Shadows of Falling Night

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Turkey

Harvey 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.”

“And they and Harvey fought together, didn’t they?”

“That too. We are capable of some bonds.”

She turned and touched the backs of her fingers to his cheek for an instant. “Yeah, you are. The Brotherhood isn’t giving you much support.”

“The Brotherhood, what is left of it after generations of defeat, is busy preparing for Trimback Two. Thanks to you, they have the pattern for the vaccine. If they can preempt Adrienne with it…her plan can be turned on her…the whole nature of things revealed in the process. The inner circle of the Brotherhood are understandably…focused.”

“Don’t they care about a nuclear bomb?”

“Not as much as you would think,” Adrian said grimly. “They are…they think of it as being commanders and generals in a long war against great evil.”

Ellen remembered the Hôtel de Brézé, and the way the post-corporeals made their un-lives an endless psychopathic revenge against the living without even realizing their own motivations. Or for that matter, the way Shadowspawn like Adrienne reduced themselves to cartoons, willing stereotypes of wickedness.

“Well, yeah,” she agreed…more or less. “I’ll go with the against great evil part, yupper, no dispute.”

“And commanders, they would say, must be prepared to make great sacrifices.”

“The problem there is I come from a long line of people, like for example Polish peasants and Pennsylvania coal miners, who ended up on the receiving end of necessary sacrifices. Other people decided it was necessary, and we got sacrificed. Making a sacrifice is really pretty easy, when you’re the one holding the knife.”

“They think in terms of campaigns. Good men…or at least men on the side of good…burned Dresden to the ground and annihilated Nagasaki. Even if Adrienne somehow uses the bomb to destroy her Shadowspawn enemies, that makes so many the less of the powerful Council adepts-and makes it more likely that Brotherhood can turn the Trimback Two option on her. The lives of billions are at stake. And you have met my great-grandfather, and Adrienne. What do you think the world would be like when they are as they wish, demon-gods openly worshipped and feared?”

“Euuww. Complete and total euuuwness,” she said…lightly, but with an underlying creeping feeling she knew he could sense.

“What is one small city to that?”

“That’s…cold.”

He smiled crookedly. “I am trying to prevent it. I have persuaded them to help. Though I have my doubts whether that was the right thing to do; and they doubt even more.”

She clutched his hand fiercely. “You have doubts? Welcome to the club, you are human.”

“Remember what I just said? Many of the uppermost in the Brotherhood can feed, do feed. Mostly on cold donated blood, which believe me is unspeakably unpleasant, and they can nightwalk. They are…lucky, and cunning and strong, and tend to survive where others die. Inevitable in a group where death is more common than life. And the life the survivors have is hard and dangerous and full of constant fear.”

Ellen suddenly looked at him. “Adrian,” she said. “If…let’s say all this turns out well…wouldn’t Shadowspawn tend to rise to the top, anyway? People with a lot of the genes, at least? I mean, we can’t undo the knowledge that the capacities exist.”

Adrian laughed. “What do you think has been happening throughout history, my darling? Why did the heritage persist, given all the disadvantages it also carries? A tenth of Asia is descended from Genghis Khan, the geneticists have found. The great sin of the Council…of the Brézés…was to separate out the bloodlines. Let them be mingled.”

“Eh?” he went on, and kissed her fingertips.

His phone played a snatch of Debussy. He brought it to his ear, listened, and his face became a motionless mask of cast iron.

“They have found it,” he said. A crooked smile. “You will not stay behind, hein?”

“What, and wait for the fireball to come find me? If it happens, I want it to be quick, and with you.”

“And with you,” he said, dropping a note on the table.

“That too.”

“My, but I spend a lot of my time in disused warehouses,” Ellen said, controlling her breathing.

That really did help…though just ignoring the fear as much as you could was even better, treating it as something that happened outside you and not worth much attention. A big part of learning to handle things like this was realizing that fear just wasn’t as important as you’d thought before you experienced a lot of it. Though she suspected doing that was something she’d have to pay for in the long run.

“Inside your head and in reality too,” she went on lightly.

“An old warehouse or disused factory is the ideal if you need abundant space that is inconspicuous,” Adrian replied. “This group would attract attention in a hotel.”

“Unless you stuck a camera crew in a corner and pretended that this band of hardcases was making Bond film twenty-nine.”

