First Citizen (45 page)

The meal was held in another hall, this one with a more intimate view of the back of the hill and its live oaks, colored yellow-green by the westering sun. We were seven for dinner: Mandy, two of her “officers,” the three in my party, and Mandy’s brother. Ram Devi, whom even I was beginning to think of as “Punjab,” stood in attendance at the main door and supervised the serving. The dinner was lamb and spring vegetables in a Middle Eastern preparation of strong herbs.

The brother, Eduardo Aguilar, was an insolent youth of seventeen. He was trying too hard in a party of adults, working his opinions on us as a stand-up comedian works his material. He must have been taking something; perhaps it was just contact with the pele plants, because he had worked a shift on patrol with the harvesters that afternoon. Anyway, two glasses of their excellent local cabernet went right through him. Or seemed to.

“You made a real ass-sh of yourself in Wichita,” he said to me. He was referring to a battle of more than two years before. “If you hadn’t been late at the river, you’da caught Pollock and saved us the trouble.”

“Ed, please,” Mandy urged him to quiet from the head of the table.

“General Pollock made a career of staying two steps ahead of me,” I said lightly, to evade the insult.

“Yeah, he really led you a cherry mace—um—merry chase. He had to come to California to find real soljers. Not your buncha pretty boys and—” His eyes swiveled left to Barney Wong. “—slants.”

Barney stiffened. He wasn’t used to ethnic slurs—nobody in my army was. Suddenly I had to interpose myself to force the issue, before Barney took a table knife to the boy.

“Are you calling me out, sir?” I said.

Aguilar focused back on me, his eyes taking on a calculating look. Beneath the calculation was his certain belief that anyone over fifty, and showing as much gray as I had gathered, must hobble with a stick and pee with great pain. If his answer was at all affirmative, I would choose bare hands for weapons and give him at least a metacarpal fracture to remember his manners by.

“No, I—ah—”

“Eduardo is not used to wine,” Mandy said smoothly. “Nor to polite company, it seems.” That with a glare at her brother. “I want to apologize for us both.”

“No offense taken.”

“You are very gracious, General.”

The dinner went on, but with strange tensions in the room that seemed to pull about Wong— from the way the others’ eyes and conversation avoided him. The boys’ insult had been more than a child speaking the worst he knew. I would have to discover more about this.

After dinner, Wong, Gervaise, and I went down the hill briefly to check on the camp and reassure our men. When we returned it was after midnight.

The room assigned to me was dark except for the frosty light of a gibbous moon coming through the draperies. I hesitated with my hand on the switch. Someone was there ahead of me. And I was making a perfect silhouette in the light from the hallway. I left the switch off and slid sideways out of the doorway, closing it with my foot.

“Don’t be afraid, General.” Mandy’s voice. From the bed. Low and liquid.

“My lady, one reaches an age when there is nothing to fear but much to be cautious about.”

“Oh. Not
that
old, certainly.” As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that she was under the sheets, lifting them in invitation, and she was wholly nude. I was halfway out of my clothes before I was halfway across the room.

Mandy tasted of cinnamon and anise. She twined like a vine. She rolled like the waves of the deep Pacific. I don’t know if she used some drug on me, either put it in my food or smeared it on her own body, but I stayed erect and hard as a bar of iron, yet painlessly, for most of the night. We rode each other like wild horses.

In the morning, as the sun first came over the hills, I felt clean and washed, empty and light, strong, and very pleasantly tired. Mandy slept beside me like a beautiful child, with a smile on her face.

After four years and more of back-and-forth war, with all its intrigues, manipulations, and shifting alliances, I needed a woman of clear and simple lusts. I needed a place where the problems were all microscale. I needed a time that moved to the rhythms of growing things, not to the mechanisms of politics and technology. I needed to be here and now.

After four years and more of chasing Gordon Pollock across the country, always two steps behind, I was tired. Now, with my rival dead, I could relax for a while, enjoy this valley, this woman, this season of youth and simple colors. With the clarity that morning brings, I decided to award myself a furlough. Let Alcott and Birdsong handle the war for a month or two. And, besides, I was already halfway in love with Mandy.

