by John Meaney
“That's not good enough. . . . Look, Harald.” She switched her attention from Donal to the phone. “You know Alf Zentril? From Robbery-Haunting? Good. I'm going to call in a favor. Expect to see his team at your location shortly. If not, we'll send our own people. Got it?”
She listened a bit, then nodded. “Sounds good. Make sure you're not spotted.” And after a moment: “Good luck.”
Laura put the phone down.
“I didn't figure you for a territorial animal,” she said to Donal. “We have an officer's life at stake, and the Distributed Intelligence Organization has resources we could never—”
“It's not Sushana I'm thinking of,” said Donal. “Ah . . . I don't mean that the way it sounds.”
“You don't?”
“The driver that Harald followed,” Donal said. “He's not an Illurian agent.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you needed to ship something—or a dead someone—out of the country, and you're a foreign intelligence officer, you'd use the diplomatic bag.”
“Diplomatic bag . . .”
“That's just what they call it. The ‘bag’ could be a shipping crate.” Donal was sure of himself now. “If it's from an embassy, Customs doesn't open it.”
“Damn it,” said Laura.
“It's as if the embassy mail room were a bonded warehouse all by itself.”
“All right. I've worked it out. But someone official in the embassy might want to run an operation off the books. I've heard people do that sometimes.”
A tiny smile tugged at Donal's mouth. “That's terrible.”
“Right. We'd never do that.”
“Thanatos forbid.” Donal sat himself down in the visitor's chair. “So what are we going to do, boss?”
“We're going to track down whoever's got Sushana,” said Laura, “and deal with the fuckers.”
“On or off the books?”
“Either way.”
Harald's network of snitches was huge, but he wasn't the only one with resources. Big Viktor had contacts of his own, and right now he was busy bouncing one of them, hard and repeatedly, against a brick wall.
Still, Franz was refusing to talk. His eyes had widened at the blue-and-white photograph that Viktor had shown him: the photo of Sushana. But Franz had shaken his head, clamping his mouth shut.
This was unusual for Franz. Unfortunately, his reticence guaranteed that Viktor would keep hammering until he got answers.
“How's business?” asked Viktor, using a paper towel to wipe blood off his fist. None of the blood was his own. “Well enough to miss it when it's gone?”
They were behind Franz's largest gambling joint. In a parlor at the front were stone couches where wraithing addicts slid into trance, their disembodied viewpoints hooking on to wraiths and following them in their races through channels beneath the city.
Viktor hooked his fingers into Franz's collarbone and pulled downward, tugging at the friable bones and bringing a wince to Franz's face. Then he hammerlocked Franz's arm and propelled him indoors, through the dingy hallway to the parlor.
No clients lay on the deserted stone couches. Each couch was a single hollowed stone, shipped from upstate Orebury, quarried from the Resonant Caves.
Viktor bared his teeth in something that was nearly a smile. He pushed Franz away from him, then, crossing his arms, reached inside his leather jacket and drew out two square-edged Grauser automatics.
He took aim at the nearest couch.
“No.” Franz swallowed. “Don't you know how much they—”
Viktor pulled both triggers.
Shards of stone blew in all directions. One sliver cut Viktor's cheek, but he ignored it.
“No,” Franz whispered.
Viktor swiveled and took aim at couches on either side of him, arms spread dramatically: a calculated stance. Intimidation is a skill best learned on the streets.
“All right.” Shoulders slumped, gaze weakening, Franz said, “The woman—there was one like her.”
He meant Sushana, from the photograph.
“Tell me.”
“I heard . . .” —Franz swallowed again—“she was in the docks, with Tax Silberman's crew. You know them.”
Viktor nodded.
“It was a snifferwraith.” Franz spoke quickly now, as though some internal dam had broken. “What I heard, anyhow. They scanned her, found she was a plant, and . . .”
“What?”
“Either they dumped her straight into the Plax with chains on, or they took her to Sally the Claw and he did it. I ain't sure which version is true, and I didn't try to find out.”
There was a rage building up inside Viktor, but now was not the time to release it.
Sushana, my love.
Franz looked up, regaining a little of his composure. “Was she one of yours?”
“Was . . .”
Then it burst out, a black flood that Viktor made no attempt to rein in. His hands raised of their own accord and the twin Grausers thundered loudly, shot after shot crashing through the air as stone couches blew apart into sharp-edged fragments.
Franz was on his hands and knees, crawling back toward his office for safety beneath the maelstrom, then giving up. He crouched on the floor like a facedown fetus, shivering while the world disappeared in the cacophony overhead.
“Sushana,” Viktor whispered.
The guns clicked empty, half a second apart, and Viktor's rage dissipated more quickly than it had come, blowing away like smoke in a sudden wind. What remained in Viktor's core was something harder and darker, and as patient as it needed to be.
It would take time to reach Sally the Claw, past all the cutouts, the lieutenants, and the foot soldiers, but Viktor would do it. What happened next would be up to Sal, but Sal was not the kind of man to submit to arrest.
Viktor was counting on that.
Donal looked ready to fall over. Alexa had already gone, finally giving in to Laura's order to get some rest. Nothing more was likely to happen tonight, or this morning.
