The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “I . . . I’m afraid I don’t have an address. Just a phone number. But Ms. Brézé said not to use it very often.”

  This is one scared lady, Salvador thought. And I really don’t think she’s naturally a scaredy-cat.

  He thumbed the number into his phone as she gave it, then spoke:

  “Here’s my card.”

  He slid it across the low table. “Please let me know immediately if Ms. Tarnowski contacts you again, or you get any other information.”

  “Detective,” she said as he rose to go.

  He turned, raising a brow, and she went on: “Remember I said Adrian was capable of anything at all?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, his sister struck me the same way. But worse.” A swallow. “Much, much worse.”

  Outside Cesar met him, and they walked down towards the end of Canyon, then turned right across the bridge over the small and entirely dry Santa Fe River with its strip of grass and cottonwoods. That led to Palace just north of the cathedral, the reddish sandstone bulk of it towering over the adobe and stucco of the neighboring buildings. Salvador jammed his fists into the pockets of his sheepskin jacket and scowled, pausing only to give the finger to a Mercedes that ran the yellow light and nearly hit them. Right afterwards a rusting clunker with the driver’s door held on with coat-hanger wire did the same thing.

  Then he keyed the number into the police net, the service that gave you locations.. . .

  Not listed, it said.

  “This is screwy,” he complained, after he’d filled his partner in.

  He looked at it again; California area code, south-central coast. But. . .

  Not listed.

  “You try, Cesar.”

  Not listed.

  The next time Eric tried, a string of garbage scrolled across his phone.

  “Now that,” he said, “isn’t just fucked-up. That is enemy action.”

  Cesar raised his hands palms up and made a weighing motion; he wasn’t as paranoid as his senior partner. Maybe, it said.

  “But at least we’ve got names to go with our composites. Adrian and Adrienne Brézé,” Eric conceded.

  “That is fucked-up, too, amigo,” Cesar said cheerfully. “Because the databases are still not giving us anything even though we’ve got the names. They don’t have e-mail addresses; they don’t have bank accounts.. . . You did send them out?”

  “Yeah, local, state, Fart, Barf and Itch, and Homeland Insecurity, which means the spooks. It can take a while, even now that they’ve got the whole system cross-referenced.”

  “It shouldn’t take a while to get something. Everyone leaves footprints. The question is, my friend, should we be thinking of this as an arson case, or some sort of kidnapping?”

  “A little early for that. According to Demarcio, she’s wherever-it-is of her own free will. ‘Sorting paintings,’ if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, only we can’t reach wherever she is, and anyone will say anything if they’re persuaded right. But!”

  Cesar grinned and showed his notepad, a picture of an elderly but well-maintained Prius. “Abandoned car on Palace, ticketed and towed about an hour ago. Registered to—”

  “Ellen Tarnowski.”

  “So maybe, it’s not so early to think about maybe some slight element of kidnapping.”

  Salvador’s notepad beeped. “Well, fuck me. Take a look.”

  The picture was from the security cams at Albuquerque International Sunport, the airport in the larger city an hour’s drive south; the face-recognition software had tagged it.

  “That’s Brézé and our mystery man with the gun, all right. Still in the black leather outfit. Nine thirty to San Francisco last night, just opened up and the request got it. Wait a minute—”

  He tapped at the screen. “Fuck me.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They didn’t have tickets. Look.”

  “Could be tickets under someone else’s name.”

  “No, there were two vacant first-class seats, according to the ticketing record. But look, when they cleared for takeoff they recorded all the first-class seats as full. But there aren’t any names attached to these two. Which isn’t supposed to be possible. Breaks three laws and twenty regulations.”

  Cesar made a hissing sound of frustration. “Mierda, for a second I thought we’d get a name on Mr. Shotgun. What about the other end?”

  “Flight got into San Francisco International . . . nothing on the surveillance cam there, and it should have gotten them.”

  The younger man grinned. “Maybe they got out on the way, ¿sí ?”

  “Yeah, at forty thousand feet. So . . . possible kidnapping, by one or two different parties. Or possibly the Brézé twins are acting in concert. One or the other of them’s responsible for the burn, I’d bet my cojones on it.”

