The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  He chuckled, and Salvador’s opinion of him went up. It was never easy for civilians when reality crashed into what they thought had been their lives.

  “How could you tell it was a shotgun?”

  “Two barrels. Looked like tunnels.”

  “And the man?”

  “He was older than me—fifty, sixty, gray hair cut short, but he was moving fast. He had blue eyes, fair, sort of tanned skin, but you could tell he was pink underneath?”

  “Anglo, but weathered?”

  “Right. And he was dressed all in black, black leather. And he shouted at us, just, ‘Go, go, go, get out, run, keep running.’ We did.”

  “Exactly the right thing to do,” Cesar said.

  “But I was going to go back. Then it burned . . .” he whispered. “If I had—”

  You’d be dead, Salvador thought. On the other hand, if the guy hadn’t run you all out, you’d all be dead. There’s something screwy here. Arsonists don’t care who gets hurt and they certainly don’t risk getting made to warn people.

  Mrs. Lopez spoke again. “There was a younger man outside, when we ran out. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there, with his hands in the air, almost like he was high or something. And there was a, a van or a truck over there.”

  She pointed to the wall of the compound across the street from what had been her house. Salvador made a note to see if they could get tire tracks.

  “When we were across the street the younger man sort of, oh, collapsed. The older man with the gun, the one in black, helped him over to the van, not carrying him but nearly, sort of dragging him and putting him in the backseat. Then they drove off.”

  Cesar tapped at his notepad and called up the face-sketch program.

  “The younger man looked like this?” he began, and patiently ran them through the process of adjustment.

  Salvador stared, fascinated as always, watching the image shift, slowly morphing and changing and then switching into something that only an expert could tell from a photograph of a living person. He knew that in the old days you’d had to use a sketch artist for this, but now it was automatic. It would even check the final result against the databases with a face-recognition subsystem. When they’d given all the help they could Cesar went on:

  “Thank you, thank you both. We may have to talk to you again later.”

  He blew out a sigh as the couple left and turned and leaned back against the end of the van, looking at the notepad in his hand. Salvador prompted him:

  “Their stories were consistent?”

  “Yeah, jefe. Right from the start, it wasn’t just listening to each other and editing the memory.”

  He touched the screen. “Okay, sequence: When Mrs. Lopez got home with the kids, around five, Ellen Tarnowski’s car, she’s the upperfloor tenant, was there. Mr. Lopez, the husband, got home a little later and noticed it too. Because she’s usually not back from work by then.”

  “They friends with her?”

  “They know her to talk to, just in passing. Said she was nice, but they didn’t have much in common.”

  The senior detective grunted and looked at his notepad, tapping for information; Mr. and Mrs. Lopez were a midlevel state government functionary and a dental hygienist, respectively. Ellen Tarnowski . . .

  Works at Hans & Demarcio Galleries. Okay, artsy. God knows we’ve got enough of them around here.

  There were three hundred–odd galleries in Santa Fe, plus every other diner and taco joint had original artwork on the walls and on sale. Half the waiters and checkout clerks in town were aspiring artists of one sort or another, too, like the would-be actors in LA. She looked out at him, a picture from some Web site or maybe the DMV: blond, mid-twenties, full red lips, short straight nose, high cheekbones, wide blue eyes. Something in those eyes too, an odd look. Kind of haunted. The figure below . . .

  “Jesus.”

  “Just what I said. Anyway, she comes downstairs just after Mr. Lopez arrives. Mrs. Lopez looks out the kitchen window and notices her because she’s wearing—”

  He checked his notes again.

  “—a white silk sheath dress and a wrap. She knew it was Tarnowski’s best fancy-occasion dress from a chat they’d had months ago. Another woman was with her. About Tarnowski’s age, but shorter, slim, olive complexion or a tan, long dark hair, dark eyes . . .”

  “Really going to stand out in this town.”

  “Sí, though if she’s going around with la Tarnowski she will! I got a composite on her too, but it’s not as definite. Mrs. Lopez said her clothes looked really expensive, and she was wearing a tanzanite necklace.”

