Valentine's Exile (16 page)

“My mom ran. I was fourteen.”

“What's a ‘special executive'?” Valentine asked.

“I'm attached to the cabinet.”

“That superglue is tricky stuff.”

“Quick but dusty, Major.”

“You are going to come to the point of this?”

“Tobacco? Maybe a little bourbon?” Sime made no move to produce either, and Valentine wondered if some assistant would emerge from the shadows of the big, dark room.

“No, thanks.”

“Trying to make things more pleasant for you.”

“You could get me a bar of that soap you used before meeting me.”

“How—oh, of course. Ex-Wolf. I'm very sorry about all this, you know.”

Valentine said nothing.

Sime leaned forward, placing his forearms on the table with interlaced, quick-bitten fingers forming a wedge pointed at Valentine. “Are you a patriot, Major?”

“A patriot?”

“Do you believe in the Cause?”

Had the man never read his service file? “Of course.”

“Body and soul?”

This catechism was becoming ridiculous. “Get to the point.”

Sime's eyes shone in the window light. “How would you like to do more to advance the Cause than you've ever done before? Do something that would make the rest of your service—impressive though it is—look like nothing in comparison?”

“Let me guess. It involves the charges against me disappearing. All I have to do is go back into the Kurian Zone and—”

“Quite the contrary, Major. It involves you pleading guilty.”

A moment of stunned silence passed. Valentine heard Young shift his feet.

Valentine almost felt the edge of the sword of Damocles hanging above. “That helps the Cause how?”

“Major Valentine. I'm personally involved in—in charge of, in a way, some very delicate negotiations. A consortium of high-level officials in the Kurian Zone—”

“Quislings?”

Sime wrinkled his nose and opened and shut his mouth, like a cat disgusted by a serving of cooked carrots.

“Quislings, if you will,” Sime continued. “Quislings who run a substantial part of the gulag in Oklahoma and Kansas. They're offering to throw in with us.”

“I see why you use good soap.”

“Stop it, Major.”

Valentine turned toward Young.

“Listen!” Sime said, lowering his voice but somehow putting more energy into his words. “We're talking about the freedom of a hundred thousand people. Maybe more. An almost unbroken corridor to the Denver Protective Zone. Wheat, corn, oil, livestock—”

“I see the strategic benefits.”

Sime relaxed a little. Valentine felt nervous, his dinner of doubtful meatloaf revisiting the back of his throat. “Still don't see how my pleading guilty helps.”

“These Quislings are afraid of reprisals. Maybe not to them, but to some of the forces they command. The Provisional Government organizing the new Free Republic wants to show them that we're not going to permit atrocities. ”

“Show? As in show trial?”

Sime turned his head a little, as though the words were a slap. He looked at Valentine out of one baleful eye.

“You have me. You also have this: plead guilty, and it comes with an offer. You'll get a harsh sentence, most likely life, but the government will reduce it and you'll serve somewhere pleasant, doing useful work. Five years from now, after we've won a significant victory somewhere, your sentence will quietly be commuted to celebrate. You could return to service or we could arrange a quiet little sinecure at a generous salary. When was your last breakfast in bed? I recommend it.”

“I have the word of a ‘special executive' on that? I've never heard that title before.”

“Consider it as coming from your old governor's lips. He knows what you did in Little Rock. I'm speaking for him and for the other members of the Provisional Government. ”

Valentine took a deep breath.

“Do this, Major, and it'll be the best kind of victory. No bloodshed.”

“That's the carrot; where's the stick?”

“You haven't given me an answer yet.”

“Let's say I fight it out.”

“Don't.”

“Let's say I do anyway,” Valentine said.

Sime looked doubtful for the first time. “The Garage.” The air got ten degrees warmer in the dark of the cafeteria.

“Will you accept a counteroffer?”

“I'm a negotiator. Of course.”

“Do you know Captain Moira Styachowski?”

“I know the name from your reports. She served with you on Big Rock.”

“Get her in here. I hear that same offer from her, and I'll take it.”

“Ah, it has to come from someone you trust. I feel a little hurt, Major. Usually my title—”

“I've had a gutful of titles in the Kurian Zone. You can keep them.”

“I'll see what I can do. If she's on active service I might not be able to get her.”

“She's the only—no. If you can't get her, get Colonel Chalmers. I've dealt with her before.”

Sime extracted a leather-bound notepad and wrote the name down. “She's with?”

“A judge with the JAG.”

“Very well. Thank you for your time, Major.”

“I have nothing but time.”

“Don't be so sure. Take my deal.” Sime looked up and waved to Young.

The next day rain tamped down the dust on the exercise yard. The shooters and the looters stayed on opposite sides of the pie slice between the frowning brown wings D and E, trying to keep their pannikins full of lukewarm lentils out of the rain as they sat on long, baseball-dugout-style benches.

“Anyone got an offer from a civilian named Sime?” Valentine asked.

Farland and Thrush exchanged looks and shrugged. Roderick sucked soup out of his tin.

“We're getting pushed back again,” Farland said. “God, it's like getting a shot when the doctor keeps picking up and putting down the big-bore needle.”

Roderick stopped eating and stared. “I had rabies shots. Harpy bite.”

“He said all this is more or less of a show. To convince some gulag Quislings that Southern Command won't just shoot them dead if they join us.”

“News to me,” Thrush said. He returned his pannikin to the slop bin and returned, twitching up his trousers with his deft little hands before he sat. It took Valentine a moment to remember when he'd last seen that gesture—Malia Carrasca's grandfather in Jamaica would go through that same motion when he sat. “You know, they might be firing smoke to get you to plead out.”

“They've tried murderers before,” Farland said. “My uncle served with Keck's raiders before they hung Dave Keck. But he killed women and children.”

