He moved forward, shouted another phrase in the lingua demonica, his voice utterly different—deep and harsh, but somehow also like the chittering of a rat the size of a wolf. Another police commando erupted out of a utility room, tearing off his earphones and batting at smoking spots on his uniform; the smell of scorching polyester was added to the medley of stinks. Behind him communications equipment shorted out in a spectacular barrage of yellow and red sparks and a crackle of burning plastic.
The Brotherhood commandos sprinted forward. They seemed to know exactly where the Turkish police were hiding, those who weren’t stumbling blind or rolling on the floor as they fought with private demons. Mostly they just touched them, and the Turks lost interest or slumped unconscious. The less Power-endowed used hypodermics.
There was a bustle of action. “Clear!” one of the operatives said at last. “They’re barricading the street outside, though. And the airship will have to leave. No amount of Wreaking can hide something that size for long.”
Adrian nodded. “The bomb?”
“There’s been no one here but the gendarmes for hours at least.”
Adrian was snarling—literally—when she came up to his side, holstering her pistol, and then gasping with relief when he needed not hold the Wreakings in operation any longer. The snarl wasn’t simply anger; she could feel the frustration and self-reproach. And even in the darkness he looked a little pale. Wreaking on that scale without time for preparation would be draining even for an adept of Adrian’s capacities. They needed a little privacy. Even when it didn’t involve sex, she felt feeding was far too intimate to let anyone else watch if it could be helped.
“Remember what you said about Harvey,” she said.
Some of the tension went out of him. There was even the faintest trace of amusement in his voice when he spoke:
“It is much easier to appreciate his dashing redneck savoir-faire when you’re not on the receiving end.”
“Sir,” one of the Brotherhood operatives said. “This was under the windscreen wiper of one of the trucks. Old model, but a substantial semi-tractor. I get an impression that it came from the east—there’s a residue that smells like that curse the Council put on the area.
The note read, Sorry I couldn’t show you and Ellen around Istanbul, but I’ve got Georgia on my mind.
“Let me see this truck,” Adrian said.
While he examined it, Ellen kept her back to him and her eyes busy. Despite the temptation; his face might have been a disreputable angel’s when he concentrated that way, but it wouldn’t do him any good to have her mooning over him and it might to have her watching his back. There was a long silence, broken only by the muffled sobbing of one of the Turkish SWAT team.
“They are expecting backup soon,” one of the operatives said, after a few words with the crying policeman. “Even if you got their communications before they called an alarm.”
Adrian sighed again. “And it would tickle Harvey’s fancy no end to have us waste more time and more of the Power. This is the vehicle, there is no doubt about that.”
One of the others placed her palms against it, and concentrated. “I feel absolutely nothing, she said dubiously. “No linkages, no trace of flexion in the world-lines beyond what you’d expect for one anonymous vehicle. It is…Just there.”
Ellen couldn’t resist the snicker that she mostly smothered. “Now you know what it’s like being a normal,” she said.
“That is the effect of the new…Technique,” Adrian said; even here among Brotherhood loyalists he didn’t say machine. “Even now that it has been removed. That portion of its existence has been, mmmm, cut out of its history as far as the Power is concerned.”
He turned. “Deal with the gendarmes; get them out, implant short-term amnesia, and plant some suggestion of psychotropic gasses. After the Bangkok Strike, that will be credible enough. We should torch this truck, otherwise someone from the Council might notice. We cannot have them getting a hint of the Boase Effect.”
One of the team nodded. “Sir, we have to evacuate as soon as we’ve done that. There are far too many of the enemy around, and they have the Turkish government under close control.”
He nodded. “I and my companions will carry on the search. Back to the roof, the lot of you.” Only Ellen heard him add: “For whatever good it will do.”
“What about us?” she said, as the Brotherhood operatives withdrew; one of them was limping and swearing, though that was the limit of their injuries.
