17

When the phone rang, I was dreaming that my mother was shouting at me. She was screaming so loud that I couldn’t recognize her, I just knew it was her. We started arguing about Yasmin, but that changed; we fought about living in the city, and we fought about how I could never be expected to understand anything because the only thing I ever thought about was myself. My part was limited to crying “I am not!” while my heart thudded in my sleep.

I thrashed awake, bleary and still tired. I squinted at the phone, then picked it up. A voice said, “Good morning. Seven o’clock.” Then there was a click. I put the phone back and sat up in bed. I took a deep breath that hesitated and hitched two or three times on the way in. I wanted to go back to sleep, even if it meant nightmares. I didn’t want to get up and face another day like yesterday.

Trudi wasn’t in bed. I swung my feet to the floor and walked naked around the small hotel room. She wasn’t in the bathroom, either, but she had written a note for me and left it on the bureau. It said:

Dear Marîd—

Thanks for everything. You’re a dear. sweet man. I hope we meet again sometime.

I have to go now, so I’m sure you won’t mind if I borrow the fare from your wallet.

Love ya,

Trudi

(My real name is Gunter Erich von S. You mean you really didn’t know, or were you just being nice?)

There is very little I’ve missed in my life, as far as sex goes. My secret fantasies don’t concern what, they concern who. I’d seen and heard everything, I thought. The only thing I’d never heard faked—until, evidently, last night—was that involuntary animal catch in a woman’s breathing, the very first one, before the lovemaking has even had time to become rhythmical. I glanced down at Trudi’s note again, remembering all the times Jacques, Mahmoud, Saied, and I had sat at a table at the Solace, watching people walk by. “Oh, her? She’s a female-to-male sex-change in drag.” I could read everybody. I was famous for it.

I swore I’d never tell anyone anything ever again. I wondered if the world ever got tired of its jokes; no, that was too much to hope for. The jokes would go on and on, getting worse and worse. Right now I was certain that if age and experience couldn’t stop the jokes, there was nothing about death that would make them stop, either.

I folded my new clothing carefully and packed it in the zipper bag. I wore my white robe and keffiya again today, making yet another new look—Arab costume but cleanshaven. The man of a thousand faces. Today I wanted to take Hajjar up on his promise to let me use the police computer files. I wanted to fill in a little background, on the police themselves. I wanted to find out as much as I could about Okking’s link to Bond/Khan.

Instead of walking, I took a cab to the police station. It wasn’t that I was getting spoiled by the luxury Papa was paying for; I just felt the urgent pressing of events. I was killing time as fast as it was killing me. The daddies were buzzing in my head, and I didn’t feel muscle-weary, hungry, or thirsty. I wasn’t angry or afraid, either; some people might have warned me that not being afraid was dangerous. Maybe I should have been afraid, a little.

I watched Okking eat a late breakfast in his flimsy fortress while I waited for Hajjar to get back to his desk. When the sergeant came in, he gave me a distracted look. “You’re not the only bakebrain I have to worry about, Audran,” he said in a surly voice. “We’ve got thirty other jerks giving us fantasy information and inside words they dig out of dreams and teacups.”

‘You’ll be glad I don’t have a goddamn piece of information for you, then. I came to get some from you. You said I could use your files.”

“Oh, yeah, sure; but not here. If Okking saw you, he’d split my skull. I’ll call downstairs. You can use one of the terminals on the second floor.”

“I don’t care where it is,” I said. Hajjar made the phone call, typed out a pass for me, and signed it. I thanked him and found my way down to the data bank. A young woman with Southeast Asian features led me to an unused screen, showed me how to get from one menu to the next, and told me that if I had any questions, the machine itself would answer them. She wasn’t a computer expert or a librarian; she just managed traffic flow in the big room.

First I checked the general files, which were much like a news agency’s morgue. When I typed in a name, the computer gave me every fact available to it concerning the person. The first name I entered was Okking’s. The cursor paused for a second or two, then lettered steadily across the display in Arabic, right to left. I learned Okking’s first name, his middle name, his age, where he’d been born, what he’d done before coming to the city, all the stuff that gets put on a form above the important double line. Below that line comes the really vital information; depending on whose form it is, that can be the subject’s medical record, arrest record, credit history, political involvement, sexual preference(s), or anything else that may one day be pertinent.

As for Okking, below that double line there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Al-Sifr, zero.

