The Council of Shadows s-2

by S. M. Stirling

  Duquesne had an abstracted look for a moment. "Predation on human beings?" he said. "But why…Ah, the same phenomenon would make a human consciousness easier to affect, eh? And once committed to that, path dependency would maintain it even if it was no longer essential when the ability had grown. A legacy system, as it were."

  Well, he's a cool one! Ellen thought. Then: Well, judging by Peter – which is to judge by a sample of one – the stereotype is true to the extent that physicists really can get lost in an idea. But then, so do artists. Or even art historians like me. Or anyone in a field that requires really deep thought and intense commitment.

  "I am deeply sorry, but by involving you in this matter, I have endangered you, Professor Duquesne," Adrian said gently. "You now know of our existence, and of the Power…"

  "The Power?"

  "The term for the ability in general."

  The man made a dismissive gesture. "Let me develop my line of thought. So, if this phenomenon is instinctive, it is not well understood even by those who possess it?"

  "No. There are many techniques for amplifying the effect, but no real scientific understanding." He smiled bleakly. "My breed is many things- paranoid, sociopathic, sadistic-but we have produced no scientists that I know of, though some have been scholars. It is only a few generations since the whole business was thought of in superstitious terms, as magic."

  "If I could do such things"-Duquesne nodded towards the glass-"I might not have developed a scientific sensibility either."

  He thought for a moment. "The information you sent me…in retrospect, and taking them seriously, the sections on the-"

  Duquesne was still speaking French, but Ellen lost him after half a dozen words. She could see Adrian do the same a few seconds later.

  "Professor, you are speaking to scientific illiterates," Adrian said. "Can you put this in layman's terms?"

  The academic made a quick impatient gesture. "No. Not without complete misunderstanding."

  "There is nothing you can say?"

  Another string of technicalities, ending with phase shifts.

  "And that is why silver resists the Power?" Adrian asked.

  "From what Boase said, the transuranics should as well. Fascinating!"

  "No less fascinating is that the memory stick itself had…I find myself in the same position as you, Professor…it is hard to express…a feeling of no feeling. Usually anything linked to a significant nexus of probabilities in the future has a feeling of importance. Or of nonimportance if it does not. This information simply did not show either."

  "Fascinating," Duquesne murmured again. Then he laughed. "Perhaps it is as it was with the Large Hadron Collider. The future is interfering with the present to prevent certain information from being accessible."

  He stopped laughing when they both stared at him expressionlessly.

  "That was a joke, monsieur," he said.

  "I'm afraid it isn't." After a moment Adrian went on: "You are willing to continue this research?"

  "Ah…well, that is a difficult matter. I have commitments to other projects. I certainly cannot do research in isolation, without informing colleagues…It would all be completely irregular. Things are not done in such a fashion. But if a project can be arranged-we must think and plan in some detail."

  "Of course," Adrian said soothingly.

  After a little more conversation Duquesne left, still shaking his head.

  "The poor man," Ellen said wistfully. '"This is his last normal moment, isn't it?"

  "Yes, alas," Adrian said. "Wait…wait… now we follow him."

  "How many?"

  "It's not quite certain yet," Adrian said as they went out the door and turned right into the bustling night; Duquesne was walking towards the nearest metro station. "The world-lines are coalescing… yes. Two normals, renfield muscle, and a Shadowspawn. He will intervene only if the normals fail."

  "You'll take care of him?"

  "Exactly. I'm afraid you must keep the normals occupied."

  Gulp.

  "I wish Harvey were here to help."

  So do I!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  "You!

  The man who called himself Jose Figuerez froze in the corridor with a spray of files against his chest. Harvey Ledbetter raised his hands in a soothing gesture.

  "Hey, Dhul Fiqar-"

  "You know my name?"

  " Obviously."

  "How did you get in here?"

  The man's eyes darted to the stairwell. Obviously he was wondering how Harvey had gotten up here unnoticed; there was an inconspicuously armed guard on the front door and at the vehicle entrance, and the rear was locked, with steel reinforcement on the inside. Nothing out of the ordinary here in Veracruz, though the concealed stash of automatic weapons would raise eyebrows if anyone knew about them.