  “Okay, we got her last-known location in Santa Fe. Here. Let’s go see how Demarcio’s story holds up.”

  The building that housed La Casa Sena and several upscale shops was mainly nineteenth-century, adobe-built with baked-brick trim, rising around a courtyard patio that featured a pool and a huge cottonwood. Originally it had comprised thirty-three rooms of living space–workroom-storeroom–quasi fortress that presented a blank defensive wall four feet thick to the outside intended to repel Apaches, bandits, rebels and tax collectors, whether Mexican or gringo. Now there were a wine boutique, several stores selling upscale jewelry and foofaraw, and the restaurant occupying two sides of the rectangle.

  Iron tables stood out under the cottonwoods, vacant this time of year; the flower beds were sere and brown as well. A glassed-in box near the entrance covered the original well that had supplied water to the complex. He glanced at the menu posted beside the door; they weren’t open for lunch yet.

  “Ever eaten here?” he asked.

  “Twenty-five for a ham sandwich?” Cesar said, peering at the prices. “You loco?”

  “I had dinner here once. An anniversary, the last one before Julia divorced me and went off to Bali to Find Herself.”

  Cesar snorted. “You can’t find yourself in New Mexico, you aren’t going to find anything different in Cincinnati or damn Bali.”

  “Yeah. But the food was actually pretty damn good.”

  “Jesus, if lunch is like this, what’s dinner for two cost?”

  “About the price of a trip to Paris.” Salvador grinned and read the small print: “And the ham sandwich has green chile aoili, ciabatta, aged Wisconsin Gouda—”

  “It’s still twenty-five dollars for a fucking ham sandwich. Okay, a ham and cheese. I don’t care if the butter was made from the Virgin’s milk.”

  “Can I help you?” a young woman in a bow-tie outfit said, opening the door. “Lunch doesn’t start seating until—”

  They flashed their badges. “The manager, please.”

  That brought the manager out quickly. “I’m Mr. Tortensen—”

  After the introductions the manager showed them through to his office, though Salvador felt as if half the contents of his wallet had vanished just stepping over the threshold of the front door into the pale Taos-style interior. Even the office was stylish. The man was worried, brown-haired, in his thirties, lean to the point of emaciation, and licking his lips.

  What sort of restaurant manager is skinny? Salvador thought. Well, probably this far up the scale the customers don’t like to think eating can make you fat.

  “What can I do for you, Officers?” he said.

  Salvador leaned back in the chair. He knew he could be intimidating to some. People who’d led sheltered lives particularly. He didn’t have to do anything, even if they were people who’d consciously think of him as something they’d scrape off their shoe on a hot day.

  “You had two guests at dinner yesterday,” he said. “From a little after five thirty to seven thirty. Ellen Tarnowski and Adrienne Brézé. I’d like some details.”

  The man started very slightly; then his mouth firmed. “I’m afraid
our clients’ confidentiality is—”

  Cesar cut in smoothly: “Ms. Tarnowski’s house burned down last night, and there’s suspicion of arson. Her car was found and towed from a parking spot not too far from here. We have independent confirmation that she was here last night, and she’s a missing person with this as her last-known location.”

  Salvador nodded. “So we’d really appreciate your cooperation in this arson and possibly kidnapping investigation.”

  The manager started; short of shouting terrorism it was about the best possible way of getting his attention.

  “Let me make a few calls,” he said, pulling out his phone.

  Cesar worked on his notepad. Salvador crossed his arms on his chest and enjoyed watching the manager sweat as he tried to get back to his routine. People came in to talk to Mr. Tortensen about purchasing and things that probably made perfect sense. At last a harassed-looking man in his early twenties came in; he was slimly handsome, but looked as if he really wasn’t used to waking up this early. Which, with a night-shift job like waiting tables, he might not be.

  “Ah, this is Joseph Morales, Officer,” Tortensen said. “He had A-seventeen . . . their table . . . last night.”

  Maricón, Salvador thought; clinically, he wasn’t bothered by them.

