Shadows of Falling Night (18 page)

“Our esteemed imperial bitch was here…and killed.”

He frowned, and the heavy high-cheeked brown features grew abstracted for a moment. “Yeah, some homeless dude, she blew a weak spot in his brain. Nice neat job. Not like her to be so kindhearted.”

They smiled. Dale went on: “That was when she stole her brother’s
blonde. The one he got back. Tasty piece, but it’d make you puke the way he moons over her.”

Dmitri sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “It would not do to underestimate him,” he said. “He has killed so many of us…including several of my cousins.”

“Tell me.
Or
to underestimate his sister. So should we try for the kids, or not? I really want to get my hands on that Mex who shot silver at me, too. Hands, not to mention teeth and other stuff. I like breaking the brave ones.”

“Hmmm. A big payoff if it works, they are a shield to our enemies and Adrienne wants that complicating factor taken off the board, but she will be…how do you
yanki
put it…peeved, if there is any injury to her children. She made that very clear to me.”

Dale was visibly tempted to say:
Do I care?
Or words to that effect, but he did not. It was so transparently untrue; you would have to be insane not to care what Adrienne Brézé thought. Dmitri’s respect for him went up a notch when he avoided empty bluster.

“Only if we have a truly obvious and very good chance,” he said, and the Shadowblade reluctantly nodded. “From your account of your own attack on Adrian’s home, his renfields were much luckier than they should have been—and they have excellent defensive Wreakings, both implanted and their amulets.”

Then both their heads came up, turning towards the northeast. “They are moving!” Dmitri said.

“Yeah,” Dale breathed, and his voice was somehow chill and hot at the same time. “How would you feel about watching kids for a while, Kai?”

“Watching ’em catch on fire?” she said hopefully. “Drown? Fall off cliffs?”

“No,” he said, cuffing her good-naturedly. “Watching ’em really carefully.”

“There is something in my baggage that we need,” Dmitri said. “Assault with the Power did not work very well for you; and it is daylight now. Perhaps more mundane means…”

CHAPTER NINE

Santa Fe and points east

T
ooling down I-25 on a bright weekday morning in winter and turning off at Cerillos was a weirdly normal experience, right down to Leon saying are we there yet? And passing the scatter of pseudo-Pueblo-style outlet stores and the Kitty Big House where Julia had stashed her cats when they went on vacations out of town—the interstate skirted the ragged eastern edge of Santa Fe, well away from the glitz and antiquity of the historic district. It still wasn’t a big city, but there were men alive who had been born before the first paved roads went in downtown.

He watched every possible ambush point. He also kept carefully under the speed limit and unlike the majority of local drivers—who considered it
giving information to the enemy
—used his turn signal well in advance.
Santa Fe had about sixty thousand people and the city police force was small in proportion, and he’d be bound to be recognized by one of the uniforms if he was pulled over. The official story was that he’d simply vanished with no forwarding address after being put on paid leave when his partner got killed. Or possibly he’d just died. He’d fought the temptation to contact his sister for the same reason—all he could do would be to endanger her. The best possible thing would be for her family to think he
had
died or run off into the wild blue yonder baying at the moon.

The little municipal airport was out at the end of Airport Road, in the part of town where people whose grandfathers had lived in the downtown adobes resided in little
fake
adobes with littered yards, earth-colored stucco over frame and flat roofs that leaked like bastards at the slightest provocation. The surviving real adobes and Territorials had all been thoroughly pimped up for the brie-and-chablis crowd by now.

Eric Salvador grinned at the thought. One of the early American governors of what was then the New Mexico Territory had made a farewell speech that included telling the locals to stop building in adobe or keeping goats because the
gringos
would always look down on anyone who did that sort of low-rent greaser stuff, though he’d been
slightly
more tactful in his choice of words.

How things have changed.

That bunch ate a lot of goat cheese now, too, while the goat-herders’ descendants bought Wisconsin Velveeta at Sam’s Club.

The airport could take jets; there was a regular shuttle to Denver, Dallas/Ft. Worth and LA, though he’d always flown out of Albuquerque because it cost the earth to start here. Mostly it was private planes, of which Santa Fe had more than its share. And one leased by a certain Adrian Brézé when he needed it, which would be waiting for them, engines hot and pre-cleared to leave fast. He felt a little nervous even so.

“This is Adrian’s plane we use?” Cheba asked as they turned into the parking lot.

She seemed a little nervous now too, and he hid a smile as he realized that in her case it was simply that she’d never flown before. He pulled into the parking lot and halted several rows away, just in case…he didn’t
think
there was an ambush waiting with the body scanner, but you never knew.

He was tempted to just leave the keys in the car, but the thought offended his tidy instincts and police training both. If the Brotherhood didn’t send someone, eventually the Humvee would be towed. It wasn’t registered to Adrian Brézé, either. He’d found out last year during the investigation into Ellen Tarnowski’s disappearance—Ellen Brézé now—that the man just didn’t exist as far as the records were concerned. If you were Shadowspawn and wanted to, you could exist in the cracks between the walls of the world, passing like a ghost. So could your retainers.

“No,” he said. “It’s some sort of rental thing. When we talked it over Adrian said he thought owning a private jet he’d only be using a few times a year was…showing off. Peter will be on board—”

Some sort of rent-a-servant was waiting by the entrance for them, with a dolly to take the luggage. Eric swung out and gave the surroundings a cautious scan, while Cheba organized the twins, who were fussing over what toys, books and devices they’d carry with them in their hands and backpacks and what would be put away. They weren’t exactly spoiled, but they’d been used to getting their own way a lot.