Make that “completely.”

If she had used a drug on me—and I did think the world had an aura, a brightness to its color and sounds, that morning—then it was one that imparted a feeling of power, optimism, freshness, strength. But I felt neither giddy nor silly, as sometime happens with lifters. And none of the mushmind that comes with tranks. Mandy’s drug must have been the legendary chericoke, or a close derivative. And if she had used it without my knowledge, then so be it.

The staff knew to bring a double order of breakfast to this room. A soft tap on the door and, when I looked out, a tray with cereals and cakes, yogurt and fruits, and coffee. I poured some of the latter, and the smell of it appeared to wake Mandy. Her sleepy smile blossomed in a telltale instant as she focused on me.

We took the food out onto the small terrace, an open space under the house’s arches, hanging over the valley. The sun warmed us and chased the haze of fog that drifted below us. After the passion of the night, however, Mandy was very contained and quiet. She dipped her yogurt with the tip of a spoon and lapped it with her tongue like a cat. With the light of day, I was careless of personal signals and decided to pursue a matter from the evening before.

“What was that comment at dinner about ‘slants’? And Lieutenant Wong was treated coldly, I thought. Yet Asian prejudice has been a dead issue in California for decades.”

“Don’t ask,” she said, lifting her head between laps of yogurt.

“But I do ask.”

“Very well …” She sighed and pushed away her dish. “We’re in the middle of a little war of our own here, General. The rest of the country calls us ‘dream merchants.’ By accidents of geography and climate, this region grows a most potent brand of pele, one that commands high prices. The weed grows in other places, of course, but our plantings are the largest and have the strongest alkaloid concentrations. This year, maybe this decade, our pele is the drug of choice in America. That gets us a bad rep with other retailers, particularly with the great pharmaceutical houses of Japan and Korea.”

“What do they have to do with it?”

“Simple competition. People flashing out on pele aren’t buying methaluude, diodreamin, cocolaide, or most of the other chemical dependencies. Our Asian friends are working through an American front company, Hajimeru Kara, Inc., to change that.”

“What can they do?”

“Look out there.” She pointed off toward the east, between the fog and the sun. Her finger did not hold steady but wove a short line against the horizon.

“See them?” she asked.

I looked hard, and finally detected a pair of gnats, diving among the hilltops, two ridges away.

“Crop dusters?”

“Very good, sir!”

“Not yours.”

“No. They come every morning when they can see through the fog to fly. They get a few patches where they think we aren’t looking. They don’t try to destroy the plants, just poison them. It’s more fun if we put all the effort into cultivation and harvesting, then kill off a few customers. They think we don’t know about it.”

“Can you stop them?”

Mandy shrugged. “No air force. Just a few private jets and they aren’t armed.”

“I have a wing of Stompers here. …”

“How many in ‘a wing’?”

“A dozen planes.”

“Would you fly them against civilians? That would hardly be honorable, would it?”

“I’ve done worse.” She stared at me with a hooded look. I moved my eyes away—and noticed that those planes were growing larger and they were no longer zipping around. Coming right at us.

“Do they often do that?” I pointed.

“No …” She hesitated.

The two dusters came in straight and level. If they opened up with cannons or machine guns, they could pick Mandy and me off this ledge. Their silhouettes grew against the sun, larger, wingtip to wingtip, separating, their engines a drone, a blast, a thunder. And then the planes pulled up in a hard climb. Were they trying to frighten us?

Something tiny broke off from the belly of each. Without thinking, I dove across the table, tackled her in the chair, and crashed the both of us back behind the foot of the archway. Mandy banged her head, scraped an elbow, and cried out as I fell on top of her.

The bombs went off with a shallow concussion that had the undertones of a timpani section, with flutes and fifes singing over it. Sonic grenades. They were meant to cause neural damage, but you had to be line-of-sight to receive the full effect. Behind a parapet, with the blast below us, we were only shocked and deafened in the midrange. That effect would wear off. I helped her to her feet.

“Next time,” I said, my own voice sounding muffled in my head, “we’ll come out and play.”

