Читать книгу Free Fall - Laura Anne Gilman - Страница 11

The atmosphere at Eddy’s was calm, even at the height of the lunch rush. The tables were set with linen so pale blue as to look white, and the floral displays at the front door were placed so perfectly that every table got only an occasional hint of their perfume, so as not to overwhelm the taste or aroma of their excellent, if overpriced food. Conversations were quiet, occasionally intense, and always, as befitted the surroundings, civilized.

Sergei Didier, art connoisseur, boutique gallery owner and trendsetter, former man about the art scene, had spent the past ten years looking for an excuse to eat here. He wasn’t about to waste the experience. But he couldn’t avoid the reason he had finally gotten here, either.

His companion waited until the waiter had finished refilling their glasses and moved away before speaking again. “You’re asking me if I believe in things that go bump in the night.”

Sergei lifted his glass and admired the way the red liquid looked almost brown in the light. It was an excellent vintage, and the aged tannins suited the wild boar on his plate to perfection.

He took a sip, letting the wine slide down his throat with the quiet appreciation it deserved, and then placed the glass on the tablecloth next to his plate. “I am asking if you are willing to admit what you already know.”

The other man at the table raised a white eyebrow at that. “I never admit to anything that will not profit me.”

Sergei knew that. More, he was counting on it. Finding the chinks, the weak spots, within the ranks of his former employer took resources. Some of those resources he already had. Some of them he had to acquire.

Acquiring took delicacy, discretion, and knowing when to bull forward and damn the usual rules. But bull forward carefully. “It is said, in legend and story, that the gratitude of the wee folk was to be valued.”

There was another period of silence as they ate. The business that had, superficially, brought them here was long-finished, the arrangements for a private showing at Sergei’s gallery of this man’s collection all but nailed down in discreet, gentlemanly fashion, waiting only for the lawyers and the insurance companies to agree.

“You’re claiming that there are fairies running around Manhattan?” His dining companion was one of the most famous unknown men in the City. He paid a lot of people a lot of money to make sure that was so. Or rather, his company paid people a lot of money to make it so—and to make sure that nobody disturbed him from his work, which was to determine what the stock market was going to do before the market itself knew.

He was not a man who believed in fairies.

“I am not claiming anything,” Sergei said peaceably, not retreating.

“No. You’re asking me to do so.”

It was an odd conversation held by an odd couple: a seventy-something bald-headed, pug-faced man in a thousand-dollar blue suit and an old-fashioned bow tie, and a forty-something man with a full head of silvering-brown hair and a face perhaps a shade too sharp-lined to be considered handsome. He wore a less expensive but better-fitting suit, and his monochrome tie was perfectly tied, the picture of the confident underling: exactly the picture he wanted his companion to relax into.

The old man wasn’t buying it.

The waiter came by and refilled their wineglasses with silent precision. Sergei let the conversation lapse again: there was nothing to be gained by pushing further, and the meal was worth his full attention.

“I knew a girl once…”

His companion let the sentence trail off, waiting for Sergei to show interest.

“Indeed?” A polite cock of the head, but his attention still on the meal. It was like coaxing a feral cat, like the one that lived out behind his gallery. If you gave them any attention whatsoever, they suspected the worst. Ignore them, and they were intrigued.

“She had claws.”

“Indeed.” Sergei had no idea what breed of Fatae had claws, but he was sure there were at least three different types. Maybe more. Wren might know, if she would ever pick up the damn phone when he called. He shut that thought away. That was personal. This was the job. All his attention had to be on the situation, nowhere else. He could not allow himself to think of anything other than his goal.

The Silence had taught him that, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate, ready and eager to believe he could help save the world from itself. They had taught him how to concentrate, how to shut out distractions. They had also taught him how to lie, to cheat, and to kill.

And how to betray.

Wren would answer the phone, eventually. Or she wouldn’t. He was the one who had screwed up: he had to wait for her to decide.

“Claws, yes. And eyes that were almost…they were like opals. Dark but filled with color. She wore sunglasses, all the time.”

“And you thought she was human.” He had once thought the entire bipedal world was human; working with Wren Valere had taught him differently. Not even the humans were human, sometimes.

