Shadow Puppets (16 page)

And around the corner charged two Indonesian-looking men, one with a pistol and the other with a small plastic automatic weapon. Bean recognized the Israeli design, because that was the weapon his own little army had used on missions where they had to be able to conceal their weapons as long as possible.

“Come with us!” shouted one of the Indonesians.

Bean thought this was probably a good idea. Since the assassination attempt had included one backup, it might include more, and the sooner he got out of there the better.

Of course, he didn’t know anything about these Indonesians, or why they would have been there at this moment to save his life, but the fact that they had guns and weren’t firing them at him implied that for the moment, at least, they were his dearest friends.

He grabbed his suitcase and ran. The front right door of a nondescript German car was open, waiting for him. The moment he dived in, he said, “My wife—she’s in another cab.”

“She safe,” said the man in the back seat, the one with the automatic weapon. “Her driver one of us. Very good choice of cab for her. Very bad choice for you.”

“Who
are
you?”

“Indonesian immigrant,” said the driver with a grin.

“Muslim,” said Bean. “Alai sent you?”

“No, not a lie. True,” said the man.

Bean didn’t bother correcting him. If the name
Alai
meant nothing
to him, what was the point in pursuing the matter? “Where’s Petra? My wife?”

“Going to airport. She not using ticket you giving her.” The man in the back seat handed him an airline ticket. “She going here.”

Bean looked at his ticket. Damascus.

Apparently Ambul’s mission had gone well. Damascus was, for all intents and purposes, the capital of the Muslim world. Even though Alai had dropped out of sight, it was unlikely that he was anywhere else.

“Are we going there as guests?” asked Bean.

“Tourists,” said the man in the back.

“Good,” said Bean. “Because we left something in the hospital here that we might have to come back for.” Though it was obvious that Achilles’s people—or whoever it was—knew everything about what they were doing at Women’s Hospital. In fact…there was almost no chance that anything of theirs remained in Women’s Hospital.

He looked back at the man in the back seat. He was shaking his head. “Sorry, they telling me when we stop here and shoot guys for you, security guard in hospital stealing what you left there.”

Of course. You don’t fight your way past a security guard. You just hire him.

And now it was all clear to him. If Petra had gotten in the first cab, it wouldn’t have been an assassination, it would have been a kidnapping. This wasn’t about killing Bean—that was just a bonus. It was about getting Bean’s babies.

Bean knew they hadn’t been followed here. They had been betrayed since arriving. Volescu. And if Volescu was in on it, then the embryos that were stolen probably had Anton’s Key after all. There was no particular reason for anyone to want his babies if there wasn’t at least a chance that they would be prodigies of the kind Bean was.

Volescu’s screening test was probably a fraud. Volescu probably had no idea which of the embryos had Anton’s Key and which didn’t.
They’d implant them in surrogates and then see what happened when they were born.

Bean had been taken in by Volescu as surely as Peter had been by Achilles. But it wasn’t as if they had trusted Volescu. They had simply trusted him not to be in league with Achilles.

Though it didn’t have to be him. Just because he had kidnapped Ender’s jeesh didn’t mean that he was the only would-be kidnapper in the world. Bean’s children, if they had his gifts, would be coveted by any ambitious nation or would-be military leader. Raise them up knowing nothing about their real parents, train them here on Earth as intensely as Bean and the other kids had been trained in Battle School, and by the age of nine or ten you can put them in command of strategy and tactics.

It might even be an entrepreneurial scheme. Maybe Volescu did this alone, hiring gunmen, bribing the security guard, so that he could sell the babies later to the highest bidder.

“Bad news, sorry,” said the man in the back seat. “But you still got one baby, yes? In wife, yes?”

“Still the one,” said Bean. If they had the ordinary amount of good luck.

Which didn’t seem to be the trend at the moment.

Still, going to Damascus…. If Alai was really taking them into his protection, Petra would be safe there. Petra and perhaps one child—who might have Anton’s Key after all, might be doomed to die without ever seeing the age of twenty. At least those two would be safe.

But the others were out there, children of Bean’s and Petra’s who would be raised by strangers, as tools, as slaves.

There had been nine embryos. One had been implanted, and three were discarded. That would leave five in the possession of Volescu or Achilles or whoever it was who took them.

Unless Volescu had actually found a way to switch the three that
were supposedly discarded, switching containers somehow. There might be eight embryos unaccounted for.

But probably not, probably only the five they knew about. Bean and Petra had both been watching Volescu too carefully for him to get away with the first three, hadn’t they?

By force of will, Bean turned his thoughts away from worries he could do nothing about at this moment, and took stock of his situation.

“Thank you,” said Bean to the men in the car. “I was careless. Without you, I’d be dead.”

“Not careless,” said the man in the back. “Young man in love. Wife has baby in her. Time of hope.”

