Performance Anomalies (26 page)

The vomit stank of stomach acid and alcohol. Cono pulled the gun muzzle away and grasped Timur’s face by the chin, turning his head to the side. His old friend was still breathing, faintly.

Why not kill him now?
For some reason, or for no reason, the reflex said no.

Cono stood up and wedged the two pistols into his belt. With hose from the acetylene tanks he tied Timur’s ankles, then his wrists, and finally made two loops around his face, pushing the hose into Timur’s open mouth before tying it off in a bulky knot. Maybe within a few minutes’ time, Cono would have an inspiration as to how to finish him off.
The machines, perhaps. Easy burials …

The hum of the crusher returned to Cono’s ears as he rounded the troop of cylinders. He brushed a hand against his grazed thigh: very little blood. The shoe that had been hit was missing only part of the sole beneath the toe. Cono rolled the yellow canister that had shielded him. There was a clean bullet hole on one side, in the midsection, but no exit hole.
Saved by high-U
. Cono was too mentally exhausted for the irony to register.

The guns pressing against his abdomen would be a nuisance while carrying the canisters, so he placed them near the stairs to the cockpit. Bending over to pick up the canister seemed an impossible task—the fight with Timur had drained what strength he had left.

For a moment Cono lost track of where he was and why. He stopped suddenly, motionless except for his eyes, which swept the cavernous building. The rapid thudding of his heart told him that he was in danger, but he couldn’t grasp the source of it. He squatted and lowered his head between his legs. Gradually, the extra blood flow to his brain relieved the dizziness and helped him make sense of what he saw. Now he recognized the yellow barrel in front of him, the drilling armature, the pit wired with explosives. He began to hoist the canister that had saved his life, when the import of Timur’s words came back to him in a rush. Katerina had turned. Xiao Li and Dimira were in Zheng’s hands.

Cono had to find them.

He felt for one of his mobile phones. He punched in the number Katerina had given him at the pool. He called again and again, with no answer. What if Timur had been lying? But why? It served him no purpose, except to ridicule Cono for the trust he had put in Katerina. He tried the number three more times. Nothing.

Cono looked again at the canister and ran his hand over the clean hole the bullet had made. Why was he going on with this? He could leave the quarry
now
. Why risk more? What did he care if someone put the uranium to use?

He hadn’t learned from schools or religions or books why so many dead people would be such a bad thing. They died every day by the thousands. When he’d lived by himself as a boy in the forest, death was everywhere. He had killed to fill his empty stomach countless times—birds and coatis, young capybaras and tapirs, a monkey once. He’d felt their squirming in his hands, their bites, the fast beating of their hearts, the subtle step-by-step crunching of cartilage as he broke their necks and looked into their eyes. He ate them raw when the rains made a fire impossible, their blood and juices smearing his nakedness. Wasn’t death the way of this world?

Besides, maybe the people who wanted the high-U so badly had a rationale that was simply beyond his crude knowledge. He felt trapped by his ignorance. Trapped and angered.

Back in California, Todd the mathematician had told him that the Americans had dropped nuclear bombs on Japan to save millions of Japanese lives, but Cono had no way of knowing if it was true, unlike people who had been to school. Muktar the painter—he had been a loner but a good friend, and he had chosen to join the religious fanatics, those with a twisted purpose in a wasteland of no purpose. Could Cono say he was a bad man? And Katerina, who had railed about the terrible tragedy of a uranium detonation—she had given him that high-minded sermon at the same time that she was selling him out and condemning his friends to a beast, to Zheng. Why go on with this?

He could stop now, try to find Xiao Li and Dimira; they wouldn’t last long in Zheng’s hands. He could leave the whole stinking high-U mess to forces he couldn’t control anyway. He was one man diving in the sea on an empty tank, trying to wrestle with a giant octopus a hundred feet below the surface.

Octopus. What about an octopus?
The disorienting whorl of sleeplessness was surrounding him again. Cono’s mother appeared in a half-dream and took his hand—a little hand like one of the hands clutching the edge of the swimming pool, shining with water droplets on skin. His hand in hers, the breeze lifting spray from the waves that were tossing themselves onto the beach …

Cono shook himself. His mother faded away. He picked up a piece of scrap rebar lying in the dirt and pummeled his injured shoulder with it. As he looked down at the circular rim of the canister between his knees, the arguments and rationales vanished. An impulse took over. He picked up the canister.

Raising it above his head was a struggle, and the mouth of the crusher was blurry. His body swayed under the load, but finally he heaved it into the air. The canister barely reached the top of the mound of stones in the bin, but it tipped forward and began rolling down to the mouth; it disappeared. The clomps and screams and sparks jolted Cono.

Like a robot, he climbed the stairs to the control room and pressed the feed lever until another mouthful of stones was greeted by the crusher. Through the cockpit window he saw a wide tinge of pinkish gray on the slanting horizon.
Four more to carry. Four, right?

He returned to the square pit and eased down the ladder into the tunnel chamber. He tried not to waste time staring at the chains and the pile of clothes.
Just think of the next load, and the next.

He had made it up with the third canister to the pit and was hunched over, changing arms for the carry, when he saw three pairs of legs above him.

“
Who are you?
” The question was fired at him in Russian, and he looked up into the dark eye of an AK-47 an arm’s length away.

“I am a trusted servant, preparing a delivery,” Cono said, standing up slowly and looking at his wristwatch. “You’re early. But I’m glad you’re here. They’re heavy.”

“Tell me now!” shouted the woman holding the gun. “Who are you?” She searched the vaulted space with darting eyes, never quite meeting Cono’s gaze.

“My name is Dmitry,” Cono said. “And I’m a servant who isn’t afraid of radioactivity, unlike my boss, who pays me well.” He looked at the men on either side of the woman. “You two look strong. Help me with this.”

Cono lifted the canister up from the pit, feigning to almost fall over. One of the men helped to grapple with it. Two guns were still trained on Cono.

“Thanks. It’s heavier than it looks.”

“You’re not from here,” the woman said.

“My boss prefers to import his workers. Says it’s hard to find good help. And he says I’m expendable if I don’t deliver on time.” Cono began to climb out of the pit.

“Stay there. Shoot him if he moves.” The woman reached into a backpack at her feet and pulled out a little metal box with a handgrip and a nozzle. She passed it over and around the canister. The Geiger counter clicked slowly, then faster. When it reached the middle of the canister it trilled like a cicada.

The two young men shuffled a few steps away when they heard the sound.

“Keep your guns on him!” the woman shouted.

“I hope this is what you’re looking for,” Cono said, “because it’s a lot of work.”

“What’s that noise outside?”

“The generator. Keeps the lights on. Can I come up now?” Cono put a hand on the rim of the pit. “The boss said it was dangerous work, but I didn’t expect
this
.”

“Let him up. Then make him sit.”

“Is here okay?” Cono leaned against the rusted flywheel frame. The young men shifted their footing to keep him in their aim. He saw the stack of boxed explosives out of the corner of his eye and worried that he’d chosen the wrong spot.

The woman put the Geiger counter in the backpack and looked warily at Cono, swinging her weapon until it was pointed at his chest. “Where is the other canister?”

Cono finally saw her eyes straight on. There was something familiar about them—their wide spacing, the extra flesh beneath the eyebrows that pushed the lids down, the broad and protruding forehead above them. Even the way the small muscles at the sides of her eye sockets tugged nervously beneath the skin.

“The other one’s down in the tunnel.” Cono raised an arm in a dramatic gesture and pointed his index finger down at the tunnel entrance. The guns trained on him had summoned what few reserves Cono had left in his brain, but he couldn’t tell if he was giving a cunning performance, or merely acting semi-giddy with fatigue.

“Omar, go down behind him. Not too close. Bring it up. Mansour, back to the door, keep watch.” The woman stared at Cono. “Anyone outside could have seen that the gate was open. It’s an amateur job. It stinks.”

“You’re the professionals.” Cono waved his hands in the air somewhat ridiculously. “I don’t even get a gun. But tell Omar to be careful. My boss is paranoid.” He pointed to the wires and charges on the walls of the pit. “And no shooting, please.” Cono gestured carelessly toward the boxed dynamite to his left. “It scares me.”

“He talks too much,” the woman said to the others. “You two, do as I said.”

“We should give him to Allah.” Omar pointed his pistol at Cono’s head. “We know where the stuff is now, Tamaris. We weren’t told he’d be here. And why is his face smashed up? We should send him
now
.”

“That is not the plan,” Tamaris said with a steely look at Omar, who had used her real name, against orders. “It would spoil the rest of the deal.”

“The rest of the deal? Tell us about the deal!”

Tamaris pointed her gun at Omar. “Go down and get it. Mansour, guard the door.”

Mansour looked back over his shoulder as he marched to the same door by which Cono had entered the building. The plastique-rigged shed next to it would be another hazard if there were any shooting.

Cono eased himself into the pit and backed into the hole. “Careful with your head, Omar.”

14

Omar pointed his gun below him as he descended the ladder after Cono. Cono’s feet hit the floor and he stepped back to make way. When Omar reached the floor, Cono swept his arm toward the canvas, the cot, and the chains.

“Cozy, isn’t it?”

“Shut up. Where is it?”

“This way. My boss hid it well.” Cono stooped to enter the tunnel. He lifted the tarp, exposing one of the yellow barrels. Omar was at his shoulder.

“But it looks like there are more than they said.”

“Let’s see.”

Omar’s attention was momentarily fixed on the tarp as Cono raised it with one hand. In the instant of distraction Cono whipped his free hand against Omar’s forearm. The pistol clattered against the rock wall. Cono’s other fist was crushing Omar’s temple before Cono could stop it. The young man’s head was hammered against the tunnel wall. His lifeless body slumped next to the nearest canister.

Just a boy
. Cono reached down and scraped up a handful of dust and gravel. Standing, he extended his arm over the young man’s body and let the dust and gravel fall; it was the same gesture he’d seen his mother make at the burial of a neighbor boy who had died in a knife fight. With his eyes, Cono followed an individual quartzite grain as it left his hand, was nudged by other grains in midair, hit Omar’s shirt, and then bounced onto a button on his chest.

“Kiss the next world for me,” Cono whispered.

He picked up the pistol and climbed the ladder. As his head emerged at the top, he immediately saw Tamaris’s rifle trained on him. Cono placed the pistol out of view on the second rung of the ladder before he crawled into the pit and crouched, looking back down the hole.

“He said he could do it himself,” Cono said. “He said I was weak like a woman.”

Tamaris’s attention was divided between Cono and the door where Mansour stood guard.

“Almost, Omar. Almost. The tunnel is tight,” Cono said as he backed away from the hole in the direction of Tamaris, seeing out of the corner of his eye the point of the gun turning toward him, closer now, within reach.