It was already twenty-five o'clock, and the only thing Laura had achieved since Harald's phone call was to dispatch a team from Robbery-Haunting to act as Harald's surveillance team.
Now she told Donal, “You need to go home.”
“What about you?” He was too tired to argue much but had no wish to leave her here.
Laura looked around the office, then decided quickly, rolled up two charts from her desk, and tucked them under one arm. “I'll come with you. All I need is a phone, and the switchboard can patch through to the apartment.”
“All right.”
Picking up the phone, Laura waited for the internal operator to come on, then gave her instructions, thanked the wraith, and put the phone down.
“Let's go via the street,” she said. “I need some air.”
“Me too.” He thought perhaps it was for his benefit, because Laura looked exactly as she always did.
Donal and Laura descended in the elevator shaft side by side, borne by Gertie, who remained silent all the way, giving them only an impersonal push to assist their exit from the tube.
At ground level, they passed along the stone halls that became the outer reception area, where Eduardo was on perpetual duty, melded into the stone block of the reception desk.
“She'll be all right,” Eduardo said, meaning Sushana. “I'm sure of it.”
Donal nodded, but Laura shook her head. She was obviously sure—or almost sure—that Sushana was already dead.
Out on the street, the sidewalks were slick with puddles through which fine silver threads swam, glinting orange or crimson where they caught the streetlights' reflections. Donal and Laura walked in silence, until a purple cab appeared and Laura flung her arm out.
“It'll be quicker than retrieving the car,” she said.
“Um. . . all right.”
Perhaps she was too tired to drive. Or perhaps it was just that she wanted to be out of contact for minimal time. Donal followed her
into the cab and told the driver to take them to Darksan Tower, fast.
It took only minutes to reach the tower.
“Good man.”
Laura paid before Donal could move. They got out and passed the entranceway's guardians. Laura's heels clicked on the black-glass floor as they crossed the lobby to the express elevator and ascended straight to the apartment.
At first Donal thought he was too wired to rest, but once inside the bedroom he pulled off his jacket and sat down on the edge of the bed to pull off his shoes. He felt the lure of the bed and lay back and slipped into relaxation, and then he was asleep.
“Very good,” he might have heard Laura murmur.
After she had kicked off her shoes, taken off her jacket, undone her skirt and blouse, and allowed them to slip to the floor, Laura stood there for a long time, staring at Donal as he slept.
It was hard for Laura to remember sleep, and dreaming.
Clad only in black lingerie, she walked out into the hallway and stopped before the mirror-hung wall. Clapping her hands softly, she spoke the keywords that activated encrypted spells inside the hidden mechanisms. She stopped, listened—no sound came from the bedroom save the softest of snores—then clapped once more.
This was the quickest way up, faster than ascending the outside of the building. That was something she did only when she needed to feel alive—or to try recapturing that feeling.
The mirror shifted, then swung back, revealing a narrow portal. It led to a darkened shaft. Inside, a slender ladder formed of struts that might have been bone glimmered with a gray-green luminescence.
Laura stepped through the portal and directly onto the ladder. She grabbed hold with both hands, swung her other foot onto the same rung, and waited. The door swung shut behind her, the concealing mirror once more in place.
After a quick glance down—the ladder disappeared into the black depths—Laura craned her head back, focusing on the faint heptagonal outline high above. She returned her attention to the ladder.
Slowly at first, Laura climbed.
Ten minutes later she was at the hex-guarded hatch, muttering the keywords that would let her through. In moments, the hatch flared silver and swung itself up and back. A sudden vicious draft caught hold of Laura, but her grip was tight. After a moment she moved, pulled herself up onto the roof, and stepped into the turbulent night.
The hatch swung shut behind her.
Laura was high above the streets now, on the complex Gothic–deco spire that rose high above Darksan Tower proper, hundreds of feet above her apartment on the 227th floor. As always, necrotonic cables hung in dark catenary curves, linking her building to the other towers that stood like giant sentinels high above the city streets.
Hunkering down—not against the cold, simply to present a lower profile to the capricious wind that could tug her straight off the roof at any time—Laura watched the night and waited.
Soon, pairs of glowing scarlet eyes were visible amid the darkness, where Laura's enhanced vision could scarcely make out the cables and skywalks. The tiny scarlet beacons moved through darkness, drawing closer.
Laura's cats were coming.
One by one, the small shapes slipped across the narrow stone bridges, the hanging cables, and the tiny translucent filaments that normally bore only sprites engendered by the splitting off of insubstantial fragments from large wraith forms.
Now the cats moved steadily across these narrow byways, their forms undulating as necessary to counteract the turbulence that swept these high places. Their eyes glowed powerfully scarlet when a distant reflection caught them.
Once, as a scanbat glided past overhead, two of the cats hunkered down on the skywalk they were traversing, alert to the opportunity to catch new prey, but the bat was past soon enough, and after a moment the cats continued on toward Darksan Tower.
If Sushana was alive, Laura needed to know. She had lost officers before, but not in this team, not during this job. What Laura did for a living—or whatever she should call it now—had always defined her. And now that she had allowed Donal into her life—un-life—the job mattered more than ever.
