The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “Enough, and knowledge of how to make more. The Council may plan to step in as saviors; instead they will be exposed, and their numbers are so few that even the Power would not be enough, not against a humanity knowing what they are and united against them. Nothing is certain, but it may be the turning point in this long war!”

  “Well, that’s good to hear. At least this wasn’t a complete wash.”

  “No. And—” He frowned.

  “Aha! That’s your portentous frown.”

  “I had a flicker. When Étienne mentioned the children. Something. . . yes, portentous. A shadow from the future. Something involving them; some decision I will make concerning them. That is . . . is becoming. . . a crucial point on which much will turn.”

  “What sort of decision?”

  He smiled. “That is impossible to know at this point.”

  She punched his shoulder; it was like striking a layer of resilient hard rubber through the fine cloth.

  “In other words, you know it’ll be important, but not how. And you don’t know whether deciding one way or another will make things good or bad!”

  “It is often that way when many adepts surrounded a nexus. The most fortunate choice will gradually become clear.”

  Ellen made an exasperated sound, and then a little squeak as his hand gripped the nape of her neck.

  “Perhaps you worry too much, and about the wrong things, my sweet.”

  Ellen fluttered her long fair lashes. “Why, whatever could you mean, good sir?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dream.

  The sense of sick dread got worse as the flames erupted through the door and Eric Salvador was flung back to lie helpless in the dust of Afghanistan that had eaten so many soldiers’ bones in so many wars. This time he could see the figure who walked through the fire.

  It was a woman, young, naked, her face doll-like and pretty, with slanted eyes, hair piled up on her head in an elaborate coiffure that looked Asian. If he’d seen a picture like that he’d have gotten horny. Instead he felt as if giant fingernails were screeching down slate everywhere in the universe, as if he should run and run and run, and there was a stink that wasn’t physical at all, and he retched hopelessly.

  “Who’s been a naughty boy?” she crooned. “Naughty, naughty. I’m naughty too, sometimes.”

  Then she knelt by Johnson’s body, only it wasn’t Johnson anymore, it was Cesar, and he was naked too. They rolled in the dust, coupling like dogs, but Cesar was screaming. When she raised her head, blood masked her mouth and dripped from her chin and poured from Cesar’s throat. Yellow flecks sparkled in her dark brown eyes.

  “I just love brave men,” she said. “They’re delicious.”

  “Christ!”

  This time there were cigarettes under his searching hand. Eric fumbled the lighter twice. The dark coal glowed like an eye as he sucked in the smoke. He fumbled for the light switch and sat with his feet on the floor, then pulled the smoke into his lungs again, coughed, inhaled again. After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he looked at the time. It was just three o’clock, which meant he’d been asleep a bit less than two hours. The air in his bedroom smelled close, despite the warm breeze that rattled the venetian blinds against the frame of the window. Sweat cooled on his back and flanks.

  He looked at the phone. “I’m not going to call. Cesar puts up with a lot, but he’s not sleeping alone this last month. I can’t tell him I had a bad—”

  The phone rang. He picked it up.

  “¿Jefe?”

  “There’s anyone else at this address?”

  “Get over here. I’ve got something you need to see. About the Brézé case.”

  Eric Salvador knew something was wrong. He could feel it, a prickling along the back of his neck. Cesar’s house was completely dark except for the light from the street lamp, which was very damned odd even at three thirty, since Cesar had just called him. His partner’s new Chinese import was parked in the driveway; the ground between the road and the house was gravel, with a few weeds poking through. The neighborhood was utterly quiet, and the stars were bright. A cat walked by, looked at him with eyes that turned into green mirrors for an instant, and then passed. Nothing else moved.

  Shit, he mouthed soundlessly, and pulled his Glock 22, his thumb moving the safety to off.

  Then he touched the door. It swung in. He crossed the hallway, instinctively keeping the muzzle up and tucking his shoulder into the angle between the bedroom door and the wall. Then the smell hit him. He looked down. It looked black in the low light, but the tackiness under his foot was unmistakable.

