electromagnetic cushion, banging down onto the track with a clang and a spine-shivering
scree-ee-ee
 . . . 

Clack.
And it was stopped.

It was two a.m.; Torrence and Bibisch, leaning on one another in a front seat of the first car, woke and jumped up at almost precisely the same instant. Bibisch hissing, “
Merde, quoi
—?”

Both of them reaching for their weapons.

Torrence snatching up his beautiful, his pristine, his compact and cunning, his oiled and shined-up AMD-65. A Hungarian assault rifle, developed in the late 1980s, widely purchased by the Arab nations in the 1990s. Old ordnance, like most of the NR gear and yet almost unused. It had been in protective storage for a generation, in Egypt. Part of a shipment of weapons Badoit had gotten to them just two days before. Torrence had only had one opportunity to learn its intricacies and test it out—in Lespere’s underground range. But he’d fallen in love with it immediately. It was a grenade-launching rifle, equipped with a shock absorber in the folding stock, forestock that reciprocated as the 7.62 x 39mm-caliber rifle was fired, and an optical sight. Torrence slung his knapsack on his right shoulder; it carried two antipersonnel PGR grenades and two antiarmor PGK grenades. Bibisch carried a Hungarian Spigon submachine gun—more importantly, she had charge of a US-made Stinger ground-to-air missile launcher.

All this probably wouldn’t do them a bit of good, Torrence thought, because they’d been taken by surprise.

Four hours earlier, Steinfeld had come into the attic of the old police station with Bones. Found Bibisch and Torrence there, naked, asleep in each others’ arms. He sighed, annoyed, and shook them awake. “It’s your watch, Torrence. Bibisch, go downstairs and clean up.”

They dressed silently—Bibisch trying valiantly not to giggle—and went downstairs.

Then Steinfeld sat in the attic of the old police station with Bones. Who put on a headset that double-jacked him into the hidden transmitter on the roof.

Steinfeld and Bones sat in the dark room on two crates near the window, limned in diluted moonlight coming through the frosted glass. Bones was rocking slightly as he communed with the SA’s Paris database: with a mind that was beyond morality, indifferent to the suffering imprinted in its bubbles of magnetism, its crystals of silicon; he was a wolf of the plateau. They sat there for twenty minutes, Steinfeld’s lower back hurting with the tension. He wondered, for perhaps a second of that twenty minutes, if it would have been better if Jerome and Bones and Bettina hadn’t broken into the SA’s London database. If they hadn’t got the code for the Paris database; for decryption and full access. They could have gone on in blissful ignorance, thinking they were making a difference. But some of the things they’d found out made them feel puny . . . 

And then Bones sat up straight. “They’ve got a couple of our auxiliary people.”

Steinfeld’s mouth went dry. “Who? How?”

“The reprisals. This guy Giessen’s behind it. Some of our boosters had some relatives shot in the reprisals. Others in processing centers. One of them came forward, just walked into Second Alliance HQ asking for Giessen . . . the other they caught in the tunnels. Giessen put out some kind of a night-seeing bird’s eye that followed one of our people after an action at Montmartre . . . followed him home. Watched the place. Scooped up one of our cells an hour ago, there.”

“
Who,
I said, damn you.”

“Guy named DeBlanc.”

“DeBlanc. I think he used to be with the Point Cadre—which means he knows—”

“Wait. Wait. It’s coming up. He was Point Cadre—but he was one of those people with extractor-resistant brain chemistry. They couldn’t extract him, so they tortured his kids in front of him . . . Oh, shit. It says . . . it says,
Confessed during interrogation of offspring.
Fuck. He just broke. I guess . . . The first one, French guy named La Soleil.”

“
Not
Point Cadre.”

“No. But he helped us get Barrabas and the woman into the city. He saw Hand there. Told them all that shit. Then the other guy DeBlanc cracked maybe . . . less than half an hour ago. Told them—” Bones seemed to listen for a moment. Stiffened. “Oh, motherfucker. Steinfeld, they know where we are.”

