Iron Sunrise (37 page)

I"—she paused, an unreadable expression on her face—"I know that, like you, I have difficulty understanding that event. We can't go home, now or ever. The door is shut, all options closed. There is no sense of closure: no body in a coffin, no assailant under arrest and charged with murder.

"But—" She took a deep breath: "I shall try to be brief. We are still here, however much we mourn our friends and relatives who were engulfed by the holocaust. We survive. We bear witness. We go on, and we will rebuild our lives, and we will remember them.

"Someone destroyed our homes. As an agent of the surviving caretaker government, I dedicate my life to this task: to bear witness, and to identify the guilty parties, whoever they are and wherever they may be sheltering.

They will be held to account, and the accounting will be sufficient to deter anyone else who ever contemplates such monstrous acts in future."

She paused, head tilted slightly to one side as if she was listening to something—and, as she continued, Wednesday realized, She is listening to something. Someone is reading her a speech and she's simply echoing it!

Startled, she almost missed the Ambassador's next words: "We will now pause for a minute in silent contemplation. Those of us who believe in the intervention of higher agencies may wish to pray; those of us who don't may take heart from the fact that we are not alone, and we will make sure that our friends and families did not die in vain."

Wednesday was disinclined to meditate on much of anything. She looked around surreptitiously, examining fixtures and fittings. The ambassador's girth—She's not fat, but she's carrying a lot of padding around the waist.

And those boxes around the podium … and the guy at the back there, and that woman in the dark suit and business glasses … Something smelled wrong. In fact, something smelled killing zone, a game Herman had taught her years before. How to spot an ambush. This is just like a, a trap, she realized. But who—

Wednesday turned back and was watching the Ambassador's eyes as it happened. They widened slightly as somebody a couple of rows behind Wednesday made a nervous noise. Then the Ambassador snapped into motion, sudden as a machine, arms coming up to protect her face as she ducked.

Then:

Why am I lying down? Wednesday wondered fuzzily. Why? She could see, but everything was blurry and her ears ached. I feel sick. She tried to moan and catch her breath and there was an acrid stink of burning. Abruptly she realized that her right hand was wet and sticky, and she was curled around something bony. Dampness. She tried to lever herself up with her left hand, and the air was full of dust, the lights were out, and thinly, in the distance through the ringing in her ears, she heard screams.

A flicker of light. A moment later, she was clearer. The podium—the woman wasn't there. The boxes to either side had exploded like air bags, blasting heavy shields into the air in front of the Ambassador as she ducked. But behind her, behind them … Wednesday sat up and glanced down, realized someone was screaming. There was blood on the back of her hand, blood on her sleeve, blood on the chairs. A bomb, she thought fuzzily. Then: I ought to do something. People were screaming. A hand and an arm lay in the middle of the aisle next to her, the elbow a grisly red mess. Frank was lying on the floor next to her. The back of his head looked as if it had been sprayed with red paint. As she recognized him, he moved, one arm flailing at the ground in a stunned reflex. The woman who had been seated behind him was still seated, but her head ended in a glutinous stump somewhere between her neck and her nose. Bomb, Wednesday realized again, confused but trying to hold on to the thought. More thoughts: Herman warned me. Frank!

She leaned over him in panic. "Frank! Talk to me!" He opened his mouth and tried to say something. She winced, unable to hear him. Is he dying?

she wondered, feeling lost and anxious. "Frank!" A dizzy laugh welled up as she tried to remember details from a first-aid course she'd taken years ago—Is he breathing? Yes. Is he bleeding? It was hard to tell; there was so much blood everywhere that she couldn't see if it was his. Frank mumbled something at her. He wasn't flailing around. In fact, he seemed to be trying to move. "Wait, you mustn't—" Frank sat up. He felt around the back of his head and winced, then peered at Wednesday owlishly.

"Dizzy," he said, and slowly toppled toward her.

Wednesday managed to brace herself with one arm as he fainted. He must weigh over a hundred kilos, she realized fuzzily. She looked round, searching for help, but the shout died in her throat. It hadn't been a big bomb—not much more than a grenade—but it had burst in the middle of the audience, ripping half a dozen bodies into bloody pulp, and splashing meat and bone and blood around like evil paint. A man with half his clothes blasted off his body and his upper torso painted red stumbled into the epicenter blindly, arms outstretched as if looking for someone. A woman, sitting in her chair like an incisor seated in a jaw between the empty red holes of pulled teeth, screamed and clutched her shredded arm.

