The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “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, the Compassionate, this time victory will be ours!”

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

  “¿Perdóne 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 of piedra 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 t
o 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.

  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 can’t 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.

  “Rashid! Rashid! ” he shouted.

  Farmer came in with Rashid stumbling before him; Rashid was thin and dark and probably quite quick. He was bleeding freely too, from a pressure cut above the eyes that more than half blinded him with the stinging, sticky fluid. The sort of injury you got when you turned around at a sound behind you and got pistol-whipped in the same motion; his hands were secured with a one-way loop, a variety that could be yanked tight with a tag but couldn’t be removed without cutting it.

  “The others?” Harvey said.

  “Dead,” Farmer said. “A little Wreaking and they didn’t suspect a thing until too late.”

  “Evidence?”

  “Nothing that’ll show from the street until they start to smell. The truck they’ve got will do fine to get us to Lopez’s boat with the package. It looks like a piece of crap but the engine’s in good shape, the cargo compartment is well shielded, and they’ve got a knock-down lifting tackle inside.”

  “Looks like they were planning on using it for exactly what we’ll do. Secure friend Dhul Fiqar here. We wouldn’t want him to get reckless in his disappointment, and we do need a mite of information from him.”

  Guha had her knife in one hand, ten inches of slightly curved steel with a dimpled bone hilt. The man’s eyes tracked it as she approached, being careful to keep well out of Harvey’s line of fire and looking like an image of Kali with the front of her body splashed red. She produced a larger loop of the type around Rashid’s wrists and dropped it neatly over his shoulders, working it down to his elbows. When she jerked it tight it sent the swivel chair spinning; she stopped that with a flicking kick to the man’s ankle. Then she stepped close and put the point of the knife against the bristle of five-o’clock shadow under his chin, undid his belt with her other hand, made that into a loop and used it to strap his knees together. Duct tape finished the job.

  “Now,” Harvey said, kicking the other chair over, straddling it and leaning on the back. “At this point, you’ve probably realized we are not the CIA or the Mossad.”

  Dhul Fiqar jerked slightly; the American had switched into perfect, colloquial Arabic, the dialect an educated man from Damascus would have spoken.

  “You speak Arabic . . . but . . .”

  Harvey shook his head.

  “That trick of saying things like ‘you bastard son of a sow and an ape’ and calling my mother and sister nasty names to test whether I could understand you is played out, my friend. Where did you get it, an old Kamal el Sheikh film? I really had trouble not laughing out loud in Haiti.”

  He dropped into verse, rolling the throaty sounds:The happiness of children

  When embraced by parents is like

  The happiness of a thirsty man

  When drinking water

  And the happiness

  Of suckering an asshole like you.

  He switched back to English: “That last bit don’t scan ’cause it ain’t in the poem, but you get the idea.”

  Dhul Fiqar gathered himself a little. “You are not the Jews or the Americans?”

  “Course not. The Army of Northern Virginia would have been more formal. You know what I mean—guys in black body armor rappellin’ down on your roof in the night, drones, android surveillance chipmunks in the plumbing. The Mossad would just’ve killed you, if they didn’t retroactively kill your granddaddy before you were born. And neither would ever have let you near real plutonium. You know that.”

  That struck Dhul Fiqar hard enough to draw a grunt. “What do you want with me, then?”

  “We don’t care a bucket of warm piss about you. We just want a functionin’ bomb in the twenty-five-kiloton range. That’s what all this was about; we sold you that plutonium so’s you’d build it for us. Give me the control codes and your specs now, and I’ll even let you and your fella Rashid here live. We’ll just take the gear and head on out. Last offer. If Jasim there could talk, he’d advise you to say yes.”

  “Who are you?” Dhul Fiqar whispered.

  “I don’t have time or inclination to tell,” Harvey said.

  While he spoke he reached under his guayabara with his left hand; the X harness held two clips of ammunition under his right armpit, and a cylinder-shaped pouch the size of a very large cigar. He took the suppressor out of it and screwed it into the threaded recess around the muzzle of the Colt while he went on:

  “Let’s just say we’re the anti-djinn squad. Now, the information, please, or things will get unpleasant.”

  “Never! I am not afraid of death! I will pass the gates of Paradise while—”

  Harvey sighed. “Y’know, Dhul Fiqar, ol’ buddy, this ain’t to the death. I believe you when you say you’re not afraid to die. This is to the pain.”

  “You cannot make me talk.”

  “Oh, bullshit. There’s times when torture don’t work so good. Then again, as I suspect you know from experience, there’s times when it does; like, when all you need is specific information, quick. Particularly since I can tell when you’re lyin’, so you can’t fool me none. And seein’ as you were planning on blowing up London or New York or Tel Aviv or something of that order, I really don’t have much sympathy to spare for the way you’re about to suffer.”

  “What are you planning on using it for?” Dhul said a little wildly. “A fireworks display?”


  “Oh, we’ll use it for the greater good of humanity,” Harvey answered.

  Bit hard on the bystanders in Tbilisi, but omelettes and eggs and all, seein’ as the Shadowspawn are planning to kill off at least half the human race in the immediate future.

  Harvey nodded, and Farmer stepped away from Rashid. The Texan extended his arm, sighting in the old-fashioned single-armed grip. Then he fired one shot, letting the recoil ride up.

  Phut!

  Suppressors didn’t silence a gun. They did knock the sound down a fair way from the hearing-damage level of a shot in a confined space to something like a door slamming or a heavy book being whacked down on a tabletop. The big .45 hollow-point slug ripped the thin Arab’s kneecap away and he toppled like a cut tree, clutching at it. After a moment he began to shriek, high-pitched and astonishingly loud. Farmer stepped forward and put his foot on the man’s throat, pressing just enough to cut the sound down to bearable levels.

  Sweat was pouring off Dhul Fiqar’s face, but he remained silent except for the heavy sound of breath whistling in and out through flared nostrils.

  “Oh, hell,” Harvey said wearily; the adrenaline of danger was fading. “Jack, take over. Break him, and do it fast.”

  “Sure thing!”

  Farmer drew back his foot and kicked Rashid in the temple, hard. The body jerked a few times and went still; Harvey could feel the life fading out of the brain stem, entropy randomizing the signals for a moment until they faded away. Then Farmer stepped over to the desk and swung his light nylon backpack onto its surface and began to unpack it.

  Dhul Fiqar’s eyes were fixed on the hypodermics and ampules, the surgical instruments and the tools. Farmer whistled between his teeth as he worked, and then drew on a pair of thin-film gloves, stripped off a piece from the roll of duct tape and slapped it across the prisoner’s mouth. Guha sighed and went to stand by the window, looking outwards.

  “They’ve got a bathroom here,” she said. “All right if I go and shower?”

  “Good idea. Make it quick,” Harvey said. “I want you driving, and it’d be a nuisance coverin’ up the way you look.”