At first I assumed there was some kind of computer problem. I started over again, returning to the first menu, choosing the sort of information I was looking for, and typing in Okking’s name. And waited.

áÇ ÔìÁ. Nothing.

Okking had done this, I was sure. He had covered his tracks, just as his boy Khan was now covering his own. If I wanted to travel to Europe, to Okking’s birthplace, I might learn more about him, but only to the point when he left there to come to the city. Since then, he did not exist at all, not officially speaking.

I typed in Universal Export, the code name of James Bond’s espionage group. I had seen it on an envelope on Okking’s desk once. Again, there were no entries.

I tried James Bond without hope, and turned up nothing. Similarly with Xarghis Khan. The real Khan and the “real” Bond had never visited the city, so there was no file on either of them.

I thought about other people I might spy on—Yasmin, Friedlander Bey, even myself—but I decided to leave my curiosity unsatisfied until a less urgent occasion. I entered Hajjar’s name and was not astonished by what I read. He was about two years younger than I was, Jordanian, with a moderately long arrest record before coming to the city. A psychological profile agreed point for point with my own estimation of him; you didn’t dare trust him as far as he could run with a camel on his back. He was suspected of smuggling drugs and money to prisoners. He was once investigated in connection with the disappearance of a good deal of confiscated property, but nothing definite came of it. The official file put forth the possibility that Hajjar might be profiting from his position on the police force, that he might be selling his influence to private citizens or criminal organizations. The report suggested that he might not be above such abuses of authority as extortion, racketeering, and conspiracy, among other law-enforcement frailties.

Hajjar? Come now, what ever gave you that idea? Allah forfend.

I shook my head ruefully. Police departments all over the world were identical in two respects: they all have a fondness for breaking your head open for little or no provocation, and they can’t see the simple truth if it’s lying in front of them naked with its legs spread. The police don’t enforce laws; they don’t even get busy until after the laws are broken. They solve crimes at a pitifully low rate of success. What the police are, to be honest, is a kind of secretarial pool that records the names of the victims and the statements of the witnesses. After enough time passes, they can safely shove this information to the back of the filing system to make room for more.

Oh yeah, the police help little old ladies across the street. So I’m told.

One by one, I entered the names of everyone who’d been connected to Nikki, beginning with her uncle, Bogatyrev. The entries on the old Russian and on Nikki matched exactly what Okking had finally told me about them. I figured that if Okking could excise himself from this system, he could alter its remaining records in other ways, too. I wouldn’t find anything useful here except by accident or Okking’s oversight. I went on with a diminished hope of success.

I had none. At last I changed my mind and read the entries on Yasmin, Papa, and Chiri, on the Black Widow Sisters, on Seipolt and Abdoulaye. The files told me that Hassan was likely a hypocrite, because he would not use brain implants for his business, on religious grounds, yet he was a known pederast. That wasn’t news to me. The only thing that I might suggest to Hassan someday was that the American boy, who already had his skull wired, might be more useful as an accounting tool than just sitting on a stool in Hassan’s bare shop.

The only person I knew on whom I didn’t peep was myself. I didn’t want to know what they thought about me.

After I searched the files for my friends’ histories, I looked at telephone company records for the phones in the police station. There was nothing enlightening there, either; Okking wouldn’t have used his office phone to call Bond. It was like I was standing at the hub of a lot of radiating roads, all of them dead ends.

I walked out of there with food for thought but no new facts. I liked knowing what the files had to say about Hajjar and the others; and the reticence it showed toward Okking—and, not so mysteriously, toward Friedlander Bey—was provocative if not informative. I thought about it all as I wandered into the Budayeen. In a few minutes I was back at my apartment building.

Why had I come here? Well, I didn’t want to sleep in the hotel room another night. At least one assassin knew I was there. I needed another base of operations, one that would be safe for at least a day or two. As I got more accustomed to letting the daddies help me in my planning, my decision making got faster and less influenced by my emotions. I now felt completely in control, cool and assured. I wanted to get a message to Papa, and then I would find another temporary place to sleep.

My apartment was just the way I’d left it. Truthfully, I hadn’t been away long, although it felt like weeks; my time sense was all distorted. Tossing the zipper bag onto the mattress, I sat down and murmured Hassan’s commcode into my phone. It rang three times before he answered. “Marhaba,” he said. He sounded tired.

“Hello, Hassan, this is Audran. I need to have a meeting with Friedlander Bey, and I was hoping you could fix it for me.”

