Читать книгу Curse the Dark - Laura Anne Gilman - Страница 12

“Andre Felhim. Code 28-J8-199-6.”

“Good afternoon, sir.” A chime followed the almost-human-sounding voice, and the door of the restricted elevator opened with a soft hum, giving him access to the inner building where the Silence had its unmarked, unremarked world headquarters, on a side street in a side corner of Manhattan.

Andre put his keycard back into his pocket, touched the display pad on the wall, and rode in silence up to the seventh floor. It was quiet, now; most of the activity on seven occurred in the morning, when new reports were compiled and distributed. Friday afternoon was a time to catch up, to cover all your bases and plot strategy for the next week. Or, for managers like himself, for the weekend. The Silence slept, but not for long. There was a review meeting scheduled for Saturday morning, and he still had to look over the agenda.

“Ho, the glamorous life,” he said wryly, walking down the hall toward his office, a plain square of space carved out of the floor plan by three walls and a window. He still wasn’t quite sure how he rated one of those rare windows, but the first lesson you learned was take what you can get and never let anyone think it might have been a mistake.

While he’d been out of the office this morning, meeting with an extremely particular and paranoid new client, someone had dumped a dozen or so files into his in-box, threatening to topple the stack that was already there. A series of salmon-pink “while you were away” slips were taped to the back of his chair, fluttering slightly under the flow of air from the vent overhead. Andre pulled them off the fabric, flicking through them while he checked to see if his message light was on.

It was.

“It never stops,” he muttered, more amused than annoyed. Far worse if it were to stop. Information was the lifeblood of the Silence. And the more information you had, the more essential you were. If anyone thought, however rightly or wrongly, that you didn’t have access to new information…

The only thing equal in sin was not to bring money into the coffers, to pay for the less lucrative situations they had been founded to deal with. Endowments, even impressive ones, only went so far when you had the entire world to save.

Well. For the moment, anyway, he didn’t have to worry about either of those sins. Bringing The Wren—and Sergei—onto the Silence’s roster had been a coup he could rest on for a while longer yet, information-wise. Especially with this new client, who thought that the island estate she had just inherited might be infested with something unworldly. It was probably nuclear-irradiated cockroaches, considering where she lived, but the Silence would earn a pretty penny checking it out and cleaning it up, whatever the cause.

He almost hoped it was glow-in-the-dark cockroaches. They were still collecting royalties on the movie that got filmed after the last one of those Man-meets-Nature, Screws-it-up situations.

But that sort of project was a sideline. The supernatural screwing with the natural was their raison d’être; specifically, the Italian situation was where his focus needed to be, right now. Matthias would be annoyed not to have Sergei’s help on his current project, but Andre was not entirely unhappy that his former protégé had dug in his heels about letting the girl work alone.

He’d refrained from giving them anything more than the official, filed details of the situation, as per policy, but this felt…wrong. Bad, in his gut. And not only because they had so little information on the missing manuscript itself. Something about this had put his hackles up, and only the knowledge that these two really were the very best he could put on it made him sign off on the assignment.

That, and the fact that “I have a bad feeling about this” was not an acceptable reason within these hallways.

“You’re back.”

“You’re a master of the obvious.” He regretted his tone the moment he saw his assistant’s expression. “I’m sorry. It’s been a hellish twenty-four hours, and I’m a proper bastard for taking it out on you.”

“Make it two boxes of truffles at Christmas this year and you’re forgiven. As always.” Bren was office manager and dogsbody to three managers, Andre included, and they all ran her ragged. Chocolate once or twice a year seemed to him the least he could do.

“Anyway, you can see that disaster has once again struck while you were off-premises.”

She twiddled two red-nailed fingers in the direction of his desk, and Andre sighed dramatically. “Indeed. Any actual corpses?”

“None you have to dispose of. Coffee?”

He considered the offer briefly, then shook his head. “Thank you, but no. I’m irritable enough already without adding that swill to the mix this late in the day.”

