I swallowed a Regionsync pill to reset my body clock. These pills always reminded me of the pill women take to regulate their fertility. Still, I had no desire to meet up with Williams while I was suffering from jet lag, so I gulped it down.
The Meatplane touched down gently on the runway at Ruzyne Airport. Its wings contorted—pretty alarming, if you’re watching it for the first time—and the forward momentum of the plane was absorbed. It was like being inside a bird who uses its wings to elegantly guide its landing onto a tree branch. As a result, these Meatplanes could land on the narrowest strip of runway, decelerate massively, and yet the people inside would barely feel a thing—g-force was kept almost constant. This was also helped by the polymer seats going into shock absorption mode, of course. An electric current subtly modified the seats on a macromolecular level to turn them into something like giant mushrooms, and by the time the seats returned to normal, we passengers were greeted by the smiling faces of the cabin crew guiding us toward the exits. I always enjoyed my flights on these sorts of civilian planes—they beat the hell out of those surreal military stealth craft on the comfort stakes.
Prague. City of culture. City of a hundred spires.
I left Ruzyne Airport and took the metro to emerge on an overcast morning.
“Which genius’s bright idea was it to use Charles Bridge as the dead drop?” Williams asked.
We were standing on the bridge watching the amber clouds cast their shadow over Vltava River.
Williams had been late for our rendezvous, of course, and as usual was just trying to bluster his way out of it. I nodded and said nothing. He did sort of have a point: Charles Bridge was indeed overloaded with tourists. It was as if some mob had decided to get together to try and sink the bridge using its own body mass.
Having said that, Williams was still a paid-up veteran of the elite Special Forces, and his job over the last few years had, to a greater or lesser extent, consisted of playing “Where’s Waldo?”—tracking down and identifying his target from the surrounding rabble. Finding a person for a prearranged rendezvous was surely easier than when you were trying to neutralize them. On a scale of one to ten, the likelihood that Williams had simply been a bit lazy and arrived late was probably an eleven. As always. I knew from experience that it wasn’t worth calling him out on it, though—not unless I wanted to get into a heated debate that would soon descend into a farce.
I asked Williams how things were. Williams scowled—he seemed almost disappointed that I wasn’t challenging him. He had obviously rehearsed his story in his mind and had been ready to stand his ground.
“Not bad. Same old, same old,” he said.
“ ‘Same old, same old’? Williams—you just got here forty-eight hours before I did!”
“And there it is. Dude, I knew you were annoyed about having to wait. I told you, it’s not my fault, there are too many people on this stupid—”
That’s our Williams for you …
“Williams, have we really come to Prague to act out a Monty Python sketch?”
“Well, it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do. John Paul ain’t here.”
Huh. Well, it looked like we were in the middle of some sort of comedy after all. Or at least a shit-show. Not that I was too surprised; this was hardly the first time we’d been sent halfway around the world to a place where John Paul wasn’t.
“Isn’t here? Does that mean he was here up until—”
Williams cut me off. “Yeah, the morning I arrived I had a coffee with the latest CIA genius in a Starbucks. ‘Unfortunately, sir, we appear to have temporarily let him out of our sights.’ Fucking Langley brat. Straight out of Harvard, wet as piss behind the ears, not even enough Czech to read the sports pages, and still he’s landed himself a nice little posting at the embassy here.”
“Huh. Says all you need to know about Langley, putting a greenhorn like that on such an important target.” I sighed, but truth be told I was hardly surprised. These days the CIA was little more than a throwback to a bygone era, a vestigial bastard child of the Cold War. As had just been proven, again. And, yet again, it was up to us in Intelligence to pick up the slack and clean up after their latest operational clusterfuck.
“Yeah. You know those spy novels where the agents can always rely on the desk jockeys? M to cover your back, Q to give you just the right gadget at the right time? I say we burn those books. Every time Langley fucks up, we burn them all.”
Williams was only half joking—I could tell he was seriously pissed. With good cause, to be fair. The CIA just can’t get the staff anymore. I surveyed the statues of the saints that lined the bridge. One of them in particular caught my eye: the saint had a number of samurai-like figures kneeling at his feet, waiting to be baptized. It was like a scene from a Kurosawa movie. I knew that quite a lot of these statues were of famous Jesuits, so I guessed that this one was probably one of the missionaries who first proselytized Christianity in Japan.
I wondered how this saint could have gotten his message across when he was a stranger in a strange land. How did he communicate with the Japanese? What did they understand by his reverential treatment of God? What did they even understand by the word “God”? How was it translated?
“Dude, are you even listening to me?” Williams interrupted my reverie.
“Sure, sure. I was just thinking about that wet-behind-the-ears CIA brat. How he feels in a country where he barely has enough of the local language to get by.”
“What? Fuck him and the fucking horse he rode in on. And fuck Langley for not sending some fucker who speaks the fucking lingo.”
“Indeed. Anyhow. What now?” I asked.
Williams shrugged. “Look up John Paul’s woman, I guess.”
“He has a woman?” The first I’d heard of this.
“A woman John Paul visited, at least. That’s how the Secret Service knew he was in the area.”
“Shit, sounds like we’d have captured him already if they’d been doing their job properly.”
“Well, the CIA say that they’ve been keeping a close watch on her. Not that I believe anything those idiots say anymore. But that’s what they say. And according to them, John Paul’s recent appearance by her side was the first incident since they’ve been tracking her.”
“What’s the probability John Paul has already left the Czech Republic?”
“Dunno. Hard to say. His ID doesn’t seem to register at airports after all. Maybe he left, maybe he’s still hanging around. I guess our best bet is to hope he’s still here and keep a close watch on the woman,” Williams said half-heartedly. He was right, of course; there wasn’t exactly anything else we could do, according to procedure. That didn’t make it any better, though.
“Hey, Clavis. This is just like that Kafka play, no? Except in our case it’s Waiting for John Paul.”
Williams was being uncharacteristically literary again, or at least was trying to be, so I felt I needed to point out two things. Number one, Waiting for Godot was by Beckett and not Kafka. And number two, Godot never actually appears in the play, leaving the two protagonists to speculate about his whereabouts with an ever-increasing sense of futility. Don’t jinx us, in other words.
“Meh. It’s all Kafka to me,” said Williams.
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