Genocidal Organ (12 page)

“This time, though, it’s different. This may be a tracking mission, but it’s not a simple case of finding a target of opportunity and taking him out. When the chance presents itself, you’re not just to kill him—you’ll need to discover the seeds of the next genocide he’s planting.”

Colonel Rockwell finished speaking, and the undersecretary of defense took over. “You will be appointed staff officers and temporarily attached to the Intelligence Department of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

No surprises, given how closely integrated the two intelligence departments of the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were. “In other words, under your command,” I said.

“You’re being assigned to J2,” said Boss, “but as this is a joint operation between Intelligence and DIA, we’ll be able to provide you with comprehensive support from our end too. This is a crucial mission after all. There are a lot of people relying on our success.

“In short, gentlemen, to coin a phrase, you could well be our only hope. Our last line of defense before another massacre takes place. Shit, even as we speak, what’s to say that John Paul isn’t trying to turn a country somewhere in the world into a new living hell?”

3

Corpses.

The crater in the ground was like a giant’s stockpot, packed full of the remnants of charred people.

Humans have a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat than most mammals, which means that when they’re heated up good and proper, their skin crisps up like pork crackling, and were it not for all the other things that inevitably end up getting burnt to a crisp with them, they would give off a similar savory aroma. Burning corpses get their characteristic foul odor from things like clothes and hair in particular. Were it not for those, burning humans wouldn’t smell much different from any other meaty barbecue.

All these thoughts ran through my head as I sat on the edge of the still-warm crater and surveyed the mass of human flesh that spread out before me. A thought flickered through my mind: the carnage in front of me was really no different from a meal that someone, somewhere was about to eat. As I brooded, one of the corpses opened its eyes, its eyelids cracking as it did so. Its skin and bone and flesh were all burnt to a crisp, and the eyes that stared out through the eye sockets made the corpse look like something from a Hammer horror movie.

“I’m all burnt to a crisp,” my mom muttered, looking at her charred hands.

“Yep, like a crispy Peking duck,” I said.

“I wonder if I taste as good as Peking duck,” my mother said with a laugh. As she did so, a crack appeared in her hardened cheeks. She was like a painting that had been in the sun for too long.

This was really funny. “Looking at you like this, Mom, I can’t help think that you’re nothing more than a pile of flesh and bones.”

“Manners, manners! After all, you’re not exactly much more yourself, are you?” Mom seemed offended. “If a corpse is just a pile of flesh and bones, then how can you pretend that a person who just happens to be alive is any more than that either? We’re all just objects.”

“Just objects, huh? Try telling that to Williams. Better still, try using him as an object … what, like an ashtray, maybe?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t be too happy at first. But he’d come around sooner or later.”

Warplanes were circling the sky at a dangerously low altitude; they reminded me of the underbellies of great whales. There was an occasional smattering of gunfire, and the smell of gunpowder permeated the area.

“He’d come around to what?” I asked. “The idea that he’s just an object?”

“Yes, that he’s just a piece of meat, O-son-of-mine-who-calls-himself-an-atheist-but-can’t-quite-bring-himself-to-accept-one-of-the-central-tenets-of-his-so-called-belief-system.”

I laughed.
O son of mine.
That’s what Mom always used to call me when we played our high-falutin’ language games. Putting me in my place for being the innocent that I was.

“ ‘I am naught but flesh, and the flesh profiteth nothing,’ ” I countered.

“Naught but flesh, maybe, but don’t take that as a bad thing. Your body is not a prison, you know.”

I nodded. Because Mom was always right. If she said something was so, it must be so.

“Look, your friends are here to pick you up,” she said.

There was a roar. A transport craft was descending from the skies, and the blast was whipping up the air around us, causing the trees around the crater to blow this way and that. I lifted a hand to my face to shield myself from the debris that swirled in the air. The plane’s hatch opened, and there was Williams, beckoning me toward him.

“See you later then, Mom.”

“See you later, O son of mine.”

I waved goodbye to my charred mother.

My mother waved her blackened matchstick arm back at me.

The personnel carrier started its ascent. I lay back in my recliner seat and before I knew it I was asleep and the crater full of corpses was no more than a speck in the distance, a memory.

I fell asleep on a passenger craft in the world of the dead; when I awoke it was on a passenger craft in the world of the living.

My visits to the land of the dead had become more frequent since Alex’s death. So much so that I’d even considered seeing one of the counselors that the forces supplied for us. I hadn’t quite gotten around to it, though, and I probably wouldn’t. After all, it wasn’t like it was affecting my work in any way. Basically, I’d resigned myself to the nightly call of the deadlands.

