“Yeah, I just feel like shit. Dizzy.” He had started breathing fast and shallowly. “They don’t keep enough oxygen in the air here, y’know?” He swallowed convulsively, leaned away from Tommy and vomited on a guard’s boots.

  The man shouted angrily but didn’t hit Ben, just moved away when Koshan said something to him.

  “How did you do that?” I asked, impressed.

  “Do what?”

  “Persuade him not to beat Ben up.” I’d have been pretty ticked off if those had been my shoes.

  “Oh. I just told him that the American has altitude sickness and that hitting him would probably make him throw up again.”

  “Oh.” Altitude sickness? That sounded a lot better than concussion, which was what I’d been worrying about; he might have been hit on the head back when I vanished briefly. “That’s not so bad, then. I mean, he’ll get better as soon as we go down into a valley, right?”

  Koshan sniffed the air. “I would guess that we are about twenty-five hundred feet above sea level, here. And in this part of the country,” he said, “the valleys are at least two thousand feet above sea level.”

  “I’m guessing that would be a no.”

  “And if we keep going this direction, we will have to go over the Gundiz pass. And on the far side of that are the high valleys at four thousand feet.”

  “That high… You’re sure?”

  He gave me a pitying look. “I grew up there. Why do you think somebody with a degree from the University of Merzadeh is working as a guide to high country trekkers? Being a native Pamiri turns out to be a better job qualification than a degree in psychology.”

  “But… he’ll acclimatize, right?” Ben’s breathing was beginning to scare me.

  “Maybe.” Koshan put an arm around my shoulders, then apologized to Penny for the fact that his hand had brushed her neck. Our present arrangement didn’t allow for a lot of privacy. “Thalia, I will try to persuade them to leave Ben at the next village. I will tell them that it’s simple murder to force a man who’s this sick into the high Pamirs.”

  He didn’t sound too confident, and I didn’t feel optimistic myself. We had, after all, been treated to a graphic demonstration of the fact that Hormuz Rakhim had no objections to murder. All I could hope was that if he still wanted American support, he must realize that killing an American wouldn’t help.

  But then, taking five Americans hostage – six if you counted Ryan, which I certainly did – indicated a certain lack of interest in State Department opinion.

  I listened to Ben gasping for breath.

  After a while, Ryan Nicholson began crying again. It was a thin, miserable wail in comparison to his earlier cries, and he kept stopping to cough. George did what he could, including contorting himself so that Ryan could at least lean on Penny, even if her bound hands kept her from comforting him. Koshan crooned the Taklan song he’d been singing to Ryan on the plane, but nothing settled the baby for more than a few moments.

  “Does he have any heart valve problems?” he asked Penny.

  She gasped. “How did you know? The doctor said it probably wouldn’t give him any real difficulty, he might have trouble with some sports but it wasn’t bad enough to put him through an operation at his age.”

  Koshan waited until she was fully occupied with Ryan before speaking again. “People with heart complications,” he said, very quietly, “are more likely to suffer from altitude sickness, and it is more likely to cause them… grave consequences.”

  I didn’t have to ask for clarification. He meant, more likely to kill them.

  I listened to Ben’s rapid, shallow gasping and wondered if he had a “minor” heart problem that he’d never mentioned.

  It was almost dark when the truck finally pulled up in front of a cluster of flat-roofed houses. Two young women came out, smiling. One of them held a basket of bread.

  “My people,” Koshan said proudly, “we Pamiris, we hold hospitality sacred. All visitors we welcome with bread and salt – even these.” His tone expressed utter contempt for Rakhim and his accomplices.

  He listened to Rakhim’s demands. The tone was calm, even polite, but even I could tell that he was issuing orders, not making requests. “We stay here tonight,” he said. “He demands the villagers vacate one house for him and the rest of us. They are not happy about it, but it is not a fighting matter; they simply feel that he is rude and uncultured.”

