Secondhand Sorcery

By 2300, the roof of the airport garage was a lot less crowded. All the camera drones had long since landed for lack of anything to show, and most of the important guests had shuffled down the stairs to whatever sleeping quarters the Turks provided, with standing orders to whoever would listen to wake them the second something happened.

This arrangement quickly rattled down the chain of command until a multinational handful of low-ranking aides (and one luckless major in Air Force blues) were gathered around a single table, drinking endless rounds of coffee and taking bathroom breaks in turns. Now it was just them, a few increasingly haggard Turkish servers, and Keisha’s trio, waiting together. Their hosts, considerate as always, had dug up a batch of electric space heaters on extension cords. They weren’t all that helpful in the open air, but she appreciated the thought.

Per Titus Marshall, “Secundus” had landed successfully in Fatih, but sustained an unspecified setback in the process. After that announcement, their pet warlord had spent several minutes fiddling with his phone and swearing in Latin, then stormed off the rooftop—ignoring the protests and questions of about a dozen flag officers from as many different NATO members—and not reappeared since.

Nobody knew where he went, but in response to repeated text messages from several people he had agreed to let them know as soon as he heard anything. At that, all eyes turned to Hamp, who only shook his head and snagged a cheese-filled sigara börek from a passing waiter. More than a few people remarked that this Marshall character was out of control and would have to be reined in—keeping one eye on the stairs as they said it, in case he came back and heard them.

That had been around 1930. Boredom and exhaustion, exacerbated by jet lag, had culled the population since, despite valiant efforts by everyone in authority to pretend that something was happening. All things considered, Korgeneral Balbay had improvised an excellent presentation on potential next steps, and it wasn’t really his fault that he reminded Keisha of cable news anchors stalling for time while they awaited fresh developments.

Now, an hour before midnight, she had to admit there was no sensible reason for her to stay on that rooftop any longer. The children might have fallen asleep by now, and whatever happened in Fatih she was in no position to do anything about it. Some mixture of pride, fear, and stubbornness kept her sitting at the table. Hamp, who’d never seen or spoken with Nadia and didn’t have to imagine her bleeding out in some anonymous alley, kept Keisha company out of friendship and solidarity. And Dr. Gus … Dr. Gus would have his own reasons.

Hamp drained his latest cup. Keisha wasn’t trying to count them anymore, but they were at least straight coffee now. He was starting to sober up. “So. Why’d you get into this whole business in the first place, Doctor?”

Dr. Gus smiled. He’d been perfectly amiable the whole time, treating their bizarre situation as a chance for camaraderie no matter how rude and surly Keisha’s new boss acted. “You might say it was because my parents had an interesting dinner guest when I was nine.”

“Dinner guest,” Hamp repeated. “What, some spook ‘scientist’? I didn’t think they recruited that young.”

“Not precisely. My family was not even in America at the time, though we had left our own country. But a longtime friend of my father’s happened to be passing through the area for his work, and made the time to sit down for dinner with us. He was a charming fellow, very polite, but I do not doubt I would have forgotten that night entirely if my parents had not received word of his death a few years later.”

He stopped to take a drink of water. Dr. Gus had never been fond of caffeine or alcohol. “Our guest was just a vague memory at that time, hidden by the rising storms of my adolescent concerns, but I was not too addled to make note of current events, or the peculiar attitude of my parents toward them. When I brought the matter to my mother she admitted it: our friend died on the twenty-ninth of September, 1957.”

Keisha had heard this story multiple times before, and watched Hamp’s face to see how he would react. As expected, he was incredulous. “You honestly expect me to believe that, as a kid, you met Grigoriy goddam Tzepora.”

“I am not aware that he had any such middle name, but yes, I did. And what was most remarkable about him, looking back, was the fact that he was not remarkable at all. The man I remember wore his hair perhaps slightly longer than was fashionable, and ate no meat, but he did not rant and rave about the Kabbalah—as so many of our modern chroniclers depict him—or do anything uncanny. He might have been a sales clerk at a store.

