Shadows of Annihilation

by S. M. Stirling

  She judged that the young Mexican widow would best come ripe, as the term of the trade put it, if she was left to come to it mostly on her own, with an occasional gentle, subtle assist. You didn’t want to interrupt someone who was about to decide to do what you wanted them to do, just as the most successful seductions culminated in someone trying to kiss you first, convinced that the whole thing was their idea.

  “You . . .” Luisa said. “You ladies were in Jerez the day before yesterday, weren’t you?”

  They both nodded.

  “Have . . . have you heard the rumor that there was a bomb there?”

  “Yes, we heard an explosion yesterday,” Ciara said, which was true if a bit misleading, and sighed. “Such a pity that stubborn men make so many others suffer for their folly.”

  Good craft, sweetie, Luz thought.

  “I do not love the United States,” Luisa blurted, then relaxed as neither of them looked angry. “I wish Mexico could be independent!”

  Ciara patted her hand. Luz rested her elbows on the table, set her chin on her linked fingers, and nodded encouragingly, helped by the fact that it didn’t necessarily mean agreement here.

  “I would too, in your position,” Ciara said.

  Luz added silently to herself:

  But I’d also expect it to actually happen when frogs grow hair. Also, Uncle Teddy would never have invaded Mexico if Mexicans hadn’t messed up so spectacularly right next door. I’ll let Ciara carry this, though—Luisa seems to like her more, or at least fear her less, which is perceptive.

  The Mexican woman looked down at her plate, then stabbed her fork into her cake and ate a mouthful, obviously without tasting it.

  “My husband fought for Madero,” Luisa said, which Luz had looked up in the local Chamber files.

  He’d also managed to die doing it, with what sounded like the blundering heroic idiocy of a brave clueless amateur, leaving his new bride alone in the world. That wasn’t untypical: Madero had been intelligent but eccentric, a spiritualist, a theosophist . . . and an idealist naïve enough to actually believe Porfirio Díaz when the old tyrant said he wanted a free election and would be ready to step down if he lost.

  A lot of Madero’s better-educated followers had been about as gullible, their ideas of politics a matter of books and dreams. There had been plenty of politics in Mexico during Díaz’s reign, but most of it had taken place in smallish cliques, secret camarillas operating behind closed doors, leaving a lot of the literate class below the level of great wealth without any direct experience. For that matter Madero’s family had been of great wealth, and even they hadn’t known how things were really managed, having been on the outs with the pro-Díaz clique that governed, or feasted on, their home state of Coahuila.

  “He just wanted a free government! Everyone was sick of Don Porfirio staying on and on, and the ones around him taking everything and selling everything and spies behind every mesquite bush . . . I was happy too when Don Porfirio resigned and left for France, it was like a fiesta and everyone acting as if they were relatives . . . but then Huerta killed Madero . . . and . . . and men went mad! Killing each other . . . we could see the smoke of the burning haciendas on the horizon . . . robbing gri . . . Americanos, killing them . . . anyone should have known what a man like Presidente Teodorito would do then! He said so as he campaigned in the U.S. elections, said so for all to hear! And the stupid revolucionarios, and the crazy puffed-up northerners who followed Villa, they who thought they were such heroes, they did worse; after everyone knew he would be president in el Norte, they crossed the border and planted bombs and shot people there and shouted mad dreams about taking back Texas and California. We couldn’t beat the Americanos in the time of our grandfathers—”

  She meant what Americans called the Mexican War of 1846–1848 and Mexicans referred to as La Primera Intervención Americana en México. Which was when a million and a half square miles from the Gulf to the Pacific had abruptly gone from being northern Mexico to constituting the southern and western United States, including Luz’s own birthplace. Though in fact at the time most of that had been Indian country, some of it inhabited by tribes who’d never even heard of Mexico, or the United States either.

  Though the Apache had, Luz thought. They used to raid nearly as far south as this in those days, looting and killing and burning.

  “—how did those idiots think we were going to beat them . . . you . . . today, now, when the Estados Unidos are ten times as strong, one of the great powers of the earth, and we are still poor and weak? And while we were fighting each other, too? Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

  The table jerked and plates and cutlery rattled as Luisa thumped her fists down on it.

  “I am no soldier, no general, but if I could see that, why couldn’t they?” she added plaintively.

  Ciara sighed and patted her hand again.

  Because you’re not a fool mesmerized by your own heroic reflection in the mirror of your mind, Luz thought. Self-inflicted stupidity, thy name is Vanity.

  Ciara tapped a finger on her own temple: “Men don’t always think with this, not when their blood is up,” she said, and sighed again, possibly thinking of her own brother.

  Women didn’t always either, but their characteristic follies only partially overlapped with those of males. And their circumstances in most places made them a little less prone than men to delusions of omnipotence, always a mistake in a world where even the genuinely powerful were often puppets of forces beyond their control, their choices made for them by necessity and likely as not to be undone or twisted into something unforeseeable by the giggling idiot hand of chance.

  Luisa Muñoz’s life wouldn’t have left her in any doubt she was someone history happened to, like anvils falling on her head, not someone who made it. A mouse that knew it was a mouse had a much better chance of scurrying through the walls unseen than one under the delusion it was an elephant and hence given to walking around in full view of God and the household cat.

