Turn of the Cards Read Free

a smirk. “So what? They can’t touch us. We’re DEA.”
    “If innocent people died”
    “Hey, baby, we’re in a war,” Lynn said. “In war, people die. The sooner these fat-ass Dutchmen wake up and smell that cup of coffee, the sooner they’re gonna fit into this new Unified Europe thing.”
    Mistral Helene Carlysle gave him a final angry look and got into the driver’s seat. The two agents piled hastily in after her. They squealed away from the ancient church as emergency vehicles flooded the square behind them.
     

Chapter Two
     
    On Eglantier Straat the narrow ancient houses leaned gently toward one another across the canal, the tulips in the boxes at every sill like overemphatic splashes of makeup on the faces of aging tarts. Mark Meadows collapsed in the doorway of the house where he rented a flat, and just breathed. It was a questionable move, however necessary. The streets in this district were all named for flowers — its name, Jordaan, was the nearest the Dutch could come to phonetically spelling its old name, which was the French word for garden — but the Eglantine Canal that ran right past the house front smelled more like a sewer.
    After a while old Mrs. Haring’s big black tom Tyl appeared and jumped on Mark. He made sure to brace his hind feet in Mark’s crotch and knead Mark’s solar plexus with his powerful forepaws, making it difficult to breathe. Mark thought he loved all animals, but Tyl was an evil bastard.
    In the first flush of panic Mark’s instinct had been to return here, home, like a fox to its earth. Now that he had a chance to think about it, he wondered if it had been such a good idea.
    They’ve found me. How do I know they’re not upstairs waiting? How do I know they aren’t up under the gables across the canal, watching, calling to each other on their walkie-talkies, getting ready to yank the snare?
    He felt scattered, strange, irresolute. He felt as if maybe he should just lie here in the doorway until they came for him. It was better than having to choose. To act.
    He squeezed his eyes shut. No. He’d been suffering these bouts of indecision, of the sensation that he was a lot of dissociated motes flying around without a common center, since Takis. Dr. Tachyon said they ought to pass, in time, but that was mostly just to make Mark feel better, not to mention himself. The truth was, Mark’s condition was something entirely new to the psychological sciences of Takis as well as of Earth.
    A part of Mark had died on Takis. Literally.
    He reached to his chest, felt the reassuring lumps of the vials in his shirt pocket, beneath the sweater. Only four now. He hadn’t even thought of them when the shooting started.
    Would I have had the presence of mind to take one before… before Takis?
    He told himself to hang on. Things had worked out fine. He hadn’t needed a friend; if he’d summoned one, there might have been a confrontation with his pursuers. More innocents might have been hurt. As it was, he desperately hoped no one had been killed by the gunfire meant for him.
    And he could not stop from wondering, What have I really lost?
    He made himself breathe slowly, from his diaphragm — not easy with that damned fifteen-pound cat digging him there and grinning — and pull his wits together. He wasn’t too hip to modern police procedure, but he understood that cops were basically lazy. If they knew where he was living, they’d just have waited for him there, rather than roam all over the city in hopes of stumbling across him. They could take him easily and unobtrusively here, in this still-slummy backwater of the generally gentrified district just west of where the medieval town walls once stood.
    If unobtrusiveness was a priority. They had been willing to spray a crowd of innocents with gunfire in broad daylight. Not exactly discreet.
    He shivered. And they were Americans. Not since Vietnam and his belated rise to consciousness of the antiwar movement had he felt such