Colony, page 28
“You gonna neutron-bomb us, aint’cha? Kill everybody in the cities but save the buildings. Once we start the uprisin’, boom!”
Garrison shook his head. “No neutron bombs. The World Government dismantled the last of them years ago. I’m not going to try to stop you. Go ahead and start slaughtering the whites. See how far you get.”
“You’re white, man. You’re gonna be part of the massacre.”
“We’ll see about that... boy.”
“Yeah,” Leo said, his voice a jungle cat’s rumble now. “We’ll see.”
His image faded and the screen went blank.
Garrison stared at the empty screen for a moment, then stabbed at the keyboard again. “Arlene,” he called, “we go Tuesday.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Is tomorrow Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
“Then get with it! Tell Cobb, and tell him yourself. Speak directly to him. Tell him to have Cylinder B ready for us. Is my whole art collection ready to go?”
“Has been for a week.”
“Send it now, tonight. And get word to the other Board members. We meet here tomorrow at noon and go straight to the colony; no stopover at Alpha or anywhere else. Whoever isn’t here at noon will have to make his own arrangements.”
“Some of the Board won’t be able to get here by noon tomorrow,” Arlene’s voice answered. “Sheikh al-Hashimi is all the way over...”
“You tell him and the others to get their asses up to Island One tomorrow. The shit hits the fan Thursday!”
~~~
BOOK FOUR
November, 2028 A.D.
World Population: 7.33 Billion
~~~
Mankind cannot afford to wait for change to occur spontaneously and fortunately. Rather, man must initiate on his own changes of necessary but tolerable magnitude in time to avert intolerable massive [and destructive] change. A strategy for such change can be evolved only in the spirit of truly global cooperation, shaped in free partnership by the world's diverse regional communities and guided by a rational master plan for long-term organized growth. All our computer simulations have shown quite clearly that this is the only sensible and feasible approach to avoid major repeated and untimely global catastrophes and that the time that can be wasted before developing a global world system is running out. Clearly, the only alternatives are division and conflict, hate and destruction.
—Mesarovic and Pestel,
Mankind at the Turning Point,
The Second Club of Rome Report, Reader's Digest Press, 1974
~~~
TWENTY-EIGHT
As the airliner circled the gray-brown smog dome over New York City, David thought of the ironies of his past three months.
It had taken him a couple of days to travel the quarter-million-mile distances between Island One and the Moon, and from the Moon to Earth. But it had taken more than three months to cover slightly more than five thousand miles from Argentina to New York. And still he was an ocean away from his original destination.
He grinned to himself ruefully. I was closer to Messina at Space Station Alpha than I am now.
Traveling through the emptiness of space had been easy. But making headway on Earth, where David was a fugitive—that was very difficult.
Technically, he was also a prisoner. He stayed with Bahjat as she contacted a seemingly inexhaustible succession of PRU rebels. Most of them were as young as David and she herself, but a surprising number were older. One thing many of them had in common: they were poor. Penniless, most of them. Hungry, hollow-eyed, and angry.
They lied and stole, bartered for horses here and a boat there, forged credentials for the pair of them, shared their dingy homes and even darker hideouts—caves, cellars, church lofts, stables. They were all ready to help the renowned Scheherazade and her prisoner from Island One.
Some of the guerrillas were financially well off, enough to keep Bahjat supplied with enough money to survive.
“Why are they revolutionaries?” David would ask her. “What are they rebeling against?”
“They are like me,” Bahjat would inevitably reply. “They fight against injustice.”
David wondered.
He was hardly ever alone with her. But when he was, contrary to her chosen name, Scheherazade became a listener, not a talker. She got David to talk about himself, his life, his studies, about Island One. She would sit with him for hours—on a train, on the backs of pack mules, aboard a fisherman’s blacked-out night-running boat—and listen to him talk, smiling encouragingly. David knew she was pumping him for information about Island One, but he didn’t care. He also knew there was more to it. She cares about me as an individual, he thought. I know she does.
And he began to care about her.
It was a strange relationship that grew between them: friends, yet opponents; fugitives racing for a goal that neither of them fully comprehended, each hoping to find safety at the end of their journey; each afraid that safety for one meant mortal danger for the other. They lived together week after week, never out of each other’s sight, caring for each other, helping each other, trusting each other with life itself—yet they were not lovers. They hadn’t even kissed.
