John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

As the drills dug through and the grenade charge went off with a muted whumpf, driving its drill bits into skin and flesh and bones so that blood sprayed around the disc’s flat edges…

Torrence heard another explosion, much louder than it should have been; he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the Pasolini woman had tossed a couple of standard grenades into the crowd— oh, god —and people were screaming…

Damn her damn her damn her damn her.

He saw Cordenne running along the fringe of the crowd, heard gunfire spurt, Cordenne’s gut erupting red as he went skidding into his own puddle, giving out a sort of sobbing laughter.

Torrence glimpsed a silvery whirring out of the corner of his eyes not far overhead: a bird’s eye, a small thing of featherlight metal and glass, flashing on plastech wings to follow him. He imagined the image of himself—a small, desperate, fugitive figure—transmitted to some Security Center TV monitor. The boarded-over Metro was just ahead (bullets spat chips of street asphalt at his ankles) and the bird wouldn’t follow him down into the metro station because it wouldn’t be able to transmit from underground.

Bullets whined past his ear as he reached the seemingly boarded-over Metro, felt the soft warmth of an aiming-laser kiss the back of his neck. And as he dove through the paper of the false-boards the NR had left here, submachine-gun rounds parted the air where he’d been a half second before.

He slipped in his rush, fell down the stairs of the subway station—striking heavily on his shoulder, cursing with the pain, somersaulting down the steps quite without control, nose bloodying, lip splitting on concrete edges.

Up, instantly, at the trash heap on the bottom of the stairs. Up and running into darkness. Because it was get up and move, or die.

Running into darkness, thinking: That fool Pasolini played right into their hands …

“Did you get that clearly?” Watson said. “The NR operative—the woman—tossing a grenade into the crowd?”

“We got it,” Klaus said.

“Let them try to pretend they’re not terrorists when we get that about!”

“Here’s the fourth one… He looks familiar…”

Klaus tapped the keyboard, the image on the screen zoomed: a compact man with dark hair; a Spaniard probably, though not dark enough to evoke notice in the crowd.

“That’s the Spanish fellow,” Watson said. “We haven’t got a name for him.”

His name was Danco.

They watched the monitor. On it, Danco struggled in the grip of four men in white jumpsuits, who were dragging him to the building. The New Resistance guerilla thrashed like a worm on hot stone, Watson thought.

The Spaniard bellowing something. Watson caught a few words, “…Cowards if you don’t kill me… spineless cocksuckers!”

Danco was trying to provoke them into killing him, of course. Knowing the extractor would pick his brain; knowing there was simply no way to resist an extractor.

Klaus reached for a toggle, spoke into his headset, “San Simon, get down there and tell them to search him before they—” And then he swore in German.

Danco had wrenched an arm loose, found the explosives strapped under his slicker. Klaus shouted, “No, no, you idiots, get it away from him, don’t run—we need him—!”

But they’d instinctively flung themselves away as Danco thumbed the detonator on the plastique, a cylinder no bigger than a perfume bottle that exploded into a fireball, engulfing Danco and the SA bull running up to him and two of the unarmored security men…

“Bloody hell!” Watson burst out.

Danco was reduced to pulp, the second one would be too long dead to extract, and two others had so far gotten away…

“We need to wire those tunnels,” Klaus murmured.

“Yes, obviously, naturally, but there are miles of them. And it could cause whole streets to collapse if we blow them. Move over, please.”

Klaus stood, and Watson sat down at the console, feeling as if he’d drunk a gallon of espresso, his pulse racing with fury and frustration. He ran back the images of the two who’d gotten away. They had a clear shot of the woman. But the man was harder. Every angle was half blocked by someone, or he’d been turning the wrong way. There—when he looked back over his shoulder, after the grenade went off in the crowd—a grainy shot of his face. Rather too much range for the cameras… He seemed to be missing most of an ear…

Watson punched for computer enhancement and magnification. The image rezzed onto the screen. A man’s face. A strong, simple, sharply chiseled face. Eyes with an almost psychotic intensity. Maybe that was just the fear, the danger. Still, Watson shivered with a faint sense of déjà vu. He’d looked at that face before… and not in a glossy CIA file photo. He’d seen it somewhere digitally, like this. Where?

He punched for a facial match-up search in the videofile. On a hunch, he specified May 12. The evening of the Le Pen assassination…

Watson remembered it with toothache clarity…

The Palace of Versailles. The fantasy of the Sun King. The embodiment of absolutist royal power. The austere and vast chateau to the west of Paris, its fanatically symmetrical array of gardens now overgrown and pocked with shell holes; the North Wing partly caved in. The South Wing, though, mostly intact.

Le Pen had weathered criticism from the neo-Fascist ranks for making Versailles his base of operations. It was not a state building, it was just a vast, oversized museum. A monument to Louis XIV’s aloofness; his disdain for the stinking, starving masses of the great city. But Le Pen’s intent was obvious to the man on the street; the symbolism shone like fireworks in the sky: imperial power was returned. Kings had been chosen by bloodline, and genetics was the axis of power in the new state.

Le Pen began holding televised nationalist fêtes in the South Wing, and for the latest had arranged to bus a thousand white middle-class Parisians—returned to Paris at the announcement of the war’s end—to the dowdy grounds of Versailles. They waited for him lined up to either side of the formal walkway approaching the Petites Écuries; a shield stood between the crowd and the walkway where Le Pen was expected. The impenetrable transparent plastic shield had been erected in a tunnel shape from the entryway out to the podium in the gardens where Le Pen was to speak. He was always thoroughly protected. And with equal thoroughness he had directed that the carvings over the arch of the Petites Ecuries be restored for the occasion: the masterpiece by François Girardon, Alexander Taming His Charger Bucephalus. Alexander the Great (Alexander the unapologetic tyrant!) astride the raging horse, with two trained chargers holding the rebellious mount to the course. The damage from the war to Versailles was relatively minor: the breast of Bucephalus had been cracked, was partly fallen.

A team of workers from Paris had seamlessly replaced the horse’s chest with a clever cosmetic plaster, tinted to suggest age. The repair was complete when the president of Fascist France, Jean Le Pen, grandson of the founding father of the Front National, stepped out of the entry between the cheering crowds… The crowds waved and shouted on the other side of the temporary plastic shielding… Le Pen took one long stride toward the podium, where he was to announce the formation of the Unity Party and its alliance with SPOES, the Self-Policing Organization of European States…

And the breast of Bucephalus burst open. A stream of Teflon-coated bullets ripped through Le Pen and his bodyguards and his minister of defense.

Le Pen had been killed by a small, remote-controlled machine-pistol lovingly hidden in the ornate carvings over the archway of the entry to the Petites Écuries rotunda. Hidden there by NR operatives two days before. They’d waylaid the repair crew and taken their places. The plaster over the barrel of the gun was paper-thin.