Nightmares merged at the edges, bleeding over into daylight, rawhead and bloodybones come out to play. Wednesday licked her lips, tasted bright metal dampness, and whimpered as her stomach tried to eject wine and half-digested canapes.

The next thing she knew, a man in black was standing over her, a gun at the ceiling—looking past her, talking urgently to a floating drone. She tried to shake her head. Something was crushing her. "—an you walk?" he said,

"—your friend?"

"Mmf. Try." She pushed against Frank's deadweight, and Frank tensed and groaned. "Frank—" The guard was away, bending over another body and suddenly dropping to his knees, frantically pumping at a still chest.

"I'm, I'm—" He blinked, sleepily. "Wednesday?"

Sit up, she thought fuzzily. "Are you okay?"

"I think—" He paused. "My head." For a miracle, the weight on her shoulder slackened. "Are you hurt?" he asked her.

"I—" She leaned against him, now. "Not badly. I think."

"Can't stay here," he said faintly. "The bomb. Before the bomb. Saw you, Sven."

"Saw who?"

"Jim. Clown." He looked as if he was fading. Wednesday leaned toward him. "Sven was here. Wearing a waiter's—" His eyelids fluttered.

"Make sense! What are you saying?" she hissed, driven by a sense of urgency she didn't understand. "What do you mean—"

"Svengali. Back. Performer." His eyes opened. "Got to find Sven."

"Are you telling me you saw him—" Shock brought Wednesday into focus.

"Yes. Yes. Find him. He's … " Frank's eyes closed.

Wednesday waved at a passing guard: "Here!" A head turned. "My friend, concussion. Help?"

"Oh shit, another—" The guard waved one of her colleagues over. "Medic!"

Wednesday slid after Frank, torn between a pressing need to see that he was all right and a conviction that she should go look for the clown. Leaving Frank felt wrong, like letting go of her only lifeline to stability. Just an hour ago he'd seemed so solid he could anchor her to the universe, but now everything was in flux. She stumbled toward the side door, her head whirling, guts churning. Her right hand stung, a hot, aching pain. Svengali?

She wondered: what could he be doing here? A short passage and another open door brought her weaving and stumbling onto the lawn at the back of the embassy building. Bright light glared down from overhead floods, starkly silhouetting a swarm of cops buzzing around the perimeter like disturbed hornets. Sven? she thought.

She stumbled around the side of the building. A woman blocked her way:

"You can't come—"

"My friend!" She gasped, and pushed past. For some reason, no arms restrained her. Bodies were laid out on the grass under the harsh spotlights, some of them unmoving, others with people in paramedic orange frantically working over them. Other people stood or shambled around in a daze, prodded by a couple of enhanced police dogs that seemed to have a better idea of what was going on than any of the humans. Only a couple of minutes had passed, and the noise of sirens was still getting closer, audible over the ringing in her ears.

She found him squatting on the grass, wearing face cake and a red nose spattered with blood, holding his head in his hands. His costume was a clown's parody of a snobbish chef's outfit. "Sven?" She gasped.

He looked up, eyes red, a trickle of blood running from one nostril. "Wed-Wed-"

"We've got to go," she said, trying to think of anything else that wasn't inane. "We'll miss our, our … "

"You go, girl, I'll, I—" He shook his head, looking dizzy. "Help?"

Was he here to perform? she asked herself. Then: "You're hurt? Come on, on your feet. Back to the dining room. There's medical triage in there, first aid. Let's get you seen to and pick up Frank and catch a taxi. If we stay here, they'll ask questions till we miss the ship."

"Ship." His hands came down. He looked at her eyes cautiously, expression slightly puzzled. "Came here to, had to, set up? Frank? Hurt? Is he—"

"Deafened and shocked, I think." She shivered, feeling cold.

"But we can't just—"

"We can. Listen, you're one of my two guests, right? And we'll give them a statement but we've got to do that right now, our ship leaves tonight. If you're a guest, they won't grill you like a performer or staff. I hope."