They seldom slept without others nearby, usually in the same room. And when they did—out on a hillside trail in Ecuador, in an abandoned gasoline station on a ghost highway in Mexico, in an alley near the docks of Galveston—they were too exhausted to see if their friendship could include physical lovemaking.
But it included something else, something that grew subtly between them. David knew that he could rely on Bahjat. And she knew that she could rely on him. They were partners. Maybe that’s more important than being lovers, David thought. It’s certainly more unusual.
They aimed for New York, on the telephoned instructions of the PRU leader she called Tiger. David didn’t argue. There was a World Government headquarters in New York, near the site of the old United Nations building.
They had traveled by foot from the Indian village in the Peruvian Andes until a friendly truck driver picked them up. Once in a town with communications, Bahjat found PRU friends and helpers. They dyed David’s blond hair and the shaggy beard that curled around his face. They darkened his skin. Now he and Bahjat looked like a young Latin American couple, at least superficially.
The two of them rode on horseback, on pack mules, in a stolen sailboat, in fishing smacks, on trains and buses, and even once in a stolen limousine. They went through Ecuador, by sea to Panama, across the crumbled and useless canal, through steaming jungles into Mexico, and finally—with forged credentials—past the heavily armed immigration and customs inspectors at the Rio Grande.
Through it all, David watched the people of Earth, his kinfolk, watched and learned.
He learned that hunger was not only painful, but it could affect the way you thought. It could teach you to hate.
In Panama he learned that World Government officials could be bribed; in Galveston he learned that agents of the multinational corporations couldn’t be.
In New Orleans, David learned that he could trust no one, not even professed revolutionaries.
The leader of the PRU cell there was older than most, a broad-shouldered former longshoreman, over thirty, who mumbled about the battle that he was preparing for—an uprising that would involve not merely the whole city of New Orleans, but many other cities, as well.
His name was Brandy, and his face had been broken and scarred in hundreds of dockside fights. He drank hard, smoked continuously, and talked too much. But when he looked at Bahjat, David quickly noticed, he stopped talking and his face grew thoughtful, scheming.
After an all-night session of drinking, planning, and smoking, Brandy decided that he and his two closest aides would sell David to the Garrison Corporation. He calmly announced this to David as they sat in a smoke-filled, beersmelling upstairs room over a street-corner church near the old quarter of New Orleans.
Brandy’s two aides were in the room with Bahjat and David and their leader. They grinned at David’s shocked surprise.
“We’ll keep you with us,” Brandy told Scheherazade. “We’ll have a lot of fun with you.”
With a strength David didn’t realize was in him, he picked the closest man up off the floor and hurled him through the flimsy door that led to the stairs. It splintered and he went crashing down the steps. The second man lunged at David with a knife, but he never got close. David shattered his breastbone with a karate kick.
He whirled to deal with Brandy and saw that the leader was on his knees, doubled over and holding his crotch, vomiting with pain. Bahjat stood over him, tiny fists clenched, teeth bared.
Bahjat wanted to run then, but with newfound cunning David used the knife he picked up from the grimy floor to convince Brandy that he should phone a bank and set aside a sizable credit account for Mr. and Mrs. Able. As the point of the knife touched his eyelid, Brandy agreed.
Then they ran—as far as an all-night computerized bank terminal, where they had the entire amount of credit transferred to them as a cashier’s check made out to cash.
Then they walked into the best hotel in New Orleans, registered as Señor and Señora Pizarro, and, with Bahjat speaking nothing but Spanish, were wafted up to their suite by a real, live, uniformed bellman.
The room clerk shook his head as they went to the elevator. Another pair of scruffy-looking spicks, he grumbled to himself. Where the hell do they get the money? I can't afford to stay here!
The hotel room had two beds. David let Bahjat luxuriate in the shower as he paced the thick carpeting, wondering what to do about her. She came out with a towel wrapped modestly around her petite body. David showered very quickly, but by the time he came back into the bedroom, also towel-wrapped, she was already in the farther bed with her back turned to him.
He sat on the edge of her bed. Without turning toward him, Bahjat said, “Please, David... I know what you want. I can’t... I just can’t.”
He sat on the edge of the bed for a long while, then got up, leaned over, kissed her bare shoulder, and went to the other bed. Despite his expectations, he fell asleep almost immediately.
The next morning, Mr. and Mrs. Pizarro bought a pair of airline tickets for New York, after Bahjat had a long phone conversation with Naples.
“Tiger is heading for New York,” she told David. “We are to meet him there.”
