The Council of Shadows (26 page)

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
.”

 

 

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.”