Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (45 page)

In the anemic sunshine of an April morning they took us outside to put us to death.

Oh, that's not what they told us. “You are runners,” a frère said as we stood in the street. He wore the badges of a lieutenant—though he bore just a single earring—and was using a loud-hailer to be heard above the gunfire that snapped like angry dogs at the buildings nearby. “We are still in the process of clearing the Blancs from this arrondissement,” he continued. “It is a building-by-building job, and our ammunition consumption is high. We can't spare fighters to carry rounds to our positions, so that's what you will do. Follow me, m'sers.”

He took a step toward the corner. I started moving after him. I couldn't see any point in sticking around to be shot by one of the sour-faced guards.

At the end of the next block, a group of frères crouched behind a wrecked Citroën. Gunfire echoed from somewhere behind the building across the street from them. Our lieutenant reached the group behind the wreckage, and exchanged words.

“Here,” the corporal said, throwing a hemp bag at me. I caught it, and had to stifle some very military language—the thing weighed a ton. It clattered like cheap toys, which made sense when I looked inside and saw that the bag was filled with plastic magazines.

“Not him,” our lieutenant said. He pointed to the last of the stragglers approaching the Citroën. “My friend, it's time to do your part.” He gestured at me; I shrugged and tossed the bag to the laggard, a scrawny trustafarian whose cheeks still bore the remnants of semipermanent tattoos. He dropped the bag, and didn't bother to restrain his opinion of its weight. “Pick it up,” our lieutenant said. “Your life may depend on how well you carry that.

“We have a fire-team in that building across the street. You will take this bag to them, and ask them if they've heard anything from the teams further up the block. The damned Blancs are jamming our communications again.” I looked along the line our lieutenant's finger had traced. It didn't seem that far to me. A couple of weeks ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about strolling across the street, even in the face of Parisian traffic.

The kid picked his way through the rubble to the edge of the furthest building on our side of the street. He peered across, reminding me of an old man I used to see on the Rue Texas from time to time, who took forever to work up the courage to brave the traffic on my narrow street. Dust had made the kid's face the same gray as the old man's. I guess I should have felt sick myself, but I don't remember feeling anything.

I saw movement across and up the street—that would be the fireteam, calling its runner forward. The kid looked back at us, and I was impressed at how widely his eyes were open, and how white they looked. Our lieutenant casually waved the kid forward—though the gun in the lieutenant's hand lent a lot of weight to the gesture. The kid began to run.

Then he wasn't running anymore, and a dark red pool was spreading over the pavé from under his crumpled body. I hadn't heard a shot, and the kid hadn't made a sound, other than the dusty scuffling sound his body'd made when it hit the stones. Our lieutenant didn't seem that surprised, though. “Did you get it?” he asked the corporal. “Quickly!” The corporal nodded, simultaneously waving forward one of his companions, who gave him something too small for me to see, and which the corporal plugged into a slot in a hardcover notebook. The new frère gave a thumbs-up, and picked up a wicked-looking, bloated rifle. Then he stepped out into the street, raised the gun, fired, and stepped back into the shelter offered by the pockmarked wall. Somewhere out of my line of vision, a building exploded.

It sounded like he'd blown up half the city. It was like being inside a thunderstorm, and I instinctively put my hands over my ears in a too-late attempt to protect them. The incredible noise was still rumbling when our lieutenant picked up another crudely woven bag, handed it to me and said, “Go.”

I'd been numb up to that point, just watching what was happening without really seeing it. When my hand closed on the bag's handle and I felt the hemp fibers scratching my palm, it was as if I'd suddenly come to the surface of a warm lake and broken into clear, freezing air. That was the moment I realized that Sissy was dead. That we were all dead. No point in kidding myself; they'd probably killed her within a day of raiding the Dialtone. There were all sorts of ways it could have happened. None of them mattered to me. “Fuck the lot of you,” I said quietly, and walked into the street.

I didn't run. What was the point? I walked as though I were just on my way to the corner to buy lunch. If I could have, I'd have whistled a jaunty tune, something from Maurice Chevalier or Boy George. My mouth was too dry to make a properly jaunty sound.

I passed the trustafarian, lying dusty and broken on the cobbles. I made a point of looking at the spot from which the killing shot must have come, and was surprised to see that the building at the end of the block was mostly still there. That huge explosion, whose final basso still echoed, had come from the destruction of just one room. The chambre and its window—and, presumably, the Blanc sniper hiding there—had been plucked from the building's structure like a bad tooth. And now I was taking my little walk so that our lieutenant could see whether any more snipers waited. Now I realize that this is what it means to fight building to building, room to room. At the time, I thought nothing. Felt nothing. Just walked.

No shot came. No expanding round ripped open my back and spread my lungs out like wings behind me.

I reached the building that was my goal, and discovered that the fire team was already moving through it, into its courtyard and beyond to the next block. A solitary, grimy frère waited for me. Grabbing the bag, he spat at my feet and hustled to join his comrades. I guess he didn't appreciate my sangfroid.

By the time our lieutenant and the others had caught up to me, I'd had a chance to do some thinking. I stripped off the stiff, new T-shirt and web belt and buried them in some rubble. I didn't know what they represented, but I was pretty damned sure they had something to do with the way our lieutenant had been able to pinpoint the location of the sniper who'd killed Scrawny. The frères might kill me, but I was going to see that they didn't benefit in any way from it.