  "I walked," Harvey said. "Let's talk, shall we?"

  The man waved him through the door of the office. There were only two chairs in the little third-floor room, the office model on casters that Dhul Fiqar went to behind his desk, and a plain molded-plywood-and-wire type near the louvered window that cast bars of savage light and ink-black shade on the plain polished concrete floor. The air that came in past it was hot and rank-heavy with rancid smells, traffic stink and petrochemical plant effluent and the smell of a warm sea not far away and far too full of rotting garbage and raw sewage and the odd dead pig, dog or inconvenient human.

  Veracruz was big. Not quite the thirty million-plus monster that Mexico City was, but bigger than New York or Tokyo, with a lot less in the way of frivolous infrastructural luxuries like sanitation than a first-world city.

  The Arab seated himself behind the desk, keeping his hands on the edge. His left thumb was pushing an alarm trigger that would alert some of his followers, or at least would have if Harvey hadn't bent the path of some electrons, just so. The other was twitching with readiness. Which meant…

  Yeah, gun in the upper right drawer. And that's making him feel safer, Harvey thought. He probably thinks he's got me trapped. Silly bastard.

  "How did you find us?" the man behind the desk said tightly.

  "Well, Dhul, ol' buddy, consider that we got seventeen kilos of weapons-grade plutonium out of Seversk-"

  " Seventeen kilos?"

  "Y'all weren't the only destination. Sorry, fourteen kilos for you."

  I used the rest to kill Brancusi. Well, kill his postcorporeal energy matrix. Sorta debatable whether that was the same him who was a bouncing baby boy 'round about 1911.

  He went on aloud: "We brought it all the way to Port-au-Prince with every security service in the world lookin for it, and handed it over to you intact…Are you really surprised we can find out what we need to?"

  Dhul Fiqar-the name meant Sword of the Prophet, and Ledbetter assumed it was a nom de guerre-was quite believable as a Mexican here in Veracruz even apart from his accentless command of the local Spanish dialect; he was olive-skinned and had a few gray hairs in his bushy black mustache.

  In fact he was from Lebanon, originally, and Harvey suspected he'd been placed here as a sleeper agent by an organization that no longer existed to any great extent. He was extremely fit, even a little gaunt, with the face of someone whose compulsions were eating him slowly from the inside. Right now he was obviously thinking hard.

  "Perhaps it is not so surprising," he said after a moment. "You knew to whom you were selling the material?"

  "Is that a surprise either?"

  Contempt glinted in the dark eyes; he might as well have sneered mercenary aloud. Then a hint of caution. But a capable one.

  "You were well paid," Dhul said. "Ten million euros is a great deal, even in these times."

  "Yep. And you did get the material, and it's the real goods. That's a first."

  Light kindled in the man's face, an exultation that nothing could suppress for long.

  "Always, always before something has blocked us. The most accursed strokes of bad luck! But by the Lovingkind, t
he Compassionate, this time victory will be ours!"

  "You reckon?" Harvey asked, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

  "?Perdone usted?"

  "You think so?"

  "It is fated!" An effort at control, and Dhul went on. "But sit, sit, my friend," he said; the affability sat very poorly on him, if you could sense emotions directly.

  "Thanks, but I won't be here long," Harvey replied.

  He's certainly been a busy little bee, and he's built up quite a little operation on his own. They're like cancer cells – usually there're a few left to grow back.

  "How'd you manage to machine the plutonium?" Harvey said.

  This was an older section, near run-down docks but not very close to the modern container facilities. Most of the buildings were from the same period, built during the booming days of the Porfiriato from blocks otpiedra muca, coral stone. Some were pocked with bullet holes under the cracked stucco, from the revolution and the brief American occupation that had followed, or the drug wars of recent years. Nowadays they held a tangle of struggling small businesses or cheap rooming houses with the odd spot of renovation. The metal desk and antique ASUS-S6 computer would fit right in.

  "When you love death more than life, these things are not difficult," Dhul Fiqar said.

  Ah. A suicide machinist. Wonders never cease.

  Plutonium was toxic chemically, violently dangerous as a radioactive substance, and a stone bitch to handle-for one thing, if you exposed it to moist air it was liable to more than double in volume as it turned into a flaky paste of hydrides that would then spontaneously burst into flame at room temperature. The job wouldn't be impossible, with computer-controlled machine tools as common as they were these days. You could set up an improvised clean room for it, though you'd be well advised to use a cellar and pump it full of concrete afterwards.

  It would all be much easier if you didn't mind the operator dying a couple of weeks later. And this bunch had the advantage of being completely obscure-that was why he'd picked them, rather than hire some unemployed Russians or whatever. They had the best possible reasons not to talk, too.

  "Besides, it was already formed," Dhul Fiqar acknowledged. "You saved us much time with that, since we had only to alter the angles on the wedges. I would like to know how you gained access to those components!"

  Well, you make a deal under the table with these werewolf-vampire-sorceror-psychopath types, then -Harvey thought ironically.

  Dhul went on: "You will receive the last payment as agreed."

  "Well, that's what I'm here about. We'd like to discus the possibility of delivering it for you. With an additional fee, of course. After all, we got the material to you in the first place, right?"

  A wave of savage suspicion and utter refusal roiled through the man's mind. Harvey sighed, though he wasn't surprised. When Dhul spoke, his voice was smooth.

  "I will consider your offer to transport it to the target for us."

  Dhul Fiqar was lying; the Texan had enough of the Power to tell that easily, from someone without protections or shields. Harvey smiled wryly; he'd expected the man to try to kill him to provide a cutout for anyone on the trail of that missing metal. But it would have been so convenient if he had agreed, of course. Always better to have someone hand the goods over to you rather than take them by brute force.

  "You really should have taken me up on that," he said regretfully. "Or at least been willin' to consider it. But I suppose if you was reasonable, you wouldn't be in this exact line of work."

  He ignored the trickles of sweat running down his face and flanks. He'd spent a lot of his life in hot, humid, smelly places, starting with Texas. The Brotherhood had been obligingly incurious as to how much plutonium he'd smuggled out of Seversk; the organization had always been decentralized. Part of the hell-metal had gone into the coffin bed of a postcorporeal Shadowspawn lord, which had been Harvey's official mission. The rest had come here, and there was more than enough for a critical mass.

  "Didn't I get you the finest ex-Russian bomb components? And after all, we got the stuff to you without a problem. That shows we can handle transit security."

  "I said I would consider it!" Dhul Fiqar snapped.

  It surely does alter your interactions with people when you can sense whether they're fibbing, Harvey thought. Could that be the reason I keep getting divorced?

  "Where are y'all keeping the bomb?" he asked with a guileless smile.

  "Far from here."

  Another lie, and the Arab's mind had jumped sideways at the word bomb, a feeling of anxiety reassurance.

  "And it is not yet assembled."

  Bingo, lie number three. I thought he'd work it this way and it turned out I was right. The bomb's ready and it's in this building. He wouldn't want it out of reach.

  "Okay, time to cut the comedy," Harvey said.

  His hand went under his embroidered, khaki-colored linen guayabera; he was wearing it three-quarters unbuttoned over a black T-shirt printed across the chest with very small white letters:

  Yes, I am carrying a concealed handgun. (Pursuant to CH 411.172, Texas Government Code.)

  The hand came out with a Colt Commander. 45, a customized model with a Caspian Arms titanium frame and an integral laser sight that came on when you took up the trigger slack. The little dot came to rest on Dhul Fiqar's chest, and the man froze with his hand halfway to an open drawer. There was nothing quite so intimidating as knowing exactly where the bullet would hit: in this case in the cluster of big blood vessels just above the heart.

  Harvey knew he wasn't nearly as fast as he'd been thirty years ago, but he was still pretty good, he had the priceless advantage of moving first, and the Arab wasn't a pistol expert anyway. If he had been he'd have carried at all times rather than leaving his gun uselessly in a desk, and Harvey would have made a different plan to begin with. A firearm where you couldn't reach it was about as useful as one on the cold side of the moon; you might not need it often, but when you did you needed it very badly.

  "Now kick back from the desk, friend," he said. "That's right, lean back in the chair. Relax, and we'll have us a talk."

  There might be some position that made it more difficult to move quickly than sitting back in a swivel chair with your feet off the ground, but he couldn't think of one offhand. Dhul Fiqar was sweating, but his eyes were steady and burning with hate. The fear in them was well under control, and Harvey could see him note how the gunman's back was to the open door. A shout would bring armed help.

  "You know, it's a relief sometimes to deal with folks who can't hex firearms," he said.

  The important thing now was to keep hitting his opponent faster than he could respond until his mental balance went completely to hell. He grinned.

  "Sure, yell for help if'n you want to; that alarm you pressed had a little malfunction. The more, the merrier."

  "You are mad," the plutonium buyer whispered, though he obeyed and kept his hands visible. "You will die for this! Die slowly."

  Then, louder: "Rashid! Jasim! Come quickly! Alert the others; the Jews and Crusaders are here!"

  There was a brief burst of fire from below.

  MP-5, Harvey thought. ' Bout half a clip.

  It was racking-loud inside, but through the thick coral-block walls a casual ear would miss it, or mistake it for a piece of machinery stripping a gear.

  Harvey shook his head with a tsk sound. If you could Wreak, even the little he and the other two could manage, you shouldn't need to shoot.

  "Guha, bring Jasim in, would you?" he said, speaking normally. "It ain't polite to keep friends apart."

  To the man in the chair: "I took the liberty of havin' some company of my own along on our little visit. Sorta forgot to mention it, on the off chance you'd be unreasonable."

  The pickup mike was in a little skin-colored patch on his throat. The bud in his ear was similarly tiny and inconspicuous. The Brotherhood might make its operatives fly coach, but they didn't stint on gear.<
br />
  A woman's voice with a singsong accent spoke: "Jasim's in bad shape, oh, yes, indeed. Will this much of him do?"

  He could hear her voice twice, through the radio and from the door behind him as she walked through and tossed something through the air. It landed on the desk with a wet, meaty thump.

  "It's very big," she went on.

  Which was what Jasim meant: big, or huge or strong. The man had probably taken the name because he was a six-four slab of muscled beef. Dhul Fiqar scrabbled backwards a little in his seat; the head of his follower was wrapped in a piece of burlap sacking, but that fell away to show the blank-eyed contorted face. A spray of blood whipped across his cheeks and mouth, and he scrabbled a hand at it in involuntary reflex. The metallic-coppery scent was suddenly heavy in the damp hot air, and flies buzzed downward.

  That's more Farmer's style, really, Harvey thought. But I suspect Guha is a bit prejudiced about these folks. You can take the girl out of Hindustan, but you cant take the Hindu out of the girl. Come to think about it, her family were Kashmiri Pandits back a ways, if I recall correctly.

  Theoretically once you knew about the Shadowspawn-Brotherhood war and the reality behind the false front of history, human tribes and nations and religions shouldn't matter anymore. The ancient enemy was more important, and besides that, you learned how they used human rivalries to keep the prey species down. In practice it didn't always work that way, not for humans, sometimes not even for Shadowspawn.

  And I can't fault a severed head for technique. It's classic. Now we have to keep our friend Dhul Fiqar psychologically off balance well and truly.

  "There was a machete," she said half apologetically. "I think he was using it to open coconuts and then tried to open me."

  The front of her cotton blouse was soaked and dripping with sticky red. It clung to her body so closely that the blouse was transparent, and he could see her navel and the outline of her sports bra.

  "It seemed bloody appropriate to use it on him," she finished.

  She chuckled, and Dhul Fiqar flinched a little. It probably didn't help that she was a woman.