“He will be glad that you are showing interest in doing things the proper way, my nephew. Certainly, he will want to see you and learn from you what progress you are making. Do you wish an appointment for this afternoon?”

“As soon as you can, Hassan.”

“I will take care of it, O clever one, and I will call you back to tell you of the arrangements.”

“Thanks. Before you go, I want to ask you a question. Do you know if there’s any connection between Papa and Lutz Seipolt?”

There was a long silence while Hassan framed his reply. “Not any longer, my nephew. Seipolt is dead, is he not?”

“I know that,” I said impatiently.

“Seipolt was involved only in the import-export trade. He dealt only in cheap trinkets, nothing that would be of interest to Papa.”

“Then so far as you know, Papa never tried to cut himself a piece of Seipolt’s business?”

“My nephew, Seipolt’s business was barely worth mentioning. He was just a small businessman, like myself.”

“But, also like yourself, he felt he needed a secondary income to make ends meet. You work for Friedlander Bey, and Seipolt worked for the Germans.”

“By the life of my eyes! Is that so? Seipolt, a spy?”

“I’d be willing to bet you already knew that. Never mind. Did you ever have any dealings with him?”

“What do you mean?” Hassan’s voice became harsh.

“Business. Import-export. You have that in common.”

“Oh, well, I bought items from him now and then, if he offered some particularly interesting European goods; but I don’t think he ever bought anything from me.”

That didn’t get me anywhere. At Hassan’s request, I gave him a quick rundown of the events since my discovery of Seipolt’s body. By the time I finished, he was thoroughly frightened again. I told him about Okking and the doctored police records. “That’s why I need to see Friedlander Bey,” I said.

“You suspect something?” asked Hassan.

“It isn’t only the missing information in the files, and the fact that Okking’s a foreign agent. I just can’t believe that he has the full resources of the department looking into these murders, and yet he hasn’t come forward with a single useful piece of information for me. I’m sure he knows much more than he’s telling me. Papa promised that he’d pressure Okking into sharing what he knows. I need to hear all that.”

“Of course, my nephew, don’t worry about that. It shall be done, inshallah. Then you have no true idea of how much the lieutenant actually knows?”

“That is the way of the flic. He might have the whole case wrapped up, or he may know even less than I do. He’s a master at giving you the runaround.”

“He cannot give Friedlander Bey the runaround.”

“He’ll try.”

“He won’t succeed. Do you need more money, O clever one?”

Hell, I could always use more money. “No, Hassan, I’m doing fine for now. Papa has been more than generous.”

“If you need cash to further your investigation, you have only to contact me. You are doing an excellent job, my son.”

“At least I’m not dead yet.”

“You have the wit of a poet, my darling. I must go now. Business is business, you know.”

“Right, Hassan. Call me back after you’ve spoken with Papa.”

“Praise be to Allah for your safety.”

“Allah yisallimak,” I said. I stood up and tucked the phone away again; then I began looking for the one other object that I’d found in Nikki’s purse: the scarab she had taken from Seipolt’s collection. That brass reproduction tied Nikki directly to Seipolt, as did her ring that I’d seen in the German’s house. Of course, with Seipolt now among the dear departed, these items were of questionable value. True, Dr. Yeniknani still had the homemade moddy; that might be an important piece of evidence. I thought it was time to begin preparing a presentation of all I’d learned, so that I could eventually turn it all in to the authorities. Not Okking, of course, and not Hajjar. I wasn’t sure who the proper authorities were, but I knew there had to be some somewhere. The three items were not enough to convict anyone in a European court of law, but according to Islamic justice, they were plenty.

I found the scarab under the edge of the mattress. I unzipped my bag and stuffed Seipolt’s tourist’s souvenir down under my clothing. I packed carefully, wanting to be sure that everything I owned was out of the apartment. Then I kicked a lot of scraps and rubbish into low piles here and there. I didn’t feel like spending a lot of time cleaning. When I finished, there was nothing in the room that showed that I’d ever lived there. I felt a stinging sadness: I’d lived in that apartment longer than in any other single place in my life. If anywhere could truly be called my home, this little apartment should be it. Now, though, it was a big, abandoned room with dirty windows and a torn mattress on the floor. I went out, shutting the door behind me.

I returned my keys to Qasim, the landlord. He was surprised and upset that I was going. “I’ve liked living in your building,” I told him, “but it pleases Allah that now I must move on.”