“Eric and the others are down by the docks. That was an excellent thought of his. Come, we can do some work along the way.”
He walked over to the wounded Turks. One…
Ellen swallowed and let her eyes slide out of focus. “Is he dead?”
“Not quite, but beyond hope.” Adrian went down on a knee and touched the man’s forehead; the body went limp. “Help me with this one.”
Fortunately the ambush team had all had the usual first-aid supplies with them. They did what they could and then Adrian levered the semi-conscious man upright. Ellen took an arm over her shoulder, her nostrils wrinkling with the smells of blood, scorched flesh and gear, and body wastes. They walked the man out. The street outside was the tail-end of chaos as policemen chivvied the last of the local civilians away; a medium-sized truck with official markings was still burning despite fire-extinguishers. An ambulance pulled away as she watched, and machine-pistols turned towards them.
Adrian pulled out ID from a pocket, held it up and snapped orders in Turkish. Ellen was close enough to see the look of relief on the nearest faces; paramedics ran forward with a gurney, and a squad rushed past the two Americans.
“What did you tell them? And how did you explain me?” she asked, as they walked past briskly; a police noncom went ahead of them, waving others aside.
He continued ahead as the pair turned left, down towards the Golden Horn to the south.
Adrian shrugged. “I told them I was a Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı officer.”
“What’s that?”
“The Turkish equivalent of the CIA and the FBI, combined. It’s a useful cover.” He smiled bleakly. “Harvey taught me that one. It’s appropriate, no? Let’s see if the others have managed to blunder as badly as we and the Brotherhood.”
Peter Boase held up the tablet, the screen glowing with high definition pictures of Harvey Ledbetter and his two presumed accomplices.
“Have you seen these people?” he asked, one of the half-dozen phrases of Turkish they had learned. Then: “I don’t speak Turkish. Yes or no, please?”
Eric didn’t speak Turkish either; he was good with languages, but no Shadowspawn to pick them up in a few days. He did, however, have a knack for telling whether people were lying or not. He was also usefully intimidating, scowling with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, the scabs and bruises on his face adding a little gravitas. All that helped, but trying to do detective work in a place where you didn’t speak the language and didn’t even have some interpreter sweating by your side was still a nightmare.
“No,” the Turk growled, and started to push past Peter into what might be the entrance of a rooming house, or some really cheap apartments. “I have not seen them.”
“Yes, you did, my friend,” Eric said. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you that lying was a sin?”
As he spoke he put his left arm on the door frame, barring the local’s way. With the same motion he brought his right hand up and fanned out a crisp spray of bills with a gesture like a stage magician’s.
He hadn’t done that before because money was like a gun. Which meant it wasn’t a magic wand that always made people do what you wanted. In this case, if you offered the money before you knew whether the person actually had the information needed, you muddied the waters beyond repair. If nothing was what they had, chances were they would make a determined effort to sell you disguised nothing.
The man had been sporting a scowl to match the New Mexican’s; that faded as
he looked down at the bills. He didn’t smile—the sensible man wouldn’t, when a foreigner waved that sort of cash under his face. Danger and gold went together a lot more certainly than love and marriage ever had, and this looked to be the sort of neighborhood where people were acutely aware of the fact.
He did look as if he were thinking things over, though, unconsciously chewing for a second on his substantial mustache. Then he gave a jerk of his head, motioning them through into the foyer. That was a fairly fancy name for a dark dingy little expanse with a staircase leading upward, and a slight whiff of either human or cat urine under a reek of cheap disinfectant. It made a good place to do business, though. Under all the differences of detail—the building was basically stone, and might be a thousand years old—it made him sort of nostalgic for some of the things he’d done as a homicide roach. Even little Santa Fe had plenty of places like this, and Albuquerque still more.
“Bingo,” he said softly, as the man took the tablet.
The Turk grunted, and surprised him by expertly manipulating the touchscreen to enlarge the faces. Then he surprised Eric again by speaking in comprehensible if thickly accented English, the type that got meaning across without necessarily being able to master the tense structure:
“Yes, I see him, and him, and her, the dark woman. She is wearing scarf on head and long coat, but she look from like a hawk and everyone else dog, bad woman I think. Think she have gun. Man with yellow hair too; bad man, cruel man. Old man meet them on dock, truck with—”
The man’s English failed him, but not his command of information technology. The fingers of his right hand danced on the screen; Peter sighed, and Eric swore fluently in Ladino Spanish. Even more surprisingly, the Turk chuckled appreciatively at one of the riper phrases. The screen he showed was of a big flatbed with an integral crane…Perfectly suited for lifting a heavy load, and with modern controls one operator could use it; there were video pickups on the business end.
“Old man hires six to make fast on gulet,” he said. Then with a slight frown: “He speaks very good Turkish. Not like Turk, but good for foreigner.”
“A gulet is a type of local sailing craft,” Peter said. “It would have a diesel, too. Small enough for three people to operate, if they knew what they were doing and didn’t mind taking risks.”
“Joy to the fucking world,” Eric snarled sotto voce. Then, to the other man:
“When?”
The Turk plucked the money out of his hand, then rubbed his thumb over his fingers in a meaningful gesture. Eric produced more, but before the man could reach for it he leaned close and whispered with their noses almost touching:
“When?”
He wasn’t trying to scare the guy; from his own instant appraisal he judged that that would take a lot more than getting in his face. He did want to make sure that he wasn’t dismissed as some foreign pansy who could be dicked around with impunity.
“Just now,” the man said with a smile, and added street directions.
Eric tossed the money over his shoulder as they turned and dashed out of the building. It was a petty gesture, but satisfying. One glance at the man had told him that he wouldn’t grovel for the money metaphorically, but at least he’d have to do it literally.
Adrian stopped. Eric was standing and glaring out to sea as if he was looking through the sights of a missile launcher across the crowded docks of Karaköy.
Peter slumped expressionless against a bollard, staring at a gulet already small in the distance towards the east, its hull and masts white against the blue of the Asian shore. Adrian stood and panted with his hands on his hips, long practice forcing him to take slow deep breaths and keep his shoulders back to let his lungs expand. Ellen was not far behind, carefully guarding his path; the Brotherhood operatives were gone, having been lent grudgingly for a single operation. The quayside was crowded with a simulacrum of maritime life, little in the way of freight or fish, but plenty of big ferries and some cruise ships as well as pleasure craft of all shapes and sizes.
Adrian turned to a young dockworker who was coiling rope.
“So, brother,” he said in perfect idiomatic Turkish. “Did a gulet just cast off from here?”
“Yes, the Çobanoğlu. Bodrum built, mostly teak, thirty meters. Strange though, no real crew, just three foreigners and a container in the hold that they hired some men to help stow. That is a waste. This is the prime cruising season down along the coast, and that is too much ship for two men and a woman.”
He shrugged, evidently not overly disturbed at the perils of some foreigners, or their obvious lack of good sense. “If I were still living in Hamburg, I would want to go for a cruise this time of year as well. Winter there is not as cold as Erzurum, but you can go for months without seeing the sun. No wonder Germans are all mad.”
“That is very helpful, brother.” Adrian shook hands with him, and slipped across a discreet wad of bills as he did. “Now, if you could help me find a gulet of my own…No, no crew is necessary…Also, no formalities, I am in a hurry…May God witness what I say, that would be a help to me, and I would be thankful. Grateful, to anyone who helped me.”
“By God, it is good to find a man who knows what he wants without filling in forms,” the local said, covertly glancing down to see the denominations in his palm and trying to hide his surprise. “My father’s brother’s paternal cousin—”
Turkish used separate, specific words for kin terms like that, much more precise than English.