“No. I thought she was a dream. And, like all dreams, eventually I woke up. And she was gone.”

The man was seventy-four, and for a moment his voice was that of a man in his twenties.

Sergei could relate. Magic did that to you. But what he was doing here had nothing to do with Wren for the duration. Not in that way, anyway. The Cosa Nostradamus might not want him, either, but they needed him. Needed his contacts, his skills. His ability to get past the front guard of the Silence, even now. Especially now.

Andre Felhim, his former boss, was still inside, fighting to reclaim the organization from the corruption eating it from the top down, the force that had turned it from benefactor of the innocent to persecutor of the different. Sergei didn’t think that the old man had a chance in hell, but hell had been known to throw some wild dice.

In the meanwhile, Sergei stood just inside the door and tested the foundation for weaknesses. A way for the Cosa to defend themselves, come the next attack. Because it would come, there was no doubt of that.

“You never tried to find her again?” he asked his companion.

“Of course I did. But after a while…You let dreams go. Or you go insane trying to convince others that it was real.”

They ate in silence. When the waiter came to take their plates, Sergei’s host raised weary eyes to him. “They are real.”

Sergei nodded. The knowledge did not seem to bring the older man any peace.

“What do you want me to do?”

Sergei’s next meeting didn’t go quite as well.

“No.” Flat, unbending, and final.

“Joanie…” He tried for a reasonable tone.

“No.” She kept walking, looking straight ahead; no sideways-slanting glance that might give him hope. She had a black leather pocketbook slung over one arm, and black leather sneakers on her feet. He had caught her on her lunch break, taking a power walk.

“Joanie.” He kept pace with her, letting a hint of calculated wheedling slide into his voice, just enough to make her laugh and give in, once upon a time.

“I hate you.”

“You always did.”

Her mouth twisted, and she glared at him. Joanie was tall, and blond, and had a chest that just asked for a deep breath and a low-cut neckline. But the way she glared made her cousin to Wren in attitude, if not looks.

Don’t think about her. Don’t go there now. Damn it, focus!

They were walking along a glass-enclosed arcade, under artificial lights replicating sunlight. The stores lining the walkway were trying very hard to look expensive and exclusive, and the women walking in and out of them, bags in hand, were doing likewise. He had just come from his lunch, with the results of it tucked securely away by means of one phone call to a very discreet private bank, and an electronic transfer to another account set up within the same bank. Sergei felt a little dirty about it all, but that wouldn’t stop him from using every penny, and going back to ask for more, if needed.

“I can pay for information.”

“You think I’m holding out for money?” Her voice went from reluctant to honestly annoyed.

Nobody who worked for the Silence ever needed to take a second job, even if they had the time or energy for it. “No.” He didn’t think that. “But it will make…whatever happens, easier.”

He had no idea what was going to happen, but playing on someone’s fears of the future was usually effective. He’d learned that from his tax guy.

Joanie shook her head, blond ponytail wagging. “Nothing’s going to happen. You’re wrong.”

“I’m not wrong.” He paused. “Joanie. I was there. I saw what I saw.”

She didn’t bother arguing that point. “You never killed for the cause?”

He had. He had, more than once. “I never killed an innocent. I never killed one of our own.”

Poul Jorgunmunder had. Poul, Andre’s protégé, his replacement once Sergei left the Silence.

And the innocent he had killed was Bren, Andre’s left-hand woman. A good woman, as far as Sergei knew. Poul had killed her in cold blood, in order to implicate the Fatae in the murder of a Silence employee, setting a trail of clues that would have fired up anti-Fatae sentiment even higher, caused even more deaths.

Sergei had seen it happen. So had Andre. Only one of them had been horrified.

“I was an Operative for ten years,” Joanne said. “I worked with Poul, when he first came on-board. Smart kid. Sharp. Everyone knew he was going places.”

“Yeah,” Sergei agreed, tasting something sour in his mouth that wasn’t from lunch. He had never liked Poul, but he had trusted Andre’s judgment on the man. They had both been wrong. “He went places…right to Duncan’s side.”

She looked puzzled. It seemed honest. She didn’t know. She wasn’t part of it.

He had picked right. Sergei allowed himself a faint breath of relief.

