Black Madonna

22

Michael had shooed the others out of the room and was busy skipping through the electronic static, He knew the LTG number of the Priory system at Rennes-le-Chateau, and now that he’d recovered he was finally doing what he should have done much earlier.

Somewhere there has to be a directory, he thought; somewhere, I can find who was connected to that system; who entered it, the records will be somewhere. Oh, I just love these blind hunts, and I don’t expect the icons will be the obvious ones.

It took him a frustratingly long time to hunt down the numbers. When he did, what he found annoyed and frustrated him further. Nothing remained in either of the first two systems he cracked but a single icon in the stripped databanks: an icon of a plain stone throne. When he found it a third time, he jacked out and scratched his scalp in irritation. To his surprise, the clock opposite him read four forty-eight. He went to join the others, but Geraint was not among them.

“I’d better get him,” he said. “Leave this to me.”

Slightly apprehensive, he hurried to Geraint’s room and knocked gently.

“Yes, come in.” The voice was still tired and weary.

Almost reluctantly, Michael opened the door. Geraint was sweeping away four cards from the table before him, back into the silk wrap in which he kept them. Michael knew enough of the designs to know what they were.

The Empress, The High Priestess, Queen of Cups, and lastly Art, the angel usually named Temperance. Not difficult to see what’s on his mind, he thought. As Michael sometimes did with anything outside his own expertise, he made the mistake of taking the surface appearance for the underlying one. The explanation was too facile, but he wasn’t going to ask about it in any event.

“It’s nearly five. We’re expecting a visitor, remember?”

“Yes, thanks.” Geraint didn’t look at him. He was lost in thought.

I may have to do my world-famous impression of an alarm clock with a snooze function in five minutes, Michael thought glumly. He retraced his steps.

Streak was polishing a gun barrel. Michael would have been disappointed if he’d been doing anything else. The elf hadn’t been hired for his analytical intellect, after all.

“I’ll take the front, you take the back,” he grinned. “Serrin can sit up here and do the ju-ju all over the shop. We’ll net the plonker, bet your life on it.”

“Elegantly put.” Michael said wryly. “I think I’ll have to some explaining to the servants, though. Excuse me one moment.”

As the clock ticked on to one minute before the hour they grew tense. Serrin was getting no signal from any of his watcher spirits, and Streak was almost twitching with apprehension. At last, a carriage meandered down the street. Remarkably, it didn’t appear to have a driver.

“Here he comes,” Streak said through clenched teeth to Geraint beside him. “Right, term, let’s see more than your visiting card.”

The carriage stopped precisely before the front door and Streak slipped into the doorway, taser readied, hawksh eyes scanning the scene.

The young man opened the carriage door. Streak didn’t move.

He wore an ostentatious costume, a floppy dark blue cap, a silk doublet with gold threading, and powder-blue hose. His shoes were exquisitely soft leather, with gilded buckles. Whether he was smiling as he had been at the Baptistery was impossible to see: the gilded mask covering his face didn’t permit his expression to show.

He stepped up to Streak without any undue hurry, and handed him the medium-sized wooden box he was carrying. The elf took it dumbly, and the man turned around and got back into his carriage. Leaving a motionless pair of men behind, the carriage moved at a sedate pace down the street and disappeared into the crowd at the crossroads beyond.

Streak snapped back into wakefulness and almost dropped the box. Very gingerly, he put it down in the doorway and reached for his scanners.

“What the-”

“I couldn’t stop him,” came Serrin’s voice from behind him. “Couldn’t touch him. He had enough power around him to bust right through the barriers. The watchers never even twitched. No trace either. I tried to have a watcher follow him and it looked more confused than I’ve ever seen. It’s out there wandering around somewhere, but I don’t think it’s going to find anything”

“He pulled this same stunt at the Baptistery,” Streak growled. “I’d like to meet Blondie again when he isn’t expecting it, the little scumfrag.”

“What’s in there?” Serrin pointed to the box.

“Nonferrous metal,” Streak said.

“Open it,” Geraint ordered.

“I haven’t finished-”

“If he wanted to do us any harm he could have cut our throats in the doorway,” Geraint pointed out. “He’s hardly going to bother with a bloody bomb, is he?”

“He also stopped us getting scragged this morning,” Serrin added.