He embraced me and called on Allah to lead each of us in righteousness unto Paradise.

I went to the bank and used the card to withdraw my entire account, closing it. I stuffed the bills into the envelope Friedlander Bey had sent me. When I got myself another place to stay, I’d take it out and see how much I had altogether; I was kind of teasing myself by not peeking now.

My third stop was the Hotel Palazzo di Marco Aurelio. I was dressed now in my gallebeya and keffiya, but with my short haircut and clean-shaven face. I don’t think the desk clerk recognized me.

“I paid for a week in advance,” I said, “but business matters force me to check out earlier than I planned.”

The desk man murmured. “We’re sorry to hear that, sir. We’ve enjoyed having you.” I nodded and tossed my room’s tag onto the counter. “Just let me look at . . . ” He keyed the room number into his terminal, saw that the hotel did indeed owe me a little money, and began getting the voucher printed out.

“You’ve all been very kind,” I said.

He smiled. “It is our pleasure,” he said. He handed me the voucher and pointed to the cashier. I thanked him again. A few moments later I crammed the partial refund in my zipper bag with the rest of my money.

Carrying my cash, my moddies and daddies, and my clothing in the zipper bag, I walked south and west, away from the Budayeen and away from the expensive shopping district beside the Boulevard il-Jameel. I came to a fellahin neighborhood of twisting streets and alleys, where the houses were small, flat-topped, needing whitewash, with windows covered by shutters or thin wooden lattices. Some were in better repair, with attempts at gardening in the dry earth at the base of the walls. Others looked derelict, their gap-toothed shutters hanging in the sun like tongues of panting dogs. I went up to a well-kept house and rapped on the door. I waited a few minutes until it opened. A large, heavily muscled man with a full black beard glared down at me. His eyes were narrowed suspiciously, and in the corner of his mouth his teeth were chewing away at a splinter of wood. He waited for me to speak.

With no confidence at all, I launched into my story. “I have been stranded in this city by my companions. They stole all our merchandise and my money, too. I must beg in the name of Allah and the Apostle of God, may the blessings of Allah be upon him and peace, your hospitality for today and for this evening.”

“I see,” said the man in a surly voice. “The house is closed.”

“I will give you no cause for offense. I will—”

“Why don’t you try begging where the hospitality is more generous? People tell me there are families here and about with enough to eat for themselves and also for dogs and strangers, as well. Me, I’m lucky to earn a little money for beans and bread for my wife and my four children.”

I understood. “I know you don’t need trouble. When I was robbed, my companions didn’t know that I always keep a little extra cash in my bag. They greedily took everything in plain sight, leaving me with enough to live on for one or two days, until I can make my way back and demand a lawful accounting of them.”

The man just stared at me, waiting for something magical to appear.

I unslung my zipper bag and opened it. I let him watch me shove the clothing aside—my shirts, my trousers, socks—until I reached down and pulled out a paper bank note. “Twenty kiam,” I said sadly, “that’s all they left me with.”

My new friend’s face went through a rapid selection of emotions. In this neighborhood, twenty-kiam notes made their presence felt with noise and shouting. The man may not have been sure of me, but I knew what he was thinking.

“If you would give me the benefit of your hospitality and protection for the next two days,” I said, “I will let you have all the money you see here.” I thrust the twenty closer to his widening eyes.

The man wavered visibly; if he’d had big, flat leaves, he would have rustled. He didn’t like strangers—hell, no one likes strangers. He didn’t like the idea of inviting one into his house for a couple of days. Twenty kiam, though, was equal to several days’ pay for him. When I looked closely at him again, I knew that he wasn’t sizing me up anymore—he was spending the twenty kiam a hundred different ways. All I had to do was wait.

“We are not wealthy people, O sir.”

“Then the twenty kiam will ease your life.”

“It would, indeed, O sir, and I desire to have it; however, I am shamed to permit such an excellent one as you to witness the squalor of my house.”

“I have seen squalor greater than any you can imagine, my friend, and I have risen above it even as you may. I was not always as I appear to you. It was only the will of Allah that I be flung down to the deepest pits of misery, in order that I might return to take back what has been torn from me. Will you help me? Allah will bring good fortune to all who are generous to me on my way.”

