Shadows of Falling Night (36 page)

After a few moments of silence: “Dale must have
learned
something from Great-uncle Arnaud when he killed him; he definitely seems to have changed his behavior after that. A pity he didn’t tell you what it was that he learned, precisely. Perhaps he soul-captured Arnaud for a really prolonged, enjoyable interrogation internally? Dangerous…but Dale always was excessively non-risk-averse.
Vraiment
, it is a puzzle…”

Kai flopped backward when the Shadowspawn broke the link, mouth working and tears leaking down her cheeks as she covered her face with her hands. Adrienne rubbed her hands and looked around:

“Now, we do have a Taser here somewhere, do we not? Let us literalize the metaphor! And when we reach the manor we’re stopping at, you can show David some appropriate gratitude, Kai. He is growing quite excited, and it would be cruel to deny him. Travel can be a broadening experience, don’t you agree?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Turkey

H
arvey Ledbetter grunted and stretched as the engine noise stopped and they stepped down into the open stained-concrete expanse of the warehouse.

“The problem here is that we can hide the…package…from the
Power
but it’s going to be a bit harder to hide it from the fuckin’ Turkish
police
. Who have prob’ly been put on the QT by the Council’s puppets. And we don’t want to put ourselves in the hospital with Wreakin’ too much to throw them off.”

He didn’t mention the other possibility; either collapsing with a burst brain vessel, or going unpleasantly mad and having to be killed by your friends.

“Adrian got the Brotherhood to drop some hints too,” Farmer said. “He told us that before we went after you. No details, of course.”

A sly grin. “After all, there was a remote possibility you might turn us.”

“Not hard to slip information in as from the CIA or some other nefarious source,” Anjali said judiciously. “Terrorists with nuclear weapons make people nervous, oh yes indeed.”

They walked through the dimness to the front of the building and its magnificent view of a blank brick wall across the street. Bursa was one of the biggest cities in western Turkey. Mt. Uludağ towered over it to the south, and the hills around were forested; that and the parks and gardens around the mosques and palaces had given it the nickname of Green Bursa in the old days. The old days hadn’t included a huge clutch of automobile and textile factories, or the run-down industrial district where they’d parked the bomb.

The corner office had dirty windows. It was also cold and smelled seedy, of ancient tobacco and machine oil and tired electronics and far-from-fresh socks.

For some reason this sort of neighborhood seemed a bit more depressing than the equivalents he’d grown up around, and God knew Texas had
depressing
in plenty. Even in the Hill Country of his birth where at least the background looked fairly good. Though that had been all right here, too, from what they’d seen coming in. The snow lay thick on the higher pines, and there were ski resorts where Europeans and the newly prosperous Turkish glitterati cavorted. Down here it was mostly just chilly rather than freezing.

They grew olive trees around the town, which meant you never got
really
cold weather. Not by Jack Farmer’s standards, at least; Harvey and
Anjali disagreed. Even the discomfort had a certain instant-nostalgic charm now, though. When you didn’t expect to live much longer…

Well, hell, most of the things I like doing can’t be done when you’re
old,
and, Harvey, you are old for this job. And you never really were afraid of being dead, right? Afraid of dying, but that’s only logical, as the Science Officer said.

Harvey seated himself in the absent manager’s swivel chair and put his feet up. “Okay, let’s get logical here. We want to be hard to check up on. What’s the easiest sort of marine traffic to check?”

Anjali and Farmer looked at each other. “Anything where there are computerized records,” Farmer said.

“Which means all commercial cargo shipping through regular channels,” Anjali said; computers were easy enough to fix with the Power, but there were so many of them and it left traces. “I am presuming you went overland for that reason?”

Harvey nodded. “Yeah. Shipping’s a bottleneck. You two got it off that container ship in Europoort-Scheldt easy enough, because nobody with the Power was looking. But there are ways around that. What we need is a purchase, not a charter, and under the table,” he said. “Something just big enough; the god damned thing—”

He avoided saying
nuke
or
bomb
most of the time, just basic fieldcraft.

Not being evasive or euphemistic, no sirree, not us.

“—only weighs a couple of tons, anyway. We want it shipped on something you’d look at and not think
cargo
. Something just big enough to have a hold that’ll conceal it.”

The two agents looked at each other again. “You mean one of those tourist sail-cruising things, what’re they called…” Farmer hesitated.

“Gulets,” Anjali said.

“Yup.” Harvey nodded. “They were mixed cargo boats before they took to ferrying two-ton, two-tone Teutons around to soak up raki and court skin cancer. Now, good old straightforward stealin’s out. Nobody may notice a truck going missing if you’re careful, but a ship, even a little one, that’s a hog of a whole different bristle. We need to show a little more finesse this time.”

“We are experts at finesse,” Anjali said.

“As long as it involves kicking guys in the crotch,” Farmer added. Then: “No! I was kidding!”

“Jack would put on weight if you did that,” Harvey said. “And he’d get too meek and mild to be useful. Okay, you pick a gulet up in Bodrum and meet me in Istanbul.”

“Why there?” Jack said. “It’s out-of-the-way, and it’ll take time.”

“That’s where they make ’em. Not as many ripples.”

They both nodded; an adept sniffing along their trails would be more likely to spot a disruption if the thing they affected was unique rather than one among many.