“What?” Mandy shouted beside me.

Next time came the next morning. We went down to the valley before dawn, readied four of the Stompers, and waited under the fog. A fifth plane already in the air, high over the valley, pulling radar watch.

“Guns Leader from High One. Two bogeys on scan. Bearing east southeast at ten miles. Crank ’em and spank ’em.”

Because the excursion involved little danger—unless there were more than two of the dusters, or one decided to ram us—I took Mandy along on the foray. We circled around the hills, contouring them with our ground radar, and came out of the mist behind the bogeys. We checked on visual to make sure we weren’t dogging a pair of innocent Cessnas on private business. But as soon as we broke, the dusters went into wide evasive turns, one left, one right. We split, tracked them, and blew them away with rockets. The whole operation lasted five minutes.

Mandy’s eyes fairly gleamed.

That evening, as we were getting ready for bed, an emergency signal came up from the valley. An intruder had been found near the Stomper pads, a man dressed as a
ninja
and carrying a string of clock-detonated bombs.

“Send him up to the house,” I told Gervaise.

“Sorry, General,” she said, “he didn’t survive getting caught.”

“See if you can get a live one next time.”

Next time turned out to be that same night. Mandy and I were in bed, lying quietly after our lovemaking. We were in her corner suite, above the east gate, with one set of windows looking into the hill, the other across the valley’s end.

I was almost dozing and Mandy’s breathing had slowed to sleep when a tiny
tink
came from the window. My eyes popped open. Turning my head, I caught a shadow against the drapes, on the outside. I slithered off the bed and rolled into the darkness beside the window’s moon-lightened square.

Whoever it was had climbed two stories of stonework beside the gate and now hung or clung on the sheer stucco face of the building, without balcony or ledge. He was cutting a circle of glass above the lock. I let him in.

A hand came through the hole, pushing out the curtain, and worked the lock. The window swung out, pulling a bow of the material with it. Then a leg swung through and found the floor with the knee and ankle slightly bent to cushion and absorb sound. The weight followed, anchoring the figure on this side of the window. And I hit it.

A straight kick pushed the knee in directions it didn’t want to go. The intruder cried out briefly, rolled into the room, and tried to bring up a weapon two-handed, aiming it at the bed, not at me.

A second kick hit clenched hands and hard metal. The weapon
phutted
once, well off target, as it went flying. The intruder was curling into a crouch to deal with me. One arm hung lower than the other and at an angle.

A third kick came up, heel and edge, under his chin. A hard crack echoed in the room. He somersaulted backward into a chair and lay still. Mandy turned on the lights.

“Are you hurt, Gran?”

“No. You?”

“Nuh—he’s moving! Behind you!”

I spun, stepped, and put a fourth kick into the black-clad, staggering body, right on the solar plexus and four inches in. It whistled and collapsed.

Crouching on guard above it, I did a quick pat search, pulling out weapons and tossing them onto the bed. Then I unwrapped the black cloths around the head, and discovered a girl. Her jaw was a shattered, blotchy mess where my third kick had taken her, but that had absorbed the shock and saved her a broken neck. I used strips of her clothing to bind whole arm against broken one, straight leg against bent.

“I have interrogators at the camp,” I told Mandy. “We’ll know soon enough what’s going on.”

“But her jaw—?”

“I saw a man speak clearly with half a tongue once. It all depends on having the right persuasions.”

The
ninja
held her silence for eighteen hours, then broke. She told us a lot of babbled mush about secret rituals and codes and an interlinking trail of Japanese names that meant nothing to us, but hidden among all this was one solid fact. That she had known which room to attack because we had a traitor, not just in Mandy’s organization, but in the house.

“Why is all this happening now?” Mandy asked me as we stood over the dying girl. “They’ve been spraying and harassing us for months. But trying to kill me, that’s new.”

“When I brought a couple of companies of heavily armed soldiers into the valley, it might have looked like bringing in reinforcements. As if you were escalating.”

“So, we
are
escalating,” she said. “What now?”

“You go for the win. There is no losing position, it would seem, that leaves you alive. And first we find the traitor.”