  “What the fuck’s tanzanite?”

  The other thing we have hundreds of is jewelry stores.

  “Like sapphire, but expensive. Here’s what she looked like.”

  He showed a picture. The face was triangular, smiling slightly, framed by long straight black hair. Attractive too, but . . .

  Reminds me of that mink I handled once when I was young and stupid and trying to impress. Pretty, and it bit like a bastard. Took three stitches and a tetanus shot and the girl laughed every time she saw me—remembered me hopping around screaming.

  “I don’t think she’s Latina, somehow,” he said aloud, as his fingers caressed the slight scar at the base of his right thumb.

  “Yeah, me too, but I can’t put my finger on why. Incidentally let’s do a side-by-side with the composite on the man they saw standing still outside, when the old goatsucker with the gun ran them out past him. The one he shoved into the backseat later.”

  Salvador’s eyebrows went up as the pictures showed together. “Are they sure that’s not the same person? It’s an easy mistake to make, in the dark, with the right clothes.”

  His partner nodded; it was, surprisingly so under some circumstances.

  “Looks a lot like Dark Mystery Woman, eh? But it was a guy, very certainly. Wearing a dark zippered jacket open with a tee underneath. Mrs. Lopez said he looked real fit. Not bulked up but someone who worked out a lot. She got a better look at him than at the woman, they went right by. Nothing from the databases on either of them, by the way, but look at this.”

  His fingers moved on the screen, and the two images slid until they were superimposed. Then he tapped a function box.

  “Okay, the little machine thinks they’re relatives,” Salvador said. “I could have figured that out.”

  “But could you have said it was a ninety-three-percent chance?”

  “Sure. I just say: ‘It’s a ninety-three-percent chance.’ Or in old-fashioned human language, con certesa. Okay, back up to what Mystery Woman was doing earlier. She and Tarnowski get in Tarnowski’s car and drive off around five thirty, a few minutes earlier?”

  “Mystery Woman was driving. Tarnowski looked shaky.” Cesar consulted his notes. “Yeah, Mrs. Lopez said Tarnowski looked like she was going to fall over, maybe sick, the other one helped her into the car.”

  “That’s two people who have to be helped into cars. This smells.”

  “And then two and a half hours later someone runs in waving a sawed-off shotgun, while Mystery Woman’s brother or cousin or whatever was standing outside ignoring everything and talking to himself in a strange language—”

  “Strange language?”

  “They just heard a few words. Not English, not Spanish, and not anything they recognized. He talks in the strange language, falls, goatsucker with the gun gives him a hand, they drive off, and then the place just happens to burn down a few minutes later.”

  Salvador sighed and turned up the collar of his coat; it was dark, and cold.

  “I need a drink. But get an APB out on Ellen Tarnowski and flag her name with municipal services and the hospitals statewide. Also the old gringo with the sawed-off shotgun, use the face-recognition protocol for surveillance cameras. We can get him on a reckless-endangerment charge, trespassing, uttering threats, suspicion of arson, bad breath, whatever.”

  “Sí, and littering. The M
ystery Woman and the Mystery Man too?”

  “Yeah, why not? Let them all do a perp walk and we can apologize later.”

  He sat down on the tailgate and began doggedly prodding at the screen. The first thing tomorrow he’d start tracing Tarnowski’s life. So far nobody had died, and he’d like to keep it that way. The employer was a good first place.

  In the meantime, he could try to get some sleep. He snorted quietly to himself. After dredging up this many memories, much chance there was of that.

  Dream.

  Eric Salvador always knew it was a dream; he just couldn’t affect it or get out of it or do anything except watch and smell and taste and feel an overwhelming sick dread as it unfolded. There hadn’t really been a burned-out MRAP at the end of the village street by the mosque. That had been somewhere else, that little shithole outside Kandahar he’d seen on his first tour, and it had been there only one day. It was a composite of all the bads, building up to the Big Bad itself.

  A couple of other things are right for the day, he thought.

