Laura Gilman - Curse the Dark

With a chuckle at his own foolishness—the first even faint laugh he’d had since being handed the Italian project three days ago—he moved to the door and closed it against the external office distractions. And in that time his brief good humor fell away as though it had never existed.

Magic. This entire situation smelled of magic. Stank of it, actually.

Andre had been among the first, years ago, to endorse the use of Talents within the Silence. He knew their value, in an organization that dealt with the results of magic in more than three-quarters of their situations. But magic itself—the basic, unpredictable power—still made him uneasy, despite or maybe because of his continued exposure to it. For all their talk of current and channeling, it wasn’t the same as building a generator, and then flipping a switch. It was random, unpredictable—untrustworthy. Uncontrollable. Almost as uncontrollable as this unaffiliated Talent, his best (former) student at the reins or no. It was a pity he was becoming so fond of the girl. That might become a problem, eventually.

Sitting down at the glass-and-brass table he used for a desk, Andre spread the message slips out in front of him, scanning the names and sorting them into order of importance.

“Damn, damn, and damn.” It was the strongest expression of displeasure he would allow himself in the office. Andre leaned forward and stared at the blank wall opposite him. Two of the messages were from Alejandro, wanting to know with increasing levels of impatience what was happening with the Italian situation.

Alejandro wasn’t his superior…technically they were both on the same management level, and Andre in fact had seniority in years. But he was the person with oversight in that area of the world, and so despite having to come to Andre for aid, he still kept the upper hand. Levels and negotiations. The Silence was a masterpiece of levels, and every level you went up there were more appearing above you.

There were levels of trustworthiness, as well. His—what was the term? His lonejack didn’t trust him at all. Her handler trusted him just so far. How much did he trust them?

And how much of what they trusted him with could he in turn place in trust with others?

Last night, Sergei had called him. At home, not ten minutes after walking through the door, which meant the Handler had been waiting for him since Andre kept no set routine. When Andre tried to trace the call back, he discovered that the call had been routed through two different pay phones, ending up with one of those prepaid mobiles that was bought for cash. It was a level of paranoia the other man had never shown, even when he was in the thick of situations a decade ago, and normally Andre would have been amused by it, but for what his operative told him.

Not that Sergei’s cause of concern—a whisper campaign to discredit one of their operatives—was anything to worry about, not when the whispering wasn’t about the Silence itself. If anything, the Council’s attempts to discredit Wren worked to the Silence’s benefit, binding her more closely to them, if only fiscally.

But part of their deal with Sergei had been that they would protect Wren in the case of attack by the Council, and the means of attack had not, in their agreement, been specified as purely physical.

And it bothered Andre a great deal that no one in the organization had heard about this “whisper campaign” earlier. Information wasn’t the name of the game, it was the game.

Picking up the phone, he ignored the glowing message light and dialed a three-digit number. You didn’t keep Logan waiting.

“You got my report?” Andre asked.

The answer was affirmative, followed by an interrogative.

Andre picked up a rough-edged chunk of marble from his desk and rolled it in his right hand as he spoke. “I don’t know. It could be nothing, it could be good for us—or it could be potentially very ugly.”

The baritone on the other end of the phone got louder, just a shade too vehement for it to have been a polite comment. You didn’t hedge in front of Logan, either.

“We don’t know enough about what the Council knows. Truthfully, we don’t know anything, really. If our sources were compromised, then everything in the file is suspect.” He didn’t think that had happened, but it was a contingency they had to cover. That was the real reason the upper levels of the Silence needed Wren working for them; she was their conduit into the Cosa Nostradamus and the gossip therein. Gossip about the magical world that was so often the cause of the situations the Silence existed to clean up.

Although her admittedly extraordinary ability as a Retriever was a very useful thing to have in the toolbox, indeed. And the P.R. value of letting it be known—selectively, oh so selectively—that she was on their roster, that could not be overlooked or undervalued, either. “We didn’t hear anything because we’re not the ears they’re whispering into, no…and none of our clients have reported anything in their nets. It’s not likely…Sir, yes…Yes, sir. Yes, I would say that it is entirely possible that our involvement is being whispered as well.”

A pause, and he reached for the bottle of antacid sitting on his desk, shaking out three pills but not taking them just yet. Bad form to chew while getting chewed out by your boss.

“Yes, sir. We’re already on it.”

Andre hung up the phone and exhaled sharply through pursed lips. That hadn’t been as bad as it might have been. Logan was a bastard, even for the Silence, but a decent Division manager despite that. Or perhaps because of it; he knew that praise and beatings had to be carefully balanced for maximum result. Being reamed by a senior administrator the way Andre just had was always a learning experience.

And the only thing to do with experiences like that was to learn from them.

Andre mentally sorted through the list of people available to him, and jabbed a button on the phone.

“Darcy. Pronto.”

While he waited for his researcher to arrive, Andre went through the list of “while you were aways” and dropped almost half into the shredder placed discreetly beneath his desk. The rest could wait until he had a spare moment to deal with them.

“You rang, oh mighty one?”

When Darcy Cross was born, office gossip claimed, the presiding doctor had asked her mother if she wanted to file a complaint, since clearly not everything had been delivered. The ensuing years hadn’t done anything to refute the doctor’s comment: now in her mid-thirties, Darcy could claim four foot five inches if she wore heels, and her bone structure was so frail it reminded one, inevitably, of a baby chick. People always stepped carefully around her, as though she might shatter from a sharp word. But the mind in that delicate body was first-rate, and the Silence paid very well for the use of it.

“Two of our ops are getting pressured from an external source, creating doubt as to their effectiveness, their veracity. Subvert, nothing concrete, nothing provable.” He pulled a three-inch-thick folder from the pile to his left and handed it to her. Everything was on disk, of course, but the surest way to keep something secure these days was to keep it offline.

“You want me to find the source?” The remote expression in Darcy’s hazel-blue eyes made it clear that she thought she was being undertasked.

“Not exactly.” His headshake made her perk up, more interested. She perched on the edge of the sole guest chair and waited to hear more.

“We know who is doing it, and why—more or less. The current situation is to our benefit, but only so long as it remains…imprecise.” So long as his players remained off balance and uncertain, but not irreparably damaged in mind or reputation. Logan had been quite emphatic about that. “We need to know exactly what is being said, and to whom, on an ongoing basis. Monitor the flow. And if the pressure is ramped up in any way, or you feel that there is any cause for alarm—”