The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “And the smell.”

  Harvey kept his eyes on the man in the chair as she left—if he could order it, looking away would be cowardice—but he let a Mhabrogast phrase fall through his mind. A slight burring sensation flickered behind his forehead for an instant, and his consciousness of the other’s emotions faded.

  He hadn’t done it to isolate himself from Dhul Fiqar’s pain; it was Jack Farmer’s pleasure in what he was about to do that he really didn’t want inside his head.

  Give Jack his due, he don’t torture people for fun. He doesn’t even let himself do it in the line of duty unless a superior orders him to. But it does sorta make you queasy to share the jolt it gives him when he’s got an excuse to cut loose. Halfway between digusting and . . . tempting, which is worse.

  Farmer cut the arm of Dhul Fiqar’s shirt away and injected him twice in one of the swollen veins near his elbow, where he’d been straining against his bonds. The dark eyes went wide, and then the pupils expanded until the iris was a thread-thin rim around them.

  “Anytime you feel like talkin’, Dhul Fiqar, just nod vigorous-like,” Harvey said heavily.

  Farmer smiled as he raised the battery-powered electric drill and held it before the captive’s face, letting the motor whir with a touch on the trigger.

  The vehicle was a Chinese-made Foton Aumark with a lot of miles and hard use on it, the 2010 model, a cab-over-engine type with a van body and a five-ton capacity. Someone had worked over the Cummins diesel until it burbled happily, though, despite the heavy load. Dhul Fiqar’s suicide machinists had made something that would work, and at least it wasn’t leaking radiation, but it wasn’t exactly a suitcase bomb either.

  “So, we’ve got the bomb,” Guha said, driving carefully down the narrow street.

  She could pass for a mostly indio Mexican if you didn’t look too closely. Farmer was in the back with the long crate. This wasn’t a tourist area, and blond German-American Midwesterners were conspicuous by their absence around here. Harvey was slumped in the passenger seat himself with a billed cap drawn down over his face, for the same reason in its Scots-Irish Texan Hill Country incarnation.

  “The question is, my big boss, how do we get it to the target? Cannot you feel the threads of destiny on it? And this we will plant among thousands of Shadowspawn adepts? Perhaps we should carry it in on our shoulders, wearing red noses and big floppy shoes?”

  “The adepts’ll cancel one another out, a bit.”

  Guha snorted. She was right; the overlapping abilities with the Power would help, but not that much when the wielders were all threatened with the same onrushing death casting its shadow backwards through time.

  Harvey went on: “Adrian’s workin’ on that.”

  Though he don’t quite know what he’s working on hiding. Come to think of it, the world bein’ what it is, there’s a lot of people who don’t know the truth of what they’re dealing with. And God help the ones who stumble across the truth, or part of it.

  “Okay,” Cesar said. “Guess what? Something funny on the Brézé case.”

  “Tell me something funny. I could use it.”

  Salvador sipped at a cup of sour coffee and looked out the window at a struggling piñon pine with sap dripping from its limbs; they were having another beetle infestation, they happened every decade or two. Firewood would be cheap soon; he could take his pickup out on weekends and get a load for the labor of cutting it up and hauling it away.

  The prospect of an afternoon spent with a chain saw was a lot more fun than the case he was working on now.

  Man beats up woman, woman calls cops, woman presses charges, woman changes mind, couple sue cops to show how they’re together again. Tell me again why I’m not selling insurance.

  “The funny thing is the analysis on the DNA from the puke I found in the Dumpster behind Whole Foods,” Cesar said.

  “Ain’t a policeman’s life fun? Digging in Dumpsters for puke?”

  “Sí, jefe. Nice clean white-collar job, just what my mother had in mind for her prospective kid when she waded across the river to get me born on US soil. Anyway, there’s blood in the puke.”

  “I remember you telling me that. The attendant says it was Adrian Brézé’s puke, right?”

  “Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I’m pretty sure that Brézé paid him something to forget about it—he sweated pretty hard before he talked, and I had to do the kidnapping-and-arson dance. He saw the blood in it, too.”

