A young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
The walk through the secret mountain route lasted half an hour longer than expected. The morning sun had already spread its unfaltering rule over the sky as the four trod across a roughly carved road in an inner escarpment on the foothills toward a discreet grotto, the opening no more than two yards across in the side of the main ridge, piercing through it from one side to the other.
"Better to space ourselves out," said Seiber. "Siraj first, then you guys, and then me. 'Bout fifty yards between you two and each one of us."
When Skyler looked back to Siraj to hear his feedback, the man was already fading in the darkness, his figure sawn off by the forward beams of his flashlight. At some point the shape escorted by the two flaxen half moons of light on the carved walls gained the appearance of the unblinking eye of a feline predator, slowly crawling away through the rubbery bends and twists, so slowly it was as if he wasn't making any progress at all amidst the gravel caroming off the limestone.
"Okay, now you two."
Nadim turned on his flashlight and stepped in first, leading the way with the beam of light breaking the dark like the hull of an icebreaker. Skyler followed at his side.
It took him the better part of a minute before he got used to not seeing his steps. The edge of the sweeping flashlight reached just far enough for him to make out the tip of his shoes, swaying back and forth. He looked back. Seiber had finished checking out the area and followed them inside, silhouetted in a natural white aura. Siraj's was an artificial gold. Both steps intermingled around them, blending harmonically, as if they were the mountain's heartbeat. Blood of sounds. Of the waves of history.
"You been here before?" Skyler asked Nadim.
"Oh, yeah. End to end. Many times. Was our home for a while once."
"How long's it gonna take?"
"Well, the cave's natural, so the line is pretty rugged. What, you need water or something?"
"I'm fine. What do you mean by 'something?'"
"What do you want?"
"What do you have?"
Nadim unfolded the inner skin of his cloth, displaying a rack of pockets with cassette tapes like an old-school dealer.
"Sgt. Pepper's, Let it Bleed, Quadrophenia..."
"They let you bring 'em with?"
"Do I look like I'm allowed? And they say I'm the crazy one."
"Well, my bad. How 'bout Phil Collins? You said you like him."
"I didn't say I like him."
"You said you wanted to meet him."
"I didn't say I like him."
"But you like him?"
"Yeah, I like him."
"So, what's with correcting me?"
"'Cause that's not why I want to meet him."
"You wanna meet him, but not because you like him?"
"Right."
"All right. Christ. Why do you wanna meet him then?"
"Because of Duchess."
"What duchess? The...the song?"
"Yeah, the song Duchess."
"What about it? You don't like it?"
"I hate it."
"You wanna meet Phil Collins because you don't like one song?"
"I didn't say I don't like it. I said I hate it. Not liking implies a certain degree of indifference.
"So, you're...not indifferent to that song enough to dislike it, which means you hate it?"
"Right."
"And why the hell is that?"
"Because it's almost perfect. It's just one step away from perfect. And that ruins it completely. As if the Mona Lisa had a crack on the canvas. Like the shit drainpipe in the Death Star. I wanna meet him and tell him to redo it."
"You're nuts."
"No, I'm not," Nadim argued. He pulled out the album Duke and plopped it into his recorder. He plugged in a pair of military earpieces and let Skyler put one on. Some clicks of the skip button as quick bursts of white noise flared up in Skyler's right ear. The final blasts of drums from the Behind the Lines carried on to the beginning of the next track like a comet tail.
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