  By the time we had been untied and shoved into a hastily vacated house on the outskirts of the village, Ben’s every breath ended in a hacking cough. Ryan had cried himself into exhaustion after vomiting the fruit bar all over George’s shirt, but he kept waking himself up with coughing and gasping. All of us looked exhausted in the flickering light of the single petroleum lamp we’d been given, but Ben looked like a corpse.

  “Koshan,” I asked, “do you know the name of this village?”

  He looked slightly offended. “Of course I do. This is Tireza.”

  I borrowed a pen from George and scribbled the name on the cuff of Ben’s shirtsleeve. I was getting terribly worried about him.

  “Ben, can you take yourself and Ryan to Merzadeh?” I asked, as quietly as I could.

  He looked blank. “Wha’?”

  “Brouwer teleport?”

  “Uh…”

  “Cerebral edema,” said Koshan behind me. “His brain is swelling.” That cut my options down to exactly one.

  “Not a good sign,” I said, “he already had too much brain for his own good.” I could crack a joke about it because suddenly I wasn’t conflicted. There was only one thing to do, and I was going to do it. I turned to Penny. “Let me take Ryan for a moment.”

  With the baby’s head against my shoulder, I wrapped my free arm around Ben’s waist and pictured the apartment in Merzadeh.

  The smoky darkness of the mountain hut changed into the clear, clean darkness of the in-between. My stars spiraled us along bright lines and sharp turns and impossibly convoluted surfaces, all the long dark way to Merzadeh. The three of us slid from a crumpled, mountainous surface to the smooth flatness of an apartment floor, from cold moonlight to the warm light of electric lamps.

  Brad was there, asleep with his head on the dining room table. I didn’t see Gary or Sheng. I pushed Ben into a chair.

  Brad startled awake with our arrival. “Thalia? How—”

  If I gave myself time to think before returning, it was going to break my heart. I set Ryan down on the table. “These two need a clinic. Immediately.” I pulled Ben’s cuff down so the writing was obvious. “This is where we are tonight.”

  I didn’t even dare wait to kiss him good-bye; he might have tried to keep me with him. The stars swirled from my empty hand and carried me back into the in-between.

  It seemed possible that my heart was going to break anyway.

  21. All the help he could get

  It had been a hellish day. Lensky hadn’t been able to think of anything to do but hang around the embassy waiting to get word and making a nuisance of himself. Couldn’t our own radar systems track one small plane? Ok, not from America, but hadn’t we given the Pakistanis some excellent radar equipment to sweeten the latest deal with India? Well, yes, there were some rather high mountains in the way… What about satellite imagery?

  At this point the Deputy Chief of Mission drafted him to help a driver who was being sent over to the Taklanistan Royale to collect random Americans stranded by the earthquake and the renewed hostilities. He was not entirely surprised to find Jennifer McAusland at the wheel of the minibus.

  “What’s my role in this mission?” he asked. “Prayer?”

  “If you like. But I’d prefer you stayed ready to shoot anybody who tries to stop us.”

  Based on his previous experience being driven by McAusland, Lensky felt only sympathy for anyone who actually got in her way. But the situation had already deteriorated. Instead of policemen at barricades, now they had to deal with rioters who, whenever they recognized the driver of the minibus as a foreign woman, threw rocks and bottles at them. Lensky emptied one clip from the Glock at a knot of such protestors who had turned their bottles into Molotov cocktails. That was at the corner of Akbaital Street. After McAusland made the turn onto the commercial street with her usual lack of regard for Newtonian physics, he steadied himself with one elbow on the window while he reloaded.

  “We really should have taken automatics,” she said regretfully as she pulled up in front of the luxury hotel. “Oh well, at least we got here.”

  The people huddled in the lobby sported expensive suits, equally expensive tans, and terrified faces. McAusland and Lensky had a difficult time persuading some of them that yes, their best option really was to run across the few feet of sidewalk between the hotel and the minibus and scramble aboard.