Not the politics, not the checking of boxes when cases cleared or budgets were secured. The real people.
The first of the cats licked her hand and settled down beside her to wait.
While Laura thought about the ways she could direct her friends of the night, which buildings they might investigate, which people they might observe unsuspected from the darkness, the cats themselves gathered in a widening circle around her on the rooftop. Behind her rose the skeletal needle that was the final up-thrust of Darksan Tower, making its mark in the night sky.
Then the cats were gathered, and Laura began to speak.
While Donal dreamed—bizarre, broken images that might have been a nightmare, might have been a way of dealing with the dark reality without frightening himself—and while Laura laid out her plans for the cats' approval, the rest of their team was busy.
Alexa, after calling in at a cops' bar and sinking back three flame tequilas in rapid succession, was now in her own apartment, inhaling lilac clarity smoke from broken twigs burning in a copper bowl. She was attempting to reverse the drunkenness and cough her way back to sobriety.
But the other members of the team were more active. Harald, though he had not slept in three days, looked entirely alert as he sat astride his stationary motorcycle and told his new colleagues, the team from Robbery-Haunting, everything he knew about the embassy's layout and the driver who was their target.
“When he moves, we follow, hanging back but not enough to risk losing him.” Harald's gentle eyes did not change as he added, “If he spots us, we'll need to shut him down.”
“Shut down? How permanently?”
“An officer's life is at stake.”
The R-H guys looked at one another. “That explains it,” one of them said.
“What?”
“Why our boss is doing your boss a favor.”
“And,” said one of the others, “why none of us is on duty right now, unless we have to be. No reports.”
“Off the books?” asked Harald.
“Completely. Unless something exposes us.”
“Good,” said Harald. “Let's try to keep things quiet. I like quiet.”
Around him, the R-H team nodded. They had lives and families to return to when this thing was over. While this was happening, Harald's friend Viktor was on the west side, near the dockyard district, only a few miles away from the bonded warehouse where Harald's trail had begun. But Viktor's target was something else.
There were several acres of concrete beyond the chain-link fence. Stacks of pallets and crates stood haphazardly between a half dozen block-shaped office buildings and warehouses. They provided reasonable cover from the swinging silver beams cast by slow-gliding jelly lights overhead.
In the office, a surprising number of windows were lit. Men in ties and shirtsleeves were going about their business (most of which, Viktor knew, would be legitimate, for this was a real trading company).
Strange ripples of darkness moved across the chain-link fence. Atop it stretched razor wire that slowly twisted and turned, animated by tortured wraiths whose forms had been dragged thread-thin along the wires' lengths. They screamed forever in a realm where no human could ever hear, hanging on only so that they might catch a living person and deliver agony of their own.
At the gateways, guards stood smoking and watching the street outside and the unlit buildings beyond, occasionally fingering their weapons. As Viktor watched, an older, gray-haired man approached them. The men dropped their cigarettes and ground them out with their heels.
Alertness was everything.
But still, thought Viktor, as the older man retreated to one of the buildings, the setup was less secure than it looked. That was partly because Sally the Claw was running a mostly legitimate business here. But it might have been a miscalculation, or an overreliance on Sal's reputation as a stone
killer with an organization of psychopaths at his back.
To Viktor, the outer defenses looked strong, but once inside the perimeter, the site was poorly guarded.
Even as he thought this, Viktor noticed the gray-haired man reentering a building without having to use any kind of password or submitting to personal inspection. The building's doors were not even locked.
From his hiding place inside a blackened alley mouth, Viktor smiled, cold and predatory.
In the apartment, Donal sat bolt upright on the sweat-soaked bed, sheet falling away from his bare torso. His eyes snapped open, seeing nothing but the fading tails of his own nightmares. The bedroom was empty save for him, with no sign of Laura's presence.
“Oh, Thanatos,” he said.
Then his eyelids fluttered, and he lowered himself onto the mattress, shivered once, and slipped straight back into his dreams. He smiled briefly, but it was cold and flat.
Donal slid deeper into sleep.
Viktor remained standing in the alleyway, knowing he should take action, not knowing why he wanted to stay as he was. But he had worked the streets for long enough to trust himself, to trust his own subconscious, which saw more of the world than the surface mind.
After a few minutes he got it.
On the very edge of his peripheral vision, five stories overhead in what had seemed a deserted building, a shadow shifted within darkness: just the tiniest of movements.
Snipers.
Well, one sniper at least, in this building. Even if the man was solo—which was probable—he would not be the only man stationed around the perimeter. Other buildings would have their watchers armed with rifles, observing the surrounding streets and watching the compound fence from the outside.
There was a chance that this was some enemy of Sally the Claw, whether police or criminal, watching the premises with much the same intent as Viktor himself, but that seemed unlikely.
Victor began to move his feet slowly, carefully, down the alley's length, just above the broken concrete surface.
Once, he touched a half brick with the toe of his shoe and stopped himself from scraping the brick across concrete. Instead, he circled the small obstacle with his foot and took another silent step. With such slow motion, he took an endless time to reach the back of the building.
