Aces Abroad

Andrea, Andrea, what have I done?

She bit her lip. The GSG-9 commando riding across from her saw and gri

He put his arm around her. It wasn't just a brotherly gesture. Even the prospect of danger wasn't enough to drive sex wholly from his mind. Oddly she found she didn't mind the attention. Perhaps it was her acute awareness of how incongruous they were, a pair of small gaudy cockatoos riding among panthers.

And Gregg… did she really care what happened to him?

Or do I hope he never leaves that tenement alive?

The screaming had stopped, and the buzz-saw sounds. Hartma

He felt like something from a medieval fable as painted by Bosch: a glutton presented with the fullest of feasts, only to have it turn to ashes in his mouth. Puppetman had drawn no nourishment from the terrorists' dying. He'd been nearly as terrified as they.

A humming, coming closer: Moritat, The Ballad of Mackie the Knife. The mad ace was locked in killing frenzy now, stalking toward him with his terrible hand still dripping brains. Hartma

Bile surged up his throat at what he was going to do. He choked it back, reached for a string, and pulled. Pulled hard. The humming stopped. The soft tocking of clogs on wood stopped. Hartma

He pulled A

His own breathing nearly deafened him. He could feel the emotion swelling within Mackie. He steeled himself and stroked it, teased it, made it grow.

Mackie went to his knees before the chair. He unfastened the fly of Hartma

Hartma

If you don't it's never going to end, Puppetman taunted. What are you doing to me?

Saving you. And securing the best puppet of all.

But he's so powerful-so… unpredictable. Involuntary pleasure was breaking his thoughts into kaleidiscope fragments. But I've got him now. Because he wants to be my puppet. He loves you, the way that neurasthenic bitch Sara never could.

God, God, am I still a man?

You're alive. And you're going to smuggle this creature back to New York. And anyone who stands in our way from now on will die.

Now relax and enjoy it.

Puppetman took over. As Mackie sucked his cock, he sucked the boy's emotions with his mind. Hot-wet and salty, they gushed into him.

Hartma

Senator Gregg Hartma

White light drilled him from the rooftop opposite, fierce as a laser. He raised his head, blinking.

"My God," a German voice yelled, "it's the senator." The street filled up with cars and whirling lights and noise. It didn't seem to -take any time at all. Hartma

Past them all he saw Sara, dressed in a white coat that was the defiant antithesis of camouflage.

"I… got away," he said, voice creaking like an unused door. "It's over. They-they killed each other."

Television spotlights spilled over him, hot and white as milk fresh from the breast. His gaze caught Sara's. He smiled. But her eyes drilled into his like iron rods.

Cold and hard. She's slipped away! he thought. With the thought came pain.

But Puppetman wasn't buying pain. Not tonight. He drove himself into her through the eyes.

And she came ru

And down away where light never was, Puppetman smiled.

MIRRORS OF THE SOUL

Melinda M. Snodgrass

April in Paris. The chestnut tress resplendent in their pink and white finery. The blossoms drifting like fragrant snow about the feet of the statues in the Tuileries Garden, and floating like colorful foam atop the muddy waters of the Seine.

April in Paris. The song bubbling incongruously through his head as he stood before a simple gravestone in the Cimetiere Montmartre. So hideously inappropriate. He banished it only to have it return with greater intensity.

Irritably Tachyon hunched one shoulder, took a tighter grip -on the simple bouquet of violets and lily of the valley. The crisp green florist's paper crackled loudly in the afternoon air. Away to his left he could hear the urgent bleat of horns as the bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled up the Rue Norvins toward Sacre-Coeur. With its gleaming white walls, cupolas, and dome the cathedral floated like an Arabian nights dream over this city of light and dreams.

The last time I saw Paris.

Earl, his face holding all the expression of an ebony statue. Lena, flushed, impassioned. "You must go!" Looking to Earl for help and comfort. The quiet; "it would probably be best." The path of least resistance. So strange from this of all men.

Tachyon knelt, brushed away the petals that littered the stone slab.

Earl Sanderson Jr. "Noir Aigle" 1919-1974

You lived too long, my friend. Or so it was said. Those busy, noisy activists could have used you better if you'd had the grace to die in 1950. No -even better-while liberating Argentina or freeing Spain or saving Gandhi.

Laid the bouquet on the grave. A sudden breeze set the delicate white bells of the lilies to trembling. Like a young girl's lashes just before she was kissed. Or like Blythe's lashes just before she wept.

The last time I saw Paris.

A cold, bleak December, and a park in Neuilly.

Blythe van Renssaeler, aka Brain Trust, died yesterday… Gracelessly he surged to his feet, dusted the knees of his pants with a handkerchief. Gave his nose a quick, emphatic blow. That was the trouble with the past. It never stayed buried.

Straddling the slab was a large elaborate wreath. Roses and gladiolas and yards of ribbon. A wreath for a dead hero. A travesty. A small foot came up, sent the wreath tumbling. Contemptuously Tachyon walked over it, grinding the fragile petals beneath his heel.

One ca

His certainly were.

On the Rue Etex he hailed a cab, fished for the note, read off the name of the Left Bank cafe in rusty French. Settled back to watch the unlit neon signs flash past. XXX, Le Filles! "Les Sexy." Strange to think of all this smut at the foot of a hill whose name translated as the Mountain of Martyrs. Saints had died on Montmartre. The Society of Jesus had been founded on the hill in 1534.