The dozen Brotherhood operatives sitting and talking quietly or working on their kit were a mixed lot. There were eight men and four women: Europeans, Turks, two who looked as if they came from below the Sahara-the one with the ritual scars in particular-an a couple of East Asians and uncharacterizables. Half of them were smoking, too. If you had the Power, you could do that without worrying about the consequences. Getting cancer was a matter of bad luck…

They all wore clothes that were dark, rugged and practical without shouting deadly supercommando secret society SWAT squad; besides that, to anyone who saw them the only thing they all shared was ages ranging from early twenties to early middle age.

No, not quite the only thing.

They shared a hard-faced toughness, more a mental than a physical quality, though they had the tensile readiness that showed they were at home with violence too. They had a weird collection of weapons, tailored for the sort of thing they usually did. Nothing automatic, nothing complex except for one futuristic-looking and very massive sniper rifle; the firearms were simple cut-down break-open shotguns with twin barrels or those even more cut down coach gun things or revolvers, along with plenty of blades of various types and a couple of crossbows and martial-arts-style thingies. The silver plating on the blades and silver-jacketed ammunition wouldn’t be necessary for Harvey Ledbetter, or Farmer and Anjali if they’d gone over to their old boss, but they’d work just as well as naked steel and lead, and it was what they were used to.

She checked her own gear; revolver and a couple of knives, and there was a Kevlar lining to her bush jacket, light silver mesh here and there, and various harmless looking objects that were actually amulets with embedded Wreakings. She wouldn’t need the silver, none of the people they were going after could nightwalk, but the amulets might well come in useful. All three of them could Wreak on a level that made them nightmares to a human normal like her.

Couple of tabs of valium would be welcome too, but we’ll have a stiff brandy and a quiet cuddle afterwards instead, and Adrian can have a sip of blood, which is really soothing…for both of us. Christ, Harvey, why did you have to do this? I like you and you saved my life. Also you’re too smart and tough for comfort if you’re not on my side.

Then she went over the plans again; the target was yet another old building, one dating from the 1930s and an early example of Bauhaus Industrial with a flat roof.

“Ah, it looks as if things are about to move,” Adrian said with satisfaction.

Two newcomers walked in, and they were past middle age, though slim and vibrantly fit. One was a man who had the tell-tale yellow flecks in dark eyes that often showed up with a heavy dose of Shadowspawn blood; very much like Adrian’s, in fact. The woman’s eyes were pale blue and her white hair cut to a cap of curls, but she gave off the same subliminal crackling sensation Ellen had come to associate with adepts. The genes for appearance weren’t very closely linked to the ones that controlled the Power.

“We’ve located the device…or at least, we’ve located the place Harvey Ledbetter has been using and we cannot locate the device with the Power,” she said, in a crisp British accent with an overtone of something else. “Which is itself a valuable clue.”

Nobody’s using their names, Ellen noticed; though the team had introduced themselves. Paranoid, what?

“Is there going to be interference from the Council?” one of the grunts said.

Adrian cleared his throat. “Probably not, this time,” he said. “That is the most I can say. The factions there are like a knot of adders.”

“What a surprise,” someone muttered.

The looks Adrian got were almost as sidelong as they’d been at the Hôtel de Brézé or the church in Vienna. Her husband had always been an independent operator…or loose cannon…even by the standards of the Brotherhood’s decentralized operations. Plus he had close family links with the enemy’s upper echelons. And she suspected there was an element of sheer envy at his command of the Power.

“Ledbetter is an outlaw,” the Brotherhood woman went on.

Brotherhood woman, Ellen thought mordantly. They haven’t bothered to make their terminology more inclusive, have they? Why am I not surprised? It’s a different world in here. And once you’re inside, nothing outside seems really real.

The adept went on: “If Guha and Farmer are with him, they are too. Lethal sanction regardless of collateral damage is authorized. Don’t hesitate; it doesn’t take long to throw a switch.”

Even his hard-bitten crew winced a little at that; she did herself. One little switch, or with this crowd just a flash of thought, and you became an ionized gas. She hoped Harvey wouldn’t do that with so many civilians around…but then, she hadn’t expected him to go rogue like this in the first place. Even Adrian hadn’t, and he’d grown up around the Texan. It might be some subtle mental influence from Adrienne or one of her minions; yet another hellish thing about the Shadowspawn world was that you could never quite tell for certain whether anyone’s mind was entirely their own. Mental compulsion could be extremely subtle, extraordinarily so, a matter of imperceptible nudges at the probabilities of individual decisions.

“What’s our insertion?” another asked.

“Vertical.”