  And these days even elephants need game preserves and wardens to protect them from men with guns after their ivory or meat or just their heads as souvenirs—mice survive under our feet no matter how much effort and ingenuity we put into wiping them out, Luz thought.

  She tapped Ciara’s foot under the table and flicked her eyes at Luisa in a signal to go on.

  “When men start daring each other and showing off for each other, waving their fists and baring their teeth . . .” Ciara said.

  “And snorting and pawing the earth like a bull in the corrida . . .” Luz added, lest her silence seem ominous.

  “Peacocks! Roosters!” Luisa said, hitting the table again. “They decide on war, and women and children weep and bleed for it, go hungry and cold, see their homes and the work of their hands burn! We are left to nurse the cripples and bury the dead!”

  Luisa took a deep breath. “You Americanos here have not dropped that terrible gas on us, or murdered millions of the unarmed, or driven us out of our country, or taken our houses and lands and forbidden our language and customs or burned the records of our history or changed the names of everything, and the Germans have done all these things in Europe. I have spoken much with Madame Teffeau—she only escaped by a miracle. She is strong, she does not weep, but I have wept for her.”

  “And in the world as it is, the choice is not between us Americans and nobody, it is between America and Germany,” Ciara said. “It’s a hard world for small nations.”

  Unless you’ve got the British or Japanese on your doorstep, Luz thought. They’re better than the Germans, but only marginally. This isn’t a time that’s easy on the weak . . . but then, what time is? Kings and empires come and go, but Darwin rules forever.

  “Yes!” Luisa said. “The Americanos have not tampered with our religion—”

  She crossed herself, and Luz and Ciara echoed the gesture.

 
“—and their soldiers have not treated our women with disrespect. There is work and food for the common people. All these things could be worse, much worse. They have been worse, and we did it to ourselves—I remember the civil war.”

  Bless you, Uncle Teddy and General Wood and Plenipotentiary Lodge, Luz thought. Sometimes virtue is its own reward, and in a quite tangible sense. At the most surprising moments, sometimes, and that makes a hardworking spy’s life easier.

  “And now . . . los malditos alemanes, the accursed Germans, bringing that awful stuff to Mexico! Bringing it here. With fools of our own to help!”

  In point of fact they weren’t using V-gas here, but when people heard the word German now, horror-gas popped up spontaneously . . . which was poetic justice of a sort, and something of which Luz intended to take full advantage just as unfairly as she could. Luisa breathed out through her nose and ate another forkful of her cake, giving it a surprised look, as if she’d just realized she wasn’t eating clumps of sawdust. Luz waited again, and indicated Ciara should do the same with a flick of the eyes.

  Let the information roll downhill . . .

  This was someone talking themselves into talking . . . and about to go from the general to the particular.

  “If . . .”

  Luisa’s dark eyes glanced aside.

  “If someone who . . .” she began, then paused and began again: “If someone who knew something . . . not because they were part of it, not really part of it, but who had kept silent out of fear . . . were to . . . come forward . . . would such a one, such a man, be forgiven?”

  Luz ate a piece of her tarte, feeling a hot flush of hunter’s delight at finally scenting a break, a bit like opening presents at Christmastime and a bit like carnal congress. At this point the safest thing to do would be to say something noncommittal, then have Julie grab Luisa and sweat what she knew out of her, which wouldn’t be hard. Ciara sent her a combination of an appealing look and an Up to you shrug, and Luz replied with a very slight nod: Make the promise.

  Because on the other hand, I was never the safety-first sort of person, and that’s worked out fairly well.

  “Yes. Provided he did speak . . . or that someone did on his behalf . . . I think I can promise that such a one would be pardoned. And protected,” Ciara said.

  There goes the last shred of our cover, Luz thought, as she watched Luisa blinking and working through the implications. No, she’s no sort of fool. Good-bye, cover, you lasted a whole long week from one Friday to the next . . .

  “My brother-in-law . . . I live with him and my sister . . . is a bookkeeper who works for Don Raul de Moncada. He travels between the de Moncada estates, and reviews the accounts kept by their mayordomos, you see? And checks that they are correct, and inspects things . . . livestock, crops, granaries . . . to make sure they correspond to the numbers in the books.”

  Ciara nodded encouragingly to keep the flow coming. Luz wasn’t surprised; that was the usual sort of precaution that wealthy landowners took here, necessary in a country where stocks and banks were recent innovations and not fully trusted or for that matter very trustworthy. The problem with delegating management here was that you were inviting your hired managers to cheat you; accounting was one way around that, as were patron-client relationships and using your network of extended kin by blood and marriage.

  Family ties were deeply respected here, and to further degrees of kinship than most Americans kept track of, and so were the bonds of patronage and clienthood and compadrazgo; but commercial morals made people like Fred Foreman of Fred Foreman’s Fords . . . or even merciless predators like Carnegie and Frick and John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil . . . look like paragons of selfless scruple.

  “He is a relation of theirs—a distant one, to be sure.”