  “Are you certain, Herr Brézé?”

  “Yes, I am, Herr Müller,” Adrian said. “And no offense, but how often have we had this little conversation over the years?”

  The conversation was in English, the easiest common language. Professor Duquesne had boiled with indignation for an instant when it turned out that Müller’s French was only passable, worse than Ellen’s. The middle-aged German banker spoke English with near-complete fluency, if also with an accent that reminded her irresistibly of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, which one of her roommates studying classic film at NYU had played obsessively despite complaints. He even looked a little bit like the actor, though heavier-set, and with thinning blond hair combed over the top of his head.

  It was a good movie for its day, even in 2D. But not thirty-six times!

  Müller sighed. “I hope our wealth-management section has not disappointed you, Mr. Brézé.”

  The Commerzbank Tower gave an excellent view of downtown Frankfurt, being nearly a thousand feet tall, complete with open gardens every twenty stories or so and a central atrium. Müller’s office had a prestigious amount of exterior window, and let you see that unlike most European cities the center was dominated by skyscrapers, if not to a Manhattan-esque degree.

  “I’ve never been to Frankfurt before,” she said, partly to defuse the heavy tension. “It’s very high-rise. Not at all like most central cities over here.”

  “Ah . . . there was extensive rebuilding after the Second World War,” Müller’s secretary said with a discreet cough.

  She was named Saraçoğlu and she was youngish, about Ellen’s age, with even more of an hourglass figure. The cool gray business suit tried to play that down; she had black hair cropped very short, gave off an air of efficiency and was almost as dark as Adrian. There was a slight guttural accent to her English, German and French.

  Ah, Ellen thought. Speaking of wars. Even in the twenty-first, that was a bit tactless of me.

  Urban renewal courtesy of the 8th Air Force and the RAF, and the rebuilding in the three generations since had reached for the currently gray and drizzly sky around the gray and flowing River Main.

  Less for the historical preservationists to preserve. Though in a lot of Europe stuff that looks like it was medieval or Renaissance or baroque is post-1945 restoration of buildings that were blasted down to the basement. Prague’s the only one that wasn’t heavily damaged, if I remember correctly.

  There was silence for a moment and then Adrian addressed the banker:

  “Quite the contrary, it’s been very satisfactory. I have my own reasons for new arrangements that are not, strictly speaking, of a business nature. Let’s leave it at that.”

  The decor in the big room was old-fashioned icy-modernist with very subdued PoMo flourishes, probably because times hadn’t been flush enough to redo since the last renovation in the early years of the century. Müller’s desk was a glittering expanse of dark stone, for example, and so was the oval conference table. On a plinth there was a small sculpture that looked like a length of bronze intestine, and a faint smell of the flowers in Bohemian crystal vases.

  “In good conscience I cannot advise moving substantial assets into gold at this point, much less distributing them as you propose,” Müller said. “And why pay a premium for coin and small bars? And silver . . . not a good investment at present.”
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  Adrian smiled. “I appreciate your concern, Herr Müller. I don’t expect to make much return on the transfers.”

  “You realize that Swiss bank security is, ah—”

  “Not what it was, yes. That is why I’m diversifying the locations, and not just to the Caymans, you will note.”

  Another sigh. “As you wish, mein Herr.”

  His secretary opened an accordion file of black leather and began producing documents, along with a print-and-retina scanner that she plugged into a secure link on the table.

  “First,” Müller said, “the signing authority for the initial fifty-millioneuro tranche under the Aegis Project fund, to be held in short-term commercial paper until drawn. You and Frau Brézé will both have full discretionary authority, and Herr Doktor Duquesne unless and until you remove him. All payments authorized by Monsieur Duquesne will be listed as withdrawn from the project’s funds, whose ownership will of course be strictly confidential.”

  They signed and entered their biometric data and DNA samples; Duquesne was looking a bit stunned at the amount he was being given to play with, just for starters. Plus an official salary of a hundred thousand euros a year personally, which was extravagant for a European academic.

  “And here is Frau Brézé’s power of attorney and authorization to access the other funds, and her personal account as per your instructions.”

  She darted a quick glance at Adrian, and found him smiling with that odd quirk-mouthed expression, half-teasing.

  “I thought you might want to pick up a few pictures while we were in Europe, my sweet,” he said. “You deserve it more than I, in any case. You will derive more pleasure from it; and that will give me great pleasure.”

  Ellen read the papers before she put her name to them. Essentially Adrian had irrevocably signed over an undivided half interest in everything he owned worldwide. And there was a personal account she could use for day-to-day needs with a total draw of. . .

  She choked slightly at the amount. Day-to-day needs like buying Nob Hill, or possibly Oahu, given the way the real estate market had tanked again lately.

  Money doesn’t really mean anything to him, she reminded herself. He can pick stock market winners by intuition. But it does to me! I grew up poor. Trailer-trash poor, except that we had Granddad’s house, which was what a retired miner could buy in Swoyersville in the nineteen sixties. My father was a no-good drunk and a sponger and I clawed my way into university working three jobs and getting scholarships in my spare time. Now I can collect Old Masters if I want to.

  Of course, there were drawbacks.

  Monsters who can walk through walls are going to keep trying to kill me, I have to shoot people in alleys or stab them with knives.. . . On the other hand, I get Adrian, who’s worth it all and more. And someday it may be fun to be very, very rich, if civilization hasn’t been destroyed in the meantime. If I can ever manage to feel unguilty about it. Maybe I’ll endow a foundation. . . .

  She laughed and signed her name with a flourish. The prospect of enough leisure and safety to wallow in upper-class guilt and go around contributing to good causes was fairly remote right now.

  “Thank you, Frau Saraçoğlu,” Müller said.

  Not Fräulein, Ellen thought. That’s dropped out of use for anyone except little girls.

  “These to the secure vault now, bitte,” he continued, indicating the documents.

  Adrian’s phone rang, a soft sequence of notes from a famous piece by Delibes, one that was a bit of a joke if you knew how it had been used in the movies. He tapped it, and she could faintly hear:

  “Pooka here.”

  The way his face went blank made her sit up and take notice. Duquesne didn’t catch it, and Müller was unreadable because he always looked like a truck had just run over his puppy, but Saraçoğlu noticed something.

  “Pardon,” Adrian said, and walked over to a corner of the room.

  The conversation was minimal; from the way his eyes flicked to the screen, text was coming through as well, or possibly a visual. When he tapped it closed and returned to the table he was frowning.

  “Herr Müller, we’ll need to charter a jet. Something with transatlantic capacity, and immediately. Whatever’s available.”

  Müller looked even more lugubrious, but his secretary/assistant merely nodded and began tapping at her keyboard even before he prompted her.

  “Any specifications, Herr Brézé?” she asked.

  “That it fly all the way,” Adrian said dryly. “The flight plan is Hamburg to Tucson, Arizona. Earliest possible departure.”

  In the elevator on their way to the ground Ellen looked at him.

  “Harvey,” he said to her; which told Duquesne nothing.

  Then to the professor: “It seems you’ll be having a colleague sooner than we thought, monsieur.”

  Peter! Ellen thought with a stab of delight.

  He’d been the only friend she’d had at Rancho Sangre Sagrado . . . unless you counted people who were obscenely evil, batshit crazy with variations on Stockholm syndrome, or both. Certainly the only one she’d been able to talk freely with, Jose, had been all right, but he was born a renfield.

  The Frenchman was looking at his own notepad; Adrian had transferred a list of suppliers and locations.

  “Sweden?” he said. “An abandoned military base? And underground?”

  “Discrétion, monsieur. Toujours discrétion. Remember what happened in Paris.”

  He shivered a little. “And these people, these suppliers . . . are they reliable?”

  “Entirely, as long as they’re paid. Will there be a problem with logistics?”