“And yet this most ordinary-seeming man strode into the enemy’s country with power in his hand, and gave up his life to shift the course of history. The thought of it shook me out of my complacency, and I have remained shaken ever since. All my life, like yours, has been lived in the long shadow of Grigoriy Tzepora.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Hamp said. “Your childhood hero was a mass murderer.”

“I did not think of him as a hero then; I do not necessarily call him a hero now, though it should be noted that, had Mr. Tzepora not turned nuclear weapons from an indispensable asset to an intolerable liability, we would be fighting a very different kind of war today. One with a much higher casualty count.”

“Hmph.”

“We of course cannot know what would have happened for sure. Possibly we as a species would by this point no longer be in a condition to wage war at all. At Mayak Grigoriy killed perhaps thirty thousand people, most of them noncombatants. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki between them claimed five times that—and those bombs were essentially prototypes.”

“So was Grigoriy, wasn’t he? All that Project Chariot shit, nobody uses that anymore. Now we’ve got new and improved models, like our buddy Titus. How proud are you of making men like him?”

“Titus Marshall was no protege of mine, and he might in fact arguably be called a prototype, if the reports you and Miss Lawrence gave us are accurate.”

“He’s an emissor. They’ve been around since the late eighties at least. That’s a quarter-century.”

“Yes, and there have been many different protocols used to train them over that time period. We know the early records are poor, but it is my belief—my extended speculation, really—that Mr. Marshall and his ‘Yunks’ are the result of an experimental variant protocol, used once to initially promising results, then abandoned when its risks and limitations became apparent. There were many such experiments in the early days. Most of them produced simple botches. We were not so lucky with him.”

Keisha was only listening to their bickering for a distraction, and tuned it out when she saw one of the aides at the other table show his phone to the man next to him. That man said something to the others, who hurried to pull out their own phones. Keisha was already on her way over. Before she could ask, one of them held up his screen for her. “Feuer. Fire. Northeast Fatih. From the latest satellite photos.”

“There’s a fire?” She’d looked over maps of the district, but she couldn’t remember what was in that spot.

“Gulhane Park,” someone else added, swiping at his own screen. “Growing fast.”

“They’re setting parks on fire?” a third aide said, a woman with a Scandinavian accent. “Little hooligans.” She sounded amused.

“I don’t care if they burn the whole city, as long as they frag an emissor.”

A Brit in scarlet piped up, “Ivan’s just started gabbing up a storm on radio, whatever it is. Huge uptick in traffic.”

“The juvie bastards finally came through—“

“Holy shit!” Six people knocked over their chairs getting up. Myriad was rising again in a hurry, spewing out her drones even before she was properly open.

“Well, Rainbow Brite’s still there,” the Air Force major said caustically. “Did they bag Ursula, or Bob the Builder? Or did they wait four hours just to cock up the whole show?”

“Leave ‘em alone. The poor boys couldn’t stop thinking about tits long enough to conjure. Weren’t you ever thirteen?”

A sizable herd of middle-aged and elderly men in pajamas, bathrobes, and slippers came stampeding up the stairs, throwing on coats as they came, to harry their aides with questions in person. The Turks’ AV crew were already warming up the projection screens again. Keisha withdrew from the uproar to dig through her own phone, but there was nothing new on the official channels. Fire in Gulhane Park, increased Russian radio traffic, Myriad’s reappearance. What did it all mean?

“Bloody fucking hell!” someone shouted, and Keisha looked up to see Shum-Shum rising as well. “Is it too much to ask Caligula to inform us before he lets his first-form hellions out of the nursery? Perhaps take the time out of his busy schedule to avoid a major international incident from friendly fire?”

“Oh, but you do not understand! The ancient Roman conception of ‘allies’ and their role, which is of course superior to ours in every respect—“

“Bugger off, Jean, I’m in no mood.”