“—has a good one. But it has just been refitted for the season.…A substantial deposit will be necessary with no, ummm, formalities, you understand.”
Which meant no papers, permits or licenses.
“And something will be necessary for the officials, to explain the need for haste and help them be reasonable.”
The Turk shrugged one shoulder and made an expressive gesture with thumb and fingers, the for bribes as plain as speech and much more discreet. Adrian nodded. He might not be able to bribe the local bureaucrats himself without a time-consuming dance or using the Power; he didn’t know which ones were susceptible, and like any transaction corruption required some degree of trust.
“Your uncle would not lose if he chartered it to me,” he said.
Which, as they both knew, meant sold under the table. Nobody in their right mind was going to assume they’d get their valuable property back under the circumstances. Adrian reminded himself not to try and bury the problem under money. Too much would excite suspicion. Just enough to be very tempting…The men would assume something illegal was going on, which would explain the cash and the haste.
He mentioned a figure with a percentage bonus for haste. The man nodded, turned and walked quickly away with a pleased and eager step. Adrian began to laugh, staring out to where the waters of the Golden Horn reflected the lights of towers and bridges. The cold brackish water had the stale harbor smell, unattractive in itself but hinting at voyages and adventures. A probe with the Power revealed absolutely nothing, which was significant in itself.
I must be very careful here, Adrian thought. I will do nothing but waste energy if I seek the impact of the bomb itself on the world lines, even my own. Perhaps if I focus entirely on certain other things—
“What exactly is so funny?” Eric growled, unconsciously rubbing a belly still bruised by the shot in the sewers of Vienna.
Adrian slapped him on the shoulder. “That all my life, or at least all my life since he took me from my parents, Harvey has been advising that it is a very good idea to be careful about deciding what you want before you set out to get it.”
“¿Qué?” Eric said in frustration.
“One of the things I wanted to do after I married Ellen was take her on a sea voyage. We have no time for a real honeymoon, you understand. It was more the nature of convalescence combined with the commando school. Come, we need a gulet of our own for this pleasure cruise in the footsteps of Jason seeking the plutonium fleece.”
“I’d prefer
a missile boat with some heat seekers and a couple of autocannon,” the New Mexican said flatly.
Adrian shook his head regretfully. “Not with my sister in the mix. An aircraft would be extremely unwise, even more so.” A full-throated laugh. “It is ironic. She actually loves modern technology, and I am glad to use it. But together…contending together…We dare not rely upon it.”
“Except for Harvey and his fucking bomb, and that thing shielding it.”
Adrian sobered and nodded. “Yes. Except for that.”
“And I just accomplished zip,” Eric snarled; Adrian could feel the self-reproach radiating off him.
“On the contrary. We now know for sure that Guha and Farmer are helping him. Bad news, but good intelligence.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Black Sea
Ellen was a little nervous about the gulet, and the more so as preparations for departure went on through the night until the very slightest paling appeared in the east and the city lights lost some of their harsh brilliance.
“They’re asleep,” she said, climbing back up the steep staircase to the chilly darkness of the deck, somehow emphasized rather than relieved by the lights of the city. “At last, at long last. Over-excited. It happens at their age.”
Adrian nodded, abstracted. “And their blood doesn’t help. This is the middle of the day, for them.”
“Afternoon nap, then. Is the ship okay?”
“Our Tulip is a sweet little thing and should serve us well. We’re about ready to cast off.”
She wasn’t nervous of the ship itself. It was a pretty enough craft, essentially a biggish schooner with two masts, a sharp bow, a cruiser stern and a low deckhouse that was the only break in its long smooth lines. She was no expert on boats, but the slim sleek shape of the Lale—the word meant “tulip”—appealed to her aesthetic sense in a way that made her confident Adrian was right about her being a sweet little thing.
In her experience objects that looked perfectly suited to their purpose usually were, and she could tell how something looked at a glance. It was one of those cases where aesthetics were extremely practical.
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