“I – oh, Jesus, man, I’m sorry – I -” He whirled away from the door and went race-walking back down the corridor, his brain spinning.

The concierge was laying for him at the foot of the stairs with a Bulgarian-made push broom. She uttered a piercing screech and whacked him in the head with it. Horse hairs flew in a cloud around his head. He raised his arms to defend himself She hit him again, at which point the head fell off and cracked him on the crown. He retreated in a hurry, hunched down with his hands over his head as she belabored his back with the broomstick, cawing like a triumphant crow.

In the hot, stinking street again, heart pounding, brushing horse hairs from his shoulders like dandruff. He started walking, not sure where he was going.

A kid of maybe fourteen fell into step beside him – it was hard to tell exactly; between genes and doubtful nutrition most adults around here seemed child-sized compared to Mark. But though the youngster was dark, a glance told Mark he wasn’t Vietnamese, or any kind of Southeast Asian probably.

“You American, yes?” the boy asked.

Mark bit down hard on hysterical laughter. He was blond and white and two feet taller than anyone else on the street. He looked as if he had arrived in a UFO. In fact he looked more alien than when he had arrived in a UFO, when the living ship SunDiver dropped into Holland for a touch-and-go on its way to deliver Jay Ackroyd and his sharp-tongued war bride, Hastet, back to the US of A.

“Yeah,” he managed to say, with only a giggle or two escaping his mouth like Lawrence Welk bubbles.

“You are joker?”

Given what the nats looked like around here, he could make a case for it on his own merits. But he was feeling waves and waves of guilt crashing down on him for disturbing the desperate people in “his” room. He waved the handful of papers still clutched in one hand – a little tattered from the Bulgarian broom attack – at the boy. The imprint of the Wild Cards Affairs office at the tops seemed to satisfy him that Mark was one of us and not them.

“My name is Ali,” he said proudly. “I am from Dimashq.”

“I’m Mark,” Mark said, the conversational idiot taking over. “Like, what brings you here, man?”

The boy hiked up the long tails of his Western-style man’s shirt, which he wore hanging over his shorts. There was a fistula in his skinny side you could roll a bowling ball into. Wet, shiny red-purple things writhed in there like eels.

“I am joker,” he said, not without pride.

Mark swallowed. It wasn’t the deformity itself; he’d seen as bad just a-walkin’ down the street this afternoon. Syria was the heartmeat of Nur al-Allah’s bad-crazy Muslim fundie movement that claimed jokers were cursed by God; more than three hundred jokers had been massacred in riots in the joker quarter of Damascus – Dimashq – not ten days ago. The boy was awfully damned lucky to be here, squalor or no.

The boy dropped his shirttail. “You look troubled, Mark my friend from America.”

“Well, I just got here, and I got assigned these living quarters. And I went to the address they told me, and the place I’m supposed to live in has all these people in it. Must be a whole family in there. I’ve got to talk to somebody. Get this straightened out.”

The boy spat. “Squatters. Refugees from fighting in the countryside. Everybody wants to live in Saigon giai phong. I will take you to someone who will make it right.” He puffed out his chest importantly and led off down the street.

They went two blocks, Mi proud, Mark ducking his head between his shoulder-blades in a doomed attempt to be inconspicuous. They turned a corner and a burst of automatic-weapons fire cracked out right in front of them, followed by the slap of muzzle-blast shocks hitting the building fronts.

Mark grabbed Mi by the arm and dragged him into a recess between two more or less solid-looking structures. He was getting to be an old hand under fire. Hell of a note for the Last Hippie.

Mi squirmed. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to keep you from getting shot.”

Mi pulled free. “There is no danger. They fire only into the air.” His body language said he knew a little something about being under fire too.

Mark was becoming aware that he was standing in somebody’s front yard, as blank joker faces stuck out of the lean-to jumble set back from the street between the larger buildings. All stepped right out into the street. Mark peered cautiously after. The loose horse hairs were starting to itch down inside his shirt, and he remembered he was allergic to horses.

Another burst crashed. Mark flinched but willed himself not to duck. Men in khaki shorts and pith helmets were herding people out of a building down the street, slapping and kicking and firing Kalashnikovs into the air to keep them moving.

“See?” All said smugly. “It is the People’s Security Force clearing out squatters. They think they can come here and take the housing the government gives to jokers.”

The PSF troops were bundling the squatters into the back of a big black step-van. A young man suddenly broke away, went running down the street, thatch of stiff black hair bouncing to the rhythm of his stride, elbows flailing.

One of the men in the pith helmets pulled an AK to his shoulder and fired. Dust flew from between the young man’s shoulder-blades. He fell on his face, skidding several yards on the sidewalk. The security man fired again. Screams answered, as if his bullets had found other targets.

Au showed Mark a smile full of white, well-tended teeth. “Nat dogs. They deserve no better, yes?”

Chapter Sixteen

The hunt for Mark Meadows stalled out in Bangkok, on the pool deck of the Oriental Hotel. The dogs, however, were not as idle as they looked.

“This isn’t gonna work, Lynn,” Gary Hamilton said. He had a mostly peach Hawaiian shirt on over khaki shorts and flip-flops. He sat on a big plastic chaise longue, keeping carefully within the umbra of an umbrella, applying thermo-nuclear-blast-protection-factor sunblock over every inch of his large body and worrying.

“What’s not gonna work?” his partner demanded. Lynn Saxon sat cross-legged right up on the pink pavement by the pool. He had a headset clamped on his dark hair and a little black box well equipped with blinking lights and digital displays resting next to his skinny, hairy haunches. He wore matching Hawaiian shirt and shorts dominated by an explosive shade of magenta. The Aussie tending bar in the little straw-top cabana over on the other side of the pool had opined that looking at Saxon gave him a whole new grasp of the phrase Technicolor yawn. Unlike college-boy Hamilton, Saxon had never been a member of any beer-drinking fraternities, so he felt vaguely complimented by the remark.

Rubbing thick white zinc-oxide cream on his nose, Hamilton glanced sideways at his buddy and inhaled a snort of laughter. He had been fighting off the giggles all morning. He didn’t see Lynn get zinged much. It was especially great when he didn’t even know it.

“Just sitting around listening to Belew’s phone in case he happens to get a call telling him where Meadows is hanging out,” Hamilton said. “What good is this doing us?” Saxon was hot, wired, and running, flipping those channels on his Black Box and alternately ogling the women of various colors in their French thong bikinis and shrieking curses at them if they splashed too near to his sensitive electronic equipment.

“Listen, bud,” he said, talking fast and emphatically. “Do you have any idea, any idea at all, where this puke Meadows is?”

Warily, Hamilton shook his head.

“Right! Neither do I, neither does Washington. It’s been good old J. Bob all along who’s been steering us after him. I mean, we gotta admit, when he’s right, he’s right. Right?”