  “Can’t he lay down covering fire?” one businessman demanded, pointing at Lensky.

  “No,” McAusland snapped. “You watch too much television.” Bullets spraying from the front of the hotel would only focus rioters’ attention on it. And they needed to conserve ammunition for what was clearly going to be a wild ride back.

  After they delivered a dozen wild-eyed Americans (who had probably, a day earlier, been patting themselves on the back for their courage in refusing evacuation with their compatriots) they found the remaining embassy personnel busy with preparations for immediate shutdown. They were busy stuffing documents into shredders and burn bags while trying to ignore the anti-American slogans blaring from megaphones outside the building.

  “What did we ever do to piss them off?” the Community Liaison Officer asked plaintively.

  “Supported Ergashi,” said the junior Political Officer. “Those outside, they’re the opposition making their sentiments known. Don’t shove that whole binder into the shredder! You’ll jam it.” He looked up at Lensky. “Can you take the burn bags to the roof?”

  “Sure. Have we got an incinerator there?”

  “No, but we’ve got a 50-gallon drum, and you should be able to burn this stuff while you’re getting rid of the thermite.”

  McAusland sputtered. “I forgot about the thermite!”

  She gave Lensky the background while they were hauling everything up to the roof. The box of thermite grenades had been discovered in the basement of the embassy some time previously. They thought the grenades represented war materials that had been intercepted on the way to Afghanistan, but had no idea who’d decided to store them there. When the embassy’s security officer asked the State Department where to send the things, he was told that there could not possibly be any thermite grenades in the embassy at Merzadeh, because there was no record of them ever having been put there.

  “The ambassador told us to be inventive,” McAusland said cheerfully, “and I guess it’s time to be just that.”

  They tossed one grenade in the drum and topped it off with the bags of documents. Smoke and heat covered the roof; for some time they couldn’t see to move. When the smoke thinned, they saw that the grenade had handily eaten a hole through the bags.

  “Hurry up,” said McAusland, “we need to get rid of the rest of the grenades before they finish on the documents and burn through the drum.” She pitched grenades into the drum one after another, igniting a fire that roared up from the roof like a furious dragon.

  “If the wind conditions are just right,” she said, admiring the flames, “that could start a fire tornado. Ever seen one of those?”

  “No,” said Lensky, “nor do I wish to see one. Hey, that thing is trying to burn through the roof now!” He pointed at the flaming drum.

  McAusland handed him a pair of asbestos gloves. “That’s why I brought these. We’ll have to push it off the roof.”

  Lensky stared at her.

  “Well, come on! This ought to discourage some of those bastards in the street, don’t you think?”

  After the thermite disposal, things did get a bit quieter on the street. By dusk, Lensky felt it was safe to slip back to the apartment on Kalot Rushan Street. The embassy was clearly worthless as a source of information on that damned plane, and he wanted to get away from panicky people who asked every five minutes why the US hadn’t sent a plane to evacuate them yet.

  A call to the hospital reassured him that Gary was doing all right. Sheng wasn’t in the apartment, and that should have worried him more than it did. He was running out of capacity to worry. A brief sit-down, something to eat, and he’d pull up some maps of Taklanistan and start figuring out how to find a twelve-seater Russian charter plane in a country with more mountains than farmers. There had to be a way…

  He didn’t know what had awakened him, but he raised his head with a start and saw Thalia on the far side of the table, glowing pale gold in the lamplight, with a sleeping child in her arms. A dream? No. Teleportation. She set the baby on the table between them, and the smell convinced him this was entirely real.

  And there was Ben, slumped into a chair and looking like death warmed over. The slight scrape of pulling the chair out must have been what woke him.

  They were safe.

  They were both safe.

  “Thalia,” he breathed, reaching across the table towards her. “How—”

  “These two need a clinic,” she interrupted him. “Immediately.”

  She pulled on the cuff of Ben’s sleeve, pointing out some writing on it. “This is where we are tonight.” And she stepped back into the colorless chaos the topologists called “the in-between.”