  “So he’s got an ulcer. Even rich people get them. How does this help us?”

  Cesar scratched his mustache, and Salvador consciously stopped himself from doing likewise.

  “I’m not sure it does,” he said. “But it’s funny. Because the DNA from the puke is not the same as the DNA from the blood. In fact, the DNA from the blood is on the Red Cross list. One of their donors, a Shirley Whitworth, donated it at that place just off Rodeo and Camino Carlos Rey. It seems to have gone missing from their system. They clammed up about it pretty tight. We’ll have to work on that.”

  Salvador grunted. “Let’s get this straight. The puke is Brézé’s—”

  “Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there’s no Brézé in the DNA database.”

  “That’s not so surprising; they only started it a couple of years ago, and it just means he’s not a donor and hasn’t been arrested or gone to a hospital or whatever. But the blood is definitely some Red Cross donor’s?”

  “Sí. So, funny, eh?”

  “Funny as in fucking weird, not funny as in ha-ha. Because it had to be in his stomach, right?”

  They both laughed. “Good thing we know he comes out in daylight, eh?” Cesar said.

  “Yeah, and he doesn’t sparkle. I’d feel fucking silly chasing a perp who looked like a walking disco ball.. . . But he did drink it . . . maybe some sort of kink cult thing?”

  “So I’m not surprised he puked,” Cesar said, still chuckling. “It’d be like drinking salt water, you know? Blood is salt water, seawater. My mother used salt water and mustard to make me heave if I’d eaten myself into a stomachache.”

  Salvador could feel his brain starting to move, things connecting under the fatigue of a half dozen cases that were never going to go anywhere. Then his phone rang. When he tapped it off, he was frowning.

  “What’s the news, jefe?”

  “The boss wants to see us now.”

  The chief ’s office wasn’t much bigger than his; Santa Fe was a small town, still well under a hundred thousand people. The office was on a corner, second story, and had bigger windows. The chief also had three stars on the collar of his uniform; he still didn’t make nearly as much as, say, Giselle Demarcio. On the other hand, his money didn’t come from San Francisco and LA and New York, either.

  Cesar’s breath hissed a little, and Salvador felt his eyes narrow. There were two suits waiting for them as well as the chief. Literally suits, natty, one woman and one man, one black and one some variety of Anglo. Both definitely from out of state; he’d have put the black woman down as FBI if he had to guess, and the younger man as some sort of spook, but not a desk man. Ex-military of some type, but not in the least retired.

  She’s Fart, Barf and Itch. Him . . . the Waffen-CIA, but ex-Ranger, maybe?

  “Sit down,” the chief said.

  He was as local as Salvador and more so than Cesar, and might have been Salvador’s older cousin—in fact, they were distantly related. Right now he was giving a good impression of someone who’d never met either of the detectives, his face like something carved out of wood on Canyon Row.

  The male suit spoke. “You’re working on a case involving the Brézé family.”

  “Yes,” Salvador said. “Chief, who are these people?”

  “You don’t need to know,” the woman said neutrally; somehow she gave the impression of wearing sunglasses without actually doing it. More softly: “You don’t want to know.”

  “They’re Ho
meland Security,” the chief said.

  “Homeland Security is interested in weird love triangles?” Salvador said skeptically. “Besides, Homeland Security is like person, it’s sort of generic. You people FBI, Company, NSA, what?”

  “You don’t need to know. You do need to know we’re handling this,” the man said.

  Wait a minute, Salvador thought. He’s scared. Controlling it well, he’s a complete hard case if I ever saw one, and hell, I’ve been one. But he’s scared.

  Which made him start thinking a little uncomfortably that maybe he should be scared. The man was someone he might have been himself, if things had gone a little differently with that IED.

  “Handling it how?” Salvador said, meeting his pale stare.

  “We’ve got some of our best people on it.”

  “Who, exactly.”

  “Our best people.”

  “Oh, Christ—” he began.

  “Eric, drop it. Right now,” the chief said.

  He’s scared too.

