Free The Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid by Walter Jon Williams

The Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid
    What we might call the Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid Situation began in the Staré Mêsto on a windy spring day. We were clumped beneath the statue of Jan Hus and in the midst of our medley of South American Tunes Made Famous by North American Pop Singers. The segue from “Cielito Lindo” to “El Condor Pasa” required some complicated fingering, and when I glanced up from my guitarra I saw our contact standing in the crowd, smoking a cigarette and making a bad show of pretending he had nothing better to do but stand in Prague’s Old Town and listen to a family of nine Aymara Indians deconstruct Simon and Garfunkel.
    My uncle Iago had described the man who was planning to hire us, and this man matched the description: a youngish Taiwanese with a fashionable razor cut, stylish shades, a Burberry worn over a cashmere suit made by Pakistani tailors in Hong Kong, a silk tie, and glossy handmade Italian shoes.
    He just didn’t look like a folk music fan to me.
    After the medley was over, I called for a break, and my cousin Rosalinda passed the derby among the old hippies hanging around the statue while my other cousin, Jorge, tried to interest the crowd in buying our CDs. I ambled up to our contact and bummed a smoke and a light.
    “You’re Ernesto?” he asked in Oxford-accented English.
    “Ernesto, that’s me,” I said.
    “Your uncle Iago suggested I contact you,” he said. “You can call me Jesse.”
    His name wasn’t Jesse any more than mine was really Ernesto, this being the moniker the priest gave me when the family finally got around to having me baptized. I’d been born on an artificial reed island drifting around Lake Titicaca, a place where functionaries of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church didn’t hang out much.
    My real name is Cari, just in case you wondered.
    “Can we go somewhere a little more private?” Jesse asked.
    “Yeah, sure. This way.”
    He ground out his cigarette beneath one of his wingtips and followed me into the Church of St. Nicholas while I wondered if there was any chance that we were really under surveillance, or whether Jesse was just being unreasonably paranoid.
    Either way, I thought, it would affect my price.
    The baroque glories of the church burst onto my retinas as I entered— marble statues and bravura frescos and improbable amounts of gold leaf. Strangely enough, the church belonged to the Hussites, who you don’t normally associate with that sort of thing.
    Booms and bleats echoed through the church. The organist was tuning for his concert later in the day, useful interference in the event anyone was actually pointing an audio pickup at us.
    Jesse didn’t spare a glance for the extravagant ornamentation that blazed all around him, just removed his shades as he glanced left and right to see if anyone was within listening distance.
    “Did Iago tell you anything about me?” Jesse asked.
    “Just that he’d worked for you before, and that you paid.”
    Iago and his branch of the family were in Sofia doing surveillance on a ex-Montenegrin secret policeman who was involved in selling Russian air-to-surface ATASM missiles from Transnistria through the Bosporus to the John the Baptist Liberation Army, Iraqi Mandaean separatists who operated out of Cyprus. Lord alone knew what the Mandaeans were going to do with the missiles, as they didn’t have any aircraft to fire them from — or at least we can only hope they don’t. Probably they were just middlemen for the party who really wanted the missiles.
    I’d been holding my group ready to fly to Cyprus if needed, but otherwise the Iraqi Mandaeans were none of my concern. Reflecting on this, I wondered if the world had always been this complicated, or if this was some kind of twenty-first-century thing.
    “We need you to do a retrieval,” Jesse said.
    “What are we retrieving?”
    His mouth gave an impatient twitch. “You don’t need to know that.”
    He was beginning