“True, too true. Just yell if you change your mind.”

Andre paused a moment to enjoy the view of Bren’s backside as she strode down the hallway to her desk. He had an acknowledged weakness for tall, leggy blondes. Pity she’d prefer him to be Andrea.

With a chuckle at his own foolishness—the first even faint laugh he’d had since being handed the Italian project three days ago—he moved to the door and closed it against the external office distractions. And in that time his brief good humor fell away as though it had never existed.

Magic. This entire situation smelled of magic. Stank of it, actually.

Andre had been among the first, years ago, to endorse the use of Talents within the Silence. He knew their value, in an organization that dealt with the results of magic in more than three-quarters of their situations. But magic itself—the basic, unpredictable power—still made him uneasy, despite or maybe because of his continued exposure to it. For all their talk of current and channeling, it wasn’t the same as building a generator, and then flipping a switch. It was random, unpredictable—untrustworthy. Uncontrollable. Almost as uncontrollable as this unaffiliated Talent, his best (former) student at the reins or no. It was a pity he was becoming so fond of the girl. That might become a problem, eventually.

Sitting down at the glass-and-brass table he used for a desk, Andre spread the message slips out in front of him, scanning the names and sorting them into order of importance.

“Damn, damn, and damn.” It was the strongest expression of displeasure he would allow himself in the office. Andre leaned forward and stared at the blank wall opposite him. Two of the messages were from Alejandro, wanting to know with increasing levels of impatience what was happening with the Italian situation.

Alejandro wasn’t his superior…technically they were both on the same management level, and Andre in fact had seniority in years. But he was the person with oversight in that area of the world, and so despite having to come to Andre for aid, he still kept the upper hand. Levels and negotiations. The Silence was a masterpiece of levels, and every level you went up there were more appearing above you.

There were levels of trustworthiness, as well. His—what was the term? His lonejack didn’t trust him at all. Her handler trusted him just so far. How much did he trust them?

And how much of what they trusted him with could he in turn place in trust with others?

Last night, Sergei had called him. At home, not ten minutes after walking through the door, which meant the Handler had been waiting for him since Andre kept no set routine. When Andre tried to trace the call back, he discovered that the call had been routed through two different pay phones, ending up with one of those prepaid mobiles that was bought for cash. It was a level of paranoia the other man had never shown, even when he was in the thick of situations a decade ago, and normally Andre would have been amused by it, but for what his operative told him.

Not that Sergei’s cause of concern—a whisper campaign to discredit one of their operatives—was anything to worry about, not when the whispering wasn’t about the Silence itself. If anything, the Council’s attempts to discredit Wren worked to the Silence’s benefit, binding her more closely to them, if only fiscally.

But part of their deal with Sergei had been that they would protect Wren in the case of attack by the Council, and the means of attack had not, in their agreement, been specified as purely physical.

And it bothered Andre a great deal that no one in the organization had heard about this “whisper campaign” earlier. Information wasn’t the name of the game, it was the game.

Picking up the phone, he ignored the glowing message light and dialed a three-digit number. You didn’t keep Logan waiting.

“You got my report?” Andre asked.

The answer was affirmative, followed by an interrogative.

Andre picked up a rough-edged chunk of marble from his desk and rolled it in his right hand as he spoke. “I don’t know. It could be nothing, it could be good for us—or it could be potentially very ugly.”

The baritone on the other end of the phone got louder, just a shade too vehement for it to have been a polite comment. You didn’t hedge in front of Logan, either.

“We don’t know enough about what the Council knows. Truthfully, we don’t know anything, really. If our sources were compromised, then everything in the file is suspect.” He didn’t think that had happened, but it was a contingency they had to cover. That was the real reason the upper levels of the Silence needed Wren working for them; she was their conduit into the Cosa Nostradamus and the gossip therein. Gossip about the magical world that was so often the cause of the situations the Silence existed to clean up.