“Both of us?” Anjali said. “You can manage the…package…alone from here?”

Harvey chuckled. “Darlin’, I’ve been fifty-nine for a couple of years now and I ain’t dead. Remember, no Wreaking unless you really have to. I’ll see y’all in the city the city.”

That was a joke of sorts; Istanbul was a Turkish corruption of
is tin polin
, which was what medieval Greek-speakers had called Constantinople.
The
city. Anjali got it and actually smiled slightly; Farmer just scowled and grunted, which was not much of a change. Harvey went on:

“There’s what, fifteen million people thereabouts? Good place to hide.”

“Where?” Anjali said. “It is, as you said, a somewhat large city.”

“Karaköy, the docks.”

“Address?” Farmer said.

“You don’t need to know. Dock that sucker, and I’ll be there. You won’t be able to miss me; I’ll be the man with the twenty-five kilotons. Then we load up and sail for Batumi. From there…almost home.”

“Istanbul is an interesting city,” Adrian said, looking out at the darkening streetscape. “It gives one perspective, the layers of history and the sense of time.”

“Yeah, interesting when it doesn’t have a nuke somewhere in it,” Ellen said; they were fairly sure of that, at least. “That makes it…sort of more interesting than it should be. As in, it might turn into an overdone layer cake any second.”

They were speaking English, which was a bit of a relief, though her French had improved vastly over the last year—which had been, subjectively, five or six. Even though she could switch to thinking in it with a mental effort, shifting back to her native language brought a subtle feeling of relief, like a pressure you didn’t notice until it was gone.

She picked up one of the deep-fried
paçanga böreği
pastries from the plate between them and nibbled on it. The dough was flaky and dotted with sesame, the filling air-cured beef seasoned with cumin, fenugreek, garlic, and accompanied by hot paprika, carmelized onions and bell peppers. It had an almost carnal richness, and the proprietor of the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant with battered plastic furniture had beamed with pride as he set it and the bottles of Efes Pilsen beer down before them, roaring with laughter as Adrian said something in incomprehensible glottal Turkish.

The other customers were mostly local workingmen, and after some
frankly curious stares were mostly noisily occupied with their own affairs, including loud games of cards and puffing away to add to the fug of tobacco smoke. The Karaköy District had once been the foreign quarter, Galata, on the north shore of the Golden Horn. It was overwhelmingly Turkish and Kurdish now and had been for generations, but from here you could see the outline of the Christea Turris, the ancient Genoese-built tower that dominated the skyline, like part of a castle in a storybook.

The area had some tourist traffic, but it was mostly workshops and business offices and shops that sold electronic parts, plumbing supplies and just about everything else. The red-light district was around here too, mostly staffed with Slavic types these days with additions from the more recent influx of Syrian refugees.

Ellen suspected that if she weren’t sporting a wedding ring, what locals would consider respectable garb, and an obvious husband who they’d all assume from his looks and even more from his speech and cigarette was Turkish…then the atmosphere would be a lot less relaxing. For starters, there was only one other woman present, and she was thirty years older and worked here. Night was falling, along with the cold rain outside, and there was a steady grind and hum of traffic and clank and rattle from the fast trams on the Galata Bridge just to the west.

“The you-know-what adds a certain spice, eh?” Adrian said, probably leaving out the word
bomb
because nearly everyone in the world knew
that
much English. “If anything, that makes the city
more
fascinating. The glitter of transience…”

“You are insane,” she replied. “Or male, which is much the same thing.” She hauled her mind back to business. “Would Anjali Guha and Jack Farmer turn on you? They fought with you to get your children back. And we don’t
know
that they have. They’ve just…disappeared.”

Adrian lit another of his slim brown cigarettes, looking out. “They
fought with me against Adrienne; their commitment to the struggle against the Council is absolute. With Harvey…It would depend on what he told them.” He sighed. “You must understand…it is so easy for you humans to be good.”

Ellen blinked, surprised. “It
is
?”

“Comparatively speaking. Guha and Farmer are like many in the Brotherhood…they have enough of the Shadowspawn genes to Wreak on a limited level, but not enough to feed, or nightwalk, or survive the body’s death. But that means they still have many of the…the drives and motivations of Shadowspawn. Mingled with human, fighting it, sometimes twisting together to create things worse than either.”

Ellen nodded, grimacing a little. From what she’d heard, that was what was likely to make the more unpleasant types of serial killers. The Stalins and Hitlers and Pol Pots, too. Monsters driven by appetites they could neither suppress nor really satisfy and usually didn’t even understand themselves.

“My kind don’t work well in hierarchical organizations, save at the top,” Adrian said.

“So the Council is a complete feuding, squabbling chaotic mess that only accomplishes things because it has magical powers, and the Brotherhood is the same story only with slightly less chaos and less magic. Yeah, I know it’s not really
magic
magic.”

“Exactly. Have you noticed how many mad dictators prefer to work through the night and sleep late each day? And some good men such as Churchill, who had the same pattern and always went his own way and relied on intuition…Such cooperation as Shadowspawn show is largely the product of the human part of their heritage. Guha and Farmer…have made a
conscious decision
to be on the side they are. If Harvey can somehow convince them that his plan will
work
they might well turn
again. If they believe that will advance the ends for which they fight, you see? But I had nobody else to send.”