Svengali tried to stand up, and Wednesday backed off to give him room.

"Must. Just tell the, the medics—" He staggered, and somehow Wednesday caught his left arm and pulled it over her shoulder—and she was walking Svengali drunkenly around toward the front of the embassy as the first ambulance arrived on a whine of electric motors.

GRATEFUL DEAD

"I don't fucking believe this!"

Rachel had never, ever, seen George Cho lose his temper before. It was impressive, and would have been frightening if she hadn't had more important things to worry about than her boss flapping around like a headless chicken.

"They missed," she said with forced detachment. "Six dead and however many more injured, but they missed. The reactive armor deflected most of the shrapnel straight up, and I hit the floor in time." She clenched her hands together to keep them from shaking.

"Why weren't the grounds sealed off afterward? Why don't we know who—the cameras—"

"Did you think they would be amateurs?" she asked angrily, pacing past him to look out the window overseeing the lawn. The indoor lights had blown, along with most of the unshielded electronics in the embassy. The EMP pulse had been small, but was sufficient to do for most non-MilSpec equipment on-site. And someone had done a real number on the cameras with a brace of self-adhesive clown-face stickers. "Murderous clowns, but not amateurs."

The convoy of ambulances had taken most of the injured to various local clinics, which had activated their major incident plans immediately. Those vehicles that were left were parked, sirens silenced, not in any hurry to remove the bodies until the SOC team had finished mapping the mess left by the bomb and Forensics had taken their sample grams of flesh, and the polite men and women in their long black coats had asked their pointed questions of the catering staff—

"We set them up for a long gun," Rachel reminded him, shuddering slightly.

Remembering the icy feeling in her guts as she'd walked out onstage wearing a bulletproof vest, knowing there was a reactive armor shield in front of her, and a crash cart with resuscitation and stabilization gear waiting behind the door, and an ambulance in back. Knowing that a sniper would have to shoot in through a fixed arc constrained by the windows and the podium at the back of the room, knowing the ballistic radar at the front of the killing zone should be able to blow the armor slabs into the path of a bullet-sized guided missile before it could reach her, knowing there were two anti-sniper teams waiting in the hedgerow out front—she'd still been unsure whether each breath would be her last. "They weren't stupid. Didn't bring a knife to a gunfight. Took an antipersonnel mine instead."

"And they got away with it again." George sat down heavily on the edge of the lacquered and jade-inlaid desk, head bowed. "We should have fucking known—"

"Tranh?" called Rachel.

"We leaked," the researcher said quietly. "We made it a honeypot, and we attracted the wasps, but probably only one of the passengers from the Romanov was involved, and we can't tell which one because they fried the surveillance records and probably exfiltrated among the wounded. For all we know the assassin is among the dead. Worse, if they're from an advanced infrastructure society like Septagon or somewhere with access to brain-mapping gear, the killer could have been any other guest or member of staff they managed to get five minutes alone with. And we couldn't prove a thing. It looks like the only thing left to do is bring down the hammer and stop the ship leaving. Detain everybody. Want me to get on line to Martin?

Have him lock it down?"

"Don't do that yet," said Rachel.

"Yes, do it," said Cho. He took a deep breath. "We're going to have to arrest them," he told Rachel. "Even if it tips them off. They already know something-must suspect, surely, or else they wouldn't have declined the honeypot—"

"Not necessarily," Rachel said urgently. "Listen, if you hold the ship, we'll probably uncover an assassin—a dead one, if these people are as ruthless as we think. If we do that, what happens next? I'll tell you what happens next: there's a hiatus, then a different killer starts making the rounds, and this time we'll have broken the traffic analysis chain so we won't know where they are or where they're going next. We need to let them run—but we have to stay in front of them."

George stood up and paced across the room. "I can't take the risk. They've grown increasingly reckless, from selective assassination to indiscriminate bombing! What next, a briefcase nuke? Don't you think they're capable of that?"

"They—" Rachel stopped dead. "They almost certainly are," she admitted.

"But don't you think that makes it all the more important that we keep track of them and try to take them alive, so we can find out who's behind it?"