Although her admittedly extraordinary ability as a Retriever was a very useful thing to have in the toolbox, indeed. And the P.R. value of letting it be known—selectively, oh so selectively—that she was on their roster, that could not be overlooked or undervalued, either. “We didn’t hear anything because we’re not the ears they’re whispering into, no…and none of our clients have reported anything in their nets. It’s not likely…Sir, yes…Yes, sir. Yes, I would say that it is entirely possible that our involvement is being whispered as well.”

A pause, and he reached for the bottle of antacid sitting on his desk, shaking out three pills but not taking them just yet. Bad form to chew while getting chewed out by your boss.

“Yes, sir. We’re already on it.”

Andre hung up the phone and exhaled sharply through pursed lips. That hadn’t been as bad as it might have been. Logan was a bastard, even for the Silence, but a decent Division manager despite that. Or perhaps because of it; he knew that praise and beatings had to be carefully balanced for maximum result. Being reamed by a senior administrator the way Andre just had was always a learning experience.

And the only thing to do with experiences like that was to learn from them.

Andre mentally sorted through the list of people available to him, and jabbed a button on the phone.

“Darcy. Pronto.”

While he waited for his researcher to arrive, Andre went through the list of “while you were aways” and dropped almost half into the shredder placed discreetly beneath his desk. The rest could wait until he had a spare moment to deal with them.

“You rang, oh mighty one?”

When Darcy Cross was born, office gossip claimed, the presiding doctor had asked her mother if she wanted to file a complaint, since clearly not everything had been delivered. The ensuing years hadn’t done anything to refute the doctor’s comment: now in her mid-thirties, Darcy could claim four foot five inches if she wore heels, and her bone structure was so frail it reminded one, inevitably, of a baby chick. People always stepped carefully around her, as though she might shatter from a sharp word. But the mind in that delicate body was first-rate, and the Silence paid very well for the use of it.

“Two of our ops are getting pressured from an external source, creating doubt as to their effectiveness, their veracity. Subvert, nothing concrete, nothing provable.” He pulled a three-inch-thick folder from the pile to his left and handed it to her. Everything was on disk, of course, but the surest way to keep something secure these days was to keep it offline.

“You want me to find the source?” The remote expression in Darcy’s hazel-blue eyes made it clear that she thought she was being undertasked.

“Not exactly.” His headshake made her perk up, more interested. She perched on the edge of the sole guest chair and waited to hear more.

“We know who is doing it, and why—more or less. The current situation is to our benefit, but only so long as it remains…imprecise.” So long as his players remained off balance and uncertain, but not irreparably damaged in mind or reputation. Logan had been quite emphatic about that. “We need to know exactly what is being said, and to whom, on an ongoing basis. Monitor the flow. And if the pressure is ramped up in any way, or you feel that there is any cause for alarm—”

“Insert counterpressure in such a way that it would appear to issue from the same source as the original pressure to confuse the issue and weaken the first source.” Skin that sunlight rarely saw had its own glow as she processed the intricacies of the assignment. “Will I have support on this?”

“No.” The fewer people who knew anything other than “we’re looking into it” the better, just in case. “But you’re hereby released from anything below a St. George-level priority.” He’d catch hell for that, but Logan would have to cover for him.

“Most excellent.” She weighed the folder in her hand, as though that could tell her anything. Who knew, maybe it could. She wasn’t a Talent, but her mind was nonetheless impressive. And not a little terrifying, if she looked at you the wrong way. Santa Claus might know if you were naughty or nice, but Darcy could give you details about what, with whom, when and how much you paid for it.

He was quite reasonably glad that she and he worked for the same side.

“Go on, then. Shoo.” He made a “go away” motion at her. “Go be dangerously brilliant elsewhere. I know for a fact that your office is larger than mine.”

“Because you’re never actually in your office,” she said in return, then stood to leave, folder in hand. But as she turned to go she hesitated, as though something in her brain had clicked over unexpectedly.

