Two days ago . . .
Finn O’Leary entered the tiny café and sat down across a table from a wizened little man with a smile like a bamboo viper and eyes the color of cow shit. He was the kind of man you’d distrust on first meeting and probably never feel the need to alter your opinion. The kind of man who knew that this was how people perceived him, and instead of trying to ameliorate that gut reaction, he cultivated certain qualities within him to more strongly engender those feelings. It worked very well for him.
“Sergeant O’Leary.”
“You’re Aziz?”
The reptilian smile widened a fraction.
“People in town . . . they said that I should come talk to you,” said Finn.
“Why?”
“They said you were pretty well connected, that you had resources. And contacts.”
“So does the Red Cross,” said Aziz. “What of it?”
A greasy waiter came and Finn ordered coffee, wishing he could get something stronger. But booze was hard to come by in Muslim towns. Even in shitholes like this where probably nobody within a day’s ride had been to a mosque in years. Guys like Aziz, who was probably Muslim for convenience’s sake and no other reason.
When the coffee came, Finn sniffed it, winced, drank some, and nearly spat it against the wall. But he forced it down.
“Let’s cut the tap dance,” Finn said. “I’m not in the mood for three hours of cryptic bullshit and I don’t banter. I was told to see you. If that’s the case, then someone told you I was coming here to find you. So, can we get right down to it?”
Aziz’s smile flickered and dimmed by half. “You take the fun out of things,” he said, then waved that away. “Sure. Let us talk plainly.”
“Good. Do you know why I’m here?”
After a long pause, Aziz said, “Yes. Do you?”
“No.”
Aziz folded his hands and waited.
“Why I’m here doesn’t make sense,” Finn said. “But I’m here anyway.”
“Yes.”
“So . . . you tell me. You know what the fuck’s going on, so you tell me. Otherwise I got nowhere to go with this thing.”
Another pause, then Aziz nodded to Finn’s chest. “Open your shirt.”
Now it was Finn’s turn to pause.
“Open it,” said Aziz insistently, “or I walk away.”
Finn sighed, and with trembling fingers, he pulled up the rough cotton shirt to show the hand-shaped burn on his chest.
Aziz sat there with his eyes wide and small fists balled into knuckly knots on the tabletop. Then he rattled off a long prayer in a mix of languages. Like most SpecOps field agents, Finn had a passing familiarity with a number of them—he caught words in Pashto, Arabic, Hebrew, and Egyptian. There were many blessings overlapping one another, most of which Finn couldn’t understand clearly, and a handful of names repeated over and over again.
“Lilitu.”
“Al-bashti.”
“Iblis.”
“Lilith.”
No mention of Muhammad or Allah. No mention of any other god, prophet, or saint. Aziz removed a small stone statue from his pocket. It was an earth-mother statue, one of the fertility idols, with pendulous breasts, an enormous stomach, and tubby legs. It also had a hideous face that was painted red and a wide mouth filled with sharp teeth. The stone looked ancient but in excellent condition. Aziz put it to his mouth and kissed each breast and then the feet. Then he put the idol back into his pocket.
The smile he gave Finn was truly appalling. It was filled with awe and worship, but also with a naked, undisguised sexual lust that made Finn’s stomach churn and his testicles contract into his body.
“You have been touched by her. Touched.”
Finn pulled down the front of his shirt.
“I wish I could kill you so I could carve that from your chest and sew it onto my own skin,” Aziz continued. “You have been touched by her. Flesh to flesh.”
“You’re fucking nuts.”
That changed Aziz’s smile back to something closer to what it had been. Aziz drew a breath and let it out slowly. Finn’s chest shuddered as he did that, as if with the aftershock of a prolonged orgasm. He wanted to vomit.
The wizened little man leaned across the table, head bowed and voice low. “You want something back that’s been taken from you?”
“Yes.”
“But they are already at work,” said Aziz. “They found her idol out there in the desert. They took it from the thieves who desecrated her temple. She has taken them as her own and they are already doing what they must do in her service.”
“I don’t give a fuck. I want them back.”
“You know the price?”
“Listen to me, shitbag, I can make one call and have a platoon of marines in here kicking the ass of you and everyone you’ve ever met. I can firebomb this shithole into the next dimension. I told you already: do not fuck with me.”
Aziz contrived to look hurt. “I am not ‘fucking’ with you, Sergeant Finn. I am required to ask this question, and I am asking it. Do you know the price? Do you understand it? What it means?”
“Yeah, yeah, fuck you, I understand. Now let’s get this done.”
Aziz stood firm on his point and his lip curled in a sneer. “We are not haggling over a rug, you arrogant asshole. You came to me—me—bearing her mark. Who do you think I am? A cheap gangster? Sure, that’s what everyone sees. But I protect her.”
“She seemed able to handle herself,” Finn said, and he was surprised he could manage that sarcasm.
“You don’t understand. There are proper ways to do these things. Prayers and rituals. Why do you think shrines are so important? They focus, Sergeant. They allow. Without doing everything the right way, the precise way, it all falls apart.”
Finn said nothing.
“Even now, the old bargain—the one she made with your men—is falling apart because things were not done properly. She took them after they were already dead. Their souls are being torn. Worlds are breaking apart.” He shook his head and made to stand up. “Ah, why am I lecturing a fool?”
Finn caught his arm. “No,” he said quickly. “No . . . I’m sorry. Look . . . just tell me what I have to do.”
“Are you sure? Because what we do now is to make the actual substance of the bargain. What you will do, what you will get, how it will all play out.” Aziz leaned forward and his face was alight, intense and vicious. “Are you sure?”
Inside Finn’s chest, his heart was hammering dangerously hard.
“Yes,” he lied.