“Okay, you got it,” Streak said, whipping out a heavy knife and prying open the wooden lid of the box.

“Oh, very slick,” he said as he lifted out the item inside.

It was a clock, of sorts. A hand’s length high, the gold filigree-decorated clock sat inside a glass case. A pair of exquisitely sculpted angels were bracketed to either side of the clockface and housing. Beneath the clock at the base of the case was a pool of liquid, and an intricate motor-driven mechanism rotated, lifting tiny buckets of the water to drive the clockwork mechanisms inside the housing.

“Exquisite,” Geraint said softly. “It’s worth a few nuyen, I can tell you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any thing like it.”

“I think I have,” Serrin replied, amused.

“Really? Since when did you start taking an interest in antiques?”

“Since, oh, a few days ago. Unless I’m much mistaken, this is a superior working version of Leonardo’s design for a water-driven clock. Let’s go and check it against the sketches in the book I got this morning.”

It took only a couple of minutes to confirm the identification. The clock continued to function perfectly and soundlessly, keeping immaculate time.

“Bet you a monkey the sodding thing goes bang at six o’clock or something,” Streak said, grumbling.

“We’ve been through that,” Geraint said laconically. “So why this? And why now?”

“Now, because we’re here. As to why this,” Serrin mused, “I really don’t know.”

“Well, we can worry about it at the villa I’ve found for tonight,” Geraint said. “I had some words with the cosulate. You packed?”

“More or less. Michael still has to get his deck squared way, Did he tell you what he got?”

They walked slowly back up the stairs, Michael explaining to Geraint that the Priory of Sion’s systems beyond Rennes had been stripped bare and closed down, leaving only the throne icon behind them.

“Some kind of message or signal,” Serrin suggested. “But it’s so general, it could mean anything. It must mean something specific to the Priory, but without someone to explain it to us we can’t know what it means.”

Idly, he turned on the trid. They had a few minutes to kill while Michael gathered together his equipment. The tail end of the local news was showing. Thick red and white smoke swept over the heads of a roiling crowd waving banners and gesticulating wildly.

“The Milan soccer derby,” Serrin estimated. “Usually two or three get killed each year.”

“These Eyeties don’t know squit,” Streak growled. “Take ‘em down to the Dogs, down Milwall. We know how to have a decent soccer riot down there. And look at that crowd, has to be a hundred thousand, Too many by far.”

“The San Siro,” Senin told him. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

“Not bad,” Streak said. “Oh! Ouch, look at that tackle. I’ll give them that: their footballers really know how to break legs,” and then he had no more time to expand upon the subject as the tridcast cut to an entirely different scene. After a few moments of trying to figure out what was being discussed, they dissolved into laughter.

“Oh, lovely icon that.”

“The evaporating turd? Yeah, good one. What the frag is this?”

Florentine local trid was using some graphic icons to illustrate the tail-end news item. Since it concerned a rival city-state, it wasn’t going to get better than last-spot status, but it was important enough that it couldn’t, regrettably from the Florentine point of view, be ignored entirely.

Waterways were shown with icons of various toxic effluent, from the graphic pile of excrement to clouds of steaming vapor with skull-and-crossbones motifs, evaporating from them. The scene panned back to show the canals. Serrin sat bolt upright in his chair.

“What am they saying?”

“Can’t make much out, he’s jabbering too fast,” Streak said.

“Call up the bloody subtitles,” Serrin demanded.

“Don’t know how, not on this!” Streak complained.

“Give me the gist, then.”

“It’s about de-polluting the canals in Venice” Streak paused, listening hard to the next chunk of excitable commentary.

“Big change. Lots of drek disappearing. You can fall in and not be dead inside the hour now, apparently. Tourists come to Venice, that sort of spiel. This local commentator’s getting right sarky about that.”

The scene cut again to the advertisements. Apparently soap powder moved scantily clad young Italian females to implausible states of hopeless excitement.

“Venice! The bastard’s in Venice,” Serrin yelled.

“How can you-”

“The book. The book! Slot! Why didn’t we see it? The book we found.”

“See what?” Geraint demanded to know.

“The book was a signal to the Priory guy-Serrault, Seratini, whatever-as to where our quarry is!”

“What do you mean?”

