The Eyes of the Huntress

by Niall Teasdale

  Araven smiled. ‘It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.’

  Bucharest, Romania, 10th March.

  The hotel was not quite as upscale as the one in London, and they were in a room, rather than a suite. But the bed was big, the bathroom was well-appointed, there was an internet connection which was not too bad, and the staff all spoke excellent English. Shil was a little annoyed that her linguistic capabilities covered pretty much every language in the galaxy, but on Earth she was stuck with English and some largely forgotten schoolgirl French.

  ‘I take it that Romania does not have the same general development as England,’ Araven said as Shil worked her way through the local internet.

  ‘Eastern Europe is generally a little poorer than Western Europe,’ Shil replied. ‘Sometimes a lot poorer. I suppose it depends on which bits you’re comparing. All this region was communist for decades and they didn’t exactly have a good record on keeping their population happy.’

  ‘Totalitarian governments tend to be more efficient at running things when they can use broad-ranging brainwashing techniques.’

  ‘There’s a happy thought. Okay, I’ve found this lawyer. The office isn’t too far away. On Strada Radu Calomfirescu. I think our best bet is going to be breaking in there tonight.’

  Araven nodded and began to unbutton his waistcoat. ‘Cantarvey is checking the media?’

  ‘She is, but I don’t really expect T’ney to turn up in some gossip column or something, if he can possibly avoid it anyway.’

  ‘Then our best bet is the lawyer, and we’ve nothing much to do before it gets dark.’

  Shil grinned. ‘Are you propositioning me, Azeffari?’

  ‘If I’m still “Azeffari,” then I’m ordering you.’

  ‘That could be fun,’ Shil said, starting to unbutton her blouse.

  ~~~

  Bucharest’s Old Town, or the part of it the lawyer’s office was in, was an unusual place, to Shil’s eyes. The buildings were sort of blocky, but they still managed to be attractive and somewhat ornate, maybe even baroque. Certainly, the older buildings here were more attractive than the huge tower blocks the communists had erected in other parts of the city.

  In the Old Town, many of the doors were heavy wooden things with panels, and not the most modern of locks. Getting into the office, which seemed to be in someone’s old residence, was trivial. As soon as Shil and Araven saw the interior, however, they knew finding anything useful was going to be another matter.

  ‘This is a seriously old-school lawyer,’ Shil commented, looking at the records rooms with stacks of documents and walls lined with bookshelves. The shelves were laden with box files. ‘Uh, how about you take a look in the offices. Just look for Anthony Donavan, you’d recognise the lettering, right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Great. If you find anything, bring it to me.’

  Nodding, Araven turned and headed out of the room to where they had seen a couple of offices. Well, they had had desks in them. Shil turned and scanned all the box files. Were they the best place to start? Or were the more recent documents in the piles awaiting filing?

  ‘Oh well,’ she muttered, ‘I’d better pick something and get started.’

  11th March.

  ‘I think… I think I’ve got something,’ Araven said, walking into the records room with a file in his hands. ‘I think this mentions Donavan. The lawyer’s handwriting is… I can’t believe humans still hand-write notes!’

  ‘Not all of them do. I did say this place seemed a little archaic. That may be why it was selected. Less of an electronic paper trail.’

  ‘An interesting point.’ He handed the file to Shil and settled his behind on the edge of a table. ‘Your Azeffari needs a break anyway. Have you any idea how hard it is trying to spot patterns in something you can’t read?’

  ‘More or less, yes. I learned Gadek Taved that way, with some help.’

  ‘And now you seem to speak every language.’

  ‘Not Romanian, unfortunately. Luckily, some of these notes are in English, so I can get a rough idea of what’s going on, and this seems to be a recording of a meeting with T’ney. There’s nothing much here that isn’t obscured by terms they must’ve agreed already. I can’t see any locations mentioned… Oh, “Mister Lupu.” A name.’ She pointed to the scribbled lettering on the page. ‘Go to that big, round thing on the desk in the office. It’s called a Rolodex, and I can’t believe someone still uses one, but… See if you can see a Mister Lupu in there. It should be in alphabetical order.’

  ‘That would be useful if I knew what order your letters came in.’

  Shil shook her head. ‘Some Azeffari you are. I’ll look.’ She started for the door and then paused, looking over her shoulder. ‘Hey, have you ever done it in a lawyer’s office before?’

  ‘No, but when you get a closer look at this one, you won’t want to either.’

  ‘That sucks. What’s the point in all this James Bond stuff if we can’t have sex in inappropriate places?’