  The way Olsen flicked the little Raven surveillance drone into the air, and the buzz of its engine as it climbed to circle above them, and the dopey little smiley-face button with fangs he’d glued to the nose of the corps’ thirty-five–thousand-dollar toy airplane. He’d tried to put little fake Hellfire missiles under the wings, too, and Gunny had torn him a new asshole about it. The way the translator was sweating and his eyes were flicking here and there, and you wondered if it was just the heat or generalized fear or if he knew something he wasn’t saying.

  Christ, I’ve had this fucking nightmare so many times I’m starting to sound like a movie critic.

  Smith always went into the door of the compound the same way, the way he really had. Regulation, the two of them plastered on either side, Jackson taking out the lock on the gate with a door-knocker round, whump-boom, the warped old planks smacking inward as the slug blew the rusty lock into the courtyard, Smith following, his M-4 tucked into his shoulder and Jackson on his heels.

  The explosion was always silent. Silent, slow-mo, the flames leaking around the fragments of wood and the two men flying and just enough time to realize, Oh, shit, this is a bad one, before a giant’s hand picked him up and threw him backwards until there was the impact and the pain.

  Only this time was different. This time something walked out of the fire to where he lay with the broken ends of his ribs grating under the body armor that had saved his life.

  The shape twisted and its wrongness made him want to scream out the bloody foam in his lungs, but the eyes were flecked yellow. And the voice slithered into his ears:

  “Who’s been a naughty boy, then?”

  He began to sink into the dry dusty earth, and it flowed into mouth and nose and eyes, the dust of ages and of empires.

  “Naughty!”

  “Christ!”

  He lay panting in the darkness, smelling his own sweat and waiting to be sure he was awake—sometimes he dreamed he was, and then the whole thing started cycling through his head again. It was blurring away already, details fracturing like sunlight through a drop of water. His hand groped for the cigarettes on the bedside, and then remembered he’d stopped.

  “Go back to sleep,” he told himself. “Dreaming’s no worse than remembering, anyway.”

  Christ.

  “I wonder where Tarnowski is?”

  He didn’t really want to know; kidnap victims usually didn’t end up anywhere good.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Ellen came out in a too-large white cotton robe with a towel wrapped around her hair he had the breakfast table set, in the big airy room that led out onto the balcony. The pensione was perched high on the slope above Amalfi’s little cove, and the Tyrrhenian Sea sparkled an impossible blue to the west; white buildings tumbled down the hillside to meet it, down to the Duomo and the half-Romanesque-Byzantine, half-Saracen cathedral.

  She felt much better now; the hot water had driven the last of the grue out of her mind and the stiffness out of her muscles, and she found herself eager for the day, sniffing the scent of the coffee. When she tossed the towel aside the mild warm breeze tumbled through her curly blond hair.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Brézé,” Adrian said.

  “Salut, Monsieur Brézé,” she replied.

  “And buongiorno,” they added in unison; this was Amalfi, after all.

  “You look enchanting. And dressed like that, you also look about twelve.”

  “Not really,” she said.

  Ellen struck a pose with one hand behind her head and a leg showing through the slit. Adrian’s gaze lingered on it. She was twenty-four; she was also five-foot-six and thirty-six/twenty-seven/thirty-six, taut from tennis and cross-country running, with a face close enough to a certain fifties actress that it had been embarrassing in NYU’s art history classes when they came to study Warhol’s famous portrait.

  “No, on second thought, of a perfectly legal age,” he said, after clearing his throat.

  She sat, and began to eat. The breakfast was more or less Italian, except for the chilled mango, ripe figs, crisp crumbly frese, slightly sweet and flavored with anise, torta di nocciole e limoni di Amalfi, rich with hazelnuts and tart with lemon, rolls, jam.

  “Well, that’s certainly blatant,” Adrian said after a moment, a slight prickle of danger in his smooth voice.

  “What is?” Ellen replied.

  “This.”

  He showed her his tablet across the remains of their breakfast. She took the reader and held the thin sheet between her hands. This was an announcement in the Corriere della Sera that the . . .

  “Ikhwan al-Fajr al-Aswad is to meet in Tbilisi, Georgia,” she murmured, yawning. “Next year, about this time.”

