Blades of Winter (14 page)

I slide across the floor like a cat at an ice rink. For a moment the van is up on two wheels, maybe only one. I haul myself up into the passenger seat and look out the back windows. The flashing lights are still behind us. Between the screeching tires, the roaring engines, and the whooping sirens, the noise in here is incredible.

The Greeter is a skinny five feet ten inches and looks like he’s in his late twenties. He’s got the requisite Middle Eastern skin tone (swarthy), hair (bushy), and beard (closely cropped). He smells spicy, kind of like cinnamon. I lean over to him and yell, “Name’s Scarlet. You want any help to ditch the oinkers?”

“I’m Rashid.” He looks in his rearview, then back at me, and hollers, “We’ll use the Puker. Go to the back of the van, and I’ll open the doors from here. Make sure to grab on to something.”

Oh,
this
sounds good.

The Puker turns out to be a fifty-five-gallon drum half full of crude oil. The drum is mounted on a platform with hinges that allow it to tilt, and there’s a big clear hose leading to the bottom of it. The other end of the clear hose leads to a large air tank bolted to the wall. Next to the air tank is a large green button with the word “Puke” written on it. I pull the lid off the drum and hold on to the air tank’s mounting bracket.

Rashid shouts back, “Ready?” I turn and give a thumbs-up to his reflection in the rearview mirror. He pushes a button on the dash, and the rear doors pop open. Dazzling light blazes into the van, and the sirens hammer my eardrums. I tilt the barrel so it’s on a forty-five-degree angle out the rear of the van and hit the Puke button. There’s a loud
whump!
as pressurized air launches the oil out of the drum, right at the cops. The flying blob of slipperiness splashes all over the cars, and
both vehicles slide around until they crash off the side of the road. Very satisfying!

I shut the rear doors and clamber my way to the front of the van. “Hey, that worked great,” I congratulate Rashid.

He shrugs and says, “I hate tailgaters,” with a smug look on his face. He slows to a less frenetic speed, and we compare notes on our way into central Baghdad.

“How long have you done this kind of work?” I ask.

“Quite a while, Miss Scarlet,” he says. “Since before my father died, and that was seven years ago.”

“Well, Rashid, you certainly make a good first impression.”

Rashid puffs up, obviously flattered. He stays very self-satisfied the whole way into the city.

BAGHDAD—Café owner Ilan Al-Nisat has a long memory. He remembers a time when sports dominated the conversations in his coffee shop. “I had posters of our best football players all over the walls,” the 65-year-old neighborhood fixture recalls. “My regulars used to sign the pictures of their favorite athletes so they would know which customers to argue with.” His animated expression fades as he continues. “But my children and grandchildren, they talk about other things.”

Yesterday afternoon, the café hissed with news that German security soldiers had fired into another crowd of protesters. This time, the casualties included 434 wounded and 197 killed, making this last week the province’s bloodiest in five years. Almost every native
citizen knows someone who has been injured or killed in the recent violence, particularly in the dense downtown area of Baghdad near the Al-Nisat family home.

Taking a quick break from the shop’s daily bustle, Mr. Al-Nisat tells of a much different atmosphere than the one he sees now. “People are quieter now. They don’t want to attract attention in such a public place. Besides, most of the things that get talked about here aren’t happy things.”

Mr. Al-Nisat’s children have known nothing but Germany’s uncompromising “stewardship” of their country. The Germans’ thin excuse that they protect their Middle Eastern provinces from Russia’s avarice doesn’t hold any more water for the natives now than it did back when Ilan was a young man raising his family in the apartments above his café. Across the country—in cafés, at work, and at home—boisterous talk of family and sports has been replaced by hushed, dark conversations of risings and rebellion.

Another day in Baghdad.

Rashid’s café is tidy, bustling with activity, and reeks of spicy food. Behind the kitchen is an attached garage for delivery vehicles, which is handy for stashing oil-spewing vans and sneaking nineteen-year-old white chicks into the middle of Baghdad. Despite the late hour, there seem to be a dozen of his relatives here. They’re all visiting with one another, and they all talk at once. It’s hard to tell the employees from the customers, but Rashid assures me that they can all be trusted never to have seen me in their lives.

He leads me through the kitchen and into a small office. One of his female cousins brings us iced tea and a big plate of flatbread with sauce in a bowl. Rashid tears off a hunk of bread, dunks it in the sauce, and pops it in his mouth. I dunk and pop too, but unlike Rashid I then gasp and grope for the iced tea with my eyes watering.

“Hot?” Rashid asks with a smile.

I’m too busy chugging my tea to answer. Rashid hands me another piece of bread. “Eat some bread. It’ll absorb the oils on your tongue.” I eat the bread. It helps, a little.