  ~~~

  Cantarvey was quite pleased with herself. Her voice over the comms channel had a distinctly smug quality to it. ‘I believe I have found Mister Wolf,’ she said.

  ‘And I’m sure you had to search half the internet to find him,’ Shil replied. ‘I’m going to assume that Lupu translates to Wolf?’

  ‘It does, and it is not an uncommon name. However, one Petrul Lupu is suspected of being involved in the trafficking of humans into and within Romania. He spends much of his time in Iaşi which is near the Moldovan border. He has done a good job of ensuring that no one has any solid evidence of his crimes.’

  Shil sighed. ‘Iaşi now.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Shil. If you want to find Mister Wolf, you’ll need to go to Iaşi.’

  ‘Fine. Thanks, Cantarvey. Send over whatever data you have on this guy and we’ll take it from there.’ Looking around to where Araven was lying on the bed, she said aloud, ‘It looks like we have to change cities again.’

  ‘And I was just getting settled,’ Araven replied.

  ‘Cantarvey found a likely candidate for the right Mister Lupu. In Iaşi. This is starting to get really messy.’

  ‘To be honest, I never expected this to be easy.’

  ‘No… I just wish it could have been easier.’

  Iaşi.

  It was colder in Iaşi than it had been in Bucharest, but Shil still trotted from bar to club to bar in a cocktail dress and high heels; compared to Dromeli or Tholdaria, Romania was a tropical paradise.

  They were playing foreigners, really foreign foreigners, speaking almost constantly in Luris, splashing money around, and occasionally asking if anyone knew their friend, Petrul. They were being selective about who they asked though. Both of them knew the kind of person they were looking for: the overconfident ones with too much ostentatious jewellery. Criminals who preferred to keep their day job under wraps were going to be no use, but the ones with a short life expectancy, the braggards, might just admit to knowing Lupu. Then again, the ones who really knew Lupu would then have to be winnowed from the ones putting on that extra bit of front, but both Shil and Araven knew liars when they talked to them.

  Anyway, getting a contact who knew their quarry and was willing to set up a meeting was preferable but not the main aim of the evening: making a lot of noise about looking was.

  The Gasparat, 12th March.

  T’ney glanced at the caller ID on his mobile phone, frowned, and picked up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sending you some pictures,’ Lupu said from the other end of the connection. ‘A couple were asking about me all over Iaşi last night. None of my people know them. Do you?’ The man had an accent, but not an especially thick one; even if he did much of his business in Romania, he had still felt the need to sound cosmopolitan. T’ney had difficulty understanding some of his colleagues.

  ‘Hold on,’ T’ney said as he heard the first ping of a message being delivered. Lifting the phone away fro
m his ear, he flicked through the primitive interface to find the pictures. A man and a woman, apparently out on the town, apparently human. There was something about the woman… ‘I don’t know them,’ T’ney said to the phone. ‘The woman looks vaguely familiar, but I’ve seen a lot of attractive women.’

  ‘Huh. Your libido is not the issue here. You said to look out for strangers asking questions. My contacts in the police have said nothing about someone taking action against me, but these two are asking a lot of questions. And they talk in a language none of my people recognise, so we can’t work out what they’re up to.’

  ‘None of your people recognise their language?’

  ‘And we’ve got a bunch of European languages between us.’

  ‘They need to go missing, Petrul. Quietly. Make sure it can’t be traced to–’

  ‘I know how to handle situations like this, Tony. It’ll be taken care of tonight.’

  Iaşi.

  ‘You see them?’ Shil asked quietly. The relative silence was easy: they were slow dancing, and Shil was rather enjoying the way her body fitted against Araven’s.