Keisha went back to her seat, where she was less likely to be knocked over by an excited officer. “They’ve got a point,” Hamp said in a low voice. “You’ve heard him, ‘Sarah.’ As far as he’s concerned, he’s Caesar, and he’ll help us when and if it pleases him. Sure, we don’t have to worry about nukes, but what was that Franklin quote? The one about liberty and security? They’re already running Russia; we don’t even know who the hell’s giving orders in the Kremlin anymore. How long until we’ve got an American emperor? Or eight of them?”

Dr. Gus was still placid. “I have heard this argument before. I do not think it is entirely without merit, but nor do I think that degree of pessimism is warranted.”

“Sure, we can hope,” Hamp grumbled, “now that we shut the pipeline down. Assuming we really did, and we’re not training more of the freaks in some secret hidey-hole. The Whiteout did that much good—if it wasn’t too late already.”

Dr. Gus gave Keisha a look. She kept her mouth shut. She’d known the Colonel long enough now that she didn’t bother arguing with him any more.

A few minutes later, the screens were running again, showing images of trees on fire from several angles, and a couple of shots of Shum-Shum and Myriad duking it out again. Predictably, Myriad was still winning. Some analyst with a heavy Texan twang started up a constant patter about estimated rate of spread and the number and type of Russian assets they thought were on the move inside the district. None of it was especially enlightening. “Secundus” had probably done, or was doing, something in that general area. That was all you could say.

Someone gave a cry of anguish as one of the cameras shifted focus in a hurry to show the Topkapi Palace … exploding? Was it exploding? Whatever was happening to it, it didn’t look good, and none of the eight Turkish officers shouting about it sounded pleased to see six centuries of their country’s history start ripping itself apart. They were even less happy when Akritas appeared in the middle of all the mess; he’d wrecked half the district’s historic mosques already.

“What in Sam Hill is he doing?” an American asked, cutting across what was probably a very impressive stream of Turkish profanities. “It looks like he’s—is that a little boat?”

“So it appears,” said another, who was slouched down in his chair. One camera adjusted to zoom in on the slapdash construction as it went flying over the outer walls and floated down into the Golden Horn. It continued drifting north, away from its maker’s halo; the camera zoomed in further, till you could squint and tell yourself there were people in there. It was carrying something, anyway, and that something was moving a little.

“Doctor,” Keisha said quietly. “Do we still have feet on the ground in Galata?”

“We do,” he said, quieter still. “They will be holding position.”

“What? But this—those kids could be hurt in there!”

“Quite possibly. But we cannot help them without exposing the very large hole in Mr. Marshall’s security. Added to the ‘assistance’ we have given them already, clearing Galata?” He shook his head. “Reckless. I was against even that, but was overruled. We will see what comes of it. I do not think Mr. Marshall is merciful to moles.”

“We could extract them,” she said, gripping the edge of the table so hard her fingers hurt. “Right now. There’s three of them there—if they all made it out—that’s more than half his manpower, and the better half. Yuri and Shum-Shum are tied up with Myriad, Fatima’s still in Thessaloniki—“

“We cannot be sure it is the children in that vessel in the first place. And Titus Marshall is very likely somewhere in our proximity, ready to retaliate against such a betrayal by setting Yunks loose among us.”

“But—“

“You are not thinking clearly. To go by your own reports, of the three children sent on the mission, Nadia is the most likely to defect, but would be leaving her biological brother behind. Ruslan seems unlikely to take such a risk. Hamza, I think, would refuse. The most likely scenario, to my mind, is that they would attack whoever we sent.”

She looked to Hamp, who bit his lip. “I’m sorry, but he’s right. They’re on their own. If it makes it any better, it looks like they were successful.”

“Who gives a shit?” she snarled, and threw her coffee cup down to shatter on the rooftop. Hamp put up his hands, palms out, and turned away; Dr. Gus raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. Nobody else nearby even noticed her little temper tantrum. They were all staring at the screens, and talking very fast.