  Which might mean something a century or more removed, in central Mexico. The women of the upper classes here had always married young and had big families—not even counting the innumerable by-blows and bastards, since rich men routinely kept one or more unofficial households as well in the course of their lives—and the younger sons of younger sons at the fringes filtered downward generation after generation into less and less aristocratic layers. It was a major reason why Mexico was as Spanish in blood and custom as it was, despite the inflow from Spain being a long steady trickle rather than the obliterating flood the English preferred.

  “Efraín is not a bad man,” Luisa said earnestly. “He is kind and cares for his family and cares for the sacraments. He took me in when my husband was killed for my sister’s sake—our parents are dead too—and has never treated me as anything but his own sister by blood. He has helped many of his other relatives who became poor during the fighting, this is why he was so very short of money. But he . . . he . . . is not a strong man either. He talked about Madero but did nothing.”

  Coward and weakling governed by the last person to frighten him, Luz filled in to herself. Which has its advantages. Once he realizes the Black Chamber has him he’ll be very cooperative indeed.

  “And lately, something has frightened him very badly,” Luisa said. “He weeps when he thinks nobody can hear. And he has been making plans to take us . . . the whole household . . . out of the city, to visit his aunt in Puebla, even though his work is here and he is not a rich man, he cannot afford such a thing and does not even like her, he never speaks to her save when he must for decency’s sake. When my sister complained, he shouted at her to be silent and do as she was told—that is not like him at all. And . . .”

  The two Black Chamber operatives waited.

  “. . . and,” she said reluctantly. “And he has been looking at weather vanes and testing the wind with his finger—again, when he thinks people are not watching him, for the last few weeks, since he began acting strangely. When the wind is from the west, as it usually is, he sighs with relief. But when it is from the east . . .”

  She mimed a man with clenched teeth and hunched, tightened shoulders holding his fists tightly. They all looked eastward.

  Toward the stretch of barren rocky pastureland where the Dakota Project was being built . . . and which nearly everyone with any education had by now realized was to produce something chemical, something chemical and military, and something chemical and military that had to be guarded even more closely than a conventional poison-gas works. The implications were obvious, to anyone not blinded by wishful thinking.

  On the other hand, if the brother-in-law has figured it out, he may just be jumping at shadows on that account. Best to let her continue. She’ll come to it.

  Luisa stared at her fork, then glanced eastward and back at the plate before she spoke:

  “This is my city. I was born here, and my mother and father and my grandparents before me for many generations, they walked these streets and worshipped at these altars and bore their children and were buried here. It is watered with their blood and tears and it was built with their sweat and their dreams.”

  “Your patria chica,” Luz said.

  “Yes! Yes, that is it exactly.”

  Luz and Ciara both nodded in understanding. Patria chica translated directly as little homeland; its meaning was very similar to the German Heimat. It meant the earth that gave you birth, your home country in a more direct and visceral sense than a nation-state, the place where you were truly at home among your own kin and kind.

  “Everyone I know and love and nearly all my relatives live here. I will not see it destroyed for the profit of wicked foreigners. I will save it, even if I am hated and killed or driven out for it.”

  “And very many could die if something . . . unfortunate . . . happened to the east of town,” Ciara said soberly. “Would die.”

  Luisa nodded, her mouth firm.

  “When did your brother-in-law plan his trip to Puebla?” Luz asked, carefully not staring, keeping her voice soft and gentle and monotonous, without any of the little trigger
s of challenge.

  A long pause, and then: “Efraín has told us we leave the day before the fiesta of St. John the Baptist, early in the afternoon, the very first train. My sister said why not the evening train so that we would arrive in the morning rather than late . . . and he went gray and said, No, any time but that. That was also very strange.”

  “Tomorrow,” Ciara said thoughtfully, and exchanged a glance with Luz.

  But the fiesta is a perfect day for an attack. Maximum distraction, but it’s not an American holiday so the plant will keep operating . . . it’s high-priority and doesn’t take Saturdays either . . . and it’s already doing its first full-scale trial run.

  “Wait a moment,” Luz said; Ciara had missed a detail. “You said your brother-in-law was short of money? But he isn’t now?”

  “Yes,” Luisa said, in a monotone herself and with her eyes closed for a long moment, but without hesitation. “He was able to buy us tickets without difficulty, for cash—and as I said, he has been helping many relatives, but now he complains less about that. And he has paid debts I knew he had.”

  Luz blinked in thought. “Did this start before, or after, he became so frightened?”

  “After . . . Why do you ask that, Señorita Graciela?” Luisa asked sharply.

  Luz smiled slightly. “Because you said he was a good man, a man with a kind heart, but . . . not strong. If bad men were trying to prevent him from revealing their evil plans, plans he had stumbled across, they might well first threaten him, and only then pay him money.”

  They didn’t kill him because that would have drawn attention precisely where they didn’t want it. They probably will kill him later. Killing him now would be too likely to trip alarms, but later you couldn’t leave a broken reed like that alive with important secrets in his sweating fear-filled head. They’ll have someone waiting to do it in Puebla, if they have the assets. And kill his family because he might have told them something, Luz thought clinically, before she went on aloud: