The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  Inside the apartment proved to be a tasteful, quiet place with open spaces and sparse furnishings. The windows held reinforced glass and, by the slight distortion, it looked like it could withstand helicopter assault. They also provided a stunning view of Central Park, which made this an expensive place among expensive places.

  Harv walked me through the kitchen towards a cozy wood paneled office with a roaring fire. Whoever owned the place liked to cook or had servants who knew how to. They had installed several Viking broiling ovens and a full ten burner gas range, then topped it off with a wall of Wolf baking ovens and two oversize fridges and an upright freezer. The whole place was clear of appliances and tchotchkes, only commercial grade ceramic pans and a few cutting boards decorated the space.

  Harv tugged on my elbow. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped to look. “Nice, huh?”

  “Very. Someone knows how to cook.” That made him smile. I knew Bernard couldn’t cook, which left Pina. From the locale and security, the owner had to be a high value asset with a lot of money. A trusted ally of The Syndicate then, since I doubted Pina would spend time in a kitchen.

  Harv waved me into a room, then departed for the security door. She sat waiting for me in the study, her back straight, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a leather bound book. As I approached, the room revealed itself to me. The walls were covered in leather books, almost all of them Russian, though there was a smattering of Ukrainian, French, and English titles. The fireplace was fine stone and nearly smokeless, which spoke of careful design. Near it, a great hunter of a cat lay on some kind of carpeted furniture. His sleepy green eyes took me in as I watched him and he gave me a tilt of the head and licked a paw lazily. He had a half black tongue. At first he appeared to be black all over, but his paws and belly, a few small points on his body, turned out to be white. He looked as if he were wearing a fur tuxedo. I gave him a bow. “Hullo, Hippo.”

  Hippo eyed me contemptuously, flicked an ear, then rolled on his back, yawned, and went to sleep, letting the fire warm his white belly. Pina put down the book and rose, allowing me to take her hand. I kissed it softly in the European style. She cocked an eyebrow: “Hippo?”

  “Seemed the right name for a big cat.” I cast an eye around the fortress and gave her a faint smile. “Nice place. Yours?”

  She sat and welcomed me to sit on what turned out to be a comfortable leather love seat. “Say instead that we acquired it recently, from someone who backed the wrong mafiya.”

  That tracked. Hans had to have ensnared financial backers to get the Russians those nukes and sarin. A few oligarchs would have to fall for the sin of opposing Bernard. One perhaps had cut a deal. “He gave up the cat too?”

  She smiled genuinely, a thin sharp slash of lips that made her strangely more beautiful. “He’s a rescue.”

  “Made himself at home well enough. Good for him. So why am I here?”

  She nodded, as if checking off a list. “Right, to business. Bernard wished to send his thanks.”

  Neither Pina nor Bernard would be in the same city for a while, perhaps for years. Her sending his thanks was warranted and appropriate. Still, it seemed odd that I’d have been brought here for something so simple. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Perhaps I can answer your question with a question. What does the Concierge do?”

  “You mean as opposed to the General Manager or Mystery Shopper or the Chef, for that matter?”

  She nodded and her smile widened. “Precisely that. It’s a pleasure to deal with someone who doesn’t need to be fed hints.” From Pina that might be a literal compliment but it sounded somehow backhanded.

  What did the Concierge do exactly? Solve problems. Manage unprecedented situations. Finesse things. But then so did the other functions of the Hotel. “Unlike the other leaders, the Concierge’s sole task is problem solving.”

  “That’s not much of an answer.”

  “But it is the right one, Pina. We both know that.” Unlimited power, unlimited freedom, and one and only mandate: solve the problems of The Syndicate.

  In response, she laid some dossiers on a small tasteful coffee table and turned them so I could read them: Nadya Karkova. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Sasha O’Brian. Pierre French.

  I opened Nadya’s and skimmed. The Syndicate had made her the new Mystery Shopper with her daughters in tow as subordinates. George had been opted in as a freelance operative and several other contacts incorporated into the new black operations capability. The planning looked thorough and very solid. It had Harv written all over it.

  “Take it Harv liked her?”

  Pina nodded. “She did a good number on him with those grenades.” Excellent, I was glad she had gotten credit for the trick.

  Darcy surprised me. She turned out to be someone entirely different than I had guessed. The allegedly deceased Culper Ring profiler, now missing three years. Darcy had a mop of black hair, adorable freckles, and a button nose. The accident had left her in leg braces but she was in excellent shape, if the report was to be believed. I read it twice and felt a surge of disappointment.

  Pina eyed me carefully. “Not who you thought?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  She smiled at me and it felt like a razor blade across my skin. “Let’s not be naïve here. You have some huge gaps, a major blind side.”

  “Because I made the wrong guess?” There was heat in my cheeks. Pina critiquing me raised my hackles. Gods, I hated to admit it but how I respected this woman. She had gotten under my skin.

  “Because you made it for the wrong reason. You let emotion guide you. You hoped there would be another renegade, another like you. You made a lot of risky, frankly idiotic, decisions during the war because you were lonely and romantic.” The last word sounded as if it were a mortal sin.

  “Zeus rebelled.”

  “Nonsense. Don’t be a foolish little boy. Zeus loved that old man. What they had was a difference of opinion, a family squabble over technique. Seeing his mother murdered in front of him apparently drove the man into a killing frenzy. He’s still under sedation.”

  That sent a jolt of anger, fear, and then deep satisfaction down my spine. So, I had hurt him after all. Taken what he loved while he watched. “She wasn’t really his mother.”

  “Spetz. She wasn’t your mother. Don’t confuse things.” I sat silently, considering what she had said. I could still remember my mother, a delicate woman confined to a cell. She had been kind and soft. Whenever she could, she had told me over and over that she loved me. Then they shot her in front of me at age seven.

  “So there has never been another like me?”

  Pina nodded. “You are singularly unique. Your file offers us almost no explanation. Other than you and a few others were mongrels by genetic comparison and that you have some peculiar mutations. Nothing that would explain your personality, though. Only your capabilities.”

  “Darcy going to stay with The Syndicate?” As if she had much choice.

  “She said that depended upon you. She’ll only work for you.”

  That took me by surprise. “Where is she now?” I had people I needed to watch over again, responsibilities to burden my shoulders. It felt odd, like having a second tongue.

  Pina made a negligent wave and sipped her coffee. “Your program has started acting funny, so I have her trying to understand what happened.”

  A thrill took me. “Funny how?”

  “She’s giving it a proper Turing test. The war may have inadvertently triggered an event. That’s what she called it, An Event.”

  The fragmenting of the AI cells might have forced the independent parts to seek to expand their neural model and redesign themselves. Jeeves had that function. Morris Moses would have perhaps had even more impetus. “When you reintegrated the system, the answers it gave were what?”

  “Evasive.”

  Gods, we might have created a genuine AI and the damned thing had self-replicating independent distributed systems. It was nigh unkill
able. Correction, I had created an AI and Darcy had unleashed it. “That sounds less than promising.”

  Pina chuckled. “Maybe not. Murray, that’s what you call it, also insisted on working for you.”

  “So I’m popular.”

  “This week, you are.” Sasha’s file had fewer surprises. Darcy had been her liaison to The Syndicate via Oslo, where she had been known as Zero Cool.

  “Darcy really went with Zero Cool?’

  This puzzled the Concierge. “It’s a code name.”

  “It’s an inside joke too. Okay, so Sasha plays well with your team.”

  “Yes, and thanks to you, Aaron has extended quite an olive branch to Bernard. In return, we’re vetting the Federal Express and helping them make it more secure.” The file explained the term: Fed Ex was the courier and broker service I had imputed to the Ring. It was more extensive and less organized than suspected. The Syndicate could sort that out for them. It’s what they did.