Eric turned back just as the baggage guy came towards the car, trailing the empty dolly. The man gave a meaningless tip-scenting smile that was almost as tooth-grating as the sort of asskissing from lowlifes you got as a cop, and which was apparently one of the drawbacks of giving off serious-money-and-power vibrations.

Crack.

The man pitched backward spinning, with a one-inch black hole turning red in his chest and a head-sized crater in his back, black and red and pink-white. The impact of the body on the ground was the limp, almost boneless thump of instant death. Behind him on the facade of the terminal a glass window starred and cracked, the bullet scarcely slowed down by its passage through body, ribs and spine.

Christ! .50 cal round
, flashed through Eric.

Nothing else did that sort of damage, or tossed bodies around Hollywood style with a single shot.

Ptunk-ptunk-crack!

He was diving for the ground before he recognized the sound: a .50 caliber going by, and
close
, after going through the body of the Humvee, in-and-out somewhere. Ticking and clunking sounds made it obvious that it had gone through the engine compartment, probably hitting something vital in the process.

He hugged the ground and tried to spot the shooter’s location while looking under it. That was pretty futile, given the distance a fifty-caliber could cover and the amount of scrubby hillside and small buildings within that distance. There was gear that could pinpoint a sniper with half a second of his first shot, but for starters he didn’t have the gear and for seconds if the sniper was an adept he could probably screw with it.

Another heavy
crack
, and this time it took out the left front wheel. He looked back, and Cheba had the kids down the space between the rear seats and the front. She was also covering them with her own body, over their objections and squeals; that was very brave, but also pretty futile. Fifty-caliber hard points would blast right through light armor plate, or a respectable thickness of concrete. Or three bodies in a row.

Four more shots, no more than a second apart and beautifully placed to make sure the Humvee wasn’t going anywhere.

Okay, the sniper’s trying to immobilize us, not kill anybody. Correction, is being very sure not to kill the kids. He’s got a honking great Barrett or something like that, semiauto from the timing, and he’s got a good firing position…but he waited until we stopped to shoot. Didn’t want the Humvee tumbling and burning or moving the wrong part into his sight picture.
Definitely
not willing to take risks with the kids, which means they’re trying to pin us down while they do something else—

When someone tried to immobilize you, the obvious tactic was to refuse to stay still and to do that
right away
, before whatever plan they had in mind could get into action. You didn’t let the other guy’s plan work if you could avoid it; he didn’t know what their plan
was
precisely, but it depended on him hiding behind the Humvee. A perfect solution a couple of seconds too late was worth a hell of a lot less than a passable one done in time. And he had a weird sort of safety factor here, though using it went against all his instincts.

“Cheba, take Leila, follow me, and keep
close
!”

For a wonder she did exactly what he told her without haring off on a tangent or stopping to argue; but then he’d known she had natural combat-nerves, hardly like a civilian at all. They each grabbed a child, hugging them close. She thought they were putting their bodies between the children and the sniper…but anyone good enough to shoot that well would know their weapon, which meant that the two were using the children as human shields even if she didn’t know it. He snarled as he led the way; it was
not
something he wanted to do, but he’d think about that later.

“Sniper!” he yelled to the TSA guard who’d come to the entrance, and flashed his—very outdated—police ID. “He’s using a fifty-cal,
something mil-spec. Get some rapid-response out here, call SFPD and the Armory, warn ’em!”

There was only one guard, and this place had minimal checks—this was a
very
minor airport, and mostly for private planes, a one-horse operation. Or more precisely a three-runway one with a single modest single-story building for a terminal. He could see the act being swallowed; terrorists rarely ran in already under fire, protectively clutching children. That was why his gun was firmly
inside
his coat.

There was also a fairly big National Guard HQ only a mile away on I-25, upgraded a few years ago, and they could almost certainly scrape up a reaction team.

“I’m on it, get under cover!” the man said. “Everybody, get
flat
, God damn it to hell!”

He was doing so himself, and holding his piece as if he knew what to do with it. Probably he’d seen action somewhere, there were a fair number of guys their age like that around.

“Fuckin’ A!” Eric said, and led his party right through the building and onto the runway. No swinging Jetways from an isolated boarding area here, just tarmac and ramps on wheels.

Everyone else inside the building was running around and some of them were even screaming while they did it, which meant he had a short window of opportunity. If he’d thought the shooter was trying to kill everyone in his party he wouldn’t dare head for the aircraft; it was well within range, once it taxied out from behind the terminal building. But as it was, the safest place for them all to be was in the air; if they’d been reluctant to shoot at a moving car with the kids in it, they’d be twice as unwilling to shoot at an aircraft they were aboard.

The jet was a Bombadier 900, a big business model with twin engines at the rear that could be configured for two dozen passengers. A worried-looking
female in airline gear—the copilot, apparently—was hesitating at the foot of the ramp, and there didn’t look to be anything else even thinking of taking off, even a Cessna.

“Just get us in the air!” Eric said, as he hustled everyone up the ramp.

That was the sweaty bit. Cheba and he were probably safe enough right now with the building blocking things and all…but if he was wrong in his snap judgment of where the shooter was, and the bastard had an angle on this spot and felt confident enough to try for a head shot, he was screwed, or probably just dead. He’d seen what those big bullets did to a human body, and not just today.

“We can’t just—” the copilot said, following him in.

“Yes, you fucking can,” Eric snarled, turning and shoving the door closed and dogging it himself.