  ‘I see two men paying us more attention than can readily be explained by that dress you’re wearing,’ Araven replied.

  Shil was wearing a dress made of a knitted material with enough looseness in the weave to show off more than a little of the figure beneath it. She had expected people to look, but the two watchers she had noticed were attempting to be circumspect and carrying weapons. ‘They’re carrying pistols,’ she said, ‘and I’ve seen them in the last three clubs.’

  ‘You think Mister Wolf has noticed us asking about him?’

  ‘Damn well hope so. I’m just wondering what their intentions are.’

  ‘Perhaps we should leave here and give them a chance to tell us.’

  ‘Works for me. After this dance.’

  Araven smiled. ‘After this dance.’

  ~~~

  The alley was fairly dark. There were lights at each end, but it was quite dark between the pools of light. Shil could, of course, see perfectly, if in a rather weird distribution of frequencies; the world became a strange place when you were seeing ultraviolet and infrared along with the normal range of visible light, especially when the visible was so subdued. But it let her see the two men lurking in the shadows quite clearly.

  ‘Two behind us,’ Araven said. He had pulled on a pair of gloves as they left the club, which had looked quite reasonable given the weather. They were not there to keep his hands warm, however.

  ‘I know. Two ahead. They’re going to make it look like a mugging, so they won’t use their guns. Immediately anyway.’

  ‘I’m going to be hampered by the light.’

  ‘Yes… Just leave most of the work to me.’

  ‘This suit gives me some protection. You–’

  ‘Can handle the situation.’

  Any argument was cut off by a voice from behind them. Whatever the man said, it was in Romanian and Shil did not understand it, but she turned, as the man presumably wanted.

  ‘I have no idea what you just said,’ she said in English, ‘but whatever it was, could we just get this over with?’

  ‘You should not have asked about Mister Lupu,’ the man said, pulling what looked a lot like an old sock from his pocket. It was a sock filled with something heavy, probably coins. Getting hit with that was going to hurt.

  Shil smiled. ‘You should have picked a better place for this ambush.’ Flicking a glance over her shoulder, she located the man coming up behind her with another cosh and snapped a kick into his belly. He let out a shriek as her heel punched through his skin. Araven darted forward, driving his fist into the man doing the talking before he could bring his own weapon to bear. There was a loud grunt and a sort of buzzing sound, and the man collapsed as Araven’s shock glove turned his nervous system into chaos. Shifting her weight, Shil slipped something from her bag and her arm flashed out toward the other man who had been following them. Something glittered in the light from the street and the man made a gurgling sound as her shuriken sank into his throat.

  A weighted sock flew past Shil’s head as the last uninjured man put his weight into trying to take her out. This one was bigger than the others, a real thug with heavier muscles, but obviously less precision. Still, he needed to be taken out of the picture relatively quickly, and the man she had kicked was certainly wounded, but rallying. Shil snapped a brutal punch into the bigger man’s elbow, crippling his arm and disarming him, and then followed it through with a second jab to his side, right over his kidneys, and the thug fell, his knees crumpling under him. They just didn’t make thugs the way they used to.

  And that left one. Shil ducked under the swing of what looked like a length of wood and twisted into a rising kick which his makeshift staff came nowhere near blocking. Her heel ripped through the skin of his cheek and he fell, collapsing to the ground as though he had been kicked by a mule.

  ‘Flashy martial arts moves in these conditions?’ Araven asked. ‘You’re in heels!’

  ‘Yeah. I’m going to need to wipe the blood off before we go back to the hotel.’ Araven winced at that. ‘How’s that one doing?’

  ‘Your human thugs aren’t very resilient. He’s still twitching from the shock glove.’ Araven checked the man’s pockets and removed his pistol. The space cop peered at the firearm for a few seconds and then shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen a genuine antique like this in a few years. Explosive projection of payload… Amazing.’ He handed the thug’s wallet to Shil.