  Pierre’s file was sparse. I skimmed it until I came to his assignment. Instead of Commis, they had listed him with the title of Patissier. That was a new role within The Syndicate. He worked for an entity called The Baker. Also new. And in a fit of literalism, they listed the Baker’s residence as Baker Street. I looked up to see Pina watching me intently.

  “He thinks he works for Karina.”

  She rose and waved me to follow. “Right now, today, he does. But we’d like to reassign him.” She led me into a small lobby sized chamber that held a few doors. The floor had some kind of geometric design in wood panels. In the corner was some exercise equipment and a few medicine balls, mats, and a couple of kendo shinai next to a suit of padded armor. The owner had liked to work out and had a thing for combat sports. Noted. I stopped to examine the shinai, being a fan of kendo myself. Highest quality. So he had been rich, definitely an oligarch.

  One by one she walked me through the rooms. A spacious bedroom that had a dresser, old fashioned armoire (which turned out to have small arms, a television console, and several bug out kits in it) and a bed in simple French style, as well as another cat tower holding a little bed with a soft blanket. Furniture was spare and well built, the whole of the palace done in good taste, nay, stunning taste. Beside the bed I saw a night table that had built in displays for the security station. The walk in closet held men’s clothing that looked nothing like a typical Russian oligarch’s.

  After that, a spare bedroom done in proper understatement; a working office with more displays and a laptop of pure black that looked custom built. Two bathrooms of spacious design, one with a monster tub that would fit even me. A small closet that held a litter box of wood, some cat care supplies, and a few boxes of baking soda. Another little vestibule with a third cat bed and some food dishes. A music room with a grand piano and a near perfect view of the New York skyline. Back to the kitchen, which had a separate walk-in pantry stocked with flours and cereals, a row of dried herbs hanging by strings, some legumes, and stock items in glass jars. Someone had hung some onions, shallots, and garlic. A smaller room offset held several dozen bottles of wine encased by some chrome monstrosity with gauges and dials reminiscent of a nuclear reactor.

  The apartment lacked a balcony and none of the windows opened to the outside. Subtle inclusions around the space delivered data feeds, small drawers for tools and weapons, a couple of discreet chairs tucked away for security personnel within the domicile. They had transformed the place into a true fortress. In the entry way, someone had sent a large spread of flowers in a riot of reds, golds, and whites. The cat had apparently liked them enough to chew on a few. Petals littered the floor where the hunter had spit them out.

  During the tour, neither of us had spoken. Pina returned us to the library and sat down again, pensively tapping the book. I read the Cyrillic on the spine. “The Winter Queen?”

  She nodded and motioned to the wall. “All of Akunin’s works are here.” I walked the wall and read the names. Akunin, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Strugatsky, Turgenev. Another wall had Russian classics, then French and English authors. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dumas, the works. A small section had leather bound volumes of recent writers including Hobbes, Conan Doyle, and Heinlein. Some in Russian, some in English, a few in both.

  “I don’t know his work.”

  “You’ll like Fandorin.”

  The books puzzled me. Most operatives weren’t readers, and those that were tended to not to need massive security and gun ports. No oligarch had this level of taste and certainly not the almost aristocratic restraint that had elevated what already happened to be an ultra-posh locale. Nor owned a misbehaved tuxedo cat from a rescue shelter. “Why would I like Van Doring?”

  “Fandorin. Erast. He’s unkillable, incorruptible, and lacking in ambition. Hmm?” That did sound familiar.

  “Roger said that, not you.”

  “That version of Roger didn’t dare speak when I drank water.” She shrugged and gave me a pleasant non-smile. “I am saying it now. You are rare even in our world. And now that we have time to chat without threat of exsanguination, perhaps we should finish our business together, neh?” The last belied her efforts to speak unaccented English. I’d remind myself of that later. When she was relaxed, Pina occasionally slipped back into some native language. Neh could be old Greek, Yiddish, or Hebrew, Portuguese.

  “This is about Wickham.” I meant the whole conversation but she knew that.