“Yes?” He leaned back in his chair, watching as whatever it was she was processing worked its way to the front.

“I was just remembering—it may be nothing…but I was working on another situation, and part of that involved interviewing a couple of FocAs, and one of them said something…okay, Cross, what did he say?”

FocAs was slang for Focused Actives, field agents who were also Talents. There weren’t many, and none of them were overly gifted—until Wren Valere—but still useful enough to warrant their own category.

“Right.” She snapped her fingers, making Andre blink. “He said that there’d been rumblings back home…. They were talking to each other, actually, so I was only half-listening, and yeah, ‘my dad says there’s a schism in the community, something coming big and ugly.’” She broke off, her voice rising back to her normal tones. “Think it’s related?”

“No, it’s not—wait.”

This might not be related to the specific item he had set her on, but from what he knew of the political structure among human Talents—and damn Sergei for the tight-lipped bastard he was—the relationship between the Mage’s Council and the rest of the Talent community was a fault line just waiting to rupture. As he understood the gist of Sergei’s reports, the Council wanted to be the sole arbiter of what all Talents did or didn’t do within their community. Lonejacks, the freelancers to the Council’s union, if you would, were the largest, loudest—if totally disorganized—voice in opposition to those plans.

Wren Valere was a lonejack—and one already in the Council’s crosshairs. Any trouble would certainly impact her. And now, by association, the Silence. That was reason enough to follow up on any gossip, no matter how vague.

“Sir?”

He held up one finger, to indicate that she should allow him a moment longer to process.

Even if this newest information were completely unrelated—unlikely but possible—the information could still be useful, long-term. While all Talents were considered part of what they referred to slightly tongue-in-cheek as the Cosa Nostradamus, not all of the Cosa were lonejacks or Council members. None of the Talents successfully recruited by the Silence Handlers, for example, had affiliations to either group; few of them knew much about the Cosa other than the fact that it existed. Like any large family, Andre thought without amusement, there were always branches that hadn’t spoken in generations.

That was the main reason why the Silence knew a little about the Cosa, but until Sergei had met up with his Wren, nothing at all about the Council. Cosa members were gossips, and the Cosa creed was inclusionary. The Council was neither.

While they might have been able to pry details from their FocAs, Handlers were instructed never to place their active’s personal obligations against the Silence’s interests, to the point where Andre had taken people off situations entirely if it was deemed a conflict of interest.

It had nothing to do with compassion and everything to do with practicality. The Silence needed their people to be one hundred percent on the job, and conflict impaired judgment. And that was even more emphasized with FocAs. They were too few, too valuable to risk.

Not to mention, Andre thought mordantly, that having even a low-level Talent gunning for you could make life in this electronic age…uncomfortable.

“So…?” Darcy was still standing in his doorway, waiting while his thoughts chased each other to a decision.

“Get him in here, without his Handler,” Andre said. It was a risk, but since the boy had already had contact with Darcy, less of one than sending someone else might have been. “Quickly, but quietly. And—no, wait. Send him directly to me.” That was a risk, but knowledge was power. And this might be—or become—something it would be wiser to keep for himself, rather than sharing.

After she left, he picked up the phone once again and dialed an outside number.

“Poul. I have an assignment for you.”

It was going to be a longer afternoon than he had planned.

“You think P.B.’s going to be okay while we’re gone?”

Sergei finished putting their carry-on luggage in the overhead bin and looked down at his partner.

“Yeah. I think the obnoxious little walking blanket will be fine.” He shifted to let another passenger drag his luggage by, and then closed the bin, unlacing and removing his shoes and placing them in their fabric carry bag, then storing them under the seat in front of their row. Wren had already kicked off her own shoes, practical and comfortable leather skimmers, and curled up on her own seat. The only good thing about being short, she thought, was that she got to be sort of comfortable in airplane seats.

“And Andre’s check cleared?”

“Cleared before I let you start packing.”

