Carl Sargent - Black Madonna

“Have we got everything we need?” Geraint asked him for the tenth time that morning.

“Your Lordship, you’re already dosed with quinine and KZT and half a dozen other drugs, which is why you’re so happy stuffing your face with the kind of drek you wouldn’t dream of eating back home. Kind of frags your body that way” Streak grinned. “You’ll sleep ten, twelve hours a night for a week or two as well. Trust me. Oh, and it’ll turn your piss green, but that’s always a good party trick if you can do it. If I was a bug, I’d avoid you like the plague.”

He leant back and laughed loudly. “Whoops, mixed metaphor. You know what I mean.”

“Fine,” Geraint said, having indeed swallowed a disturbingly large number of oddly shaped tablets at Streak’s behest before breakfast and then wondered whether he should show such naive trust. The hypo, at least, he knew had come from a hermetically sealed pack; it was the same pack he’d used a few times previously, prior to business jaunts to the Far East.

“Then let’s go. No point in wasting any more time.”

They paid their bill, headed through the small concourse to the VIP and private-passenger lounge, and made their way slowly to their small plane. The last week of their lives had seemed to hold so many plane journeys. taxi rides, and car trips that they were beginning to get homesick in their various ways-not that any of them was actually aware of it. What they all felt more than anything was relief that, at last, they were going to meet the man who’d caused them, one way or another, so much trouble.

They’d already been followed by more than one group of people, and been attacked by at least two of them. They’d also eluded at least two other groups of runners set on their tails by other corps who knew that Michael and his friends had some kind of head start. They’d missed only one tail, which was not entirely surprising for he did, after all, get immediate updates on all information Michael sent back to Renraku. Since Michael had already extracted a six figure sum in expenses and fees from Renraku, he thought he had to give them some justification for that, and some account of his work. So it hadn’t been too difficult to trace him.

The spy made his report and asked for instructions. He was told to wait for reinforcements and told which plane to wait for.

“Frag, that’s military issue. I don’t know if we can land in that thing,” he balked.

The voice on the other end of the line was calm but steely. “Not to worry. We have records of the construction and very recent satellite confirmation of structural integrity,” his boss said in the strangled vocabulary of the corporate executive. “Three craft will be despatched.”

“ Three? ” The spy was incredulous. That meant the best part of two hundred paratroops and auxiliary military being flown into the place. Since they were supposed to be hunting a lone individual, this seemed to be overkill, to put it mildly.

“The locals may be hostile.”

“Oh, come on, they’re just primitives with bloody hunting rifles!”

“Don’t be so patronizing. You know, your last profile suggested you might have latent racist tendencies.”

“Don’t sell me that crap,” the man said with some feeling. “Twenty of these guys could take out a bunch of hijackers on a Boeing and you’re sending in two hundred? What the frag is going down here? What are you sending me into?”

His suspicion was not unjustified. His superior paused for a moment before reassuring the man and smoothing his ruffled feathers.

“Don’t worry Johanssen. Were just taking all due precautions. You do know, after all, something of what is at stake here”

“But what about Sutherland?”

“Don’t harm him unless it’s absolutely unavoidable. The same for the Welshman. He’s a Brit noble and any trouble there could be extremely bad publicity.”

“The others?”

“If they get in your way, remove them.”

A pause. “I need formal warranty of all negotiating latitude that I have,” Johanssen said at last. “What we can offer the man, if force fails.”

“Force is not going to fail.”

“Of course not. Fifty tons of black ice failed but two hundred goons will work. You know, it just might now.”

“We’ll deal with that if the need arises. You have this direct encrypted link to me and I’m available twenty-four hours a day.”

Johanssen tapped off the telecom. He’d thought that tracking Sutherland, having managed to find him in Venice after losing him twice before, was all that he’d be asked to do until the call had come through from Chiba this morning. Now he was going to be accompanying two hundred or so Renraku troops on what looked like an orthodox single-target strike, and he just knew it was going to be a total disaster.

“It’s going to be near eighty even at this time of year, and thank your lucky stars the town’s on a river so it isn’t even bloody hotter,” Streak shot back at them over his shoulder from the pilot seat.

Though they’d taken the medicines they needed, had the sunblock they needed, and the weaponry they hoped they wouldn’t need, they didn’t really have hot-weather clothing. The elf had, however, given them copious amounts of talcum powder with which to dose themselves to prevent what he unpleasantly termed ‘bollock rot’ from excessive sweating. Exposing flesh to the sun to keep cool would mean more insect bites, despite the best efforts of all the repellent one could smear on, and some risk of sunburn for the fairer among them.

“Just what are we going to say when we get there?” Geraint mused, staring down at the featureless sands of the Saudi Arabian desert.

“That’s a good question,” Michael said. “My guess is that our man is going to have some kind of agenda of his own. He’s going to want something.”

“I thought we knew what he wanted,” Geraint put in. “A very, very large sum of money.”

“That’s what he asked for, yet it doesn’t make sense that it’s all he wants. Why are we playing this game?”

“Hmm,” was all the Welshman could manage.

“So when we get out of the plane and find our Leo lookalike, we’ve got to figure out a way to make sure he’s not holding all the cards.”

“What do we have?”

“Little more than our native wit and intelligence I’m afraid.”

“We’re buggered then,” said Streak cheerfully. “ETA twenty minutes. Not a rocket in sight. Thank heavens for that. No worries.”

“We don’t have parachutes,” Michael observed.

“Yeah, but we’ve got sonic antimissile rockets. Never fly without them.”

“Do they work?”

“Yup. Or, I should say they worked on this baby the couple of times they were needed.”

“Do you really think we’re going to get shot at coming in?” Michael asked earnestly.

Streak laughed heartily. “Nah, I don’t think so. Latest update from Jane’s says there’s nothing too close to where we’re going. It’s lively down in Basra, but we’re well away from that drekhole.”

Events proved him right. As they began the descent to a runway that was little more than a parched strip of reddened soil, everyone in the group felt the tension knotting inside them. It wasn’t fear for their safety, but the excited hope that they might at last be at the end of the trail.

The wheels of the small plane bounced a few times along the bumpy runway. Streak deliberately perpetrating some mischief among his passengers with cries of “Whoa!” and “Oh no!”, as if something serious might actually be happening. Finally, somewhat shaken and apprehensive, his passengers tottered out of the aircraft. To their surprise, a Rolls Royce, gleaming silver and gray in the brilliant sun, was standing by the huts that passed for airport buildings. With his arms crossed, dressed for all the world like an English chauffeur, the man they knew as Salai was lounging against the front door of the car. He waved to them cheerfully, as if welcoming old clients.