Jon Grimwood - redRobe

So far so normal.

Where the whole concept started to unravel was when Axl checked the instigator properties on a hunch and got not the Prosecutor Fiscal or the Secretary General of the UN or even Cardinal Santo Duque, which would have been bizarre but just about possible, but Maximillia.

Max didn’t do politics. That kind of stuff the kid left to the Cardinal. She definitely didn’t do heavyweight legal finessing either. Not that Max didn’t have a right to appeal to the Hague. It was her economy that had been wrecked by the underage Army of God. WorldBank had to be leaning on her. And Axl could understand why.

Grapes had been left to rot on the vine, whole fields of cannabis and maize had withered and died uncollected. Even the mountain coca crops had been left ungathered. Worse than that, industrial complexes were burned if executives refused to embrace poverty with what the Army thought was sufficient enthusiasm. From San Antone and Baja California to the lush sensimillia estates of Cuba, caldes, patrons and hacendados who decided to hang onto their bank accounts lost their lives.

Mexico was in ruins. Financial crimes didn’t come more obvious. Watched around the world by millions Pope Joan had taken a low-orbit Boeing shuttle to Day Effé to stop the children.

And died, on camera. Standing alone in front of an army of children. Caught by CySat stringers, Ishies, aerospats, by every wannabe news jock on the American continent. What the newsfeeds showed was the sudden stumble of a middle-aged woman, her fallen body ripped apart by beautiful, wide-eyed street children. It had been as unsettling as watching puppies kill.

Her clothes got stripped from her, strands of grey hair tugged from her scalp. The papal ring had been taken from her finger and the finger taken from her hand by a smiling ten-year-old girl wielding a five dollar Bowie ground sharp against brick.

All her fingers had gone after that, then her hands, then her feet. Last to be taken was her sightless head, brow blood-covered but unfurrowed, lips reposed, eyes shut as if she was sleeping.

The police got that back, of course. As well as most of her fingers.

What the mainstream News didn’t show, and what Axl didn’t know until the Cardinal told him, was that Joan was dead before she hit the ground. She didn’t stumble, she died. Shot as she stood doing what she always did, telling the truth as she saw it. The time had come for the children of the Army to go home. And if the children didn’t have a home to go to, she would find them one.

A sliver of super-cooled ice was all it took, poisoned at the tip with curare and fired from a hopped-up airgun. The impact no more painful than the bite from a horsefly.

The Pope knew what had happened, though.

So did those closest in the crowd. The children who ripped her apart on camera weren’t killing her, they were collecting relics. And the Cardinal believed that Joan would have approved. Just as she approved the spirit, if not the result, of most things done by the Army of God.

‘She was shot,’ Axl said firmly. ‘I saw it on vid.’

‘Vids lie.’ defMoma might have been arguing with a child.

Axl flushed.

‘You think that sequence wasn’t stripped back? From what I heard CySat’s AI went half crazy behind the scenes trying to peel the episode apart. It couldn’t be done. Every fucking checksum, every fucking kilopixel block of it validated; nothing was cropped out, nothing added, nothing taken away.

‘It happened, it just didn’t get shown,’ Axl added furiously, ‘get used to it.’

defMoma finally focused on Axl’s face. ‘You supported the Army of God?’

Axl shook his head, feeling Kate stiffen. ‘Far as I‘m concerned, Joan was a fucking lunatic who got stuffed and turned to kitty litter on camera. I just don’t know why everyone’s having trouble accepting it.’

Yanking Kate to her feet, Axl pushed back his stool, hearing it scrape in the ground. ‘Party time,’ he told her.

‘You know that woman?’ defMoma nodded towards a struggling Kate.

‘Nah,’ said Axl, sliding his free hand down to Kate’s arse and cupping one buttock. ‘But I plan to.’

Laughter and obscenities followed him out of the Inn, and kept coming right up to the point he turned the corner into darkness and Kate Mercarderes suddenly yanked up her skirt, pivoted on one bare foot and used her other to kick Axl’s head hard enough to knock him off his feet.

That didn’t just rate synth, it got crashing, speed-metal chords.

‘ Taekyon,’ Rinpoche said, dropping from the night sky. Adding, ‘tae kwon do,’ when Axl looked blank, though that could be reverb howing inside his head. ‘Sweet Jesus. Can’t you even duck?’

‘Rinpoche,’ said the silver monkey offering Kate its paw. ‘And you’re Katherine Mercarderes. Aged twenty-seven years, four months, five days. Born Mount Olive hospital in Rome. Natural carriage, natural birth, no artificial womb. No foetal augmentations/genetic rewrites. Confirmed hereditary predisposition to stress, anger and depression. Forty-three percent chance of developing breast cancer by the age of forty. Educated from six to eighteen at the Vatican by Jesuit tutor Father Sylvester. Currently in protected exile on the island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily...

‘. . . yeah right.’ The monkey’s face lost its distant look as it peered deep into her eyes. Whatever it was looking for, it found in there.

‘Retinal match,’ it stated firmly. ‘Unless those are new, of course?’

Kate slowly shook her head and the monkey sighed.

‘That was irony.’

‘So,’ said Rinpoche turning to where Axl still sat in the mud, ‘You found Kate Mercarderes, who wasn’t on Lampedusa. Now what? Planning to keep her?’

‘No chance.’ Kate came uncoiled like a spring, pivoting again as she drew back one foot to kick Axl in the head.

Axl needn’t have bothered ducking. Rinpoche came up fast and hard, his paw closing round her ankle, locking it solid. No restraints could have held Kate that tight.

‘Later,’ snapped the monkey. ‘You can kick him later.’

‘I should have let Clone kill you.’ Kate spat the words at Axl. ‘Back at Escondido when he wanted to.’

‘Yeah,’ said Axl coldly, climbing to his feet. ‘Maybe you should. While you had the chance. Because, fuck knows, your family’s been responsible for enough killing.’ He put up one hand and lightly touched Kate’s face the way visitors used to touch his when he was a kid, the way he really used to hate.

She flinched. He used to do that too.

‘So what’s one more,’ Axl asked as he reached behind him to pull the revolver from his belt, ‘I mean, after all those others… ?’

The gun was loaded, unfired. There wasn’t a safety catch to release because the model wasn’t that sophisticated and Rinpoche hadn’t bothered to create one while giving the gun a make-over because Axl never used them anyway.

Axl spun the revolver once round his finger, fast forward so the handle snapped back into his hand with a satisfying slap and the muzzle finished up pointing straight at Kate’s stomach. The soundtrack died, kicked mute by significance override.

Even Rinpoche stopped breathing.

‘Did you enjoy hitting Mai?’ Axl asked the frozen woman. ‘Did it help your stress? Make you feel all gooey inside?’

‘I apologised to Mai, afterwards…’ Kate said softly.

Gun still to her gut, Axl patted Kate’s cheek softly. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘bet that made her face less sore.’ Kate had tears in her eyes and she was biting the inside of her lip without knowing it. He’d gone out from Cocheforet nearly blind and returned with someone else’s eyes. She was afraid of him.