The Council of Shadows s-2

by S. M. Stirling

  "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."

  "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, wh
ich 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 Breze 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 pinon 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?"

  " Si, 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 Breze's puke, right?"

  "Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I'm pretty sure that Breze 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 Breze's-"

  "Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there's no Breze 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?"

  " Si. 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 Breze 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 Homeland 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 Breze 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 Brezes 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."