The scenes in which Mom had something to tell me were really just an echo of my childhood. Mom never remarried and brought me up by herself. She used to talk to me about anything and everything. My abnormal interest in literature and words, my teenage obsession with movies, all were due to Mom’s influence on me. In other words, the scenes in the land of the dead were really just like the sort of everyday interactions we had when I was growing up, at dinnertime or just lounging about in the living room. Apart from the obvious fact that Mom was now dead, of course.

Mom watched over me constantly. Her greatest fear was for me to be out of her sight. I guess she thought I might disappear. Just like my father did. People could disappear in the most inexplicable of ways. My mom was terrified that would happen with me.

I was fairly young when I cottoned on to this fact about my mom, and I guess I did my best to try and assuage her fears. I became a careful child. I took pains never to get into fights and always paid close attention to how other children spoke and acted to make sure I kept under the radar. I never stood out, never rubbed anyone the wrong way. On those rare occasions that something did happen, I made absolutely sure that Mom would never find out. I made sure she had nothing to fear. To constantly prove that she didn’t need to worry, that I wasn’t about to suddenly disappear. Reassuring Mom had always been my number one priority, dawn through dusk, kindergarten through college.

I guess I joined the forces, and put in for Special Forces to boot, because I’d grown bored with myself. I applied to the brand-spanking-new Intelligence Department, put myself forward for the fifty-to-one selection procedure for their new, experimental Special Forces, and passed. Strangely enough, my mom didn’t have too much to say about that. She smiled and said,
You have to follow your own path
.

Despite the perilous line of work I was now in, ultimately it wasn’t me who was to suddenly disappear one day like my father did. It was my mother, she who had spent her days worrying about
me
disappearing. And now her body was in a cemetery in Washington and her soul visited me every night to talk to me in the land of the dead.

For now though, when I opened my eyes the land of the dead disappeared, and I found that the aircraft was about to land. I looked out the window and saw the surface of the plane pulsing and rippling grotesquely, just as the surfaces of Intruder Pods did. As with the Intruder Pods, the wings of these Meatplanes could twist and contort in the air to absorb and adapt to the worst of the air currents, making for a supremely stable flight.

I wondered how much flesh there was on one of these giant wings. These aircraft weren’t called Meatplanes for nothing. I felt like stripping the wing down to its bones with a knife to see what the flesh was like underneath, to see the blood dripping from its carcass.

I swallowed a Regionsync pill to reset my body clock. These pills always reminded me of the pill women take to regulate their fertility. Still, I had no desire to meet up with Williams while I was suffering from jet lag, so I gulped it down.

The Meatplane touched down gently on the runway at Ruzyne Airport. Its wings contorted—pretty alarming, if you’re watching it for the first time—and the forward momentum of the plane was absorbed. It was like being inside a bird who uses its wings to elegantly guide its landing onto a tree branch. As a result, these Meatplanes could land on the narrowest strip of runway, decelerate massively, and yet the people inside would barely feel a thing—g-force was kept almost constant. This was also helped by the polymer seats going into shock absorption mode, of course. An electric current subtly modified the seats on a macromolecular level to turn them into something like giant mushrooms, and by the time the seats returned to normal, we passengers were greeted by the smiling faces of the cabin crew guiding us toward the exits. I always enjoyed my flights on these sorts of civilian planes—they beat the hell out of those surreal military stealth craft on the comfort stakes.

Prague. City of culture. City of a hundred spires.

I left Ruzyne Airport and took the metro to emerge on an overcast morning.

“Which genius’s bright idea was it to use Charles Bridge as the dead drop?” Williams asked.

We were standing on the bridge watching the amber clouds cast their shadow over Vltava River.

Williams had been late for our rendezvous, of course, and as usual was just trying to bluster his way out of it. I nodded and said nothing. He did sort of have a point: Charles Bridge was indeed overloaded with tourists. It was as if some mob had decided to get together to try and sink the bridge using its own body mass.

Having said that, Williams was still a paid-up veteran of the elite Special Forces, and his job over the last few years had, to a greater or lesser extent, consisted of playing “Where’s Waldo?”—tracking down and identifying his target from the surrounding rabble. Finding a person for a prearranged rendezvous was surely easier than when you were trying to neutralize them. On a scale of one to ten, the likelihood that Williams had simply been a bit lazy and arrived late was probably an eleven. As always. I knew from experience that it wasn’t worth calling him out on it, though—not unless I wanted to get into a heated debate that would soon descend into a farce.

I asked Williams how things were. Williams scowled—he seemed almost disappointed that I wasn’t challenging him. He had obviously rehearsed his story in his mind and had been ready to stand his ground.

“Not bad. Same old, same old,” he said.

“ ‘Same old, same old’? Williams—you just got here forty-eight hours before I did!”

“And there it is. Dude, I knew you were annoyed about having to wait. I told you, it’s not my fault, there are too many people on this stupid—”

That’s our Williams for you …

“Williams, have we really come to Prague to act out a Monty Python sketch?”