David nodded. Tiger was guiding her. They would meet in New York and she would turn David over to the PRU leader. You don’t make love with your prisoners, I guess, he thought bitterly.
Evelyn sat in the sun on the balcony of her hotel room. Barbados was a beautiful island, rich with lush tropical greenery that climbed the rugged mountains and filled the air with an exotic, pungent scent. The sky was a flaming orange, the sea glittering in the high sun. Breakers softly rolled up onto the white sand beach off in the distance.
But the city surrounding the hotel festered like an open sore in the hot sun. Hollow-cheeked children played listlessly in the streets and the rubble-strewn open lot across the street, where tourists had once parked their rental cars. There were no tourists now. The whole island was sinking into bottomless poverty. No jobs, except the pathetically few make work projects put in by the World Government. Plenty of hunger, though. And lots of babies. Like Hamelin’s rats, Evelyn thought. Babies everywhere.
Gaunt-faced, bloat-bellied babies. Not one of them looked healthy.
With a toss of her head, Evelyn tried to dismiss the troubles of Barbados from her mind. You’ve got the inside track on the biggest story of the century, she reminded herself briefly. This is no time to go squishy and sentimental, old girl.
Hamoud had been keeping in contact with Scheherazade through intermediaries. And David was with the PRU woman. They were leading everyone a merry chase. They had gotten as far as New Orleans, but that was the last Hamoud had heard from her. He was out now, trying to reestablish contact.
In the meantime, Evelyn was learning how the Peoples’ Revolutionary Underground worked. Hamoud had not let her out of his sight for more than a few hours since he had picked her up at that bar in Naples months earlier. But this meant that he was constantly under Evelyn’s scrutiny, too.
She had quickly discovered what he really wanted: fame. Notoriety. Publicity. He wanted the headlines that Scheherazade got. Now he had his own personal media specialist, his own publicist. And his own one-woman harem. Evelyn realized that his male ego could only really be satisfied in bed.
At least he's inventive, she thought, grimacing. A few more weeks and I’ll be able to start a new career—training call girls.
Hamoud thought of himself as domineering, but Evelyn had learned long ago that the way to truly rule a male is to let him think you’re totally submissive. So she gritted her teeth and gave him the anal pleasures he desired, and anything else, besides. She learned a lot about how to use furniture, especially chairs that were solid enough to hold their thrusting, contorting bodies. One thing she insisted on: cleanliness. They showered before they fucked—Evelyn couldn’t think of what they did as lovemaking. Hamoud seemed to enjoy having her soap his body and make panting noises over his penis.
He talked in bed. Never very much. He was not a man given to many words. But Evelyn learned enough, bit by bit, to start to piece together the big picture of the PRU. Within a couple of weeks she had learned enough to decipher what he was saying over the phones, no matter how guardedly he spoke.
She wasn’t surprised when she learned that much of the PRU’s financing came from the multinational corporations. It made sense. Both the guerrillas and the big corporations wanted to pull down the World Government.
Digging deeper, she began to learn just which corporations were involved. The names were kept very secret, but Island One Corporation kept popping up, and more than once she heard names such as al-Hashimi and Garrison. T. Hunter Garrison, her reporter’s memory told her, of Garrison Enterprises. And Wilbur St. Damnation George!
Stretched out on the recliner to let the Barbados sun soak her tired body, Evelyn still burned inwardly at the thought of St. George. No wonder he had fired her from International News. She had been sent to Island One to snoop on Cobb, she realized now, and had come back instead with a story that the Board would never allow to be published.
The door to the hotel room opened and clicked shut. Evelyn sat up in the recliner and saw Hamoud standing in the middle of the room, the usual scowl on his dark, brooding face.
She got to her feet and walked in from the balcony.
“That’s a new swimsuit,” he said.
“It’s not for swimming; it’s too fragile. Fall off in a minute.”
He seemed unmoved. “Where did you get it?”
“In one of the shops. It was dirt-cheap.”
“When?”
“A few days ago.” Evelyn made herself smile. She shrugged out of the halter. “Do you like it better topless?”
Hamoud smiled tightly. “It’s an improvement.”
She pulled the briefs off her hips and stepped out of them. “You prefer nothing at all, don’t you?”
“We don’t have time,” he said. “We are leaving inside of an hour.”
“Oh? What’s happened? Where are we going?”
He shook his head. “Too many questions.”