She knew all this. She just liked hearing Sergei say it again. His voice was deep and raspy, like a lion’s purr. It made her feel better. He could probably be reciting the back ads in the Village Voice and it would still make her feel better. You’re so astonishingly easy, Valere.

“Passport?”

“In my pocket with all our other papers.” He was fighting back a smile behind that stern expression, she could tell. In any other situation it would annoy the hell out of her. But not right now. Now she was out of the airport, with all the worried-looking people and loudspeaker announcements and hurry-hurry-wait-wait and all those windows looking out at all those…planes.

The fact that she was currently sitting in one of those planes hadn’t escaped her attention. But somehow being in one was better than looking at and planning on getting in one.

Wren knew it didn’t make any sense. And thinking about it just emphasized the fact that she was in a plane rather than a weirdly shaped train, or something. And if she thought in that direction too long, bad things would start to happen again.

“Emergency rations?”

“Are in your bag, next to the newspaper. And yes, I packed those disgusting maple nut things.” He sat down next to her, raising the armrest between them to put his arm around her more comfortably. “Wren. Hush. It’s going to be okay.”

Easy for him to say, she thought a little resentfully. He didn’t feel this beast singing beneath him, all filled with electronic devices practically begging to be drained. What happened if they ran into trouble, and she panicked, and tried to reach for current? What if—

“You’re thinking too much,” he said.

Guilty as charged, Officer. But he was right. If she just stopped thinking about it, her instinct for self-preservation—incredibly strong, as she knew from previous close calls—would kick in and keep her from doing anything suicidal in her panic. Probably. So. Change the subject.

“Do you think that Andre wasn’t telling us everything?”

Sergei snorted at that. “Andre never tells anyone everything. But no, I think that he was as up-front as he’s capable of being on Silence business.”

Oh, that was reassuring. She felt totally reassured. Really.

“Did I mention that I’m hating this job already? Even without the being on this thing I’m not thinking about being on?”

“I don’t like it either, woman. If you’ve any better ideas, I would love to hear them.”

“Bet Noodles would hire me.”

“Yes, I can see you spending your life as a Chinese short-order cook. Or a bicycle delivery girl. If you could Translocate better, maybe.”

“All right, that was low.” Her recent attempts at Translocation had been done under only extreme duress, once to save their own lives during a job gone bad, and once to keep a client from getting killed. But she’d gotten the job done, hadn’t she? So what was a little vomiting and current-spillover between friends?

“It will all be fine. Just another job.” Sergei took out the newspaper and checked to make sure that the business section was intact, then put it away and pulled a burgundy folder from his bag and extracted a sheaf of typewritten pages from it.

“See? All the information we need, hand-delivered by Andre’s little messenger boy this morning, including names, dates, places, and driving directions. Why don’t you try to sleep, okay? It’s a long flight, and we’re going to have to hit the ground running when we get there.”

She rested her head against his shoulder, feeling the comforting familiarity of him. None of the awkwardness or uncomfortableness of recent months, just…Sergei. The thought almost made her cry. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…only it’s not gone. Still here. Still Sergei. He was right. P.B. was a big—well, okay, full-grown demon, he could take care of himself. And if he did run into trouble, Tree-taller was around, had promised to keep an eye out. The other Talent had no beef with the fatae, the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus, and would listen if P.B. came to him. And anything Andre hadn’t told them in that packet, they’d figure out on their own. Wasn’t like they needed the Silence, the Silence needed them.

“Wren?”

They’d probably only be gone a couple-five days, anyway. A week, tops.

“Yeah. Sleep. Right. Okay. I’ll try.”

Twenty minutes later, the plane pulled away from the gate. Sergei looked up from the papers he was reading as the safety instructions tape began to play, then down at his companion. She was still leaning against his shoulder, strands of chestnut hair falling into her eyes, and he could hear the faintest completely unladylike snore coming from her half-open mouth.

“Rest well, Wrenlet,” he whispered. “Tough job ahead.”