Followed immediately, Bean realized, by a time of near despair. He should never have agreed to father children, no matter how much Petra wanted to, no matter how much he loved Petra, no matter how much he too yearned for offspring, for a family. He should have stood firm, because then this would not have been possible. There would have been nothing for his enemies to steal from him. He and Petra would still have been in hiding, undetected, because they would never have had to go to a snake like Volescu.

“Babies good,” said the man in the back. “Make you scared, make you crazy. Somebody take away babies, somebody hurt babies, make you crazy. But good anyway. Babies good.”

Yeah. Well. Maybe Bean would live long enough to know about that, and maybe he wouldn’t.

Because now he knew his life’s work, for whatever time he had left before he died of giantism.

He had to get his babies back. Whether they should ever have existed or not, they existed now, each with its own separate genetic identity, each very much alive. Until they were taken, they had been nothing to him but cells in a solution—all that mattered was the one that would be implanted in Petra, the one that would grow and become part of their family. But now they all mattered. Now they were all alive to him, because someone else had them, meant to use them.

He even regretted the ones that had been disposed of. Even if the test had been real, even if they had had Anton’s Key, what right did he have to snuff out their genetic identity, just because he oh-so-altruistically wanted to spare them the sorrow of a life as short as his?

Suddenly he realized what he was thinking. What it meant.

Sister Carlotta, you always wanted me to turn Christian—and not just Christian, Catholic. Well, here I am, thinking that as soon as sperm and egg combine, they’re a human life, and it’s wrong to harm them.

Well, I’m not Catholic, and it wasn’t wrong to want children to grow up to have a full life instead of this fifth-of-a-life that I’m headed for.

But how was I different, flushing three of those embryos, from Volescu? He flushed twenty-two of them, I flushed three. He waited till they were nearly two years further along in development—gestation plus a year—but in the end, is it really all that different?

Would Sister Carlotta condemn him for that? Had he committed a mortal sin? Was he only getting what he deserved now, losing five because he willingly threw away three?

No, he could not imagine her saying that to him. Or even thinking it to herself. She would rejoice that he had decided to have a child at all. She would be glad if Petra really was pregnant.

But she would also agree with him that the five that were now in someone else’s hands, the five that might be implanted in someone else and turned into babies, he couldn’t just let them go. He had to find them and save them and bring them home.

Peter did not want to get out of bed.

This had never happened to him before in his life.

No, not strictly true. He had often wanted not to get out of bed, but he had always gone ahead and gotten out of bed anyway. What was different today was that he was still in bed at nine-thirty in the morning, even though he had a press conference scheduled for less than half an hour from now in a conference room in the O. Henry Hotel in his home town of Greensboro, North Carolina.

He could not plead jet lag. There was only an hour’s time difference between Ribeirão Preto and Greensboro. It would be a great embarrassment if he did not get up. So he
would
get up. Very soon now.

Not that it would make any difference. He might, for the moment, still have the title of Hegemon, but there were people in many countries with titles like “king” and “duke” and “marquis,” who nevertheless cooked or took pictures or fixed automobiles for a living. Perhaps he could go back to college under another name and train himself for a career like his father’s, a quiet one working for a company somewhere.

Or he could go into the bathroom and fill the tub with water and lie down in it and breathe the water in. A few moments of panic and flailing around, and then the whole problem would go away. In fact,
if he hit himself very hard in various places on his body, it might look as though he struggled with an assailant and was murdered. He might even be considered a martyr. At least people might think that he was important enough to have an enemy who thought he was worth killing.

Any minute now, thought Peter, I will get up and shower so I don’t look so bedraggled to the media.

I ought to prepare a statement, he thought. Something to the effect of, “Why I am not as pathetic and stupid as my recent actions prove me to be.” Or perhaps the direct approach: “Why I am even more pathetic and stupid than my recent actions might indicate.”

Given his recent track record, he would probably be saved from the bathtub, given CPR, and then someone would notice the bruises on his body and the lack of an assailant and the story would get out about his pathetic effort to make his suicide attempt look like a brutal murder, thus making his life even more worthless than it already was.

Another knock on the door. Couldn’t the maid read the do-not-disturb sign? It was written in four languages. Could she possibly be illiterate in all four of them? No doubt she was also illiterate in a fifth.

Twenty-five minutes until the press conference. Did I doze off? That would be nice. Just…doze…off. Sorry, I overslept. I’ve been so very busy. It’s exhausting work to turn over—to a megalomaniac killer—everything I built up through my entire life.

Knock knock knock. It’s a good thing I didn’t kill myself, all this knocking would have ruined my concentration and entirely spoiled my death scene. I should die like Seneca, with fine last speeches. Or Socrates, though that would be harder, since I don’t have hemlock but I do have a bathtub. No razor blades, though. I don’t grow enough of a beard to need any. Just another sign that I’m only a stupid kid who should never have been permitted to take a role in the grownup world.

