Read Online Turn of the Cards by George R. R. Martin, Victor Milan - Free Book Online Page A

him in his chair by main force.
    “We’re running the problem through our computers in Washington,” Hamilton said. “We have a complete personality profile on Dr. Meadows. They’ll war-game the possibilities and give us some insight into where he’ll head from here.”
    “Fine,” Belew said. “We’ll let your pocket-protector brigade play their computer games. In the meantime, let’s try to get a handle on where our quarry is in the real world.” He snipped the end off his right forefinger.
    Saxon jerked back as blood squirted from Belew’s fingertip. The younger man’s face instantly drained of blood. “Jesus Christ!”
    Belew pressed the raw tip of his finger against the base of a gooseneck lamp. It glowed to life. The head suddenly craned and swiveled to bring its glow to bear on the map.
    Time to cast a little light, rather than curse the darkness,” Belew said with satisfaction.
    Helen stepped forward with her arms crossed tightly beneath her breasts. Reflections from the lamp glittered in her eyes. “You’re an ace, too, aren’t you?”
    “You never told us that,” Saxon said sulkily.
    “Son, Langley isn’t in the habit of telling everything it knows, unlike certain of our finer government agencies. Now, pay some attention here. I’d at least like to have some tentative answers to hand before I have to leave.”
    “Leave?” Saxon said. “Where the hell are you going?”
    “The opera, of course. The Marriage of Figaro. They’ve got an ultramodernistic set and staging for it. I hear it’s a hell of a mess, but I like to see things with my own eyes.”
     
    The old night train to Brindisi. Mark’s asleep.
    Elite unit or not, the Rome antiterrorist unit had a tendency to mill. When somebody dressed in the same coveralls they and the legitimate ground crew were wearing dropped into view beneath the tail of the Airbus, all eyes were locked on the front of the plane, where the first team was going up a ramp that had been wheeled across the heat-shimmering pavement. When the figure strolled away, no one paid any mind.
    Escape was what Cosmic Traveler did best, after all.
     
    Mark will have to engage in some creative chemistry before he can play that ace again.
    The train is winding its way across Italy’s Apennine spine. Mark is heading east — where, he isn’t sure. He’s mainly on the train because you don’t need to surrender your passport to spend the night on the train the way you do to spend your night in a hotel.
    The night is clear, but that’s okay. The roll-down plastic shade is drawn. He paid cash for the tickets. He’s still using the passport; he figures it isn’t quite as hot as the credit card. Most grunt-level Eurocrats, he’s noticed, don’t look beyond the distinctive American jacket on the document, if they look at it at all. If you look like a North African or a Turkish guest-worker, they’re liable to want to count the hairs in your mustache to be sure the number’s the same as in your passport photo. Americans get treated differently. He’s learning, Mark is.
    Since he’s asleep and all, he dreams.
    In his dreams he’s a strapping golden youth, bare-chested, with blond hair flowing to his muscular shoulders. He swings a glowing peace symbol on a chain, and the secret police and jackboots and censors and informers of America’s New World Order retreat in confusion. He is the mightiest of Movement aces: the Radical, who fought the National Guard and Hardhat to a standstill during the riots following the Kent State murders and saved the day in People’s Park.
    Mark was the Radical once, which is all the times the Radical appeared. Or maybe he wasn’t. See, he isn’t sure.
    He was a sheltered child of southern California and the military-industrial complex. His father was a war hero and technocrat, his mother a very nice woman who did all the social things expected of an officer’s wife and drank perhaps more than she should, a fact Mark didn’t realize