Stepping close enough to him so that her nipples brushed his open shirt, she murmured, “We have some time, don’t we?”
He laid his heavy hands on her hips. “No time for a shower.”
Running a fingertip across his stubbly chin, she said, “But we could do it in the shower. It’s very nice in there. You’d like it.”
With a grunt, Hamoud slid an arm around her waist and headed for the bathroom.
As Evelyn bent to turn the taps in the tub, she asked, “Will my clothes be all right for where we’re going? I don’t have anything except a few summer frocks and such.”
“You’ll need a coat in New York. We’ll get it there.”
She frowned to herself. So it's New York. That's where we’ll meet them. She had the answer she wanted. But now she still had to go through with the damned shower she had promised him.
Sitting comfortably in the airliner, wearing clothes that had been stolen in Mexico City and carrying I.D. cards that had been forged in Galveston, his beard neatly trimmed, his hair and skin dark, David sat back and waited for the plane to land. He was wolf-lean now, the easy sleekness of Island One burned away by months of hunger and danger. Wolf-alert, too. He had learned how to sleep lightly.
He thought for a moment of Evelyn. She wanted me to see the real world, he recalled, looking down at his brown-stained hands. They were toughened, calloused. I wonder if she's seen half of what I have.
Bahjat was sitting beside him, drowsing. She looked so fragile, vulnerable. Her long black hair cascaded over her slim shoulders. Her full lips were slightly parted.
But we're enemies, David reminded himself. Once we get to New York she'll turn me over to her PRU friends. And I'll make a break for the World Government offices.
Their months of closeness, of sharing mutual danger, sharing their lives and facing death together—all that was over. That's why she didn't want to make love with me last night, he told himself.
And that was why he did, he knew.
The plane finally touched down after a long delay of circling over the smog dome that hovered over New York. David shuffled along with the murmuring crowd exiting the airliner, with Bahjat directly behind him. She had warned him that other PRU people would be stationed inside the terminal building, watching him to make certain he didn’t try to run away.
As they stepped out of the access tube and into the terminal building’s gate area, David deliberately reached for Bahjat’s hand. She let him hold it.
Except for the seventy-odd passengers from their own flight, David saw no other travelers walking through the littered, filthy terminal. A few planes were parked outside the cracked, grease-stained windows, but they seemed unattended, lifeless.
Garrison shook his head. “No neutron bombs. The World Government dismantled the last of them years ago. I’m not going to try to stop you. Go ahead and start slaughtering the whites. See how far you get.”
“You’re white, man. You’re gonna be part of the massacre.”
“We’ll see about that... boy.”
“Yeah,” Leo said, his voice a jungle cat’s rumble now. “We’ll see.”
His image faded and the screen went blank.
Garrison stared at the empty screen for a moment, then stabbed at the keyboard again. “Arlene,” he called, “we go Tuesday.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Is tomorrow Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
“Then get with it! Tell Cobb, and tell him yourself. Speak directly to him. Tell him to have Cylinder B ready for us. Is my whole art collection ready to go?”
“Has been for a week.”
“Send it now, tonight. And get word to the other Board members. We meet here tomorrow at noon and go straight to the colony; no stopover at Alpha or anywhere else. Whoever isn’t here at noon will have to make his own arrangements.”
“Some of the Board won’t be able to get here by noon tomorrow,” Arlene’s voice answered. “Sheikh al-Hashimi is all the way over...”
“You tell him and the others to get their asses up to Island One tomorrow. The shit hits the fan Thursday!”
~~~
BOOK FOUR
November, 2028 A.D.
World Population: 7.33 Billion
~~~
Mankind cannot afford to wait for change to occur spontaneously and fortunately. Rather, man must initiate on his own changes of necessary but tolerable magnitude in time to avert intolerable massive [and destructive] change. A strategy for such change can be evolved only in the spirit of truly global cooperation, shaped in free partnership by the world's diverse regional communities and guided by a rational master plan for long-term organized growth. All our computer simulations have shown quite clearly that this is the only sensible and feasible approach to avoid major repeated and untimely global catastrophes and that the time that can be wasted before developing a global world system is running out. Clearly, the only alternatives are division and conflict, hate and destruction.
—Mesarovic and Pestel,
Mankind at the Turning Point,
The Second Club of Rome Report, Reader's Digest Press, 1974
~~~
TWENTY-EIGHT
As the airliner circled the gray-brown smog dome over New York City, David thought of the ironies of his past three months.
