Shadows of Falling Night (39 page)

Someone pointed to the camera pickup over the central island that held the stairwell; the building was about three stories high, too little for an elevator.

Adrian made a gesture with thumb and forefinger, as if shooting it out:
I’ve taken care of it.

The black woman knelt by the door. It had an access keypad and a biometric scanner, quite state-of-the-art, but Ellen had noticed that Istanbul had a full share of the mod-cons, which had rather surprised her. Turkey was apparently quite a modern country, at least this part of it. The Brotherhood operative reached out one slim-fingered hand and closed her eyes. There was a
click
and the door opened slightly as the deadbolts withdrew. Adrian paused, frowning.

There…are…human…traces…below…carefully…shielded,
he
thought
at them all, the word/symbols freighted with meaning beyond their content—a cold wariness, alert and hard and quite merciless.
But…no…trace…of…Ledbetter…Guha…or…Farmer. They…have…been…here…but…I…can not…be…certain…if…they…are…now.

Everyone looked slightly surprised, as far as she could tell in the dark among a group so stone-faced. Of course, Adrian’s sensitivity was far greater.

You…said…Ledbetter’s…shielding…was…very…good,
someone pointed out.

Ellen unconsciously rubbed at her forehead. She didn’t like telepathy, even the somewhat distanced relay version Adrian could provide despite her lack of the genes that would let her do it herself. She liked the real thing even less—she’d experienced that in his mind, while he was soul-carrying her. It was too much like talking to someone by whispering in
each other’s ears during an embrace, naked. Nice with Adrian sometimes. With people in general, no. Especially Shadowspawn people, who tended to get so obviously
hungry
around her.

Most of the time Adrian…well, his motto was
if you have a message, text it
. Adrienne felt the same way, oddly enough. Telepathy had low bandwidth, especially at a distance. But there were occasions when it was useful.

The building was three stories, but it had only one logical place to put something the size of the bomb. That was in the loading dock on the ground floor. One of the Brotherhood operatives secured the rooftop door with a wedge jammed in next to the hinge, and they went down the stairs in a very quiet rush; someone was always looking up the stairwell and someone down, and the second-story door was dealt with equally quietly.

I don’t think I’ll ever really love the Brotherhood,
Ellen thought.
But I do respect them.

“
Halt!
” someone shouted as they came out into the echoing spaces of the ground floor.

There was nothing but darkness, shadows and concrete pillars. She dove for cover behind one of them, ignoring the pain of landing elbows down on a hard surface. It took a moment before Ellen realized that she was hearing through her base-link with Adrian as well as through her ears. Their connection grew stronger under stress, and what she was getting now included his knowledge of Turkish.

“Halt or we will open fire! This is the gendarmerie and you will receive no further warning!”

Oh, shit,
she had time to think, before the roaring, stuttering, strobing flicker of an automatic weapon cast its jerky shadows. The deadly keening ping of ricochets sounded, all the more nerve-racking because
the danger was so random. Seconds later there was a single, louder, bang and an inhuman shriek of agony. A round had misfired or ruptured and a chain of explosions had shattered the weapon and probably most of the man wielding it.

That
was why Shadowspawn didn’t use automatics when they fought each other, and the Brotherhood didn’t carry them either. One of the adepts with her had lashed out with a preset Wreaking on reflex.

Grenades flew. More of the automatic weapons opened up, in panic: the police ambush hadn’t been set with attack from above in mind. Generally terrorists didn’t drop out of the sky on Zeppelins.…

A megaphone began to bellow something from outside. It cut off in a feedback squeal and then the big soft
whump
of gasoline going off in a rare fuel-air explosion. Ruddy light shone through a window, and screams sounded from the street. The volume of fire grew.

“No! Don’t kill them!” Adrian shouted.

Her heart lurched as he stood erect and spread his arms wide; the lisping whine of Mhabrogast as he shouted made her want to clap her hands over her ears—even though she had a revolver in the right.

Lines of tracer swung towards him…and then stopped. The world
twisted
and men leapt to their feet. They were dressed in black helmets and body armor, their faces anonymous under their night vision masks. They all tore off their goggles and threw them away, as if they’d stopped working—or were showing them something different, different and intolerable.

One kept tearing at his face as if something was clinging there; only the leather gloves he wore prevented him from ripping it away. Another simply stood rocking back and forth, tears flowing from his eyes. Two more just ran, their screams echoing over the slap of their boot soles on the concrete.

“Secure them!” Adrian snapped. “They must have been decoyed here somehow. They’re bystanders, not players!”

He moved forward, shouted another phrase in the
lingua demonica
, his voice utterly different—deep and harsh, but somehow also like the chittering of a rat the size of a wolf. Another police commando erupted out of a utility room, tearing off his earphones and batting at smoking spots on his uniform; the smell of scorching polyester was added to the medley of stinks. Behind him communications equipment shorted out in a spectacular barrage of yellow and red sparks and a crackle of burning plastic.

The Brotherhood commandos sprinted forward. They seemed to know exactly where the Turkish police were hiding, those who weren’t stumbling blind or rolling on the floor as they fought with private demons. Mostly they just touched them, and the Turks lost interest or slumped unconscious. The less Power-endowed used hypodermics.

There was a bustle of action. “Clear!” one of the operatives said at last. “They’re barricading the street outside, though. And the airship will have to leave. No amount of Wreaking can hide something that size for long.”

Adrian nodded. “The bomb?”

“There’s been no one here but the gendarmes for hours at least.”

