The priest glanced hurriedly about, then waved a hand frantically. “As you love God, your grace, put that thing out of sight before one of our overzealous guards sees it and kills you! With the numerous recent attempts on the life
of his grace, we have had to become a virtual armed camp here.
“Bring that piece of filth along. We’ll hie us to the inner guardroom—we’d have to pass by it, anyway—and leave him there.”
CHAPTER
THE SIXTH
Arsen Ademian took the quill in his left hand for a moment and flexed the cramped fingers of his right while, on the apron of the makeshift stage before him, the four drummers— his cousins Haigh and Al, his friend Sinclair, and his uncle Rupen—created rhythmic thunder from the dwnbegs. As the drum section finished its allotted time, Buddy took up the quill and evoked the melody of the ancient Middle Eastern song from his treasured oud, joined now by clarinet, guitar, bass, tambour, zils, and the clapping and shouts of his audience.
The wind from off the river was fitful, and in the lulls, like this present one, the mosquitoes and other bugs zeroed in on the sixty or so people standing and sitting on the sloping riverside lawn. The audience did not seem to mind, but running on nearly pure alcohol as they were by this time, they may not even have felt the ticklings and bites.
As they neared the finale of this number, with the drums all booming and every instrument involved in the complex rhythm, while the three dancers swirled before the stage in their rich, if scanty, costumes, a bug bit Arsen just inside his right nostril, and his involuntary flinch caused him to hit a sour note.
“Aw, goddamnit!” he thought. “Hell, 1 didn’ wanta make this damn gig in the first place! Sure, the fucking money’s good for tonight, but it ain’t like we do this for a fucking living, for Chrissakes. Besides, it seems kinda like un-American to play for these damn Iranian fuckers; why just last year,
they and the fucking Arabs put that damn embargo on our oil because of a war with Israel that we weren’t even fighting in. Now the fuckers’re all bleeding us dry at the fucking gas pumps and if it keeps up, gas could go sixty, seventy cents a gallon, for God’s sake, even a dollar, maybe.
“God knows, it ain’t often I can agree with Uncle Rupen and John the Greek and their ‘Kill a Turk for Christ’ crap, but God love ’em, they’re the onliest ones voted with me to not do this fucking mosquito gig tonight.
“Hell, anybody with half a brain would know why all the damn girls wanted to come out here tonight. They thought they could get this bunch of rich, foreign doctors so sexed up with the belly-dancing that they’d end up getting some really heavy bread laid on ’em for whoring before they left here. Heh, heh, none of the sluts knew these Iranian bastards was all going to bring their wives and, some of them, their kids, too, with ’em.
“It’s harder to figger why Greg and Mike and Haigh and Al sided with the goddamn broads, unless maybe they thought they all might be able to score some good hash off of these flickers here. Damn ’em, one day they’re gonna get the whole fucking band busted for possession, and that is definitely not the kinda publicity we’re in need of. Lord knows, I’m no goddamn puritan, I blew grass in the ‘Nam, everybody did there, but that there was a completely different situa—what the hell.”
In the midst of his silent monologue, it had seemed for a brief flicker of a moment that the audience—men and women in folding chairs grouped around folding tables, under haphazardly strung Japanese lanterns—had disappeared along with the night itself, to be instantly replaced by another, strangely dressed group, none of them sitting, all standing with solemn expressions on their faces under bright sunlight in some open, grassy place. There had been the cloying reek of heavy incense all about and, at Arsen’s very elbow, a man in jeweled brocade looking every bit as surprised and shocked as Arsen felt.
But even as he exclaimed, it all shifted back from glaring light to near-darkness, from strange and silent people to the crowded tables of raucous, drunken Iranians on a sloping lawn above the Potomac River.
“God damn Mike, anyway!” thought Arsen. “Sitting right behind me, smoking weed and blowing it this way, and I’m getting high. Funny, though, I don’t feel stoned, just hallucinating. … I wonder if that crazy Lebanese bastard has taken to smoking opium, now?”
As he shortly would learn to his sorrow, hallucinogens or narcotics had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter.
A light flashed on her private communications device, and Colonel Dr. Jane Stone depressed one of the switches and said, “Yes, Stone here.”
“Doctor,” a voice came from out the device, “Technic Peterson here. The stolen travel console suddenly reactivated a few moments ago, and we now have a firm lock on it in all dimensions.”
“You follow orders well, Peterson,” the tall, spare woman said, adding, “Hold that lock right where it is and prepare to beam me to the site and time the console presently occupies. Out.”
Arising from behind her painfully neat desk, the woman crossed the spartanly furnished office to a range of lockers, where she removed her indoor uniform and shoes, replacing them with a field-dress coverall, boots, weapons harness, and a small pack. Going on to the end locker, she pressed her thumb into the niche for a print reading, then turned the handle and opened the locker.
After filling certain pockets and pouches with weapons and survival items, some reproduction coins of gold, silver, and copper, a water-purification set, and a supply of food-energy briquettes, she reconsidered for a moment, then added a medium-sized medical kit to her pack.
“Those traitorous bastards would not be trying to come back, knowing just what they’re in for here, unless one or both of them are seriously injured or deathly ill, and I would not want either of them to die before I can get them back here to first answer for their crimes against the state, then undergo thorough reeducation. I might even take a leave of absence from here just for the purpose of overseeing the reeducation of Dr. Emmett O’Malley!”
The colonel doctor still seethed when she thought back on how the handsome, smooth-talking, lying bastard had wormed his way into her affections, won her very real love, then used her and her position to set his subversive schemes into motion. She and her intelligence network had gotten onto O’Malley and Dr. Kenmore Harold early on, of course, but they had all feigned complete ignorance just to see how far the two would go in their treasonous activities. And she and the network had waited, it developed, just a little too long to arrest the pair of traitors.
Less than two months ago, during the President’s Birthday Holidays, O’Malley and Harold, feigning a state of inebriation, had crossed over from the residence complex to this one by way of the subriverine railway, assaulted a guard, entered the room housing the time-travel projection equipment, and activated it.
“The activation, of course, set off a silent alarm I had had installed as soon as I was made aware of O’Malley’s treachery,” the colonel doctor mused. “But before I could get down here to the operations level from my quarters, they had gotten everything set, had the projector on automatic, and before 1 could stun them down, they were gone to who knows where.
“The cagey scum must have switched off the console Immediately they arrived at wherever/ whenever, for our attempts to track it with the computer have been fruitless and burned up so much of our allotment of energy that we had to stop the search. It wasn’t until last week when they apparently tried to use that console to project one of the labs to wherever/whenever that I was able to convince the board of the real danger of allowing them to remain at large with our equipment.
“But now they’ve done it right. The equipment has been turned on and left on; otherwise our rotating scanner couldn’t have picked it up just now. And I’ll get them and bring them back. And I’ll see the bastards broken in every conceivable way. I just hope that I, personally, can wangle control of the breaking of Dr. Emmett O’Malley.”
The last item she took from its rack in the locker was a heavy-duty shoulder-model heat-stun weapon and a pouch of spare power units for the device. With the familiarity of long usage, she retracted the folding shoulder stock, then clipped the weapon to her harness so that it hung muzzle down with the handgrip close to the normal hang of her hand, easy to swing up and use, should the occasion demand.