  “Hey, Chief, no problem,” Cesar cut in. “It’s not like we haven’t got enough work. Right, drop it, national security business, need to know, eh?”

  The two suits looked at each other and then Salvador. He nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Curiosity killed the cat, that right? And unless I want to go, ‘Meow-oh-shit,’ as my last words . . .”

  “You have no idea,” the woman said, almost whispering and looking past him. “None at all.”

  Then she turned her eyes on him. “Let’s be clear. There was no fire. There is no such thing as a Brézé family. You never heard of them. You particularly haven’t made any records or files of anything concerning them. That will be checked.”

  “Sure.” He grinned. “But check what? About who?”

  Salvador waited until they were back in the office before he began to swear: English, Spanish and some Pashto, which was about the best reviling language he’d ever come across, though some people he’d known said Arabic was even better.

  “Let’s get some lunch,” Cesar said, winking.

  Yeah, Salvador thought. Got to remember anything can be a bug these days.

  “Sure, I could use a burrito.”

  They shed their phones; when they were outside Cesar went on: “How soon you want to start poking around, jefe?”

  Salvador let out his breath and rolled his head, kneading at the back of his head with one spadelike hand. The muscles there felt like a mass of woven iron rods under his hand, and he pressed on the silver chain that held the crucifix around his neck.

  “It’s fucking Euro-trash terrorists now, eh?” he said.

  “Yeah. Euro-trash vampire terrorists. Maybe Osama bit them?” Cesar said, still smiling.

  “Or vice versa.”

  “What sort of shit is coming down?” Cesar said, more seriously.

  “Our chances of getting that from those people . . .”

  “. . . are nada.”

  “Somewhere between nada and fucking zip.”

  Cesar looked up into the cloudless blue sky. “Maybe these Brézés are just so rich they can shit-can anything they don’t like, pull strings, some politician leans on the FBI and the Company? Call me cynical.. . .”

  “Nah,” Salvador shook his head. “You can’t get that just with money. Not with those people, the spooks. They know they’re going to be there when any given bought-and-paid-for politician is long gone. You need heavy political leverage. Whoever they were, they were feds, and not your average cubicle slave either. They’re not going to tell any of us square-state boondockers shit. The chief didn’t know any more than we did, he was just taking orders.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ve known him a long time. We’re related, cousins.”

  “You old-timers here are all related,” Cesar said. “It’s not fucking fair.”

  “You people who just got off the bus don’t understand the strength of our family feelings. Can I help it if we’re descended from conquistadores?”

  “Fast conquistadores and slow india girls. Hell, my family goes right back to Cortés too.”

  “It does?”

  “Sure. One of my great-many-times-grandmothers was squatting in the dirt grilling a guinea pig when he rode by on his horse.”

  Salvador’s grin was brief; his eyes made a to-business flick.

  “So . . .” Cesar said. He leaned back against a wall. “How long do you want to let it cool before we start poking in violation of our solemn promise?”

  “Couple of months,” Salvador said. “First thing, get all the data on an SD card and make some copies and let me have one. Scrub your notebook and anything you’ve got at the office. None of this ever goes on anything connected to anything else.”

  Cesar grinned. “I like the way you think, jefe.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ellen kept her breathing deep and steady against the fear that made her want to pant as she walked the streets of Paris behind the professor.

  The professor who’s about to be ambushed by werewhatsits and hired killers. What a way to See Europe and Die Screaming. The other parts of this honeymoon trip were a lot more fun.

  She pulled the raw, chilly air deep into her lungs, freighted with traffic and cooking and old stone. A little fog lay on the river, with the running lights of boats shining through it like a blurred Impressionist cityscape, and wisps of it were pooling along the cobblestones. Beads of moisture starred her eyelashes, and a lock of hair came out from under her floppy hat and stuck to her brow.

  “He’s crossing the river on the Pont Marie and heading for the Saint-Paul metro station,” Adrian said. “Not long now.”

  They followed. Already Ellen had a sense that she was in a bubble of nonspace, and it grew stronger with the thronging life of Le Marais moving around; it was that kind of neighborhood. Ellen kept her head slightly down, avoided eye contact, neither hurried nor dawdled.