  The last thing he saw was the glitter of tears on her eyelashes.

  “Ben?”

  Ben was incoherent and close to unconscious.

  He already knew that the hospital was overwhelmed. And there were no taxis in the street. A call to the embassy got him the promise of a car that would take Ben and this nameless kid to the Firdausi Ismaili Clinic, on the far side of Akbaital Street.

  The driver was – hardly to his surprise – Jennifer McAusland, who helped him load Ben into the back of the car and plopped the wet, smelly baby into his arms before taking off like a kamikaze ambulance driver. “Looks like altitude sickness to me,” she yelled over the cacophony of horns and megaphones on Akbaital. “Nothing serious, the clinic can treat it.”

  The Iranian doctor at the clinic agreed with her on both counts. “Both patients should make a full recovery,” he told Lensky after Ben and the baby had been whisked out of sight. “You did well to get them immediate treatment. There is just one thing I do not understand.”

  “What?”

  He frowned slightly. “The young man is suffering from HACE – High Altitude Cerebral Edema. The baby may be similarly affected, but pulmonary edema is more pronounced. These ailments commonly affect travelers who ascend too quickly from sea level to altitudes well above one thousand meters.”

  A possible clue to Thalia’s whereabouts? The memory of a topographical map of Taklanistan dashed that momentary hope. Half the damned country was more than three thousand feet above sea level, some of it twice that. There was a reason why explorers had called their mountains “The Roof of the World.”

  “So?”

  A more pronounced frown. “Merzadeh’s elevation is less than six hundred meters, and the surrounding countryside is even lower-lying. How did two people suffering acute altitude sickness turn up here?”

  Lensky shrugged. “I don’t know, I was only asked to get them across town. I believe there might have been an emergency helicopter evacuation involved.” If only.

  McAusland was still with him when Ben was pronounced well enough to talk. Even if he could have edged her out, Lensky thought he wouldn’t. She’d been around enough of today’s desperate search to have earned a share in whatever information Ben could give them. And a woman who drove like that probably wouldn’t pass out over the mention of a little thing like teleportation.

  After hearing Ben’s story, Lensky noticed that for no reason, unforgivably, his hands were shaking so hard he was afraid to touch his weapon.

  “CIA?”

  McAusland looked worried.

  “I’m fine.” He had to be fine. There was nobody else to help Thalia.

  “Good. Drink this anyway.”

  There was so much sugar in the tea, it reminded him of the stuff Thalia’s mom poured over baklava. But it did help. He stopped shaking.

  But he couldn’t think.

  Or rather, all he could think was, “How could she do this? How could she leave me like this?”

  “Stop thinking of yourself,” Ben said brutally when he voiced those thoughts. “She went back because she was afraid Rakhim’s goons would take it out on the other hostages that we’d disappeared.”

  “Oh, and offering herself to be beaten up instead was so much better?”

  Ben looked as miserable as Lensky felt, but he insisted, “I don’t think they will beat her up. Rakhim’s got a soft spot for her.”

  “Huh. She told me all his oily flattery was faked.”

  “Not as a woman,” Ben said impatiently, “more as a… a mascot or something. She must be the only person on the face of the earth who ever believed that Hormuz Rakhim really was a liberal democratic reformer. I think he’ll be trying to regain some of his halo in her eyes.”

  “And another thing,” he said after resting for a moment to catch his breath.

  “What?”

  “They were moving us so fast.”

  “So?”

  “Well, look. I could teleport you back to where we were… at least, I could probably do that in a few hours…”

  Lensky remembered the word scribbled on Ben’s cuff. “Tireza?”

  “Yeah… but I can’t do it yet, and tomorrow they won’t be there any more. But they’re going somewhere, and when they get there, they’ll stop.”

  Lensky wondered how mathematicians could consider themselves so brilliant when they made such staggeringly obvious statements. “So?”

 

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