  “I am familiar with that aspect, and there are some individuals I could hire to handle administrative matters, perhaps?”

  “I leave that entirely in your hands. I wish results, and quickly; I don’t care how. More than our lives depend upon that, but certainly our lives, at least.”

  Duquesne’s expression was dubious, some fear, with a hint of exaltation. From her acquaintance with Peter Boase she understood that. Anyone who’d spent his adult life fighting for every penny of grant money would be attracted by the prospect. It was a peculiarly rarefied and intellectual form of greed in the service of pure curiosity.

  “But it is—” he began.

  “Most irregular, I know. You are not . . . how do the Germans put it. . . you are not operating in a salonfähig fashion anymore.”

  When they were alone for an instant waiting for the cab, she leaned close to Adrian.

  “He’s alive?” she asked. “Peter’s alive?”

  “Yes. Evidently my parents . . . acquired him rather than killing him. Possibly because of the research he was doing for Adrienne. And he has escaped.”

  “He escaped? He’s safe, then?”

  “Escaped, but not at all safe; he contacted Harvey, and that makes it entirely likely the enemy will be on his trail as well. That’s why we have to get there as soon as possible, while Monsieur Duquesne gets his project started here.”

  Peter Boase gripped the silver table knife convulsively. The night was much cooler than the day even here in southern Arizona. Outside the night was silent, save for the hoot of a great horned owl once as it glided past. He tensed at the sound, relaxed as he realized what it was, then tensed again.

  It’s not paranoia. They really can turn into birds. That would be a good way to scout around.

  His eyes flicked to the ancient LCD beside the bed. One o’clock in the morning. Hours before the sun would come up and. . .

  Make things just a little less dangerous. There’s absolutely nothing to prevent one of them from walking in at noon and just fucking shooting me. Or one of their hired guns. That would make me just as dead. Adrienne had that platoon of mercenaries working for her. Plus the police in Rancho Sangre. Plus probably they could have the government send people to kill me. No, make that certainly, from what they said around me, and they had no reason to lie. It actually explains a lot of things, o
nce you know they’re pulling the strings.

  Maybe it was paranoia. How could you think about this stuff and not go crazy? There was even a slight impulse just to slash his own wrists with the sharpened table knife and get it over with. It wasn’t the animal escape from pain that had tempted him while he was undergoing withdrawal. Now the impulse came from the knowledge that he probably was going to die anyway, and very painfully, and the sheer tension of waiting every second.

  He hadn’t bothered to close the window. The fresh air was worth it, when the people . . . things . . . he feared could walk through walls. He’d gotten thoroughly sick of the smells in this room, too.

  But the wall-walking thing meant they could be right behind him. Right now.

  He turned quickly. Was that a noise?

  “Nothing. Sheesh!”

  Peter straightened up with a shaky laugh and turned back towards the door.

  The front six feet of the giant python were already reared up man-tall. He had just enough time to see the head flash as it struck like a triphammer into his shoulder, and the knife went skittering across the floor. Then the coils were whipping around him, like trying to fight a berserk steel cable, around his ribs and his left arm, squeezing, squeezing.. . .

  “Isn’t it wonderful that Peter escaped?” Ellen smiled.

  She lay back in the deeply padded recliner and fought not to sleep as the engines rose to a muted scream outside and acceleration pushed at her.

  The aircraft was an Airbus A321 Elite, a two-engine wide-body that had served as the toy of an oil prince, before being sold on the rental market when he tired of it and bought something more recent; he’d probably moved up to an A380, because judging by this, the concept of restraint wasn’t one of the files on his hard drive.

  “Perhaps it’s your Power operating without your knowing it?” she asked.

  Effectively the plane was a luxury penthouse with wings, complete with gym, study, entertainment center and two huge bedrooms, with an air of jasmine and ozone. Half the cargo compartment below was extra fuel tanks, which gave it more range than a B-52. She felt a little guilty using it for the pair of them—the normal complement of passengers would be over two hundred—but it was the first thing that had been available, if money were no object.