“And Lieutenant Luella Parsons,” Roderick said. “When was that, fifty-nine?”

“She shot the mayor of Russelville,” Farland put in. He wiped raindrops from his glasses and resettled them.

“Yeah, but she claimed he was working for them. Said she saw him talking to a Reaper.”

“I heard they tried General Martinez himself for shooting a couple of Grogs,” Roderick said.

“That makes sense,” Thrush said. “If you ask me, it's a crime not to shoot 'em.”

“Actually it was,” Valentine said. “I was there. The two Grogs he shot were on our side.”

“First I've heard of it. Were the charges dropped?” Farland asked.

Valentine shook his head.

“You made a powerful enemy, Major,” Thrush said. “Martinez had a lot of friends in Mountain Home. He had the sort of command you'd send your son or daughter off to if you wanted to keep 'em out of the fight.”

“Technically I was under him during Archangel. His charges are why I'm here, or that's what my counsel says.”

“Bastard. Heard he didn't do much,” Farland said.

“I wouldn't know. I was over in Little Rock.”

Roderick grew animated. “Heard that was a hot one. You really threw some sand in their gears. What was her name, Colonel . . .”

“Kessey,” Valentine put in. “She was killed early on in the fighting. Bad luck.”

“What are you going to plead, Valentine?” Thrush said.

“Five minutes, gentlemen,” a guard yelled, standing up from his seat next to the door.

Everyone was wet. Were they all bedraggled sacrificial sheep? “Haven't made up my mind yet.”

Valentine grew used to the tasteless food, and the boring days of routine bleeding into one another and overlapping like a long hospital stay. He took a job in the prison library, but there was so little work to do they only had him in two days a week. He could see why men sometimes marked the days on the wall in prison; at times he couldn't remember if a week or a month had passed.

The weather warmed and grew hot. Even the guards grew listless in the heat. Young brought in two of the pamphlets produced about the fight in Little Rock and had Valentine sign them.

“Turns out I had a cousin in that camp your Bears took. One's for him and one's for his folks.”

Part of his brain considered escape. He tried to memorize the schedule of the guard visits to his hallway, tried to make a guess at when the face would appear in the shatterproof window, but their visits were random.

Also, there was the Escape Law. Any person who broke free while awaiting trial automatically had a guilty verdict rendered
in absentia
.

He slept more than he was used to, and wrote a long letter to the Miskatonic about the mule list. He labored for hours on the report, knowing all the while that it would be glanced at, a note would be added to another file (maybe!), and then it would be filed away, never to see the light of day again until some archivist went through and decided which documents could be kept and which could be destroyed.

He suggested that further investigation into the mule list was warranted. Anything important enough for the Kurians to put this kind of effort into—and apart from feeding and protecting themselves, the Kurians had few pursuits that Valentine was aware of—might prove vital.

Valentine signed it. His last testament to the Cause?

Letters arrived in a strung-together mass. Outrage and gratitude from Post, who was on the mend in a convalescent home and had installed Narcisse in the kitchen; wonder from Meadows; a few postcards from his former Razors who had heard about his imprisonment one way or another.

One offered to “. . . come git you Sir. Just send word.”

Nothing from Ahn-Kha, which worried Valentine a little. The Golden One could read and write English as well as anyone in his former command, and better than many.

Valentine heard footsteps in the hallway pause, and then a knock at the door.

“Visitor, Major.”

This time Corporal Young took him down to a regular visiting room, carrels with glass between allowed for conversation through small holes in the glass—or plastic, Valentine thought when he saw all the scratches. There were fittings for phones but it looked as though the electronics had been taken out.

He waited for a few minutes and then they brought in Moira Styachowski.

She wore good-fitting cammies with her Hunter Staff crossbar on her captain's bars. The only female Bear he'd ever met looked about as healthy as she ever did—just a little pale and exhausted.

“So they got you after all,” Valentine said.

“I might say the same about you,” Styachowski said in return, then her eyes shifted down. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. Dumb thing to joke—”

“Forget about it, Wildcard.”

She smiled at the handle issued to her the night he'd been burned in the Kurian Tower of Little Rock. “You know who's behind this, right?”

“Yes, that Sime . . .”

“No, the charges. It's Martinez.”

“My counselor told me. Seems like a sharp woman.”

Styachowski looked down again.

“What?” Valentine asked.

“I was told, Val, in language that was . . . umm, remarkable for its vigor, to come here and tell you to work with Sime on this. The ‘vigor' of the language employed made me ask a few questions of a friend at GHQ. So, for the record, take the deal.”

Valentine lowered his voice. “Off the record?”

She leaned forward. “It's a setup for the benefit of some Oklahoma Quislings. According to my source at GHQ, Sime said, ‘They need to see a few hangings to convince them.' Don't look like that. You've got your deal from Sime.”

“Sime says. He's powerful enough to make it happen? Even with a Jagger judge?”

“The representatives”—she said the word with the inflection a bluenose might use to describe workers in a bordello as “hostesses”—“are here and your trials are due to start. Luckily you were the last one arrested. The others will go first. They'll get their hangings.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Valentine asked. So goddamn helpless in here. He felt an urge to lash out, punch the Plexiglas between himself and Styachowski. Perhaps even hit Styachowski, for nothing more than being the bearer of bad news. But the mad flash faded as quickly as it rose.

“I don't have much experience in this. A couple of classes on military law and that farce we had near Magazine Mountain sums up my experience.”

“What about the newspapers? Your average townie thinks every Quisling should wind up in a ditch.”

“Military trials aren't public. I'll see if I can talk to your counsel. If it makes you feel any better, Ahn-Kha is here. I set him up quietly in the woods nearby. I sent word to that Cat you're partial to but I haven't heard back.”