  She spotted the professor’s ponytail as he walked along, deep in thought, his hands in his jacket pockets and his head down. The street life was busy this early in the evening, dense traffic, thronged sidewalks, light from lamps on curled wrought-iron brackets reaching out from the walls. Nothing was high-rise—older stone-and-stucco buildings for the most part, in pale colors. But it felt densely urban in a way that even far more built-up American cities didn’t, as if you could feel the layers of time here beside the Seine, all the way back to the Lutetia Parisiorum of the Gauls and Romans. The latest included a restaurant that had a menorah in the window and advertised, BLINIS, SAUMON, ZAKOUSHKIS ET VODKAS, and some remarkably well-stocked gay-themed fetish stores.

  She eeled through it all, keeping her target in sight without being obvious about it.

  God, it’s like I’ve done this a thousand times before! she thought, unconsciously sliding away from Adrian so that they wouldn’t be together to jog the target’s memory if he turned around, pausing now and then to pretend to look in a window. And I have, in Adrian’s head.

  Tailing, detecting a tail, losing one, in cities that had included Paris and a dozen others, or the equivalent skills in forest or desert . . . that and a hundred other things, things more arcane and terrible. There in her mind, ready to surface when she needed them.

  And I’m not even very frightened. I was frightened at first in there, because it was all so real, but I could keep it under control because I knew consciously that it wasn’t. Now when it’s really real I’m just . . . just taut and ready. And a bit apprehensive in a sort of reasoned way, as if this were something I was used to doing. I’ve even beat Adrian at it a couple of times, the non-Power parts, at least.

  “This is weird,” she murmured almost inaudibly. “Hey, isn’t it a cliché that marriage doesn’t change you? Well, it has changed me, already!”

  Adrian had turned. Now he lounged past her, heading in the other direction, then leaned against a wall like any man out for a stroll and eyeing a pretty girl.

  �
��You are doing splendidly. They will act soon,” he said quietly as she passed. “And if we had not married, I would still be sitting on a mountaintop brooding.”

  Then he ducked behind an elderly Jewish couple, came back through a gaggle of Chinese teenagers chatting in French—there were a lot of East Asian immigrants around here—and strolled slightly behind her. His looks made it easier for him to blend in; her blond height and figure always attracted attention.

  Duquense was speeding up when he suddenly turned left into a narrow alleyway.

  Wreaking, Ellen thought with a shiver. There was a possibility that he’d do that, no matter how remote. So a little push with the Power, and he does do it, willy-nilly.

  Ellen walked past it, stopped and stooped as if to fiddle with her shoe an arm’s length along the next building. Adrian came up behind her and turned directly into the narrow curving backstreet. She reached under her jacket and laid her hand on the butt of the little Five-seveN automatic, drew it, then turned and followed him in, holding it down near her thigh. The heavy silver amulet around her neck was tingling, seeming to itch at her skin.

  A tableau was frozen for an instant as she and Adrian entered the alley. Three men and Duquesne. The academic’s hand was raised in futile protest as one of the men drew a long knife from under his jacket and the other held him by an elbow and the back of his neck. Adrian faced the third, farther in, who’d been standing with his hands resting on the knob of his walking stick as he surveyed the murder-in-progress.

  Shoot the one with the knife, her training told her. He’s the immediate danger. Don’t assume he’ll go down with the first round.

  Ellen blinked at the calmly ruthless thought, even as her hands came smoothly up with the gun ready. The two men threatening Duquesne were unremarkable, except that they both looked very dangerous, moving like lethal dancers—one squat and a little darker than Adrian, the other with the drawn blade taller, with oddly silver hair.

  Even the single glance aside as she brought the weapon up and aimed showed that the man her husband faced was different—he could have been Adrian himself, aged a decade, and dressed in an opera cape, tails, white tie, gloves, gold-headed ebony cane, shining topper and gleaming shoes with spats, a white flower in his buttonhole . . . the complete outfit of a boulevardier from the earlier part of La Belle Epoque.