John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Then a tremor rolled through his chest, and she realized that she’d been holding her breath, waiting for him to breathe.

She glanced at her watch, and saw that she’d timed her speech perfectly, coming to the end just as his muscles began to relax.

Suddenly, his body jerked on the table. A snarl curled from his throat, and he gasped. “There’s an American!” he said. “He’s building a machine.” He hacked up the words, and spat them out. “He says…”

“What?”

“He says he’s going to stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“The motor.”

“What motor ?”

“The motor of the world.”

The dock strike lasted seven days, seven hard days given that Istanbul, with all its glories, was right there, almost close enough to touch. The smells of grilled fish and lamb wafted toward them from the ferryboat stop at Karakoy, where vendors clustered to serve the crowds of commuters. Khalid joked that they could swim from the ship to the shore. And they probably could have. But no. Without transit visas for Turkey, they were confined to the Marmara Queen.

So Wilson worked. Day after day, he sat at the desk in his room, plugging variables into the equations he’d worked out in prison, consulting the notes he’d made while studying Yuri Ceplak’s journals at Lake Bled.

The one problem he hadn’t been able to solve concerned the photon flux that takes place when a standing gravitational wave interacts with its electromagnetic counterpart in a static magnetic field. After the Tunguska disaster, Tesla had been nearly obsessed with the problem. And there, in Ceplak’s notebooks, was a marginal notation in Tesla’s own hand, one that turned the conundrum into an epiphany. Tesla had solved it! Wilson was now confident that he could focus the beam with astonishing precision, once he factored in the target’s harmonic.

But first the weapon had to be miniaturized so that the focusing mechanism could be tested in the field. Among other things, this meant identifying targets that were relatively “soft” and easily accessible. Not the White House, but Hoover Dam. Not the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, where NORAD was headquartered, but the Golden Gate Bridge. Not the Pentagon, but… Culpeper.

Wilson smiled, contemplating the damage he was going to do. It would be massive and clever, and come out of nowhere – like dry lightning on a clear day.

He was still immersed in his equations when he heard shouting on the docks. A few minutes later, a knock on his door confirmed his suspicions. “Hasan is pleased to inform you dock strike is over!” In four hours, they were under way.

He was asleep when the ship, having carved its way through the swell and chop of the Black Sea, hove into sight of Odessa. It was the slowing of the engines that woke him up. His heartbeat was synchronized to their vibrations, so that, when the engines slowed, it hit him like a heart attack, and jerked him wide awake.

He dressed quickly and went out on the deck, which was slick with rain. The city was barely visible behind a curtain of fog. Sea and sky bled into each other, producing a gray wash, a sort of maritime whiteout. Which was disappointing, because Odessa promised to be an interesting city. According to the captain, at whose table Wilson had sometimes dined, Odessa had once been the Soviet Union’s largest port. “This is so,” the captain told him, “because the water is warm year-round. Everywhere else, it’s locked in ice.”

Without the push of the engines, the ship seemed almost to be still. But that was an illusion. Styrofoam cups and cigarette butts trailed in their wake.

Wilson shifted from foot to foot.

Bo had left a reassuring message in the Draft folder of their Yahoo! account. Their friend in Odessa was aware of the dock strike in Istanbul, and would adjust his schedule accordingly. Relax, Bo wrote. Everything’s cool.

That’s what Wilson told himself, but he couldn’t shrug off his unease. He fingered the red capsule Hakim had given him in Baalbek, a capsule he kept taped under his shirt collar. It worked by chemical suffocation, denying oxygen to each of the body’s cells. It was a fast and violent way to die, but it wasn’t Wilson’s way.

Almost idly, he stripped the capsule from under his collar, and dropped it over the side.

He could see Odessa clearly now. The docks were right in the middle of the city, with the port authority headquartered in a huge ugly concrete structure, and obscuring “the Potemkin steps” beside it.

Wilson had read about the famous staircase in his guidebook and was anxious to see it. A broad flight of 192 steps cascading down the hillside to the Black Sea, the stairs were an architectural marvel, constructed to exaggerate normal perspective. From the base they were said to appear unimaginably steep, an effect achieved by their gradual narrowing from a width of sixty-eight feet at the bottom to forty feet at the top.

The steps were made famous in a scene in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. In the film, czarist troops open fire on the civilians of Odessa. A mother falls. A baby carriage careens down the steps, bouncing past one body after another, its innocent occupant bound for destruction. Blood is everywhere.

Good movie, Wilson thought. He looked forward to seeing the real thing.

Transit visas had been arranged, the sheets of paper already attached to their passports.

Wilson and his bodyguards were met at the foot of the gangway by a skinny guy with a bad complexion who introduced himself as Sergei. “Mr. Belov sends his apologies. He regrets that he cannot be here until tomorrow. His daughter performs in a-” He frowned, then moved his fingers as if playing a piano.

“Recital,” Wilson said.

“Yes!” Sergei agreed with enthusiasm. “Permit me,” he said, grabbing Wilson’s suitcase. This way.” Within ten minutes, they were through Customs, submachine guns and all. “Express line,” Khalid said. Zero giggled.

Half an hour later, they were checking into the first-class Hotel Konstantin.

Zero and Khalid were elated by the idea of a day at such a hotel, especially once they checked in and learned that their room had a Playstation 2 and a copy of Grand Theft Auto.

Wilson was glad, too, because he would spend a day in the same city as Irina. Despite his fantasies about her, he was pragmatic. He knew that the women on the website were glammed up for their photos and would look, in real life, rather different. Some looked like prostitutes to him, heavily made up and showing plenty of cleavage, although that might be a cultural difference. In contrast, Irina seemed demure, like a housewife in an old sitcom. Someone who would serve tea and grow flowers.

Wilson did not intend to call her or speak to her, but he was desperate to have a look.

At three o’clock, he sat at a tiny table in the Cafe Mayakovsky on Deribasovskaya Street. It was a large and busy room with perhaps a dozen waitresses – his own a heavyset pink-faced brunette. He ordered tea and while he waited, fixed his eyes on the double swinging doors through which the waitresses came and went from the kitchen, trays aloft. Each wore a lacy frill pinned to her hair, and a green-checked uniform with white apron. They moved with grace and efficiency, even the older and fatter ones, gliding between the crowded tables, avoiding one another with a kind of intuitive radar, bending the knee to serve the hot drinks and dainty pastries. To Wilson, whose brain sought order and pattern everywhere, it seemed almost choreographed in its rhythm and balance, and he watched it with pleasure.