It had taken him a couple of days to travel the quarter-million-mile distances between Island One and the Moon, and from the Moon to Earth. But it had taken more than three months to cover slightly more than five thousand miles from Argentina to New York. And still he was an ocean away from his original destination.
He grinned to himself ruefully. I was closer to Messina at Space Station Alpha than I am now.
Traveling through the emptiness of space had been easy. But making headway on Earth, where David was a fugitive—that was very difficult.
Technically, he was also a prisoner. He stayed with Bahjat as she contacted a seemingly inexhaustible succession of PRU rebels. Most of them were as young as David and she herself, but a surprising number were older. One thing many of them had in common: they were poor. Penniless, most of them. Hungry, hollow-eyed, and angry.
They lied and stole, bartered for horses here and a boat there, forged credentials for the pair of them, shared their dingy homes and even darker hideouts—caves, cellars, church lofts, stables. They were all ready to help the renowned Scheherazade and her prisoner from Island One.
Some of the guerrillas were financially well off, enough to keep Bahjat supplied with enough money to survive.
“Why are they revolutionaries?” David would ask her. “What are they rebeling against?”
“They are like me,” Bahjat would inevitably reply. “They fight against injustice.”
David wondered.
He was hardly ever alone with her. But when he was, contrary to her chosen name, Scheherazade became a listener, not a talker. She got David to talk about himself, his life, his studies, about Island One. She would sit with him for hours—on a train, on the backs of pack mules, aboard a fisherman’s blacked-out night-running boat—and listen to him talk, smiling encouragingly. David knew she was pumping him for information about Island One, but he didn’t care. He also knew there was more to it. She cares about me as an individual, he thought. I know she does.
And he began to care about her.
It was a strange relationship that grew between them: friends, yet opponents; fugitives racing for a goal that neither of them fully comprehended, each hoping to find safety at the end of their journey; each afraid that safety for one meant mortal danger for the other. They lived together week after week, never out of each other’s sight, caring for each other, helping each other, trusting each other with life itself—yet they were not lovers. They hadn’t even kissed.
They seldom slept without others nearby, usually in the same room. And when they did—out on a hillside trail in Ecuador, in an abandoned gasoline station on a ghost highway in Mexico, in an alley near the docks of Galveston—they were too exhausted to see if their friendship could include physical lovemaking.
But it included something else, something that grew subtly between them. David knew that he could rely on Bahjat. And she knew that she could rely on him. They were partners. Maybe that’s more important than being lovers, David thought. It’s certainly more unusual.
They aimed for New York, on the telephoned instructions of the PRU leader she called Tiger. David didn’t argue. There was a World Government headquarters in New York, near the site of the old United Nations building.
They had traveled by foot from the Indian village in the Peruvian Andes until a friendly truck driver picked them up. Once in a town with communications, Bahjat found PRU friends and helpers. They dyed David’s blond hair and the shaggy beard that curled around his face. They darkened his skin. Now he and Bahjat looked like a young Latin American couple, at least superficially.
The two of them rode on horseback, on pack mules, in a stolen sailboat, in fishing smacks, on trains and buses, and even once in a stolen limousine. They went through Ecuador, by sea to Panama, across the crumbled and useless canal, through steaming jungles into Mexico, and finally—with forged credentials—past the heavily armed immigration and customs inspectors at the Rio Grande.
Through it all, David watched the people of Earth, his kinfolk, watched and learned.
He learned that hunger was not only painful, but it could affect the way you thought. It could teach you to hate.
In Panama he learned that World Government officials could be bribed; in Galveston he learned that agents of the multinational corporations couldn’t be.
In New Orleans, David learned that he could trust no one, not even professed revolutionaries.
The leader of the PRU cell there was older than most, a broad-shouldered former longshoreman, over thirty, who mumbled about the battle that he was preparing for—an uprising that would involve not merely the whole city of New Orleans, but many other cities, as well.
His name was Brandy, and his face had been broken and scarred in hundreds of dockside fights. He drank hard, smoked continuously, and talked too much. But when he looked at Bahjat, David quickly noticed, he stopped talking and his face grew thoughtful, scheming.
After an all-night session of drinking, planning, and smoking, Brandy decided that he and his two closest aides would sell David to the Garrison Corporation. He calmly announced this to David as they sat in a smoke-filled, beersmelling upstairs room over a street-corner church near the old quarter of New Orleans.