“Helicopter?” the man said dubiously. “Noisy…and very complex.”

Complex meant vulnerable.

“No, we’ve arranged something rather less noticeable,” the man with the yellow-flecked eyes said. “Bless the tourist trade.”

Adrienne frowned at Dale Shadowblade. “Why are you speaking French so often?” she said.

“Practice.” He shrugged, keeping his face to where the sun had set before he arrived.

Adrienne returned the gesture at the man’s back. Her ally had always been taciturn; playing up to the Apache Devil stereotype, perhaps.

“Do you want your toy back?” she said, nodded to where Kai huddled in a corner, hugging herself.

“I suppose so,” he said. A smile: “You seem to have been educating her.”

“There are times when roadside diners are just what suits the mood,” she said with another shrug.

Kai scuttled over behind him with a lunge…but did not, Adrienne noted, touch.

“Thank you,” Adrienne said absently as Monica handed everyone coffee and retired to the corner-she hated being around other Shadowspawn.

As well she might, Adrienne thought. She has the most appetizing mind, like the aroma of fresh blueberry muffins.

“It went well at the warehouse?” she said, sipping the coffee. “I was glad to have you ask for a written précis of the plan.”

Which you usually don’t, she added: Dale was a loner and arrogant even by the standards of her species. But worth the trouble to cultivate. Arnaud…Arnaud could have been a problem. And when a person causes you problems, remember: no person, no problem.

Dale shrugged again. “There is no point in taking chances. I do not think this Brotherhood rogue will notice that his plan worked…that is, he will think it was all by his own efforts that the local gendarmerie believed his tale of terrorists and smugglers.”

“It ought to be entertaining to watch,” Adrienne said. “Monica, the pastries.”

“The consequences of Vienna have not been too…unfortunate?” Dale said.

“No, Great-grandfather was seriously annoyed with me, but I managed to convince him that you had exceeded your instructions, and I was suitably chastened by your Final Death; excellent bit of camouflage there, by the way. It is not easy to deceive a Brézé adept. Adrian is up, though there is suspicion because he apparently killed you before you could be questioned; I am down, but not irredeemably so, and court favor with the Council will shortly no longer matter much. If at all. How do you find post-corporeal existence?”

A shrug. “Much better than nonexistence,” he said, and left.

Adrienne laughed. The hotel had an excellent view. The city glittered before her, the long curves of the Bosporus bridges bright to her night-adapted eyes. She grinned happily and nibbled a baklava as another set of lights began to drift across the sky, an airship running with its engines off.

There were few things so entertaining as watching an enemy make a mistake. And if you had subtly guided the enemy into that mistake…why, that was the honey glaze on the flaky pastry crust. Though…

“That was odd,” she said.

“Doña?”

“Kai didn’t make him angry.”

“That you hurt her?” she asked, surprised.

“No, that I touched her; he would have been able to smell her blood in me, and me on her. We generally hate people touching our things unless we’re very close, and I took some of his Wreakings out of her mind, which he would also be able to sense-now he’ll have to spend hours looking for booby-traps. He should have thanked me for getting her out of the church, but done so resentfully. And snarled at her; that’s why she was so charmingly torn between relief and fear when I turned her back over to him.”

“That’s not very logical, he left her there.”

“Don’t be dense, Monica, you’re not stupid. What has logic to do with it? I am speaking of emotional patterns and you’ve been around Shadowspawn long enough to know what we’re like.”

“Well, you are all very territorial. About your lucies, particularly.”

“Exactly. Instead he was indifferent, though to be sure he’s a very self-controlled man. Hmmm. It should have needled him worse than if I’d killed her. Not that it’s important, but still…Not that she’s much of a prize. A little of the Power, yes, but not a really interesting personality. Much easier to corrupt than you, for example.”

Stung, Monica protested: “I am extremely corrupt! Why, then-me would have absolutely hated now-me, if I could have seen me back then…you know what I mean?”

“Translated from Buffy-speak, yes.”

“So I’m just…corrupt in a nice way.”

“Fairly corrupt, not extremely, and I’ve been working on it for a decade. Evil I can do myself; perverting innocence is much more fun.”

Monica beamed. “I feel really guilty about it sometimes. I know you like that.”

“Very much. It tastes like paprika,” she said, and propped her feet up a little higher. “Fetch me…no, popcorn! There’s going to be a bit of a show.”

“Ummm…I don’t think we have any popcorn here.”

“Oh, merde. Well, some brandy, then.”