And no wonder. All six screens now showed the same thing: Myriad’s drones, out in full force, slamming themselves into the walls of the Palace as Akritas rearranged them into barriers. The golden giant was advancing under fire, waddling slowly towards their eyesore of a Kremlin. Hamp laughed beside her. “The turncoat turns again, huh?”

“Looks like it,” she said coldly, and pushed herself up from the table. The concrete guardrail around the edge of the garage already had five or six people leaning against it, smoking cigarettes with almost post-coital satisfaction. Keisha found a spot of her own where she could be angry in peace.

The Colonel, not getting the hint in his current state, limped after her. “See?” he muttered in her ear. “They were successful. Had to have been. No sign of Kostroma in that brawl. I bet the weaselly son of a bitch switched sides again the second she died. Well, he’s not stupid; they’ll never keep their lines going without her.”

“Thank you, Colonel Hampton, I worked that out for myself,” she ground out, enunciating each word through her teeth. “Please do not mistake me for someone who cares.”

He left without another word, not even a grumble. She didn’t turn to watch him go, or to see the fight on the screens. They were cheering now, watching Myriad trapped between two hostile familiars. Better than boxing on pay-per-view. Meanwhile, exactly zero of the screens were focusing on the little boat in the Golden Horn.

Dr. Gus allowed her a decent interval to steam before taking Hamp’s place beside her. “I do not think Akritas would look to buy our forgiveness by sending us dead children,” he said. “And one of the three is the world’s second-best physician. I would not give up hope.”

“Do you see me doing that?”

“I cannot say what I see, except that you are angry. For all my gifts, I cannot peer directly into the soul. I am not a god.”

“No,” she said, turning to look at him. “You only train them.”

“Please,” he said with a smile. “It is rather late for this old man to deal with such blasphemous flattery. We are all mortal. Including you—though I remain very proud of the work I did there.”

Keisha took a few deep breaths to force out her frustration. This wasn’t his fault. Not all of it, anyway.

“I have had a long and rewarding career,” he went on, speaking very softly. The brass were whooping up a storm behind them; at least one was calling for champagne. “It has been a privilege, to make my mark on the world Grigoriy left us. It has always been possible, of course, for one man’s decision—or one woman’s—to have devastating consequences. But it was never, before my lifetime, so visceral, so dramatic. So direct.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Which makes it all the more important that we continue to trust one another, and have reason for that trust. I recommended you for this position because I had faith in your intellect, your abilities, your dedication, and your good judgment. Was I wrong?”

“Dr. Gus, you’ve known me for ten years. You know my history, all of it. How did you expect me to react when you threw me into this horrible … situation with no warning?”

“Like a warrior. And you have. But if you have your duty, I have mine as well. I must make sure. And your anger, it concerns me.” He waved a hand over the roof’s edge. “The view from here would be beautiful during the day, wouldn’t it?”

“If you say so.”

“Please. Indulge me. Do you not care for beauty anymore, Miss Lawrence? I recall you did. Do you never share your passion for beautiful views with others?”

He was looking at her very intently over his glasses, but she was tired, and distracted. It took her a second to get it: beautiful view. Belvedere. She’d made a scene, so now he was worried about OpSec for Belvedere. “That was in my reports too. Colonel Hampton isn’t much for scenery. He doesn’t really notice that kind of thing.”

“Of course. He is an older man, if not so old as me. Old, and tired. It takes the heart of a child to appreciate beauty when you see it. Have you perhaps taken the time to open a child’s eyes to the scenery, over the past few weeks?”

Keisha hesitated—but she really couldn’t lie to Dr. Gus, of all people. And he would find out eventually anyway. “Little glimpses, maybe. Nothing spectacular. One child in particular, who … needed a new perspective on a bad situation. I don’t know if she really understood what I was showing her. What it meant.”

“I see.” He sighed. “But children are very perceptive sometimes, aren’t they? A little perspective can be a dangerous thing, Miss Lawrence.”

She grimaced. “Don’t I know it.”