Brandy’s two aides were in the room with Bahjat and David and their leader. They grinned at David’s shocked surprise.
“We’ll keep you with us,” Brandy told Scheherazade. “We’ll have a lot of fun with you.”
With a strength David didn’t realize was in him, he picked the closest man up off the floor and hurled him through the flimsy door that led to the stairs. It splintered and he went crashing down the steps. The second man lunged at David with a knife, but he never got close. David shattered his breastbone with a karate kick.
He whirled to deal with Brandy and saw that the leader was on his knees, doubled over and holding his crotch, vomiting with pain. Bahjat stood over him, tiny fists clenched, teeth bared.
Bahjat wanted to run then, but with newfound cunning David used the knife he picked up from the grimy floor to convince Brandy that he should phone a bank and set aside a sizable credit account for Mr. and Mrs. Able. As the point of the knife touched his eyelid, Brandy agreed.
Then they ran—as far as an all-night computerized bank terminal, where they had the entire amount of credit transferred to them as a cashier’s check made out to cash.
Then they walked into the best hotel in New Orleans, registered as Señor and Señora Pizarro, and, with Bahjat speaking nothing but Spanish, were wafted up to their suite by a real, live, uniformed bellman.
The room clerk shook his head as they went to the elevator. Another pair of scruffy-looking spicks, he grumbled to himself. Where the hell do they get the money? I can't afford to stay here!
The hotel room had two beds. David let Bahjat luxuriate in the shower as he paced the thick carpeting, wondering what to do about her. She came out with a towel wrapped modestly around her petite body. David showered very quickly, but by the time he came back into the bedroom, also towel-wrapped, she was already in the farther bed with her back turned to him.
He sat on the edge of her bed. Without turning toward him, Bahjat said, “Please, David... I know what you want. I can’t... I just can’t.”
He sat on the edge of the bed for a long while, then got up, leaned over, kissed her bare shoulder, and went to the other bed. Despite his expectations, he fell asleep almost immediately.
The next morning, Mr. and Mrs. Pizarro bought a pair of airline tickets for New York, after Bahjat had a long phone conversation with Naples.
“Tiger is heading for New York,” she told David. “We are to meet him there.”
David nodded. Tiger was guiding her. They would meet in New York and she would turn David over to the PRU leader. You don’t make love with your prisoners, I guess, he thought bitterly.
Evelyn sat in the sun on the balcony of her hotel room. Barbados was a beautiful island, rich with lush tropical greenery that climbed the rugged mountains and filled the air with an exotic, pungent scent. The sky was a flaming orange, the sea glittering in the high sun. Breakers softly rolled up onto the white sand beach off in the distance.
But the city surrounding the hotel festered like an open sore in the hot sun. Hollow-cheeked children played listlessly in the streets and the rubble-strewn open lot across the street, where tourists had once parked their rental cars. There were no tourists now. The whole island was sinking into bottomless poverty. No jobs, except the pathetically few make work projects put in by the World Government. Plenty of hunger, though. And lots of babies. Like Hamelin’s rats, Evelyn thought. Babies everywhere.
Gaunt-faced, bloat-bellied babies. Not one of them looked healthy.
With a toss of her head, Evelyn tried to dismiss the troubles of Barbados from her mind. You’ve got the inside track on the biggest story of the century, she reminded herself briefly. This is no time to go squishy and sentimental, old girl.
Hamoud had been keeping in contact with Scheherazade through intermediaries. And David was with the PRU woman. They were leading everyone a merry chase. They had gotten as far as New Orleans, but that was the last Hamoud had heard from her. He was out now, trying to reestablish contact.
In the meantime, Evelyn was learning how the Peoples’ Revolutionary Underground worked. Hamoud had not let her out of his sight for more than a few hours since he had picked her up at that bar in Naples months earlier. But this meant that he was constantly under Evelyn’s scrutiny, too.
She had quickly discovered what he really wanted: fame. Notoriety. Publicity. He wanted the headlines that Scheherazade got. Now he had his own personal media specialist, his own publicist. And his own one-woman harem. Evelyn realized that his male ego could only really be satisfied in bed.
At least he's inventive, she thought, grimacing. A few more weeks and I’ll be able to start a new career—training call girls.
