Laura Gilman - Curse the Dark

She gave him a wide-eyed look of impatience. “So how late is our alleged contact?”

Oh. Right. Sergei checked his watch again, needlessly since the hands had only moved five minutes since the last time he’d checked. “Two hours from the time we landed, minus the time it took us to actually make it through customs, including the time I’ve been waiting for you to get back—”

“Yeah, I stopped in the bathroom, okay?” She bared her teeth at him. “No more fur. Anyway. I’m voting this chick isn’t going to show. Ya think?”

He thought so as well, but was hesitant to agree too quickly. It wouldn’t do to blow off their Silence contact on their very first assignment. Wren was cheerfully, aggressively able to ignore anything that wasn’t in the process of attacking her. But he was supposed to be the business guy, and part of business was dealing with the political aspects of it all. Maintain confidence in the active agent. But be cautious. “There might have been a delay….”

“Two hours’ worth? And she couldn’t delegate someone else to meet us, or maybe, y’know, call us about the delay?” He flinched, and reached for the mobile clipped to his belt. No, it was turned on, and still working. Good. Carrying a cell phone in close proximity to Wren was always a risky thing, but staying in touch was more important. And she was pretty good about warning him before a major current pull so he could turn it off in time. Mostly.

“Sergei, is there anything she could tell us that they couldn’t have given us beforehand, or called in? Or, maybe, have waiting for us at our hotel?”

He shook his head. “Unlikely, no. I mean, it’s unlikely that they, or rather she—” He gave it up as a bad job and took another gulp of the coffee, finishing it off. The brew was heavy and bitter, and even the sugar didn’t make it easy to drink, but he could practically feel it slapping his neurons into firing properly.

“Then screw this, and screw her.” Wren said, crumpling her coffee cup and looking around for a convenient trash bin. “Let’s go.”

It galled him to abandon a meet, even if the other person had flaked on them, but she was right; the contact was probably only a courtesy. And they had waited. The important thing now was to get to the monastery where the manuscript had disappeared from, and start their search. Anything the Silence needed to tell them—well, the Milan office had made the damn hotel reservation, too, so they could pick up a phone and call the hotel, or send a fax. Although it would probably be a good idea to find an Internet café somewhere if he could and check e-mail, even before they got to the hotel.

He took the cup from her, and threw it out with his own, then looked around to take his bearings.

“This way,” he said finally, leading her to the elevator, down two floors and then through a covered walkway to where the car rental offices were. “Stay put,” he told her, depositing her in the corner with their luggage. “If I remember anything about Italian bureaucracies, this will take forever.”

However, his expectations were unfulfilled, and the registration went smoothly enough. He collected Wren and the luggage, and they found their way without too many problems to the car assigned to them. He unlocked the doors, then did a double-take. “Damn. I had forgotten about that.”

“Forgotten about what?” Wren dropped her carry-on into the back seat of the battered, dark blue sedan and looked at him. “BMW. Sweet.”

“They’re like Chevrolet over here, don’t get too excited. And I haven’t driven overseas in so long I forgot to request an automatic transmission.”

Wren’s brow creased, and she reached up to tug at the short braid she’d gathered her hair into at some point. “I can’t drive stick,” she admitted.

“I can. But it’s been…a while.”

“Oh boy,” was his partner’s only comment as she got into the passenger seat and strapped the safety belt on. “Oh boy.”

The drive from Malpensa to the monastery in the hills just north of Siena took five hours, most of it on an endless winding highway where driving under one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour got you flashed lights and eloquent hand gestures as they zoomed past. Finally Sergei had gotten the hang of changing gears, and they’d moved up to speed themselves.

“So how does the Silence end up with this gig, anyway?” Wren asked, more out of idle curiosity than anything else. “Do they hand out flyers on street corners? ‘Lose something magical? Call us!’ Hey, there’s an idea. Maybe—”

“Nothing quite so crassly commercial,” Sergei said, cutting that bad idea off at the knees while shifting to pass a double-axle truck going one hundred kph. “The Silence is a watchdog organization, for the most part. Think of it as analogous to the United Nations.”

“Yeah, so you’ve said before. ‘Always on the lookout for things gone wrong to set right,’ like the Marines meet Quantum Leap.”

“I never said that.”

“Close enough. But what you never said was how the Marines got called.”

“Networking, mostly. ‘Someone knew someone who was helped in that sort of situation, let me put in a call’ kind of thing. And then they parcel out the assignments, based on who has the best skills to handle it.”

“And how many of those someones are actually Silence employees?”

“Cynical woman. Not as many as you would think. The Silence does do good work. The fact that the rest of the world hasn’t imploded yet, from means magical and otherwise, is proof of that.”

Privately, Wren thought her partner was still showing signs of Silence brainwashing. But saying that would probably be poking the bear with the grumpy stick. Fun, sure, but ultimately a bad idea.

“So. Where are we going, anyway?” she asked, in order to move the conversation on.

“A small town in Umbria called…something or another in Italian. The monastery where the object was kept is there. We’ll take a look around, see what you can pick up, and go from there. Okay?”

He was making plans without her. Normally that would lead to some harsh words—she was the Retriever, not him, and she knew what needed to be done—but the need for a nap was winning over the planning portion of her brain, and the yawn she could feel coming on overruled anything else. For now.

“Yeah. Okay.”

The rest of the trip was a blur, to her, of speeding cars, rolling green and yellow hills, and Sergei’s muttered curses forming a melody that finally sent her off into dreamland.

“We’re here.”

Wren opened her eyes to afternoon sunlight bathing her vision with a soft golden tinge. She got out of the car and stretched, then looked around. “Sorry, didn’t mean to sleep all the way.” She paused. “Where are we?” The car was parked on a small patch of gravel surrounded on three sides by tall, narrow trees. It all looked the part of a scenic destination, but the low stone building on the rise of hill behind them didn’t look like any hotel she’d ever stayed at before. She sniffed the air. It was fresh, clean, filled with allergens, and…off, somehow. She sniffed again. No, just your ordinary fresh air. Then why was there this weird trickle of unease down her spine? Jet lag. Italian coffee. Could be anything. Where the hell are we? “Sergei…”

He reached into the back seat for his jacket, but didn’t put it on right away. The expression on his face was one she knew all too well: him about to try and talk her into a job that he knew she wasn’t going to like. Except that they were already on a job she didn’t like. “I thought it might be a good idea to stop in and let the monks know that we’re here.”