Steinfeld had no time at all—but he had to make a critical decision. He found Hand sitting in a corner of the drunk tank that was now a think tank; Hand was cross-legged on the floor, taking notes on paper with a pen. He couldn’t get batteries for his voice recorder and he’d lost his palmer as they’d fled the refugee center.

Nearby, Pasolini and Bibisch and four others standing in a group, arguing politics.

Steinfeld snapped to them, “We’re getting out. Move everyone out through Exit Three, and—” He spoke directly to Pasolini. “After everyone’s gone, see to it there’s nothing much left for them to search through.”

“But what—”

“Just do it! They’re on their way!”

The group burst apart like pool balls at the break, as they raced to follow orders.

Hand stood up, licking his lips. “The SA? They’re coming?”

“Yes. We’re leaving here—some of us will be staying in Paris, some of us . . . ” He stared at Hand. He had about one minute in which to decide. “Let me see your notes.”

Hand hesitated, then passed them over. Steinfeld skimmed through them. Nothing damaging, no specifics, as arranged—Hand’s general take on things. He frowned, reading snippets here and there:

SPOES continues to gain momentum. Distributes food, shelter, jobs to war refugees & homeless who have learned that the more nationalistic they are, the more supportive of SPOES racist policies, the better their treatment by authorities . . . The Refugees find ways to justify fascism to themselves. Not difficult, it can be very appealing in all this chaos. Unity Party offers order and jobs and a satisfying return to national IDENTITY. The war was humiliating, making them feel they were unimportant pawns of US and NSR . . . Crowds respond emotionally at Unity Party rallies; racists and jingoists in full throttle . . . continued reports of isolation and deportation to PCs of troublesome ethnic groups . . . U.P.’s Soldats Superieurs said to be brainwashed into ruthlessness in expediting orders . . . some key officials rumored to have been brainwashed w/extractors . . . NR’s greatest enemy apparently global apathy, the “it can’t happen again” mindset . . . I am unable to find non-native colleagues in Paris, offices of UPI and ITV et al. closed down . . . NATO & SA discourage close reporting here . . . NATO officials stonewalled me . . . American journalists evidently concerned with NATO’s liberation of Eastern Bloc countries & terms of New-Soviet surrender . . . Smoke’s reports mostly carried only in underGrid . . . big Grid, Internet, social media mostly indifferent or closed by (?) SA connections . . . Holocaust Virus story could blow Grid open for NR . . . Critical . . . 

Steinfeld nodded briskly and handed him back the notes. Hand was okay. “We need you and Barrabas and his American friend to do some witnessing for us on the outside. We’re going to get you out of Paris.” Steinfeld smiled grimly. “Don’t look so relieved. They’ve sealed off the city. It won’t be easy.”

They’d gotten out of the safe house with four minutes to spare. The fascist troops arrived and found the place empty—and on fire. Four minutes earlier, the last of the NR contingent got out through the abandoned building next door, down through a camouflaged tunnel, into the old Metro. They headed for the one functioning train station. Some of their people were already there, taking over a surface-track magnetic-cushion train.

Bones had tinkered with the enemy’s database, used some of the computer-bug input Jerome-X and Bettina had planted through the Plateau. They had the train cleared as a special transport, supposedly for Colonel Watson. The city was sealed off—but they let the train through.

Only, a little too soon, someone noticed that Colonel Watson wasn’t on a private train, he was in the Second Alliance Comm Room.

“
Fuck
me,” Watson breathed when they told him. “They have to be on that train. How did they do it? How did they get clearance for it to get past the—Bloody hell. They had to have gotten into our computers. Take ’em all off-line before they—”

Walking, the two of them, Martha’s small hand in Steinfeld’s, through the peach orchard on the banks of the Jordan. Very early. Morning mists. Both hungry for breakfast but in the kibbutz, this time of year, with the fruit heavy on the trees, there is little time for lovers. She is so small, Martha, her hand like a mouse nestled in his palm, but he had seen her strength . . . Now she turned to him and said—