We were hustled through the ruined building in the wake of the fire team. Another body lying in the next street gave mute evidence to the existence of another Blanc sniper somewhere. Our lieutenant pointed to the ammo bag beside the body—which I now saw was that of the grimy frère I'd forced to play catch-up—and said to me, “No sense in letting that go to waste. Pick it up as you go.”

I smiled broadly. “Glad to” I said. “You might as well keep your computer locked up, though.” I spread my hands and shrugged. “No belt. No T-shirt. No service.” I'm pretty sure I giggled; the whole scene had the surreality of a night in a trustafarian club.

Before our lieutenant could say or do anything, though, a frère wearing a headset stepped between us. “Lieutenant” he said, “M'ser le sergeant, Abalain wants to speak to you.”

Just like that, our lieutenant's face had the same pallor as the dead trustafarian's. I was impressed; I hadn't thought an officer could be that scared of a noncom, even one as reptilian as Abalain. Our lieutenant took the headset and put it on. He closed his eyes as he listened.

“It was the shirt,” Abalain said. We were sitting in his office, in a rebuilt nineteenth-century apartment building. Through the window I could see the office block that had been my barracks through the first few weeks of my nightmare. “They're made of a special cloth threaded with sensors. Developed to treat battlefield casualties; the sensors record the direction and velocity of anything that hits the cloth. We adapted it by stitching a small transmitter into the collar band. It's a very handy way of fixing a location on snipers, the more so since the Blancs and Penistes don't know that we can do this.” He spread his hands and smiled. “Of course, it was a mistake that you were assigned to this duty.”

I sipped from the Tigger glass Abalain had given to me. The wine was a good one—rich and full, tannins almost gone but still tasting a bit of blackberry. I guessed it had been in someone's cellar for a good few years before being called on to do its bit for the cause. Forcing myself to think about the wine was a deliberate attempt to keep my emotions in check. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since I'd been pulled from death-duty, and I think I'd only stopped shaking just before being brought to Abalain's office. I have a vague memory of my fear and rage bursting from me as I was being led away from the carnage, of kicking the death-duty lieutenant in the balls. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking.

For some reason, it occurred to me as I sipped that it had been weeks since I'd had a cigarette. Not only did the wine taste better, I seemed to have been too busy or too frightened to go through withdrawal. “Does this mean that I'm free to go?”

Abalain laughed, the sound of a padlock rattling against a graveyard gate. “I admire your sense of humor, m'ser,” he said. “Know that if I could, I'd send you back to your place in the Rue Bonaparte. My report on our little chat about your work has been read with interest by important people. Accordingly, I've been ordered to give you a new opportunity to serve the cause.”

The next day I reported to the office next-door to Abalain's. It wasn't furnished nearly as nicely, but it wasn't a cellar and there was nobody shooting at me, so I decided I was better off. I never saw either the lieutenant or any of my fellow-targets again. I confess I didn't really worry about them, either.

Abalain had told me to meet him in order to learn about my new assignment. I was pretty sure I already knew what it was, and while waiting for him to show I decided to investigate. I couldn't help myself; when presented with a mass of data I have to know what it is, and the battered metal desk that dominated the room was a pictorial definition of “mass of data.” There were three distinct piles on top of the desk; the talus slopes of their near-collapse pretty much covered the entire surface. Two of the piles were paper, the third was of various storage media: magneto-optical disks, a couple of ancient Zips and even a holocube or two.

The paper pile nearest to me consisted of various official garbage: press releases, wire story print-outs. The ones I looked at were all from either the UN or one of the three main Blanc organizations. The other pile was a series of virtually indecipherable French-language documents that I was eventually able to identify as field reports from libertine officers and operatives.

“You can make some sense of that, yes?” Abalain stood in the doorway.

I looked him in the eye for a second, then returned to the reports. “What kind of sense do you want me to make?”

“You will do what you described to me when you were first—ah—recruited. I have need of information which I suspect is buried within these reports and press releases. You will use your skills to draw that information forth.” He smiled at me with what he no doubt thought was encouragement. Maybe he'd been a management consultant before deciding that the revolution offered better opportunities to fuck with people. “You will work here, and send the information to me as you assemble it. You will use the clipboard and wearable that are in the upper-right-hand drawer; they connect to a fibreoptic pipe linked directly to a secure folder on my desktop. You will, regrettably, have no outside access. But don't worry about that; I'll see that you get all of the information you need to do your work.”

More than enough information, I told myself.

“I gotta admit, I just don't understand this revolution.”

“What's not to understand?” Abalain offered me a Marlie; I was somewhat surprised at the gesture, and even more surprised to find myself shaking my head. “We're not really revolutionaries, you know. We're trying to restore the glories of French civilization; in a way, that makes us conservatives.”

I believe the accepted term is ‘reactionaries',
I thought. “Which no doubt explains why so many of your slogans seem to have been drawn from fast-food advertising,” I said, waving a flimsy at him. “‘La France: Have It Your Way'?”

“The fast-food philosophy is inherently French,” Abalain said. “It's a peasant philosophy, not some tarted-up bourgeois haute-cuisine thing. It's like the epoxy cobbles you and your ‘Old Paree Hands' are so dismissive about. They're perfectly in keeping with the scientific rationalism of the original revolution.” He spoke in crisp, rapid French. He'd caught me listening too intently to one of his phone conversations the week before and confronted me with a barrage of French. When my facial expression made it clear that I understood every word, he'd nodded smartly and went back to his conversation, as though he'd suspected it all along.