  There had been one he knew who was an artist with a Javelin launcher. He could put a rocket right through a firing slit, which has a good dirty joke in it somewhere.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Morales said to the policemen with transparent dishonesty, but he was at least trying to hide it. “How can I help you?”

  The restaurant manager started to speak, and Salvador held up a hand. “We’re interested in a party of two at one of your tables last night.”

  He held up his notepad with Tarnowski’s face.

  The waiter laughed—it was almost a giggle. “Oh, them. Yes, I remember them well. They ordered—well, Ms. Brézé ordered—”

  He rattled off a list of things, most of which Salvador had never heard of. He held up a hand.

  “What did that come to?”

  “With the wines? About . . . twenty-five hundred.”

  The manager was working his desktop, and nodded confirmation. Cesar gave a smothered sound that had probably started as an agonized grunt, passed through indignation, and was finally suppressed with a tightening of the mouth.

  “Tip?”

  “Very generous. Seven hundred.”

  Outside, Cesar shook his head. “Seven hundred for the tip? And you went there?”

  “I was starting to get worried about Julia, wanted to show her I thought about something besides my job. Didn’t work. Three weeks later she told me I was just as far away living here as I had been when they deployed me to Kandahar.”

  “Ai!”

  “Yeah, sweet, eh? And I didn’t leave a seven-hundred-dollar tip, either.”

  “What’s the next stop?”

  “I’ll try to see if anyone around saw the van that Adrian Brézé and Mystery Man in Leather were using after they left the burn site.”

  Salvador laughed. “And I’ll get back and catch up on my paperwork, and keep trying to locate that phone number. Don’t you wish this were a TV show?”

  “So we could just work one case at a time? Sí, the thought has crossed my mind. Along with a lot else. Like, who was the old guy in black leather? How does he fit in?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Harvey Ledbetter leaned against his pickup and pushed the sunglasses up on his forehead before he crossed his arms on his chest. He was a lean, grizzled man a little below six feet, his close-cropped brown hair shot with iron gray above a long, bony face, extremely fit for his early sixties. His eyes were startlingly blue against the weathered tan of his face.

  Hot metal pinged in the engine, and the summer sun was pleasantly warm, without the humid rankness he’d grown up with. The breeze from the west held a little coolness; the Big Sur coastline wasn’t far away. This dirt road ended in a field of long golden yellow summer grass that smelled like old hay, above a ravine that cut down through a redwood grove to the sea. Wind soughed through the grass, and birds chased insects in swift, swooping curves.

  He drew on his cigarette and savored the harsh bite. The Wreakings that shielded his mind were a teasing feeling at the corner of perception’s eye, like a slight continuous buzzing. Nicotine helped long-learned mental disciplines to keep him reasonably calm, despite the knowledge of what was coming towards him. A click sounded through the bud in his right ear: alert.

  It was some comfort to know that hidden snipers were covering the meeting site with rifles firing silver-jacketed .338 Lapua magnum rounds. Some comfort, but not too much. Tōkairin Michiko was a pureblood. She could sculpt the probabilistic foam underlying reality at a level that made his own meager talent look like a toy water pistol compared to an Apache gunship. Despite defenses as elaborate as he could make them, at close range she could probably simply make his ticker give out, or block a vein in his brain for a few crucial seconds. She could certainly do it if given time to use glyphs and Mhabrogast to focus the effect, or if she used something preactivated.

  A quiet burble of engine, a singing and crunching sound of gravel under wheels. The car snaked up the switchbacks of the road towards him, trailing dust. His brows rose a little when it was close enough for him to see the make: a Nissan GT-X, low-slung sleek elegance, with a double-turbocharged engine that put out more power than most armored personnel carriers weighing twenty times as much. You could use that on dirt country roads, but . . .

  Tacky. Very fucking rich-bitch, Michiko-sama.

  It was chrome yellow, with a license plate bearing the mon symbol of the Tōkairin clan and the black sun pierced by a jagged trident that was the sigil of the Council of Shadows.

