The Council of Shadows (14 page)

Then, louder: “Rashid! Jasim! Come quickly! Alert the others; the Jews and Crusaders are here!”

There was a brief burst of fire from below.

MP-5
, Harvey thought.
'Bout half a clip.

It was racking-loud inside, but through the thick coral-block walls a casual ear would miss it, or mistake it for a piece of machinery stripping a gear.

Harvey shook his head with a
tsk
sound. If you could Wreak, even the little he and the other two could manage, you shouldn't need to shoot.

“Guha, bring Jasim in, would you?” he said, speaking normally. “It ain't polite to keep friends apart.”

To the man in the chair: “I took the liberty of havin' some company of my own along on our little visit. Sorta forgot to mention it, on the off chance you'd be unreasonable.”

The pickup mike was in a little skin-colored patch on his throat. The bud in his ear was similarly tiny and inconspicuous. The Brotherhood might make its operatives fly coach, but they didn't stint on gear.

A woman's voice with a singsong accent spoke: “Jasim's in bad shape, oh, yes, indeed. Will this much of him do?”

He could hear her voice twice, through the radio and from the door behind him as she walked through and tossed something through the air. It landed on the desk with a wet, meaty thump.

“It's very
big
,” she went on.

Which was what
Jasim
meant: big, or huge or strong. The man had probably taken the name because he was a six-four slab of muscled beef. Dhul Fiqar scrabbled backwards a little in his seat; the head of his follower was wrapped in a piece of burlap sacking, but that fell away to show the blank-eyed contorted face. A spray of blood whipped across his cheeks and mouth, and he scrabbled a hand at it in involuntary reflex. The metallic-coppery scent was suddenly heavy in the damp hot air, and flies buzzed downward.

That's more Farmer's style, really,
Harvey thought.
But I suspect Guha is a bit prejudiced about these folks. You can take the girl out of Hindustan, but you can't take the Hindu out of the girl. Come to think about it, her family were Kashmiri Pandits back a ways, if I recall correctly.

Theoretically once you knew about the Shadowspawn-Brotherhood war and the reality behind the false front of history, human tribes and nations and religions shouldn't matter anymore. The ancient enemy was more important, and besides that, you learned how they used human rivalries to keep the prey species down. In practice it didn't always work that way, not for humans, sometimes not even for Shadowspawn.

“There was a machete,” she said half apologetically. “I think he was using it to open coconuts and then tried to open me.”

The front of her cotton blouse was soaked and dripping with sticky red. It clung to her body so closely that the blouse was transparent, and he could see her navel and the outline of her sports bra.

“It seemed bloody appropriate to use it on him,” she finished.

She chuckled, and Dhul Fiqar flinched a little. It probably didn't help that she was a woman.

“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:

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.

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.

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.”