  “More than that, but he’s a good place to start.” She sipped the coffee and looked at the mug. “Hnn. Grounds. I need another cup. Join me?”

  We made our way to the kitchen which, like every part of the home, worked. I instinctively found the coffee maker. There was a machine, discretely tucked into a wall of cabinets that lurked inside the pantry. The entire wall had been demolished and rebuilt as covered storage space. The owner had every necessary appliance from bronze die pasta presses to ice cream and coffee makers to a bevy of blenders and food processors. In one section, I found a set of French presses of various sizes, on three shelves marked Café, Thé, Tissane. I selected a large coffee press, discovered the owner had four kinds of ground coffee in small sealed glass jars, and combined three of them, some raw sugar and a pinch of pink salt, then set a kettle to boil.

  Pina watched me intently. I went to fridges and found the dairy section in one. They had milk and cream, both from some farm that claimed their cows were “spoiled bitches.” I dabbed a finger and found the quality high. Highest. Under the stove were some small copper pots. I heated the milk with a touch of cream and small pinch of vanilla sugar and the tiniest pinch of cardamom, both from easily found racks in the pantry. Ten minutes later, she had not spoken and I had taken the time to cool down, relax into the process of making things.

  By then, I’d toasted Syrian bread over open flame and paired it with clotted cream, goat cheese and lingonberry jam, as well as a small assortment of chocolate, fresh figs that I stuffed with some almond butter and cracker crumbs (it creates a slightly crunchy texture) and to counter the sweets, radishes with the yellowest butter I’d seen since the Organic dairy farm in Amherst closed its doors four years earlier. I plated them all, pulled two thin white service plates and a pair of sleek mugs, then delivered to Pina the coffee and light snack in the dining room I’d discovered hidden from the main room. Its recessed door maintained the integrity of the kitchen and also would allow a nearly perfect silent ambush for the resident.

  The dining room was a slightly more impressive place than other rooms, competing with the entry foyer for subtle exertion of wealth. The wood floors were covered with a Persian rug that nearly touched all four walls. As it happened, this particular rug was mildly famous, having prompted a bidding war several years earlier at Sotheby’s. The buyer had dropped seven million Euros for it. On the walls hung genuine Litvinenko prints. The only furnishings were an enormous wooden table with ten chairs and a massive buffet that looked suspiciously like it had been looted from Versailles. Inside it were elegant china and silver
service. The lighting had been set on small tracks with tiny blue glass sconces that highlighted the colors in the china and rug.

  We sat and she watched me still. I shrugged as I sipped the coffee. It was the best I’d had in years. Of course it would be. The lucky bastard who lived here could afford nothing but the best and had access through the Syndicate to things even I coveted. Pina raised an eyebrow as she sipped, then she simply relaxed and sighed.

  “The coffee is excellent.” I gave her my silent thanks and tested my food. I knew it would be good, I’d been sampling the pieces as I went. Combined, it turned out better than good. Watching her eat and continue to relax, bringing forth her queer terrifying smile, I learned something new about Pina. She cared about food and she enjoyed it greatly. Not enough, I suspected, to qualify as a weakness, but as close as people like us generally got. We therefore shared a mania.

  “Wickham.”

  She wiped away a crumb and her face dropped all pretense of humanity. “Darcy proved indiscrete with you, perhaps dangerously so.”

  She meant lethally. Harv hadn’t killed me when he had the chance and the Ring would have been kind enough to put down Pina’s bad dog for them, so she was posturing.

  I held up a hand and gave her a look of mild reproof. “Pina, quit stalling. You’d have killed me if you were going to. You plan so many moves ahead and, frankly, you’re so much smarter than most people, you forget that some of us can keep up with you.”

  She looked at me with incredulity perhaps. With those empty eyes she could just as easily have been thinking about her lunch order. “You’re really not afraid of me, are you?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “I hold your life in my hands. I snap my fingers and you’re dead. Doesn’t that bother you?”