“A treatise on water elementals, right?”

“And so?”

“We just got a water-driven carriage clock as a message. We had a clue about water elementals. Leonardo lived in Venice for some time, and he certainly spent enough time designing canal systems. Including the years just before he died. And what was that apocalyptic stuff I found earlier?”

“The Flood,” Geraint mused. “It sounded like the myth of the Flood to me. All it needed was a bloke with a big ship and the old animals two by two.”

“Merlin also told me he might have moved on,” Serrin added. “I think we should try Venice. Look, it’s barely an hour away and if we’re wrong we can get back here damn quick. Not that we have any definite idea of what to do next anyway.”

“Can we find out how long this has been going on in Venice?” Geraint said. “The book was sent a week ago or therabouts. If you’re right, the Priory knew our man was Venice then, if this detox work started at least that far back that would be worth knowing.”

“We must be able to check. What about the consulate?”

“Nice idea,” Geraint grinned. “I think I may just have a call from His Majesty’s Department of the Environment that I must relay to the consulate officials with all due speed. Consider it done.” He walked off briskly to his bedroom to make the call.

Michael returned with everything packed and they filled him in on the details.

“I’m not sure about this,” he said. “The chain of logic isn’t too compelling.”

“It isn’t compelling, but it’s plausible,” Serrin said, and since Venice is so close we’ve got nothing to lose by a short detour. At least we can start checking something out there.”

“Sounds good to me,” Streak said, fondling an Ingram with his usual meaningful expression. “There’s another reason why I like the idea of moving on.”

“And what’s that?” Michael asked.

“While you guys have been reinventing the Bible and up to your ears in clocks, I’ve been doing some peeking through windows. Our old muckers, the gentlemen in suits, are out there now, if you know where to look. The NOJ has, of course, tracked us here. Which I expected. Sometimes, Serrin mate, people do expect the Inquisition.”

“Very droll.”

“However,” Streak said with a slight grimace, “unless I am much mistaken, I also saw a certain Mr. Raoul Huetzlipochtli taking the air briefly on the street corner. Always did hate that moniker, the pretentious git. His real name is probably Poxface or something-it would suit him, you could land an Apollo mission on old craterface. But it’s something of a coincidence.”

“And who, pray, is Raoul Hootzlipockle?” Michael made a brave, if rather unsuccessful, stab at pronunciation.

“Top-drawer Azzie killer. Ice-cold snuff merchant. Top twenty, maybe top ten. Not surprising that other corps have their eyes on our clock-fancier. Bit alarming that Aztechnology’s leading psychopath is eyeing up our villa, though. Made me wonder a bit. Of course, I may have been mistaken.”

“You think you might have been?” Geraint asked, more casually than he was feeling.

“Nope.” Streak finished packing the gun. “Might not be a bad idea to import one or two of Streak’s little helpers into Venice. Your Lordship.”

“Like who?”

“Like two Spanish amigos who helped us before.”

“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” Geraint said. “God, this is all getting out of control.”

“Of course it is. I would be worrying if it wasn’t,” Michael observed. He seemed remarkably calm. “With so little time left, Aztechnology, Fuchi, MCT, and the rest must all be needing terrifically frequent changes of underwear. It’s not surprising that they’ve got people out there. And hardly earth-shattering that some of them have found their way somewhere close to the right place.”

Disturbing the flow of speech, Michael’s portafax began chattering a message. He checked the screen ID, grinned, and read the short communique.

“Ah, Renraku has re-routed this through Mozambique. Cheeky buggers, that’s been one of my tricks of late. They’ve upped the stakes, lady and gentlemen. We’re now talking five million on the nose for saving their butts.”

“Shee-it, that’s a million each,” Streak whistled.

“Not quite,” Michael replied, wagging a finger at him. “Two million for me, since it’s primarily my gig, and you guttersnipes can slug it out for the rest.”

“It’s a convincing reason for not just escaping and getting the hell out of here. Not that I was planning to,” Serrin said hastily.

“Indeed not. Time, I think,” Michael said as he flung a bag over his shoulder and then grimaced a little at the resultant pain in his back, “to live on the edge a little. Hell, why the frag not? Did you know, there were people dumb enough to pass up on the dessert trolley on the Titanic. Never forget that, friends. Venice it is.”