Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“Wait, it’s not his table.” Khalid played back his meeting with Trevor, remembering the woman with him. It didn’t seem as if they’d known each other long, and the dinner was her idea, not his. There was no way someone like Trevor could get a short-order reservation at Les A.

“The table is under Millicent-” He paused for nearly a minute, the morphine taking a stronger hold of his mind, blanking out not only the pain, but his entire consciousness as well. His world was turning… gray. “Millicent Gray, she got the reservation. Tell Trevor I need him.”

Five minutes later, Khalid was on the edge of blackness, a deep void that beckoned him in, one that he desperately wanted to enter but fought off like Saladin against the Crusaders at Ghalali. The nurse finally returned with a portable phone, holding it to the bed so Khalid could speak without moving and possibly tearing the stitches that ran in every direction across his back.

“I say, old fruit, this goes beyond the pale,” Trevor said somewhat sharply. “I thought we were meeting later tonight. It’s not often I get taken out by a bink like Millie.”

“Shut up, Trev,” Khalid moaned. “I’m in trouble.”

“What else is new? You bloody wogs are always in trouble. It’s the Koran, you know, all that jihad rot. It’s too violent by half and you’re all reared on it like it was a children’s story.”

“Trevor, will you shut up?” The drugs were making speech easier, but he was losing track of what he was saying. “I’m in a hospital with an Indian quack, most assuredly. I need you here. And I need your girlfriend too.”

“What are you talking about?” Concern cut through Trevor’s normal cavalier airs.

“I’ve been bloody shot, you ass. I need you to get me out of here. It hasn’t ended. It won’t ever end.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Khalid. Let me speak to the doctor.”

“No,” Khalid said. Ragaswami had left the room with the promise of returning in just a few moments. “Not tonight. I won’t be able to make it. Tomorrow morning you’ve got to come here and bring Millicent Gray. She’s tall enough.”

“What are you talking about, Khalid? Jesus, you’ve got me spooked. Are you all right?”

“They have me on drugs. I can’t talk for much longer.”

Khalid’s speech slurred as he drifted back into oblivion. “Tomorrow morning, I need you here with Mrs. Gray. Dress her in a chador, full veils. She must be covered from head to toe like a devout Muslim woman. Tell them she’s my wife. You understand?”

Trevor heard the desperation in Khalid’s voice. “Trust me, my friend, we’ll be there as soon as they let us. Christ, for you, I’ll wear the fucking veil.”

Khalid had slipped into a drug- and pain-induced unconsciousness. Had he been awake he would have heard those last few words and saved his friend’s life. As it was, he was out, the phone dropping to the floor so hard that the battery pack snapped out from its concealed cradle, cutting the connection as if Khalid had hung up the phone.

Back at Les Ambassadeurs, Trevor handed the phone back to the hovering waiter and turned to his libidinous hostess. “Do you remember my friend at the Savoy? Well, it seems he needs our help.”

“Don’t tell me he knows my husband is a member of Parliament?”

“My dear,” Trevor took one of her slim hands in his, pushing aside a plate of fine Scotch beef to get to what he really wanted. “Nothing so pedestrian. Tomorrow morning, you are going to be a harem master. And I shall be your harem.”

“I thought all members of a harem were virgins?”

“True, but after tonight I fear that you’ll have corrupted me.”

The heat coming from the central system had a dry, ozone tang that made the cabin smell like an electrical appliance that had just shorted. The antique system rattled every time it cycled water through the creaking pipes, popping so loudly that Aggie, already edgy, jumped when a pipe sounded off like a pistol shot. Outside the porthole, the late afternoon sun was hidden by layers of clouds and a wispy fog. Icy rain pelted the glass, driven by a stiff wind blasting down from the barren reaches of the Arctic Circle. According to the digital thermometer hanging near the cabin door, the outside temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but with the windchill it hovered in the midteens.

It was only the middle of October, and winter had already begun to grip the Land of the Midnight Sun.

The interior of the cabin was a comfortable seventy, but to Aggie it seemed much, much hotter. She’d just finished fifty sit-ups and was now lying on her back, her long legs held at a thirty-degree angle above the floor so that the rippled muscles of her stomach quivered. She’d been working out for two hours doing isometrics, aerobics, and step exercises, using a metal footlocker. She’d done two hundred advance lunges from her fencing lessons, each attack so focused she could almost feel an imaginary blade striking an opponent. Perspiration glossed her body and held her hair plastered to her head. Her sweat shorts and T-shirt clung like a second skin.

Getting up to begin her warm down, Aggie caught her reflection in a wall-mounted mirror. Used to seeing herself after exercising, she wasn’t much concerned with her hair or her clothes or the sweat that dripped from her chin. But her eyes… they still burned with a cold emerald fury. The hours of exercise hadn’t dimmed any of the anger that burned within her.

“Men,” she spat at her reflection.

She’d spent her entire life proving her independence, taking on challenges, facing them and more often than not vanquishing them with relative ease. Her master’s degree was her own, her sleek body, once gawky and angular, was the result of her own effort, her personality validated years of fighting the influences of her parents and their warped lives. She had earned the respect that was her due, paid for it with time and dedicated work. But in the past twenty-four hours she’d been treated as if she were just a piece of furniture, or maybe a pet.

“Screw them both!”

Jan, with his mysterious errand and his ravings about making oil so repugnant no one would want to use it ever again. Mercer, with his patronizing order to leave Alaska for her own safety. This wasn’t the nineteenth century, and she wasn’t some simpering damsel needing to be rescued. They both acted as if they knew what was best, as if her wishes and her opinion meant nothing. Jesus Christ!

For all practical purposes, Jan had raped her last night. The man who wanted her hand in marriage had forced himself on her with little regard for her feelings at all. She could have been an inflatable doll for all he cared, a masturbatory toy. She’d thought she loved him — his mind and feelings were so similar to hers — but now she saw, for the first time, how different he was. She’d known all along about his ego and self-absorption, but now she saw how driven he was by them. Even thinking about him made her uncomfortable, as if some multilegged insect was crawling across her flesh.

And what of Mercer, with his testosterone-charged assault this morning, guns drawn and orders shouted, as if they were storming some highjacked airliner? And his threatening to arrest everyone on his authority? He should have done it; everyone on the Hope was willing to go to jail for their beliefs. This was just another way for him to patronize her. A little slap on the wrist for the trust-fund environmentalist. Be careful, Aggie, she could almost hear his voice. You’re playing with grown-ups now, and we don’t want you to get hurt.

Hey, I’m an adult too, she thought bitterly. I know what I’m doing. A month shy of her thirty-second birthday and he was treating her like a six-year-old. So many men in her life had taken that attitude with her, treated her like some precious object that must be protected at all cost. Her father, especially, had hidden his problems with her mother until it was too late, fearing that a divorce or even a separation would hurt Aggie too much. That was a laugh. Like her mother’s suicide wouldn’t bother her?