  ‘He’s… Cristian Rusu. Since he mentioned Lupu, I assume he’s working for him.’

  ‘Probably. Do you think it’s worth questioning him?’

  Shil considered for a second and then shook her head. ‘I doubt he knows much. You don’t send higher-level members of your organisation to do grunt work like this. I think… I think we just use him to send a message.’

  The Gasparat.

  ‘You’re quite sure that was what she said?’ T’ney asked.

  Lupu did not particularly like being questioned like this, but he repeated what he had been told since the alien clearly did not believe his ears. ‘“Sheila McDermott sends her regards. We’re coming for you, bitch.” Clear enough?’

  ‘Sheila McDermott is in a prison on another planet, Petrul. There is no way–’

  ‘The name she used checking into the hotel is Sheila Napier, but that was what she said to tell you. She knows about you. You want me to try again? I have some–’

  ‘No. They’ll be really ready a second time. Your men won’t stand a chance. I’ll handle this. I’m going to need to make a trip to London. Keep the goods moving. Contact Patrick if there are any problems.’

  ‘Fine. Just make sure you get these people off my back. I don’t want any of your police coming down on me. I have enough trouble with the local ones.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll take care of them,’ T’ney replied. ‘One way or another.’

  Iaşi, Romania, 13th March.

  Shil was awake when the call came through from Cantarvey. She had, in fact, just been contemplating waking Araven up with a smile, so the interruption was not entirely welcome. Still…

  ‘I have located T’ney,’ Cantarvey said without preamble.

  ‘You have? Where is he?’

  ‘He has returned to his flat in London. He entered with several bags. I believe he intends to stay there for a while.’

  Shil frowned. ‘That’s… interesting.’ She was not entirely sure what T’ney being in London meant and it made her a little uneasy. Especially considering the timing. Was the man running? Or was he drawing them away from the real action? Well, whatever the case, it was probably best to get her partner’s opinion. ‘Araven,’ she said aloud. ‘Wake up, sleepyhead, time to go to work.’

  ‘Our “work” largely involves trawling bars after dark at the moment,’ Araven mumbled through his pillow. ‘Come back to bed.’

  ‘Our work just arrived in London. Cantarvey spotted T
’ney moving into his flat, with luggage. I’m not sure I like it. It feels like we’re supposed to go after him.’

  Araven turned over, looking a little grumpy: well, he did need more sleep than Shil. ‘We are. That’s why we’re on this planet.’

  ‘I mean, it feels like he’s drawing us away from the other two.’

  ‘If we pick him up, alive, we can get him to tell us where the others are.’

  Shil gave a shrug. ‘I guess… Still doesn’t feel right, but I guess we need to follow the trail where it leads.’

  London, England.

  ‘He’s not there,’ Shil said. She was standing beside Araven, across the street from the building where Tony Donavan had his home in London. They had been watching, on and off, for a while. There was no sign of life, no sign of light, and Shil still had the strong feeling that this whole thing was a set-up.

  ‘Cantarvey hasn’t seen him leave,’ Araven pointed out.

  ‘No, and that just makes me think it’s more likely he isn’t in there. This just stinks of a trap, Araven.’

  ‘Then let’s go spring it. I don’t think we’re going to get any further until we engage with D’nova somehow. And there’s always the possibility that he is inside.’

  ‘Fine,’ Shil replied, a little irritated. ‘We go in and see what happens. If we both end up dead, I’m blaming you.’ She took a stubby cylindrical device from her bag and began to fiddle with a control on it.

  ‘What do you have there?’

  ‘You’ll find out, if we need it. If we do, things are going to get messy, so hope we don’t.’

  Once again, they bypassed the locks without trouble and walked up the stairs to T’ney’s floor. Since they were still trying to keep things quiet, they also bypassed the door on his flat, easing the door open in case there was someone inside. Shil was quite sure she had been right about it being empty as soon as she got into the entrance hall: the place was just too quiet. Still, they moved in, Araven carrying a small laser weapon at the ready, and Shil turning her small device around in her hands.

  ‘You may be right,’ Araven said. ‘It looks like he’s slipped out somehow. Probably just trying to get us here and away from his people in Romania.’