The conference room could easily have held forty, and the six of them were dwarfed by its vaulted ceiling and convex walls. Kramer hadn’t spoken during the entire business. Koskotas’s lids were shut, his eyes moving rapidly behind them as if organizing file cards.
Finally, he opened his eyes. “Mr. Knight,” he said. “What we have is what we were afraid we would find.”
“Can you be a little more direct?” Aubry asked. His voice was flat with irritation.
“Certainly,” Koskotas said.
Koskotas whispered in Kramer’s ear, and they conferred quietly for almost two minutes.
So the sonofabitch can talk, Aubry thought. He had considered stepping on Kramer’s toe, just to see if he squeaked. Aubry watched them, and listened, but couldn’t pick up enough. Then he caught Leslie’s eyes. The child was watching them in a defocused manner, concentrating on nothing, taking in everything. Aubry matched Leslie, matched his body position and his breathing. Oddly, something in his head relaxed, as if a door were opening. Perception widened. Sounds and colors seemed a hair sharper.
Watching the two government men again, he noticed something for the first time: more than verbal conversation was being conducted. Kramer’s fingers rested, almost intimately, upon Koskotas’s hand. His fingers rolled and stroked in a tick-tack rhythm. Two-level communication? Or more?
Finally Koskotas turned back to them. “Please prepare your processor to receive input. I believe they have already exchanged protocols?”
Jenna smiled thinly. “I will authorize a partitioned memory cell. You won’t have access to our main banks.”
“Young lady, I assure you …”
“Save it.” Jenna’s fingers stroked her belt. “Transmit.”
“Very well. You are all involved in this incident, so it is pointless to request any kind of formal security arrangement. I assume that a verbal agreement will suffice.” He paused, until all heads nodded shallowly. Leslie’s was a precise imitation of Aubry’s.
“Very well. I’d like you to take a look at something, something that we knew from the blood and tissue sample you sent us.”
An image tweaked onto a holo stage, a three-dimensional red and blue animated helix. “This is the assassin’s genetic structure. As you remember, we’ve detected no signs of tampering, or anything to lead us to believe he is a NewMan variant.”
“That’s a relief.”
“In a moment, you may change your mind. Take a look at this.” He flashed a second slide. It was identical to the first.
“I don’t get it,” Aubry said. The tone of his voice suggested that he “got it” all too well.
“This, Mr. Knight, is you.”
The room was silent; then Jenna cleared her throat. “That thing was Aubry’s clone?”
“An accelerated clone?” Promise looked at Leslie.
“Like your child, yes.”
Aubry whispered, “Shit.”
“Of course, we know that the child is one of the accelerated clones created by the renegade Gorgon division Medusa, led by Colonel Quint and Major Ibumi. Your child was designated Medusa-16. The Medusas were utilized for an assassination attempt on President Harris. All of the others died in that attempt.”
“We’ve made certain of that,” Koskotas said flatly. “And as long as Medusa-16 … ah, ‘Leslie’ … no offense, son—” His eyes were flat and hollow, like gun barrels.
“None taken,” Leslie said in a remarkably adult voice. His eyes were defocused, and Promise declined to speculate about what had just flashed behind them.
“As long as, ah, Leslie, remains in your care, no action will be taken against him.”
“Imagine my relief,” Leslie said flatly. The singsong childish quality was completely gone from his voice.
“Ah … yes. At any rate, the accelerant technology is well understood. This clone was grown from a tissue sample, accelerated and trained to kill you.”
Aubry was genuinely perplexed. “Why go to all of that trouble? Who would do something like that?”
“Much easier to determine once you take a look at the tattoos on the back.”
A button was pressed, and the visual image became that of the slain assassin. Once again, the dragon and the lion warred upon his trapezius—the dragon in tattooed ink, the lion in ridges of keloid scar. “Yakuza,” Jenna said.
“Yes. Specifically, the Yakuza keiretsu known as Divine Blossom. And do you recognize the scar patterns?”
Leslie cocked his head, but said nothing.
“Our computer says that the patterns are typical of the tribal scars of the Ibandi people. A mountain people of Central Africa. The tribe which spawned Phillipe Swarna.”
Silence.
“Swarna,” Aubry said quietly. “I killed Swarna’s son five years ago, in the battle at Death Valley.”
“Yes. It makes sense now, doesn’t it? One region of scar is in the precise shape of the Ibandi province, in what was once northern Zaire, and which has now been absorbed into PanAfrica. Are you familiar with PanAfrica?”
Promise nodded. “We have had business dealings. Opened contractual negotiations to build a dam. The PanAfrican Republic incorporates the territory formerly divided into Zaire, Tanzania, and Uganda. A military dictatorship, under a board of generals chaired by Phillipe Swarna.”
Koskotas’s thin mouth managed another smile. “Excellent. This is what I hypothesize. Phillipe Swarna wants vengeance against you. You foiled his plan to assassinate President Harris, and you killed his son. So he obtained a skin sample.”
“How?”
Jenna rolled her eyes. “Give me a break. You’ve left tissue and body fluid all over the West Coast.”
Promise looked stricken. When she spoke, her voice was small and somehow pale. “How sophisticated would this cloning technology be?”
“Extremely. Why?”
“Could they clone Aubry … and make a female?”
Aubry stared at her incredulously, and Jenna said, “Come on, now …”
Koskotas shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t have that information at this time.”
“Yes you do,” Leslie said quietly. “But it’s classified, and you’re lying. Stupid classification. The technique was developed during the Gender Wars, back in ’06 or so.”
“Young man …” Koskotas said angrily.
Leslie ignored him. His eyes rolled back in their sockets slightly. Promise gripped his shoulder as Leslie began to recite.
“Human beings have a double set of twenty-three chromosomes, with twenty-two being identical, and one set being the sex doublet. Thus a girl is forty-six XX, with two X chromosomes, one of which doesn’t work, and a guy is forty-six XY with one Y chromosome.
“There are at least three ways to accomplish the desired effect. The least difficult is a non-DNA-alteration approach.” Leslie focused his eyes on them, and smiled slightly. “Artificially induce testicular feminization syndrome. Block the protein receptor for testosterone. The cells will automatically default to female development, even though their genotype is forty-six XY.”
“This is classified …” Koskotas muttered.
“This is in any medical library in Canada,” Leslie said snidely. “The TFS approach won’t produce a uterus, so if you want a fertile female, you’ve got to lick the dispermy and recombination problems. They did it back in ’05. Or you can take forty-six-XY blood-cell DNA and surgically or biochemically remove the Y and replace it with another X. Then implant it in an empty ovum and bang! Instant female. My guess is that someone whipped that problem, and did it for the government.” Leslie’s smile went nasty. “The ability to make women from men means that if something ever … happened to the women in North America, the U.S. could be up and breeding again in a generation.”
The room was quiet; then Koskotas cleared his throat. “I’m certain that it’s nothing so absurdly melodramatic.”
“I saw one,” Promise said. “I saw a feminized clone of Aubry.”
“So there are at least two. And probably more,” Koskotas said.
Aubry squeezed Promise’s hand. “So Swarna accelerated the clones, then had them trained by a Divine Blossom assassination clan?”
“That’s what we figure. Remember, Swarna wouldn’t need the Japanese for their killing skills—he wanted them for their direct-induction educational techniques, developed in the late nineties. They created his brainwashing center.” He flashed another image on the screen, a map of the African continent. “The Japanese own two and a half million acres in the center of PanAfrica. Literally millions of children have been trucked in from surrounding nations since its creation in the nineties.”
Jenna seemed uncomfortable. “How did he get away with it?”
“He had the Five Songs. ‘Five songs’ is a rough translation of the word ibandi. It’s some sort of crackpot Sufic splinter religion, but he has every black military leader in Africa under his thumb, using supposedly ‘politically neutral’ Ibandi bodyguards. That’s what made the bloody coup possible in the first place. Ibandi warriors had been in security and assassination all over the world for four decades. Known for intelligence, fearlessness, and skill. Funny thing is—Swarna won’t have any Ibandi around him now. Seems to have had a falling-out with them. They believe he broke some sort of covenant, one of the basic rules of the Five Songs. His betrayal is referred to as ‘the Abomination.’ We don’t know exactly what this Abomination was. He rules with an iron hand—”
“Wow, Dad. Is that what they call an original phrase?”
“Hush.”
“We tried to trim him back, but … well, you know the result of that.”
“Two failed assassinations,” Leslie said, “and an abortive coup.”
Again, Koskotas looked startled. “Why, yes.”
Promise listened to the information, and sat back and closed her eyes, face placid. “What you are suggesting is that this is a revenge killing, ordered by the enraged ruler of the third most powerful nation on the planet. That he grew the clone to do this in a manner than amused him, or fulfilled some bizarre tribal ritual. And that, although this attempt failed, there is no reason to think that he won’t do it again, and again, and again, until he succeeds.”
Koskotas nodded. “Yes, I believe you grasp the essentials.”
“And what would you suggest?”
“We can provide security for you and your family. You can stay underground—you have enough connections.”
Beat. And then Aubry said, “Are you going to … take another crack at Swarna?”
Koskotas coughed. “Not at this time.” He switched gears smoothly. “The clone was trained, and created, and sent here for one and only one reason—to kill you. It fits with his psych profile.”
“And just what is that profile?” Promise asked.
Kramer opened a briefcase and took out a disk, slipping it into the projector.
Koskotas continued. “We have limited information pertaining to the early life and actual physical presence of the man known as Phillipe Swarna. That may not even be his actual name.
“He first appeared on the scene in the middle nineties, as an Ibandi shaman. The history of the Ibandi is … colorful. They have never been conquered, partially because much of the terrain they inhabit is mountainous, and ideal for guerilla warfare. In the early eighteen-hundreds, the British tried to pacify them. A railroad was run into their territory, guarded by several hundred troops armed with cannon and mounted cavalry.”
“What happened?” Aubry asked, quietly.
“They disappeared. To this day, the Ibandi’s ceremonial knives are pounded from railroad spikes. Great embarrassment. The South Africans backed a commando operation against them in the fifties—again, a slaughter.” The image changed again. Now there was what seemed to be newsreel footage—of a mound of human heads. Most of them were Caucasian. “This was found on the outskirts of Messina, in southern Africa near the border of Zimbabwe.”
He cleared his throat. “Then when uranium deposits were found in the Ibandi province, in the late 1980s, the government of Zaire tried to confiscate the lands.”
“And?” Aubry’s voice rasped.
“Two million Ibandi just disappeared into the mountains. They waged such a war of attrition that the government of Zaire was forced to cut a deal with them, help them build factories. It was their fierceness that brought them to the attention of the world. Their young men became prized mercenaries. The first Ibandis competed in the Olympics in the nineties. Superlative distance runners and wrestlers.”
“I know some of the rest of this,” Jenna said. “Phillipe Swarna was the spiritual leader of their warrior class. The religion, this ‘Five Songs’ thing, began spreading into the regular armies of the dozen or so countries that hired Ibandian mercenaries.”
“It’s not exactly a religion,” Koskotas corrected. “It’s more of a philosophical approach to dealing with life as combat. Christianity, Islam, a dozen polytheistic sects—they were all absorbed. Fucking amazing, really. Apparently there was some feeling of alarm connected with the growth of his power and influence, and there was an attempt to kill, or disable, him. We don’t have the details. It may have involved acid, or fire. We know that he went into seclusion, and disappeared into the northern desert for four years. During that time, his face was reconstructed to resemble a mythic hero of the Ibandi, a man named Erahs. These are the first reliable pictures that we have of him.”
The image was clear, but not sharp-edged, as if the product of computer reconstruction.
What was displayed before them was a man in his fifties, with features more like those of a Negroid Pakistani than an African. Ridges of keloid tribal scars braided his face.
“He may not even be truly of Negroid stock. In recent years, Swarna has been too well isolated for us to get more current data.
“In 1999, the initial contracts were signed creating PanAfrica. This man united a dozen tribes and nations, played one off against the other, and seemed virtually unstoppable.
“The United States was experiencing its own period of collapse, and there were no resources for adventurism. After centuries of starvation, war, and disease, the world had wearied of Africa.”
And here for the first time Koskotas winced a bit. “The decision was made to let Black Africa die. Swarna had a free hand. And he carved out an empire.
“You know the PanAfrican concept,” Koskotas continued. “Nobody believed in it—but he made it work, by God. When he couldn’t get cooperation from the Japanese government, he made arrangements with the largest criminal organization in Asia, the Divine Blossom Yakuza. Divine Blossom stole the technology he needed, and mass-produced it in prefabricated factories erected in PanAfrica. Swarna became even more of a power. In the teens, we tried to prune him back, on the Zimbabwe plain, and PanAfrica crushed the United Nations forces. Through its deal with Swarna, Divine Blossom had the mineral resources to consolidate its power in Japan. It was the first ‘Yakuza keiretsu’—a keiretsu being a sort of industrial and economic confederation. Divine Blossom possessed power under and above the law, within and outside of Japan. They are probably the largest multinational in the world, powerful enough to laugh at our embargoes. The technology continued to flow into Swarna’s little social experiment.
“Then we … tried more direct actions.”
Promise looked at Aubry, as if expecting a query. When none was forthcoming, she said, “You attempted an assassination?”
“Understand that the current administration had nothing to do with it. Yes. We tried to remove Phillipe Swarna. The attempt failed. We tried again. And failed again. Swarna expanded his political empire to Asia and Central America. Counting the labor, land, and material resources he commands or influences, Phillipe Swarna is almost certainly one of the ten most powerful men in the world, and he hates the West virulently.”
“With reason,” Jenna observed. “You raped his continent, abandoned them, and then when a leader finally rose with the vision to put things back together, you tried to stop him. When that failed, you tried to kill him. What are you angling for now?”
Her gaze was merciless. Koskotas met it for about eight seconds; then his eyes shifted. Some dynamo within Kramer seemed to activate at that moment—you could almost hear him hum. Without moving, he seemed to grow in size, to radiate heat. Jenna’s attention was pulled away from Koskotas to the younger man. She didn’t look at his eyes—she looked at a spot just beneath his chin. She nodded to herself, and to Aubry.
Aubry gave her a hard, flat smile, then spoke. “Thank you for the briefing.”
Koskotas shifted, as if the room was too warm for him. “Frankly, I had no interest in this meeting. Certain … pressures were brought to bear.”
There was silence in the room for a long moment. Some kind of energy whorl seemed to connect Aubry Knight and Koskotas, as if they were playing some kind of high-stakes poker game.
Aubry broke the impasse. “I used to be a professional killer,” he said. “A ‘soldier’ for the Ortega crime organization. Part of my training was conducted by the American military, and part by former spooks.” He paused, and smiled without humor. “Of course, they might have been current operatives on detached assignment—after all, you did use Ortega men in your first attempt on Swarna, didn’t you?”
There was no audible answer, but Kramer nodded shallowly.
“I want to go after Swarna. I want you to help me.”
“Jesus Christ—” Kramer hissed, speaking at last. He clamped down, silent again.
Koskotas raised his hand. “No. We understand your position, Mr. Knight, but cannot allow such a thing. In fact, United Nations policies directly forbid any such interference in the political or economic structure of another country. We cannot prove that Swarna was responsible for the attempt on President Harris—even though his son was involved.
“We cannot prove that Swarna was responsible for the attempt on you, Mr. Knight—although the killer bears tribal tattoos associated with Swarna’s tribe of origin, and elite guard.”
Promise was staring at Aubry, had stared since he first made the offer.
“We can provide you with protection,” Koskotas continued. “We owe you this much for your efforts on behalf of President Harris. That is all we came to say.” He pushed a silver envelope toward them. “In this envelope is our proposal for security, and a special number you can call, should you need more information, or support.”
The two men smiled, shook hands, and left the room.
Aubry sat, staring at the envelope. Brooding.