“The Silence, they’re using the FocAs, Joanne. Our kids. They’re using them as weapons. Against their own kind. Against innocents.”

FocAs. That was Silence shorthand for Focused Active Agents. Talented Operatives, brought in by the Silence—by specific Handlers like Joanne and, once upon a time, Sergei, to work on very specialized situations—using magic to fight magical threats. Most of them were low-res, to use Wren’s term. Not Pures, not extremely strong, but still Talent. Young. Hell, most of them were children, in all the ways that mattered. Most of them had been under twenty when they signed on.

The Silence was twisting them. Brainwashing them somehow. Using them against the Cosa, and then throwing them away.

They had been the greatest victims of the Bridge, killed by their own kith and kin in self-defense.

The more of this he told Joanie, in just a step more detail than he estimated she could stand, the greener her pale skin became, until she tuned away and was sick in a potted plant outside one of the stores. He watched, feeling only a little guilt. He did what he needed to do, to get the results he needed.

A salesgirl glared at them, but made no effort to come out and either help, or chase them away.

When Joanie finished, he took her by the arm, and walked her to the nearest public rest room. He waited outside while she washed her face and flushed out her mouth. His point had been made; there was no need to punish her further.

When she came out, her skin was still pale and green-tinged, but the control that marked a good Operative was back in place. She opened her mouth, and the party line fell out. “We do good work. The means aren’t always just, but…”

He wished he was more surprised at her words. “Is that justification for murder, fraud, and setting up more innocents to die?”

“Are they innocent?” she asked. “Are any of us really innocent? Bren…I never met her. But she was a member of the Silence. To protect the innocent is our reason for existing. That means we take on the onus of not being innocent. We see too much. We know too much. Sometimes, we do too much. That’s the cost.”

It wasn’t, Sergei reflected sadly, only the FocAs who were brainwashed. He had been there once, too. It had taken a case going horribly wrong before he had found the strength to walk away, and only Wren had kept him from going back.

What would it take to get Joanie to walk away?

“Are you willing to wake up at three in the morning, knowing what cost you’ve paid out of your soul, if you sit and do nothing, now?”

She looked away, watching the progress of a pair of young women down the escalator below them. “I’m awake at three in the morning anyway, Sergei. Aren’t you?”

Once, he would have been silent. Now, he had an answer for her.

“No. I’m not.” It sounded priggish, but it was also the truth. “I don’t wake up and stare at the ceiling, or listen to the clock tick. I go to bed, and I sleep through the night, now.”

And with that small white lie, he walked away, hoping that what he had said had been enough to seed doubt, that even if she would not question her loyalties, she would not turn around and betray him.

He didn’t look back, but he felt her staring at him.

Three hours later, sitting in an office in another part of town, surrounded by exotic woods carved into seductive and somewhat disturbing forms, his cell phone rang.

“I’m sorry, if you’ll excuse me for a moment?” he asked the man he was speaking with. Taking the nod as permission, Sergei walked a few steps away and flipped open the phone. “Didier.”

“Maxwell’s Tea House. 4:00 p.m.”

The connection broke off, and Sergei pocketed his phone with a thoughtful frown. He hadn’t recognized the voice, or the number on the display. Not that those facts alone meant anything, good or ill. His phone number got around, and he had been sowing the ground pretty intensely over the past few months since the fiasco downtown. But he would have been slightly more comfortable if he knew which tug on what rope had produced that invitation.

Maxwell’s was, if he remembered correctly, not particularly in one group’s territory or another, and he had never met anyone there before. In fact, the only reason he knew about it at all was that Shig, the Japanese Fatae friend of P.B.’s, had mentioned it as having a particularly authentic tea ceremony. And that it was a good place to hold delicate discussions.

So it could be an honest meet. Or a setup. Or both.

It could be anything. So why did he feel a nervous chill in his bones?

Because he knew too well what all the players were capable of. And he had no backup.

“I’m sorry.” He went back to the man he had been speaking with, who was waiting patiently. “I’m afraid I am a man in demand, today.” The other man, an art dealer from New Zealand, accepted the comment as it was offered, with a smile, and they continued their negotiations.

Even in wartime, business continued.