Believe

Atticus Hawk knocked back another martini--what the heck, his boss was paying. The DOJ scored a major victory in the Court of Appeals today, and those losers in Guantanamo were going to stay put! Two years of Hawk legal memos had led to this wonderful day, and his boss was actually letting Hawk take some of the credit. What would come next in his career? Legal memos justifying phone taps on Nancy Pelosi, detentions of inflammatory political cartoonists, or summary executions of Mexicans at the border? He could hardly wait. "What did you say?" Hawk's boss was looking at him funny. Crap! He was so drunk he had said all of that out loud.

Charles Wu was also looking at Hawk funny. Being a bastard half-breed, Wu didn't like hearing anything that smacked of ethnosupremacy. That was one of the reasons he liked to give British secrets to the Chinese, though sometimes the Chinese could really piss him off, too. Still, there had never been a better time to be a British-Chinese double agent, and his services were in high demand. He sipped his bourbon slowly. The Chinese-Korean thing was really getting intense. Was it possible that China was getting too strong? Maybe that would not be a good thing. It was easy to be contemptuous of the British, not to mention the Americans, but a stronger China would have consequences a lot of talking heads in this historic baby of a city really did not understand.

Over in Chinatown, Lynnette Wong understood. "That will be $392," she said, as she handed over the latest batch of herbs for the homesick Chinese workers imported to build the new Chinese embassy in Washington. She watched the buyer carry the bag out, enough evil-fighting herbs to cover a hundred workers for a few more weeks. The workers had no clue what they were even part of. Sometimes Wong wasn't sure either--she had never actually been to China, and everything she knew of it had come from her father. Maybe her father had just been good at seeing evil wherever he was. Lord knows he had seen the threat of Ardua long before anybody else had. She looked over at his photo, then turned back to reading his old diary on Ardua of the Potomac.

Several miles west, John Doe was writing about Ardua in his own diary. Dr. Khalid Mohammad looked in on him and shook his head in perplexity. Though finally identified by his relatives in New York, John Doe refused to believe anything anybody told him about his life before amnesia. Unwilling to accept the stigma of committing him to a psychiatric facility, the family continued to pay for him to stay at George Washington University Hospital, where the neurosurgeons gladly continued to run tests on his injury-induced temporal lobe epilepsy. They were the ones who had encouraged John Doe to write down everything he could remember from his TLE episodes, but so far all he had written was babble about pink warblers waging war on infected ducks. It was all beautiful and magnificent, the triump of good over evil, and he was a part of it, and he was floating through it, and Ardua was doomed, except not quite yet. But he didn't know how to put it into words. It was well beyond words and flesh and things you could touch or see with your eyes, but he had to put down something, so he drew pictures of the pink warblers and the infected ducks, and wrote "Ardua's destiny is mine is yours is ours". John Doe looked up at Dr. Mohammad, who had sewn his skull back together months ago, but John Doe had never believed that either.