David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

He pulled up Google and typed in “Desert Storm.”

So much stuff, so much of it wrong, just the hindsight you got from the media and the old, old lies. But the dates were there and the deadline: 15 January 1991.

Get your sorry Arab ass out of Kuwait by then or we come kicking .

Yeah. That happened. Except you didn’t wait for January to come, did you? War was about planning, preparation. You placed a few markers to make sure the bets fell your way. At Christmas you slung two camouflaged Humvees underneath a couple of Black Hawks, loaded up two teams of “specialists” who’d been locked in training in a secluded villa out beyond Orvieto for weeks. Then you dropped the vehicles and the crew somewhere in the desert outside Babylon, pointed them to where the friendlies were supposed to be waiting and never said- never -that good and bad were relative in the desert, depended on which way the sun was shining, how many dollars you had stashed alongside the M16s, the rocket-propelled grenades, and the radios that could bring those same Black Hawks storming back to save you anytime you wanted.

Remembering . Kaspar hated remembering. So he hit the other Google button, the one marked “groups,” the one that took you straight into crazy territory, all those anonymous Usenet pits where anyone was anyone, could say what they liked and always be out of reach, untraceable, faceless, nameless, flaming each other night and day all around the world, just wishing there was something you could put in a mail message that would harm the other person-physically, permanently-like a demon biting its way out of the screen.

He liked these places more than anything. You could say your mind and no one ever got payback. You could type in “Desert Storm Babylon Bill Kaspar” and see… what?

A list of episodes from some dumb science-fiction series spawned out of Star Trek . He’d tried it a million times when he first got free. It was always the same. Until this September in Beijing. Something had happened then. Something that had set him on his present path.

Nothing ever got erased on the Net. The message, the solitary first in a thread marked “Babylon Sisters,” was still there.

The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the ziggurat. Let’s get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion time for the class of “91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming or not?

It was signed: WillFK@whitehouse.gov and, seeing it again, remembering the way it first goaded him in the Internet cafe on the other side of the world, Bill Kaspar thought he might go crazy, just pick up the fucking screen there and then and throw it across the empty room, stomp on it till there was nothing left but shattered plastic and glass.

The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory .

They were saying he was dead now, that he’d been Dan Deacon, too. They lied, always, and maybe that was one good reason the voices wouldn’t go away.

He closed his eyes, squeezed hard, tried to think, tried to remember, calm himself. He hadn’t risen to the bait in Beijing. He’d been too shocked to see it there. Now, increasingly, there was nothing to lose.

He’d read the Bible during all that time in the wilderness, stuck in the stinking jail in Baghdad. The Bible was the only book they allowed him. It was a new experience. When he’d first got his orders, first seen that crazy code name for the unseen figure who created and bankrolled their little project, he hadn’t got the reference. The Book of Revelation provided it. The Scarlet Beast, the Whore of Babylon. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries .

Nine bodies in the ground now and the voices kept screaming at Bill Kaspar, telling him he still didn’t have a face he could believe in, a real name, anything.

Thought you knew the guy, white boy? Or did you screw up there too ?

“Like fuck I did!” Kaspar yelled out loud, and stomped a big fist on the grimy desk, sending the Japanese teenager two seats along scurrying into the corner to find another machine.

Unable to stop himself, he typed in a reply and knew immediately that this was what they wanted. Some spook just up the road or in Washington somewhere, some stupid little geek masquerading as the FBI, gawped at a screen, waiting for a fish to wriggle on the line.

Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum , he wrote. I’ve waited long enough now. “Bill Kaspar” my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don’t meet .

You hunt. You get hunted. You wave to each other from across the canyon, wondering who gets to taste whose blood first. And when.

He logged off, set the PC to reboot, ran a comb through his hair and took one last furtive look at himself in the reflection of the PC screen. Then he walked out through the side door, avoiding the front desk, out into the freezing street, thinking about distances, measuring the space between this tacky office block and the big building in the Via Veneto, spanning the icy air between them in discrete units in his head.

The bug worked for half a kilometre, maybe more. It was made almost entirely from plastic, which was supposed to let it through any standard scanning system. The little battery was designed to keep it running for a week. By his reckoning the embassy ought to be just in range. To make sure, he crossed the empty road, watched a bus struggling over the slush, then walked a couple of hundred metres up the hill before taking out the earphone of the receiver and popping it in so that it looked as if he were listening to football on a little radio.

He cast one short glance back towards Barberini. A couple of guys in dark coats were going into the Net cafe. Not the usual clientele.

Morons . This was like playing with amateurs. Like playing with little Emily Deacon, who wasn’t that much changed, in some ways, from when she’d been a girl, shaking her long blonde hair to rock music in Steely Dan Deacon’s parlour a lifetime before, a little kid wondering why two grown men full of beer found her so funny.

There was a cafe on the corner of a side street: standard coffee, two uncomfortable wooden seats by the window, just one customer, an old man spooning stained sugar into his mouth out of an empty cup. Bill Kaspar ordered an overpriced cappuccino and sat by the smeary glass, damp with condensation, looking out into the cold world beyond, listening. Bugs were unreliable. They’d never work from inside the embassy. There were devices to prevent that, networks of transmitters that sent out a constant blur of electronic noise to deafen anyone trying to intrude.

But he was fishing too. In truth he was starting to get desperate. He’d tried every other avenue he could think of. The idea had occurred to him the previous night, just when he was beginning to realize who Emily Deacon was as she struggled against his iron grip, just as he was struggling against the voices, trying to convince them there was something better he could do with the girl than take her life.

The bug was the size of a one-cent coin. As he’d wrestled her into submission under Giordano Bruno’s watching statue, he’d pushed the Velcro back into the underside of the collar on her thick black jacket, on the off chance, not knowing how he could use this opportunity or whether she’d be smart enough to pick it up anyway. It was worth a try.

The earphone crackled. There was just static, the unintelligible rustling of a digital infinity, maybe one the embassy was putting out itself. It could be two thousand euros, the last real money he had, straight down the drain.