  It was late morning, which was a compromise between their preferred hours; Adrian might be a Good Guy, but his genes gave him a thoroughly Shadowspawn preference for waking up around noon and not becoming really active until sunset. By no coincidence whatsoever, that was a preference shared by many eccentric artists and mad dictators. She’d always been an early-to-bed, morning-type person. Marriage required a lot of meeting in the middle; going to bed late sometimes left her tired despite eight hours’ sleep, even when it hadn’t been interrupted the way it had last night.

  Nobody at the inn objected to their schedule, even though it must have played havoc with their housekeeping. They had long experience with eccentric foreigners, and Adrian had used this place before. Mostly for prolonged recoveries and convalescence, after missions for the Brotherhood during his years fighting the Council.

  “It’s pronounced Ikkhh—”

  He repeated the name as a rapid series of gargling gutturals and rough breathing.

  Mountains ran north and south from here, blue and dreaming in the Mediterranean summer warmth that brought odors of rock and citrus and stone pine through the open French doors that gave onto the balcony terrace. She shivered a little; places like this made the contrast between how the world seemed and how she now knew it really worked all the more dreadful. With an effort she cast the thought away.

  Besides her native coal-country Pennsylvania English, Ellen could speak fair French and some Italian; those were the legacy of an undergraduate degree in art history from NYU. And a little Spanish, from years spent in Santa Fe. Adrian was fluent in over a dozen languages that she knew of.

  “Show-off,” she said sweetly, and kicked him in the ankle under the table. “And don’t repeat it in Tibetan.”

  “Merde alors!” he yelped, startled. Then he smiled: “I thought that it was you who enjoyed pain, chérie.”

  She smiled back. “What can I say . . . I swing both ways when it comes to lovely hurting. That’s why it’s called sadomasochism, dear.”

  Then more seriously: “Anyway, what does it mean? Ikhwan al-Fajr al-Aswad? ” she added, trying to get the throaty sounds right.

  “It’s Arabic,” he said. “For Order of the Black Dawn.”

  “Yo
u’re right, that’s blatant. That’s an elevated finger to the whole planet. The secret conspiracy of evil that runs the world is actually announcing its meetings to the news services?”

  “They do want everyone to know . . . at least, every one of the people who are supposed to attend. Many of whom are both eccentric and hermetic recluses, or quite mad.”

  “Why not send an e-mail around?”

  Adrian chuckled. “My sweet, people don’t change much after their twenties. And many of the ones attending this affair were born before the First World War, and intend to live . . . well, exist . . . forever.”

  “Of course they don’t change. They’re dead.”

  “Only technically.”

  Ellen laughed ruefully herself. “I remember Adrienne saying something about the Old Ones disliking technology, or at least any technology that didn’t involve shoveling coal into a boiler.”

  “Exactly. Also this announcement, it is a boast. They draw closer to the day they need not be secret. When they can rule as demon-gods once more.”

  “Why in Arabic? I thought French was the Council’s official language.”

  “A slight unblatancy or minor disguise,” he said. “That’s the Arabic version of the original . . . Ordre de l’Aube Noire. It’s the term the al-Lanarki clan uses, too. Probably one of them thought it was amusing; they have an odd sense of humor.”

  “Odder than yours?” Ellen said sardonically. “In which I include your disreputable relatives, my love.”

  “My ancestors thought they were magicians and loup-garou, before they ferreted out the truth. The al-Lanarkis thought they were ghilan, until the Order of the Black Dawn contacted them and showed them how to reconcentrate the genes. It shows in their . . . subculture, you might say. As the Tōkairin thought they were Ninja sorcerors.”

  “Ghilan?”

  “The translation would be . . . ghouls, roughly.”

  “Ech,” she said. “Graveyards and corpses and that?”

  “Not quite. The ghūl of the East is not exactly the ghoul of the West. It is a thing that can assume the guise of an animal, lures unwary travelers into the desert wastes to slay and devour them. Ghūl rob graves, drink blood, and take on the form of the one they had fed upon to deceive the living.”