This café has a long history with the international covert community. Rashid’s father, Ilan, provided an unofficial safe haven for American, Russian, and Chinese agents in exchange for pieces of intel he could use as leverage with Baghdad’s German administrators.

Ilan saw that the
Damen und Herren
posted to the Middle East did not exactly represent the Fatherland’s best and brightest. He established an “understanding” with them about the many duty-free items that passed
through the café’s big garage door. The local Fritzes gladly took his bribes in exchange for seeing nothing and hearing nothing as long as the smuggling didn’t get out of control.

Rashid’s family has become more actively involved in the black market since Ilan passed away seven years ago. Rashid inherited the café and expanded it from a sleepy neighborhood coffee bar to a chain of five locations all around Baghdad. Five times the space means five times the tax evasion. Some of his many brothers and cousins run the other shops, but Rashid oversees the whole enterprise, especially the under-the-table business. This work gobbles up all his time, hence the “Lonely Rashid” bit. Rashid remains the sole bachelor in his family, but as the oldest he still commands respect among his siblings. I can’t imagine having such a complicated family life. It was thorny enough growing up in a family of three.

Still, it’s exciting to visit one of the places my father hung around in when he was away from home. I think of the row of stools at the front counter and imagine Dad settling in there for a coffee and quietly trading bits of information with Rashid’s father. They probably shared late nights in this very office, like Rashid and I are doing now.

Weird
.

My host is just as surprised as Jacques was when I tell him that I’m here to find out what really happened to my dad. Jacques already knew that Big Bertha was my father, but Rashid didn’t realize it until this moment. He tilts back in his chair and runs his hand through his hair. Then he stands up and walks to a tall filing cabinet in the corner. There’s a thick throw rug under the cabinet. Rashid pulls on the little rug and drags the cabinet out from the corner. He squats down where the rug was and fiddles with something on the floor. He pulls up a square section of flooring and sets it to the side.

Rashid reaches deep into the square hole in the floor. His muffled voice says, “Your father gave my father something to hold.” His shoulders shift as he rummages around in his subterranean stash. “Ah hah!” he exclaims. He puts something in his shirt pocket, replaces the flooring, and shoves the cabinet back in place.

Then Lonely Rashid settles back into his chair and slides something across the desk to me. It’s a data pod, a small plastic and metal doodad that stores digital files.

My teeth press tightly together. I’m scared to touch it. “What is it?”

Rashid shrugs his shoulders. “My father never looked at what it holds and advised me to do the same.” Rashid’s expression softens, and he quietly continues, “His advice was always good, so I did as he asked. He said Big Bertha had left it with him for safekeeping and that I should give it to the first trustworthy American who came looking for it.”

I stare at the data pod. The last thing I remember about my dad was him leaving for the mission that took him here. The material in this device is from after that, so it almost feels like it’s from the future even though it’s from eight years in the past.

Rashid misinterprets my hesitation and stands up. “I will give you some privacy, Miss Scarlet.” He smiles at me and leaves the office, gently closing the door behind him.

I grab the data pod and slide the top of my pants down to expose the data port built into my hip. I pop in the data pod. A selection of audio files and a stack of text documents appears in my Eyes-Up display. It’s my dad’s dispatches. They’re kind of a mess. The files are only identified by the date they were created, so if I copy them to my Bio-Drive without naming them first they’ll all have today’s date and they’ll be an unholy bitch to work with.

I sort the text stack by date and skip to the end. I open the last entry and see from the header that my father
wrote it eight years ago here in Baghdad. The report begins with codes and other official crap, the stuff that Trick does for me. Then I find what I’m looking for: the Field Action Report.

Wow, this is already a gold mine for the Information people. Dad really
was
after Winter and the Blades of Persia, like Jacques told us. Which means he
wasn’t
surveying Russian covert activity in Germany’s Middle East like it says in the official CORE entry for his last Job Number.

So who wrote those field reports in CORE? And what the h-e-double-toothpicks is a-goin’ on here?

I remember that it was summer when Dad left on this trip and that he hardly packed anything. He only took a small suitcase to hold his lightest-weight suits, which could have been for either mission. But he left Li’l Bertha at home, which according to Jacques fits the Blades mission and not the surveying mission.

I move backward through the documents and find the beginning of his dispatches from Baghdad.

Whoah!
Dad’s stories down in the basement never mentioned this kind of shit. I knew that sometimes people got killed on his missions, but I didn’t know they were twelve-year-olds! When I entered the field, I was only a few years older than this poor kid. It’s pure luck that I never came up against someone like my father.

I look at the dates from his first and his last dispatches. Impressive. In only five months my father went from the new guy in town to meetings at Winter’s secret lab. My mother has told me he was very charismatic. Since the report from November was his last, it seems like Winter didn’t think my father was as charming as everyone else did.