The door to his room opened and jammed against the locking bar.

How outrageous! Who dare to use a passkey on
his
room?

And not just a passkey! Someone had the tool that opened the locking bar and now his door was wide open.

Assassins! Well, let them kill me here in the bed, facing them, not cowering in a corner begging them not to shoot.

“Poor baby,” said Mother.

“He’s depressed,” said Father. “Don’t make fun of him.”

“I can’t help but think of what Ender went through, fighting the Formics almost every day for weeks, completely exhausted, and yet he always got up and fought again.”

Peter wanted to scream at her. How dare she compare what he had just gone through with Ender’s legendary “suffering.” Ender never lost a battle, did she think of that? And he had just lost the war! He was entitled to sleep!

“Ready? One, two, three.”

Peter felt the whole mattress slide down the bed until he was awkwardly dumped onto the floor, banging his head against the frame of the bedsprings.

“Ow!” he cried.

Wouldn’t that make a noble last word to be recorded by posterity?

How did the great Peter Wiggin, Hegemon of Earth (and, of course, brother of Ender Wiggin, sainted savior), meet his end?

He sustained a terrible head injury when his parents dragged him out of a hotel bed the morning after his ignominious escape from his own compound where not one person had threatened him in any way and he had no evidence of any impending threat against his person.

And what were his last words?

A one-word sentence, fit to be engraved on his monument. Ow.

“I don’t think we can get him into the shower without actually touching his sacred person,” said Mother.

“I think you’re right,” said Father.

“And if we touch him,” said Mother, “there’s a real possibility that we will be struck dead on the spot.”

Other people had mothers who were compassionate, tender, comforting, understanding.
His
mother was a sarcastic hag who clearly hated him and always had.

“Ice bucket,” said Father.

“No ice.”

“But it holds water.”

This was too stupid. The old throw-water-on-the-sleeping-teenager trick.

“Just go away, I’m getting up in a couple of minutes.”

“No,” said Mother. “You’re getting up now. Your father is filling the ice bucket. You can hear the water running.”

“OK, OK, leave the room so I can take my clothes off and get in the shower. Or is this just a subterfuge so you can see me naked again? You’ve never let me forget how you used to change my diapers, so apparently that was a very important stage in your life.”

He was answered by having water dashed in his face. Not a whole bucketful, but enough to soak his head and shoulders.

“Sorry I didn’t have time to fill it,” said Father. “But when you started making crude sexual innuendos to my wife, I had to use whatever amount of water was at hand to shut you up before you said enough that I would have to beat your bratty little face in.”

Peter got up from the mattress on the floor and pulled off the shorts he slept in. “Is this what you came in to see?”

“Absolutely,” said Father. “You were wrong, Theresa: he
does
have balls.”

“Not enough of them, apparently.”

Peter stalked between them and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

Half an hour later, after keeping the press waiting only ten minutes past the appointed time, Peter walked alone onto the platform at one end of a packed conference room. All the reporters were holding up
their little steadycams, the lenses peering out between the fingers of their clenched fists. It was the best turnout he had ever had at a press conference—though to be fair he had never actually held one in the United States. Maybe here they would all have been like this.

“I’m as surprised as you are to find myself here today,” said Peter with a smile. “But I must say I’m grateful to the source that provided me with information that allowed me to make my exit, along with my family, from a place that had once been a safe haven, but which had become the most dangerous place in the world to me.

“I am also grateful to the government of the United States, which not only invited me to bring the office of Hegemon here, on a temporary basis, of course, but also provided me with a generous contingent of the Secret Service to secure the area. I don’t believe they’re necessary, at least not in such numbers, but then, until recently I didn’t think I needed any protection inside the Hegemony compound in Ribeirão Preto.”

His smile invited a laugh, and he got one. More of a release of tension than real amusement, but it would do. Father had stressed that—make them laugh now and then, so everybody feels relaxed. That will make them think
you’re
relaxed and confident, too.

“My information suggests that the many loyal employees of the Office of Hegemon are in no danger whatsoever, and when a new permanent headquarters is established, I invite all those who want to, to resume their jobs. The disloyal employees, of course, already have other employment.”

Another laugh—but a couple of audible groans, too. The press smelled blood, and it didn’t help that Peter looked—and was—so very young. Humor, yes, but don’t look like a wise-cracking kid. Especially don’t look like a wise-cracking kid whose parents had to drag him out of bed this morning.

“I will not give you any information that would compromise my recent benefactor. What I
can
tell you is this: My inconveniently sud
den journey—this disruption in the Office of Hegemon—is entirely my fault.”

There. That wasn’t what a kid would say. That wasn’t even what adult politicians usually said.