S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

"You really mean it," Adrian said.

" Oh, yeah," Harvey said, relaxed, one arm hooked around the rear of the chair. "That's my price. Take it or leave it."

Adrian glanced at Ellen. "I can deny you nothing," he said, and the words were for her. "My oath, old friend. And I am glad of it, too. Once more Ellen is making me do something I very much wanted to do…but I doubted my own wanting."

"Okay, first installment on the payback," Harvey said promptly. He pulled out his phone and selected a number. "I can recognize when my talent's prompting me, even if it isn't in your league. Just tell her Operation Defarge is a go. Nothin' else."

Adrian shot him a look, shrugged, and took the phone.

"You have reached Poison Consulting. All of our operatives are serving other customers at the moment; please leave a name and number and we'll get back to you."

"Mowgli here. Lefarge is a go," Adrian said, and snapped off the phone.

"Mowgli?" Ellen said; it had been a long time since she read Kipling.

"My code name," Adrian said. "One of them."

"Oh…the human boy raised by wolves…Bit of an ironic inversion…"

He sighed. "We should go back to Santa Fe for a stop. I need to pick up a few things there. Then we'll head to California. It's some time before the Council meets, and…I was hoping our physicists would come up with something that might help us there."

"So was I," Harvey said. "When you're ready, I'll come a-runnin to earn the rest of my favor. Meantime, business calls and it's a far, far better thing."

Ellen turned and looked at Adrian as the Texan nodded and left.

"What was that?"

Adrian frowned slightly. "Harvey isn't any great adept, but he has mental shields like machined tungsten carbide," he said. "There was just a flicker…"

Ellen snorted. "You get too dependent on reading people's minds, darling. My take is that he was improvising, but he has something in mind you're not going to like. At all. Whatever this Defarge thing is, it's going to be a bone in your throat."

Adrian shrugged; then went abstracted for a moment. "The world-lines are tangled, too many Wreaking along them…but you are right. Let's get on the road, then. Perhaps we can rest a little in Santa Fe."

"Maybe I can see Giselle? She'll have worried herself sick, and I didn't dare write."

"Perhaps."

Ellen smiled. Then something teased at her memory. It wasn't all that long since her graduation, and she'd had to take English literature courses as well.

Defarge, she thought. That Dickens book. She's the one who sat knitting by the guillotine during the Terror, while the heads of the aristos fell into the basket.

Adrian shrugged again. "One of the reasons I liked living in Santa Fe for so long was how quiet it is. Little happens there."

"Well, that's unique," the Santa Fe chief of police said.

The forensics team moved around the room. Most of them had more than one hat; Santa Fe's police force didn't run to elaborate hierarchies.

Eric Salvador felt a surge of anger, and throttled it back automatically. It wouldn't help…and he'd said the same sort of thing. You did, it helped you deal with what you were seeing. Usually.

Cecile was on the bed. Usually dead bodies didn't have much expression, but usually they weren't arched in a galvanic spasm. They'd have to break her bones to get her into a bag. The look on her face was not quite like anything he'd ever seen, and his experience was broader than he liked. Now he'd have to have this in his head for the rest of his life. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat.

Cesar was naked, lying on his face between the bed and the window. His pistol was in his right hand; the spent brass of fourteen shells littered the floor around him. Most of them were in the coagulating blood, turned dark red now with brown spots. In his left was clutched a knife, not a fighting knife, but some sort of tableware. A wedge of glass as broad as a man's hand at its base was in his throat, the point coming out the back of his neck.

"This is a murder-suicide," the chief said quietly.

Salvador stirred. The older man didn't look at him as he continued.

"That's exactly what it is, Eric."

He doesn't call me by my first name very often.

"Probably that's what the evidence will show. Sir," Salvador added.

I've seen friends die before. I didn't sit down and cry. I did my job. I can do it now.

He hadn't been this angry then, either. He'd killed every mouj he could while he was doing tours on the rock pile, and it had been a lot of tours and a good round number of kills, but he hadn't usually hated them. Sort of a sour disgust, most of the time; he hadn't thought of them as personal enough to hate, really.

This is extremely personal. Now I hate.

"Chief."

That was one of the evidence squad. He walked around the pool of blood to them. "We got something on the windowsill, going out. Sort of strange. When did you say you got here, Salvador?"

"Three thirty. Half an hour after…Cesar called me."

The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.

Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he'd recorded on the ledge turned into a print as he ran the enhancement. A paw print.

"You notice a dog? Or something else like that?"

"No," he said dully. "Just a cat."

"Well, that's not it." The print was too large for a house cat. "Probably just something drawn by the smell. Big coyote maybe, the things are all over town."

"Time of death?"

"Recent but hard to pin down, on a warm night like this. Everything's fully compatible with sometime between the time you got the phone call and the time you called it in."

The chief put a hand on his shoulder and urged him outside. He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

"You know you can't be on this investigation, Eric," the older man said. "Go home. Get some sleep. Crawl into a bottle of tequila like a worm to get some sleep if you have to. Take a couple of days off and as many bottles as it takes."

"That doesn't last," he said.

"It works for a while, and the pain afterwards distracts you too," the chief said.

Salvador nodded, flicked the cigarette into the weedy gravel of the front yard and walked steadily over to his car. He pulled out very, very carefully, and drove equally carefully to Saint Francis, down to the intersection with Rodeo and the entrance to the I-25. Only then did he pull over into a boarded-up complex of low buildings probably originally meant for medical offices or real estate agents, built by some crazed optimist back in the late aughts or early teens.

"Okay, Cesar, talk to me," he said aloud, and slid the data card he'd palmed into the slot on his notebook; nobody would notice, not when he'd left his shoes standing in the pool of blood. "This had better not be your taxes. Tell me how to get the cabron."

The screen came on, only one file, and that was video. Salvador tapped his finger on it.

Vision. Three ten in the carat at the lower right corner. Cesar was sweating as he spoke, wearing a bathrobe but with his Glock sitting in front of him within range of the pickup camera; the background was his home office-cum-TV room, lit only by one small lamp.

"I'm recording this before you get here, jefe, 'cause I've got a really bad feeling about this. I was on the Net tonight and I got a query from the Quantico analysis lab we sent the puke and blood to back when before we were told to back off, you know? They said there were some 'interesting anomalies' and did I want any more information on the Breze guy, they attached the file. It looked like a legit file, it was big enough."

Cesar's image licked its lips; he could see that, but Salvador's mind superimposed how he'd looked with half his face lying in a pool of his own blood.