Adrian was snarling—literally—when she came up to his side, holstering her pistol, and then gasping with relief when he needed not hold the Wreakings in operation any longer. The snarl wasn’t simply anger; she could feel the frustration and self-reproach. And even in the darkness he looked a little pale. Wreaking on that scale without time for preparation would be draining even for an adept of Adrian’s capacities. They needed a little privacy. Even when it didn’t involve sex, she felt feeding was far too intimate to let anyone else watch if it could be helped.

“Remember what you said about Harvey,” she said.

Some of the tension went out of him. There was even the faintest trace of amusement in his voice when he spoke:

“It is much easier to appreciate his dashing redneck savoir-faire when you’re not on the receiving end.”

“Sir,” one of the Brotherhood operatives said. “This was under the windscreen wiper of one of the trucks. Old model, but a substantial semi-tractor. I get an impression that it came from the east—there’s a residue that smells like that curse the Council put on the area.

The note read,
Sorry I couldn’t show you and Ellen around Istanbul, but I’ve got Georgia on my mind.

“Let me see this truck,” Adrian said.

While he examined it, Ellen kept her back to him and her eyes busy. Despite the temptation; his face might have been a disreputable angel’s when he concentrated that way, but it wouldn’t do him any good to have her mooning over him and it
might
to have her watching his back. There was a long silence, broken only by the muffled sobbing of one of the Turkish SWAT team.

“They are expecting backup soon,” one of the operatives said, after a few words with the crying policeman. “Even if you got their communications before they called an alarm.”

Adrian sighed again. “And it would tickle Harvey’s fancy no end to have us waste more time and more of the Power. This is the vehicle, there is no doubt about that.”

One of the others placed her palms against it, and concentrated. “I feel absolutely nothing, she said dubiously. “No linkages, no trace of flexion in the world-lines beyond what you’d expect for one anonymous vehicle. It is…Just
there
.”

Ellen couldn’t resist the snicker that she mostly smothered. “Now you know what it’s like being a normal,” she said.

“That is the effect of the new…Technique,” Adrian said; even here among Brotherhood loyalists he didn’t say
machine
. “Even now that it has been removed. That portion of its existence has been, mmmm,
cut out
of its history as far as the Power is concerned.”

He turned. “Deal with the gendarmes; get them out, implant short-term amnesia, and plant some suggestion of psychotropic gasses. After the Bangkok Strike, that will be credible enough. We should torch this truck, otherwise someone from the Council might notice. We cannot have them getting a hint of the Boase Effect.”

One of the team nodded. “Sir, we have to evacuate as soon as we’ve done that. There are far too many of the enemy around, and they have the Turkish government under close control.”

He nodded. “I and my companions will carry on the search. Back to the roof, the lot of you.” Only Ellen heard him add: “For whatever good it will do.”

“What about us?” she said, as the Brotherhood operatives withdrew; one of them was limping and swearing, though that was the limit of their injuries.

“Eric and the others are down by the docks. That was an excellent thought of his. Come, we can do some work along the way.”

He walked over to the wounded Turks. One…

Ellen swallowed and let her eyes slide out of focus. “Is he dead?”

“Not quite, but beyond hope.” Adrian went down on a knee and touched the man’s forehead; the body went limp. “Help me with this one.”

Fortunately the ambush team had all had the usual first-aid supplies with them. They did what they could and then Adrian levered the semi-conscious man upright. Ellen took an arm over her shoulder, her nostrils wrinkling with the smells of blood, scorched flesh and gear, and body
wastes. They walked the man out. The street outside was the tail-end of chaos as policemen chivvied the last of the local civilians away; a medium-sized truck with official markings was still burning despite fire-extinguishers. An ambulance pulled away as she watched, and machine-pistols turned towards them.

Adrian pulled out ID from a pocket, held it up and snapped orders in Turkish. Ellen was close enough to see the look of relief on the nearest faces; paramedics ran forward with a gurney, and a squad rushed past the two Americans.

“What did you tell them? And how did you explain
me
?” she asked, as they walked past briskly; a police noncom went ahead of them, waving others aside.

He continued ahead as the pair turned left, down towards the Golden Horn to the south.

Adrian shrugged. “I told them I was a
Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı
officer.”

“What’s
that
?”

“The Turkish equivalent of the CIA and the FBI, combined. It’s a useful cover.” He smiled bleakly. “Harvey taught me that one. It’s appropriate, no? Let’s see if the others have managed to blunder as badly as we and the Brotherhood.”

Peter Boase held up the tablet, the screen glowing with high definition pictures of Harvey Ledbetter and his two presumed accomplices.

“Have you seen these people?
” he asked, one of the half-dozen phrases of Turkish they had learned. Then: “
I don’t speak Turkish. Yes or no, please?
”

Eric didn’t speak Turkish either; he was good with languages, but no
Shadowspawn to pick them up in a few days. He did, however, have a knack for telling whether people were lying or not. He was also usefully intimidating, scowling with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, the scabs and bruises on his face adding a little gravitas. All that helped, but trying to do detective work in a place where you didn’t speak the language and didn’t even have some interpreter sweating by your side was still a nightmare.

“No,” the Turk growled, and started to push past Peter into what might be the entrance of a rooming house, or some really cheap apartments. “I have not seen them.”

“Yes, you did, my friend,” Eric said. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you that lying was a sin?”

As he spoke he put his left arm on the door frame, barring the local’s way. With the same motion he brought his right hand up and fanned out a crisp spray of bills with a gesture like a stage magician’s.

He hadn’t done that before because money was like a gun. Which meant it wasn’t a magic wand that always made people do what you wanted. In this case, if you offered the money before you knew whether the person actually had the information needed, you muddied the waters beyond repair. If nothing was what they had, chances were they would make a determined effort to sell you disguised nothing.