  On the one hand, it won’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t know already. On the other hand, it’s worrisome that they’re so confident now. The last generation was a lot more careful about hiding. Michiko’s bunch just doesn’t give a shit. I wonder if they’ll register it as the official Trademark of Evil one of these days.

  The sports car pulled to a stop ten yards away, the quiet sound of its engine dying instantly. Harvey noted without surprise that the position would block one of his snipers and give the other the worst possible shot; Michiko probably wasn’t even consciously aware that she’d done that. He threw his cigarette to the ground, twisted it under his heel and moved to the tailgate of his pickup, which would put her back under both scopes.

  She got out of the car with a lithe catlike motion and walked towards him, smiling. She wore low-slung black Key Closet skinny jeans, which he admitted she could bring off, and a sleeveless silk shirt. It all showed the sort of figure high-bred Shadowspawn females tended to have, slim but high-tensile.

  All right if you like weasels with small tits, he thought whimsically, fighting down a hundred thousand years of instinctive terror. In her case, blond Japanese weasels.

  He bowed his head slightly as she approached. She took off her sunglasses, tucked one arm of them in the neck of her shirt and returned the gesture, a little more deeply.

  “Hoping the water will fall out of my head?” she said, in pluperfect Californian English.

  “Well, you may notice I’m not offerin’ cucumbers,” he said dryly, the Texan Hill Country rasp strong in his voice.

  It was only in his imagination that she smelled of rotting blood. There wasn’t any physical way of telling her apart from any rich Yonsei girl, unless you counted the tiny golden flecks in the irises. The Tōkairin had thought they were ninja sorcerers until the missionaries of the Order of the Black Dawn arrived in the early Meiji era and told them where their powers really came from, and how to make the next generation stronger.

  “You’re being very unfriendly. I can sense hostility even with those tiresome shields,” she said, pouting slightly. “Is this any way to treat a friend?”

  “No,” he said.

  After a moment she
shrugged. “Oh, well, if you want to be all tiresome and businesslike. I’ve got the preliminary schedule for the Council meeting in Tbilisi. Who’s coming in, when, and where they’re staying, plus the security protocols.”

  He raised his brows. “They’ve settled on those already? Bad tradecraft.”

  She shrugged. “It’s a protocol. The older generation . . .”

  He nodded. Shadowspawn tended to be fanatically conservative, more so as they got older. Many of the current Council lords had been youngsters when their parents carefully directed Archduke Ferdinand down the wrong road in Sarajevo.

  “We’ve made a formal request for a security review, warning that terrorists might strike, but they turned it down. Of course.”

  “We?” Harvey asked.

  “Ah, the . . . Progressive Party, we’re calling ourselves. Or the whippersnappers, to the other side.”

  Harvey laughed; it was quite genuine, and he wished it back.

  One slim yellow brow went up. “I notice that you’re not exactly the official Brotherhood yourself, Mr. Ledbetter,” she said. “They’re not nearly imaginative enough to try using us against one another the way you have. Perhaps you’re not as different from us as you’d like to think.”

  He hid his wince, but it was her turn to laugh; the silver tinkle was like splints shoved under the fingernails of his mind.

  Don’t talk to them beyond the bare necessity, he repeated to himself. Don’t show any reactions. Don’t emote, don’t engage. They’re naturally good at getting inside your head even if you’re warded, and they play games and manipulate the way they breathe. Don’t give her leverage to fuck with your mind. Just the minimum.

  He held out his hand. She extended hers, with a memory stick in it; his came back before skin could touch skin.

  “Now I’m hurt. Don’t you trust me?” she said archly.

  “ ’Bout as much as I trust a cobra,” he said.

  “Hssssssss!”

  The sound was startlingly realistic. He waited, immobile, until she tossed the little data-storage unit. He caught it out of the air, then waited while she walked back to her car with a taunting swing of the hips. The superchargers whined, and the long yellow-and-black shape seemed to stretch, vanishing in a spray of dust and gravel as she tapped the accelerator. Harvey dropped the stick into a plastic baggie, tucked it into his pocket and sighed, then produced a handkerchief to wipe his face.