Hamoud thought of himself as domineering, but Evelyn had learned long ago that the way to truly rule a male is to let him think you’re totally submissive. So she gritted her teeth and gave him the anal pleasures he desired, and anything else, besides. She learned a lot about how to use furniture, especially chairs that were solid enough to hold their thrusting, contorting bodies. One thing she insisted on: cleanliness. They showered before they fucked—Evelyn couldn’t think of what they did as lovemaking. Hamoud seemed to enjoy having her soap his body and make panting noises over his penis.
He talked in bed. Never very much. He was not a man given to many words. But Evelyn learned enough, bit by bit, to start to piece together the big picture of the PRU. Within a couple of weeks she had learned enough to decipher what he was saying over the phones, no matter how guardedly he spoke.
She wasn’t surprised when she learned that much of the PRU’s financing came from the multinational corporations. It made sense. Both the guerrillas and the big corporations wanted to pull down the World Government.
Digging deeper, she began to learn just which corporations were involved. The names were kept very secret, but Island One Corporation kept popping up, and more than once she heard names such as al-Hashimi and Garrison. T. Hunter Garrison, her reporter’s memory told her, of Garrison Enterprises. And Wilbur St. Damnation George!
Stretched out on the recliner to let the Barbados sun soak her tired body, Evelyn still burned inwardly at the thought of St. George. No wonder he had fired her from International News. She had been sent to Island One to snoop on Cobb, she realized now, and had come back instead with a story that the Board would never allow to be published.
The door to the hotel room opened and clicked shut. Evelyn sat up in the recliner and saw Hamoud standing in the middle of the room, the usual scowl on his dark, brooding face.
She got to her feet and walked in from the balcony.
“That’s a new swimsuit,” he said.
“It’s not for swimming; it’s too fragile. Fall off in a minute.”
He seemed unmoved. “Where did you get it?”
“In one of the shops. It was dirt-cheap.”
“When?”
“A few days ago.” Evelyn made herself smile. She shrugged out of the halter. “Do you like it better topless?”
Hamoud smiled tightly. “It’s an improvement.”
She pulled the briefs off her hips and stepped out of them. “You prefer nothing at all, don’t you?”
“We don’t have time,” he said. “We are leaving inside of an hour.”
“Oh? What’s happened? Where are we going?”
He shook his head. “Too many questions.”
Stepping close enough to him so that her nipples brushed his open shirt, she murmured, “We have some time, don’t we?”
He laid his heavy hands on her hips. “No time for a shower.”
Running a fingertip across his stubbly chin, she said, “But we could do it in the shower. It’s very nice in there. You’d like it.”
With a grunt, Hamoud slid an arm around her waist and headed for the bathroom.
As Evelyn bent to turn the taps in the tub, she asked, “Will my clothes be all right for where we’re going? I don’t have anything except a few summer frocks and such.”
“You’ll need a coat in New York. We’ll get it there.”
She frowned to herself. So it's New York. That's where we’ll meet them. She had the answer she wanted. But now she still had to go through with the damned shower she had promised him.
Sitting comfortably in the airliner, wearing clothes that had been stolen in Mexico City and carrying I.D. cards that had been forged in Galveston, his beard neatly trimmed, his hair and skin dark, David sat back and waited for the plane to land. He was wolf-lean now, the easy sleekness of Island One burned away by months of hunger and danger. Wolf-alert, too. He had learned how to sleep lightly.
He thought for a moment of Evelyn. She wanted me to see the real world, he recalled, looking down at his brown-stained hands. They were toughened, calloused. I wonder if she's seen half of what I have.
Bahjat was sitting beside him, drowsing. She looked so fragile, vulnerable. Her long black hair cascaded over her slim shoulders. Her full lips were slightly parted.
But we're enemies, David reminded himself. Once we get to New York she'll turn me over to her PRU friends. And I'll make a break for the World Government offices.
Their months of closeness, of sharing mutual danger, sharing their lives and facing death together—all that was over. That's why she didn't want to make love with me last night, he told himself.
And that was why he did, he knew.
The plane finally touched down after a long delay of circling over the smog dome that hovered over New York. David shuffled along with the murmuring crowd exiting the airliner, with Bahjat directly behind him. She had warned him that other PRU people would be stationed inside the terminal building, watching him to make certain he didn’t try to run away.
As they stepped out of the access tube and into the terminal building’s gate area, David deliberately reached for Bahjat’s hand. She let him hold it.
Except for the seventy-odd passengers from their own flight, David saw no other travelers walking through the littered, filthy terminal. A few planes were parked outside the cracked, grease-stained windows, but they seemed unattended, lifeless.
