George Martin - Suicide Kings

Their satellite phone was useless, and her cell didn’t work-no bars, no service-and the battery was nearly dead to boot. Jerusha sighed and thrust the phone back into one of the pockets of her cargo pants. Squinting into the sunlight, she could see a village set in the hollow of the next bend.

Wally crowded into the tiny cabin of the craft as they passed the village, and Jerusha avoided looking at the people staring as they motored past, facing forward as if confident and unworried about their presence on the river.

As soon as the bend put the village out of sight, she extended a hand to help Wally clamber out again. “Put us in here, Wally,” Jerusha said. “We really need to find a way to tell Lohengrin what’s going on down here. Maybe there’s a landline in that village I can use.”

Wally’s face stiffened. “That’s too dangerous.”

The roiling in her stomach agreed with him. “I don’t see another choice. Some of these people may not like the Nshombos any more than we do; they’re scared, but they might be willing to let me make a phone call.”

“And what if there’s a PPA fella there? It would only take one of them.”

She’d been thinking the same, but she tried to shrug as nonchalantly as she could. “It’s a chance we gotta take. I’m not sure we can do this alone, Wally. There’s something awful going on here, something big-something Lucien looks to be caught up in.”

Wally vented a breath through his nostrils. The boat puttered toward the bank and Jerusha cut the engine; Wally jumped out, knee-deep in the water, to drag the boat out of the river into the cover of leaves.

Jerusha gave him another hug. “Be right back,” she said.

“I’m going with you.”

She shook her head. “I’m black, remember?” she said with a brief flash of a smile. “Wally, it’s one thing if a woman who looks mostly like them shows up in the village. I’m not visibly an ace and not visibly threatening. It’s another thing entirely if a big guy made out of iron is with me. Then they’d know we’re up to something.” She slid a hand along his arm. She could feel the rust spots, like patches of dry, scaly skin. “Stay here-hey, use those S.O. S pads you brought along.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t either,” she admitted. “I’ll tell you what: if you hear me yell, you come running, okay?”

A grimace. “Okay.”

She hugged him once more, then headed back upriver along the bank, pushing through the thick vegetation toward the settlement as stealthily as she could. If anything looked wrong with the village, she promised herself, she would head immediately back to Wally and the boat.

As she approached, she could see through the fronds and leaves a cultivated field between her and the village: corn, soybeans, and other crops rising straggling from the poor jungle earth. A woman worked the field, walking along the rows with a cloth sack from which protruded a few corn husks. The woman was only a dozen feet away. Jerusha parted the leaves at the edge of the field and called out softly to the woman in French. “Bonjour.”

The woman glanced up, startled, and backed up a few steps. “No,” Jerusha called out, showing her hands. “I’m not going to hurt you. I need a telephone. A landline. Do you have one here?”

The woman glanced over her shoulder, and Jerusha looked in the same direction. A man was standing at the end of the small field nearest the village. He had a semiautomatic weapon of some sort strapped around him, though he was looking out toward the river, not toward Jerusha.

“No,” the woman answered in heavily accented French, quickly and softly. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “You should go. There’s nothing here. Nothing.”

“I have to make a call,” Jerusha persisted. “It’s urgent. Please. If there’s any way…”

“There’s no phone here. What the rebels didn’t destroy, the Leopard Men smashed. No phone. No electricity. Not for months.” She gestured. “Go! You can’t be here!”

The armed man called out to the women, though not in French-he was looking their way. Jerusha slid back toward the brush but it was already too late. He began to run toward them, bringing up the blackened muzzle of his weapon. Jerusha plunged a hand into her seed belt as the man shouted again, words that Jerusha couldn’t understand. The woman screamed and flung herself to the ground.

Something dark and heavy slammed into Jerusha from behind and she went down just as the weapon loosed its deadly staccato clamor. She heard the bullets whining away, tearing harmlessly into the leaves, and ricocheting off iron. Wally was standing in front of her.

Gardener threw the seed she’d plucked from the seed belt as if it were a hand grenade: one of the remaining baobab seeds. It rolled to the ground at the attacker’s feet and he glanced down, scowling as Jerusha sent her power plunging hard into the seed. It seemed to explode: roots plunging down, branches shooting skyward. One snagged the weapon and ripped it away from him as others wrapped around him. Soon he was encased in a snare of branches fifteen feet off the ground.

Wally plucked Jerusha up from the ground. The village woman lay in a fetal curl. Wally stared upward at the new baobab and its captive.

“You were supposed to stay with the boat,” Jerusha told him.

Wally grinned. “Sorry.”

The man shouted from his wooden cage, and people were beginning to look toward the field from the village.

“We should go, Jerusha,” Wally said.

“Yeah,” she told him. “I think maybe we should.”

Wally turned and plunged into the jungle, tearing the foliage apart and crushing it underneath his massive feet. Jerusha followed his orange-spotted back.

People’s Bank

Kongoville, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

The bank had been built during the colonial era, so it had some grace and charm as opposed to the proletariat grandeur (an oxymoron if Noel had ever heard one) of the Nshombos’ People’s Palace, Palace of the Arts, People’s Defense Headquarters, Justice Center, etc.

His guide for the day was supposed to be the Economics Minister, but at the last minute he had been replaced with Alicia. Noel looked over at the woman as they sat in the backseat of a Mercedes limo. “What an… ah… incongruous building,” he said, not wanting to call it beautiful in case the sister loved proletariat grandeur.

Alicia made a face. “I think it’s beautiful. I wish we had emulated this building, but my brother has strong attitudes about Western culture. I think we should embrace all the West has to offer.” And she stretched out an arm, and dragged her fingertips across the back of Noel’s neck and down his arm.

Just as Lilith’s sexuality could arouse men, his male avatar had the same effect on women. This was one time when Noel wished he could have appeared as a middling height, very average Englishman.

Noel leaned in close to Alicia’s ear and whispered confidingly, “I too love French architecture. But then we French love many things.”

Alicia turned to face him. They were only an inch apart. Every line in her body and the softness of her lips said she was waiting to be kissed. Noel knew he had to oblige her.

As he pulled back from the snog he thought, God, I hope it doesn’t go past this. Noel knew Alicia had a taste for torture… no, more than a taste, a veritable passion for torture. And he also had Niobe waiting at home. He wanted to be done with killing and fucking for crown and country.

Realizing the silence was going on a little too long, Noel said, “I do hope the security has been upgraded since 1920. On your recommendation I’ll be depositing a great deal of cash rather than using electronic transfers.”