Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [38]
Then he reached down and picked up the black envelope. He turned it over and wrote on it with what looked like a fountain pen. The pale ink had a faint luminous glow.
He wrote in big motions of the hand. Three letters.
Ace.
* * *
7
Even in the final light of the day the carpets had a jewelled brilliance. They were spread across the clean stone floor of the shop and displayed on wooden frames in the cobbled courtyard outside. Most of them were traditional Islamic designs but there were some of the newer carpets from nations to the north and east. Woven among the abstract patterns on these were helicopters, rocket launchers and lovingly rendered automatic weapons, the new icons of the Middle East.
Ace lifted a glass from the pewter tray sitting beside her on the old wooden bench. The glass was almost too hot to hold. She blew into it to cool the ada gayi, then set it aside. There was a chrome digital clock inset high among the thousand‐year‐old stones of the shop’s walls. Miss David had been gone almost ten minutes. She was in the warehouse across the courtyard from the shop, conducting certain negotiations. Ace scratched idly at an insect bite on her knee. Her skin was already a deep brown after a week travelling up and down the coast. She eased off one of her cheap plastic sandals and studied the dirt on her blistered toes. She took the other sandal off and pulled a rucksack from under the bench. In the outer pocket of the pack she had an envelope full of documents and a German army‐surplus life jacket with a compressed‐air cylinder attached for rapid inflation. In the big inner pocket there was a plastic litre bottle of the local mineral water, half a dozen computer disks, some communication cables and a hand grenade. Down the rear of the rucksack, in a concealed pouch behind the armstraps, there was a second, slimmer envelope. A black envelope.
Ace eased the sandals in beside the water bottle then splayed her bare feet out on the cool tiled floor.
Outside, in the streets below the shop, there were the sounds of cars and teenagers laughing. Someone walked by with a ghetto blaster and Ace could hear the steady pulsing beat of a familiar song. Then the music was gone, lost under the battering thunder of a UN gunship moving through the sky over the city. The carpets that surrounded Ace gave the ancient room a curiously dead acoustic. The sound of the helicopter thudded dustily all around her for a moment then faded. Ace stirred her tea and the spoon rang with a clear note against the side of the glass. The note rang in her mind. Ace’s hearing and vision had taken on a strange clarity after the sleepless nights travelling. Now she watched the big copter, standing at a window carved out of the stone wall, a box of bright flowers on the sill by her elbows. The gunship was descending in the sky over Antalya, heading out to sea to rendezvous with one of the aircraft carriers. Even at this distance Ace recognized it as an Odin, a robot‐controlled drone. The Odin could strafe enemy positions while its pilot and navigator hung in sensory isolation in harnesses in a control station five hundred kilometres away. As the helicopter faded to a speck in the distance the sea breeze rose again and carried fragments of an old Western pop song up from the street to the open window.
‘My eyes are just holograms.’
The music moved on. Ace sat on the bench in the growing twilight of the carpet shop, sipping sage tea and listening to the cadence of the street noise change. Evening was giving way to night. Through the window she could see over the stone walls of the Old Town to Karaali Park and, beyond that, the harbour. White and grey warships floated on the intense, deepening blue of the Mediterranean. Cargo copters and gunships floated down from the sky and settled on them like dragonflies.
Miss David came back into the shop folding a rug she’d taken from one of the frames outside. She set it on a table by the cash register and turned to Ace. ‘They’ll see you now.’
Ace cinched her rucksack