STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 33

Tom: Hong Kong

(Previous chapter, or start at the beginning.)

He grew aware of himself, though where and how he did not know. It came as a series of recognitions. Snugness. The homey smell of his own skin. A slight chilly current teasing the hairs on his arm. Military hospital at Bagram, after being medivacked out of enemy territory. Wokeness morphing into despair. Voices.

“…The MRI revealed a cavity here.”

“But you’re not going to operate?”

“We prefer non-operative management for eighty percent of wounds. Exploratory surgery usually risks additional complications around the spleen or intestines.”

“How long will he stay here?” A woman asking.

“Oh, five or six days, assuming his recovery is stable.”

These words bobbled, loose of moorings, until he recognized one of the voices.

“When can I speak with him?”

“As soon as he’s awake, I should think.”

A hospital. I’m in the hospital.

Not Afghanistan… and for a moment he couldn’t understand why.

The hotel door crashing in.

Nadia shooting with steely aim.

Gideon on the floor.

Tom having charged the assassin, only to be hurled across the room. Then crawling for the refuge of the bathroom on his good hand, feeling new wounds open lower down. It was like clambering over burning coals, sweat poring over his eyes, only the coals were inside of him.

Shah Maulana snarling, holding up the bloody drill, the shriek of the girl obliterating every other sound. Maulana’s pitiless eyes, alive only with crazed righteousness …only it wasn’t Maulana, it was Mang…and then the man’s image morphed into that of another fiend, the one-eyed monster, the other socket an angry void from Tom’s bullet. The golem.

The fear dropped another level. Shame. An abyss of shame.

Tom woke up. “Gideon?” His voice was a husk.

“Tom?”

He was on his back, in a bed, surrounded by the background brogue of medical monitors, the room illuminated in hospital fluorescent. Tubes inserted into the back of his hand led to bags of solution. Gideon had changed into trousers and a shirt, but despite cleaning up, he was stooped and frail. Age had caught up with him, with a vengeance.

Beside him stood a white woman, a middle-aged redhead with freckle-patterned skin and thin, serious lips. She wore a blue suit over a wide-collared blouse, with a leather tote slung over one shoulder. Tom recognized the look.

The doctor, a tidy-looking Chinese man, said, “I’ll give you a few minutes.” As he shut the door behind him, Tom noticed a policeman in the hallway. Tom was the only occupant of a room with three other beds.

“Oh, Tom,” Gideon said, “it’s good you’re awake.”

“Where am I?” Blankets covered his body. He lifted the covers. His ribs were wrapped like a mummy.

“We’re still in Hong Kong.”

“Thomas J. Wozniak?” the redheaded woman asked.

“Yes.”

She extended a hand. “Marsha Byrne, the Bureau’s legal attaché to the US consulate.”

He measured his own weakness in accepting the handshake. “How much has Gideon told you?”

“Everything I could,” Gideon said. “About my work. About Markus Mang.”

“May I?” Legat Byrne pulled a chair to his bedside. “The discussion with your father-in-law has been…alarming.”

“It should be terrifying,” Tom said. “You should be talking to the White House, not to me.”

The legat pursed her already narrow lips into a single thin line. She pulled a laptop from her tote. “I need some privacy… do you mind?”

Gideon looked annoyed. “I’ll be right outside.”

By the time Gideon shut the door behind him, Marsha had her laptop open, its screen facing Tom to show a whirling dot as it booted.

Then Deborah Church filled the screen. “Until an hour ago, I thought you were over the Pacific Ocean,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“The phone we gave you. We’re tracking it to a private jet two hours outside of LAX.”

“Her name is Nadia Zhang, Zhang with a zee. She’s an accomplice of Markus Mang. Gideon Frankel already told you what he’s planning, right?”

“I need to hear it from you.”

“It’s all on that phone.” He talked about his encounter with Mang as best he could. “Mang wants Gideon back. That’s why he talked to me. He wants Genie under full control, because when he ends civilization, it’s just going to be Mang versus machine. We have a chance to stop the attacks, but I don’t know how long. If he doesn’t have Gideon back, we must assume he’ll still go ahead.”

Deb Church filled the moments scribbling notes on a pad. “You realize you sound completely cuckoo.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right. We’ll intercept this Nadia Zhang on arrival and access that phone record.”

“You need to start scrambling to find those drones now. You need the President to order an all-out military assault on the Redoubt.”

“I’ll make sure the White House gets your message, but we need evidence to make our case. We need that phone. And we need to argue that Mang can pull this off, that he’s not just another extension of the CCP. How can he be planning simultaneous terrorist strikes against the Chinese state if he’s still in Shanghai?”

Tom closed his eyes. What was he supposed to say now? Mang’s been around for centuries and heals on the spot? His army’s made up of cyborgs capable of who knows what… oh, and he’s unleashed a psychotic artificial intelligence to help take over the world that manifested itself in an Australian hitman?

Deb Church really would think he’s crazy. No one would listen to the rest of his story. Anyway, the cike were China’s problem.

“I guess he’s just drunk too much of his own Kool-Aid.” Even over the flatness of the laptop screen he could feel her skepticism. “I’m confident the drone threat is real. And Nadia is involved in the operations. She helped smuggle them into the US.”

“How did you encounter her?”

“She, uh, she was with Gideon. An affair.”

Deb arched an eyebrow. “Explain.”

“I don’t have the full picture.” He related what he knew, even though it was flimsy. Then came the hardest part. “I compromised myself.”

When he had last seen Kirsty, he had visited the town priest to give Reconciliation, but he hadn’t confessed what really mattered. The omission had niggled at the back of his mind. There wasn’t time now for halfway measures. He imagined himself seated in a circle of fellow addicts, in some church basement or library attic, everyone with a coffee in Styrofoam cups or doughnuts on paper plates. He told Deb Church what he knew. He didn’t hold back on the cuckoo bits. By the end he was a wreck. A hot mess, Kirsty might have called it.

“We’ll see if the phone you allowed to fall into enemy hands contains the record you say it does,” his old boss said. “Final question, Tom. Should we send Gideon back to Jin Nao?”

“Gideon thinks it’s the best way for him to try to communicate with the AI.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“No ma’am, not if it’s directed by Markus Mang.”