Turn of the Cards by George R. R. Martin, Victor Milan Page A

Jokers were generically less likely to blow you up to the authorities, no matter where you were. It wasn’t certain, but scoring proscribed pharmaceuticals was a percentage game.
    He took for granted that the odds were going to catch up with him fairly soon. From years of listening to counterculture scuttlebutt he knew that a favorite game of your petty dealers and pushers and hustlers in Third World countries — which Greece to all intents was — was to turn over the occasional foreigner. It kept the cops happy and bought a little leeway, without pissing off the local talent, the people you had to live with — and, more to the point, who knew where you slept.
    The nature of his purchases was odd enough to be worth a little extra slack. He wasn’t primarily interested in any of the local drugs of choice, not the ancient Mediterranean standby hash or grass, not smack — a favorite with your seagoing trade and not coke, still in demand by European and American tourists. He was shopping more for psychedelics. In a Med port as ancient and wicked as Athens, or anyway the appendix Piraeus, you could find anything, including acid and psilocybin. But it took time, and money, and made you conspicuous. Mark could not afford much of any of that.
    He had also had to blow a major piece of his dwindling roll on fine pharmaceutical scales. The Greek heat was not on the prod for drug labs in any extreme way; home-brewing synthetic dope was not yet a popular local pastime, what with the natural product so readily available. But the requisite equipment wasn’t easy to find, even in an age in which the digital revolution had made even precision scientific measuring equipment comparatively cheap and available. It was another datum, another mote of dust on a pile that would eventually bury him unless he moved quickly enough.
    A young woman attracted his attention, one of your occasional Grecian redheads, small and pretty, whose lethal Mediterranean Fat and Mustache Chromosome hadn’t kicked in yet. She reminded him of some of the women he had seen on Takis. She had such a sweet look that he doubted she actually knew what the English word SEX NINJA written in cursive glitter on the front of her T-shirt meant. He caught her eye, smiled, and nodded.
    She smiled back behind her big round shades. Then her jaw dropped, and she moved quickly away.
    Uh-oh, said one of the many voices available at the back of Mark’s head. He turned.
    The two debaters at the accident had opened a door of the squashed subcompact and were taking out Uzis. Their differences seemed to have resolved themselves.
     

Chapter Eight
     
    So much for jokers not ratting to the pigs. He’d gotten so bad on Takis that he wasn’t even much disappointed in human nature.
    He looked back the way he’d been going. His two old friends from Amsterdam were just strolling into view in their pastel Mid-Eighties Casual Guy suits. “Hey, dude,” the dark one said, “what’s happening?”
    And then he yelled, “Hey!” for real. It was too late.
    Making the transition to one of Mark’s alter egos was like coming: the more recently it had happened in the past, the less violently it happened in the present. Back on the Rox when he had taken one of his powders for the first time in many months, he actually burst into flames, destroying the clothes he’d been wearing. This time, though, there were just a few mostly cinematic jets of fire as his molecules rearranged themselves.
    “Holy shit,” said the beefier narc, suitably impressed, “it’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash!”
    “It’s a gas-gas-gas,” J. J. Flash said with his patented devil’s grin. And a big blast of wind knocked him ass-over-ears into the front of a building.
    “Well, shit,” he said, trying to stand. “This is getting to be a regular drag.”
    The last word was sucked away by a miniature tornado, a howling vortex that buffeted him like the wings of angry eagles. J. J. sat down hard. He’d spotted her now,