The fellah looked at me in confusion for a long while. At first, I knew he thought I was just crazy, and the best thing was to run as far away from me as possible. My babbling sounded like some kidnapped prince’s speech from the old tales. The stories were fine for late at night, for murmuring around the fire after a simple supper and before sleep and troubled dreams. In the light of day, however, a confrontation like this had nothing to make it seem plausible. Nothing except the money, waving like the frond of a date palm in my hand. My friend’s eyes were fixed on the twenty kiam, and I doubt that he could have described my face to anyone.

In the end, I was admitted into the house of my host, Ishak Jarir. He maintained a strict discipline, and I saw no women. There was a second floor above, where the family members slept, and where there were a few small closets for storage. Jarir opened a plain wooden door to one of these and roughly shoved me inside. “You will be safe here,” he said in a whisper. “If your treacherous friends come and inquire about you, no one in this house has seen you. But you may stay only until after morning prayers tomorrow.”

“I thank Allah that in His wisdom He has guided me to so generous a man as you. I have yet an errand to run, and if everything occurs as I foresee, I will return with a bank note the twin of that you hold in your hand. The twin shall be yours, as well.”

Jarir didn’t want to hear any of the details. “May your undertaking be prosperous,” he said. “Be warned, though: if you come back after last prayers, you will not be admitted.”

“It is as you say, honorable one.” I looked over my shoulder at the pile of rags that would be my home that night, smiled innocently at Ishak Jarir, and got out of his house suppressing a shudder.

I turned down the narrow, stone-paved street that I thought would take me back to the Boulevard il-Jameel. As the street began a slow curve to the left, I knew that I’d made a mistake, but it was going in the right direction anyway, so I followed it. When I got around the turn, however, there was nothing but the blank brick rear walls of buildings hedging in a reeking, dead-end alley. I muttered a curse and turned around to retrace my steps.

There was a man blocking my way. He was thin, with a patchy, slovenly kept beard and a sheepish smile on his face. He was wearing an open-necked yellow knit shirt, a rumpled and creased brown business suit, a white keffiya with red checks, and scuffed brown oxford shoes. His foolish expression reminded me of Fuad, the idiot from the Budayeen. Evidently he had followed me up the dead-end street; I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.

I don’t like people catfooting up behind me; I unzipped my bag while I stared at him. He just stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and grinning. I took out a couple of daddies and zipped the bag closed again. I started to walk by him, but he stopped me with a hand on my chest. I looked down at the hand and back up at his face. “I don’t like being touched,” I said.

He shrank back as if he had defiled the holy of holies. “A thousand pardons,” he said weakly.

“You following me for some reason?”

“I thought you might be interested in what I have here.” He indicated an imitation-leather briefcase he carried in one hand.

“You a salesman?”

“I sell moddies, sir, and a wide selection of the most useful and interesting add-ons in the business. I’d like to show them to you.”

“No, thanks.”

He raised his eyebrows, not so sheepish now, as if I’d asked him to go right ahead. “It won’t take a moment, and very possibly I have just the thing you’re looking for.”

“I’m not looking for anything in particular.”

“Sure you are, sir, or you wouldn’t have gotten wired, now, would you?”

I shrugged. He knelt down and opened his sample case. I was determined that he wasn’t going to sell me anything. I don’t do business with weasels.

He was taking moddies and daddies out of the case and lining them up in a neat row in front of his briefcase. When he was finished he looked up at me. I could tell how proud he was of his merchandise. “Well,” he said. There was an anticipatory hush.

“Well what?” I asked.

“What do you think of them?”

“The moddies? They look like every other moddy I’ve ever seen. What are they?”

He grabbed the first moddy in the line. He flipped it to me and I caught it; a quick glimpse told me it was unlabeled, made of tougher plastic than the usual moddies I saw at Laila’s and in the souks. Bootleg. “You know that one already,” the man said, giving me that sorry smile again.

That earned him a sharp look.

He pulled off his keffiya. He had thinning brown hair hanging down and covering his ears. It looked like it hadn’t been washed in a month. One hand popped out the moddy he’d been wearing. The timid salesman vanished. The man’s jaws went slack and his eyes lost their focus, but with practiced speed he chipped in another of his homemade moddies. Suddenly his eyes narrowed and his mouth set in a hard, sadistic leer. He had transformed himself from one man to another; he didn’t need the usual physical disguises: the entirely different set of postures, mannerisms, expressions, and speech patterns was more effective than any combination of wigs and makeup could be.

I was in trouble. I held James Bond in my hand, and I was staring into the cold eyes of Xarghis Moghadhil Khan. I was stanng into madness. I reached up and chipped in the two daddies. One would let me get unnatural, desperate strength from my muscles, without weariness or pain, until the tissue actually tore apart. The second cut out all sound; I needed to concentrate. Khan snarled at me. There was a long, vicious dagger in his hand now, its hilt of silver decorated with colored stones, its guard of gold. “Sit down,” I read his lips. “On the ground.”

I wasn’t going to sit down for him. My hand moved about four inches, seeking the needle gun under my robes. My hand moved a little and stopped, because I remembered that the needle gun was still beneath the pillow in the hotel room. By now the chambermaid would have found it. And the seizure gun was zipped away safely in my bag. I backed away from Khan.

“I’ve been following you for a long time, Mr. Audran. I watched you at the police station, at Friedlander Bey’s, at Seipolt’s house, at the hotel. I could have killed you that night when I pretended you were just a goddamn robber, but I didn’t want to be interrupted. I waited for the right moment. Now, Mr. Audran, now you will die.” It was wonderfully simple to read his lips: the whole world had relaxed and was moving only half as fast as normal. He and I had all the time we needed . . .

Khan’s mouth twisted. He enjoyed this part. He stalked me back deeper into the alley. My eyes were fixed on his gleaming knife, with which Khan intended not only to kill me but also to hack my body to pieces. He meant to drape my bowels over the filthy stones and the refuse like holiday garlands. Some people are terrified of death; others are even more terrified of the agony that might come first. To be honest, that’s me. I knew that some day I’d have to die, but I hoped it would be quick and painless—in my sleep, if I was lucky. Tortured first by Khan: that was definitely not how I wanted to go out.

The daddies kept me from panicking. If I let myself get too scared, I’d be souvlaki in five minutes. I backed away further, scanning the alley for something that would give me a chance against this maniac and his dagger. I was running out of time.

Khan’s lips pulled back from his teeth and he charged me, uttering wordless cries. He held the dagger overhand at shoulder height, coining at me like Lady Macbeth. I let him take three steps, then I moved to my left and rushed him. He expected me to flee backward, and when I went at him he flinched. My left hand reached for his right wrist, my right arm swung behind his forearm and held his hand steady. I bent his knife hand back with my left hand, against the fulcrum of my right arm. Usually you can disarm an attacker like that, but Khan was strong. He was stronger than that nearly emaciated body should have been; the insanity gave him a little extra power, and so did his moddy and daddies.

Khan’s free hand had me by the throat, and he was forcing my head back. I got my right leg behind his and pulled his feet out from under him. We both went down, and as we fell I covered his face with my right hand. I made sure to slam the back of his head into the ground as hard as I could. I landed on his wrist with my knee, and his hand opened. I threw his dagger as far as I could, then used both hands to beat Khan’s head on the slimy pavement a few more times. Khan was dazed, but it didn’t last long. He rolled out of my grasp and flung himself back on me, tearing and biting at my flesh. We wrestled, each trying to get an advantage, but we were grappling so tightly that I couldn’t swing my fists. I couldn’t even work my arms free. Meanwhile, he was hurting me, raking me with his black nails, drawing blood with his teeth, bludgeoning me with his knees.

Khan shrieked and heaved me to the side; then he leaped, and before I could get away, he landed on top of me again. He held my arms pinned with one knee and one hand. He raised a fist, ready to smash it down on my throat. I cried out and tried to roll him off, but I couldn’t move. I struggled, and I saw the lunatic light of victory in his eyes. He was crooning some inarticulate prayer. With a wild bellow, he slammed his fist down and caught the side of my face. I almost lost consciousness.

Khan ran for his knife. I forced myself to sit up and search wildly for my zipper bag. Khan found the dagger and was coming at me. I got my bag open and threw everything out on the ground. Just as Khan was three feet from me, I nailed him with one long burst from the seizure gun. Khan gave a gurgling cry and toppled beside me. He would be out for hours.

The daddies blocked most of my pain, but not all; the rest they held at a distance. Still, I couldn’t move yet, and it would be a few minutes before I could do anything useful. I watched Khan’s skin turn a cyanotic blue as he fought to draw air into his lungs. He went into convulsions and then suddenly relaxed completely, only a few inches from me. I sat and gasped until I was able to shake off the effects of the fight. Then the first thing I did was pop the Khan moddy out of his head. I called Lieutenant Okking to give him the good news.