The Council of Shadows (15 page)

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 Brézé 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 piñon 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.

“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?”

“
Sí, 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 Brézé's
puke, right?”

“Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I'm pretty sure that Brézé 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 Brézé's—”

“Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there's no Brézé 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?”

“
Sí.
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.

“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 Brézé 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.

“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 Brézé 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 Brézés 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.”

“You sure?”

“I've known him a long time. We're related, cousins.”

“You old-timers here are
all
related,” Cesar said. “It's not fucking fair.”

“You people who just got off the bus don't understand the strength of our family feelings. Can I help it if we're descended from
conquistadores
?”

“Fast
conquistadores
and slow
india
girls. Hell, my family goes right back to Cortés too.”

“It does?”

“Sure. One of my great-many-times-grandmothers was squatting in the dirt grilling a guinea pig when he rode by on his horse.”

Salvador's grin was brief; his eyes made a to-business flick.

“So . . .” Cesar said. He leaned back against a wall. “How long do you want to let it cool before we start poking in violation of our solemn promise?”

“Couple of months,” Salvador said. “First thing, get all the data on an SD card and make some copies and let me have one. Scrub your notebook and anything you've got at the office. None of this ever goes on anything connected to anything else.”

Cesar grinned. “I like the way you think,
jefe
.”

E
llen kept her breathing deep and steady against the fear that made her want to pant as she walked the streets of Paris behind the professor.

The professor who's about to be ambushed by werewhatsits and hired killers. What a way to See Europe and Die Screaming. The other parts of this honeymoon trip were a
lot
more fun.

She pulled the raw, chilly air deep into her lungs, freighted with traffic and cooking and old stone. A little fog lay on the river, with the running lights of boats shining through it like a blurred Impressionist cityscape, and wisps of it were pooling along the cobblestones. Beads of moisture starred her eyelashes, and a lock of hair came out from under her floppy hat and stuck to her brow.

“He's crossing the river on the Pont Marie and heading for the Saint-Paul metro station,” Adrian said. “Not long now.”

They followed. Already Ellen had a sense that she was in a bubble of nonspace, and it grew stronger with the thronging life of Le Marais moving around; it was that kind of neighborhood. Ellen kept her head slightly down, avoided eye contact, neither hurried nor dawdled.

She spotted the professor's ponytail as he walked along, deep in thought, his hands in his jacket pockets and his head down. The street life was busy this early in the evening, dense traffic, thronged sidewalks, light from lamps on curled wrought-iron brackets reaching out from the walls. Nothing was high-rise—older stone-and-stucco buildings for the most part, in pale colors. But it felt densely urban in a way that even far more built-up American cities didn't, as if you could feel the layers of time here beside the Seine, all the way back to the Lutetia Parisiorum of the Gauls and Romans. The latest included a restaurant that had a menorah in the window and advertised, BLINIS, SAUMON, ZAKOUSHKIS ET VODKAS, and some remarkably well-stocked gay-themed fetish stores.

She eeled through it all, keeping her target in sight without being obvious about it.

God, it's like I've done this a thousand times before!
she thought, unconsciously sliding away from Adrian so that they wouldn't be together to jog the target's memory if he turned around, pausing now and then to pretend to look in a window.
And I have, in Adrian's head.

Tailing, detecting a tail, losing one, in cities that had included Paris and a dozen others, or the equivalent skills in forest or desert . . . that and a hundred other things, things more arcane and terrible. There in her mind, ready to surface when she needed them.

And I'm not even very frightened. I was frightened at first
in there
, because it was all so real, but I could keep it under control because I knew
consciously
that it wasn't. Now when it's really real I'm just . . . just taut and ready. And a bit apprehensive in a sort of reasoned way, as if this were something I was
used
to doing. I've even beat
Adrian
at it a couple of times, the non-Power parts, at least.

“This is
weird
,” she murmured almost inaudibly. “Hey, isn't it a cliché that marriage doesn't change you? Well, it has changed me, already!”