Shadows of Annihilation Page 31

  “Yeah, lady . . . uh, ma’am, we did. We drop bombs . . . fire and gas bombs, ma’am. Should we name the crates Merciful Mother of God or St. Francis of Assisi, or som’ptin’ like dat?”

  “A point,” she said. “Now, what caught your eye first?”

  Two hours later, the pilot of Hellpig was wearily going over his attack run with the firebombs one more time.

  “Yeah, we were low. You gotta be low if you’re gonna put ’em anywhere near where you want ’em, the firebombs. They don’t have fins, they just tumble and fall. I was aiming for this bunch of bad guys, and I got ’em, neat as you please. It’s sort of like you draw a thick line on the ground from the spot where the first one hits, so you do it in your head—you’ve got to feel where they’re going to hit, then draw that line over the target. Two got away but they were way ahead of the others and moving like bats outta hell.”

  He smiled. “Well, three got away, if you count the one being carried.”

  A small swift bell rang in Luz’s head. “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” she said, feeling something like a cold breeze in the overheated room. “One being carried?”

  He glanced over at her, since she’d been mostly silent until now.

  “Yeah, there was this guy out in front—in front of all of them—and he had another guy over his shoulder. Well, it could have been a girl, I suppose, if she were in those sort of pajama things the campies—”

  Which was Army slang for campesino, peasant.

  “—wear.”

  “And he was running with someone over his shoulder?”

  “Running like his . . . the seat of his pants . . . was on fire, flat-out. Running fast over broken country. He had one arm over the guy across his shoulder, sort of a fireman’s carry, and a rifle in the other one. I’m not sure about that, but I think it was one of ours, an R-13, which isn’t exactly a feather either.”

  In fact it weighed just a fraction under ten pounds with a twenty-round magazine loaded.

  “I’d put him on any football team I was coaching, I’ll tell you that, even if he was an old guy.”

  “Why did you think he was old?”

  “Well, I’m not sure—”

  “You don’t have to be, Lieutenant Vlastos,” Luz said, and smiled. “You can leave that to us. We’re not always right, but we’re usually sure.”

  He laughed, relaxing, which had been her intention.

  “Well, yeah, I know how that works, ma’am. Reason is, his hat was off, no surprise there, and his hair was white, like an old man’s, like my dad’s these days. It really stood out.”

  He was obviously going to ask her something, something along the lines of Does that help? Then he smiled thinly and nodded: No, I don’t ask the questions.

  Then his eyes went to Julie Durán’s locks, pale yellow where they weren’t sun-streaked to the color of tow, and to Lieutenant Stoddard’s close crop, like a cap of old gold.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Luz said nothing at all, and he nodded again.

  Blonds were rare in Mexico, but they weren’t outlandishly rare, any more than they were in Andalusia or Sicily or around the lieutenant’s parents’ birthplace on the Turkish side of the Aegean. If you excluded people who were outright indio, perhaps three in a hundred and twice that in the northern tier of states, both depending on how light a shade of brown hair you put into the blond category.

  When the airmen were thanked and gone, Julie looked at her over a cup of the now even-more-vile coffee. “You got something,” she said.

  There was no resentment in her voice; this type of interrogation was a fishing expedition pur sang, done on the off-chance something went click with something else. As often as not, being an operative was like walking around with a bag of puzzle pieces, trying them against the ones the world handed you. It meant a lot of tedious mental work that had to be done with painstaking attention to detail and a focus that never wavered no matter how bored you were.

  Luz thought carefully. The foremost cause of failure in her line of work was saying too much. Unfortunately, saying too little ran a close second. It was a business that ran on trust and in which you could trust nobody, and its occupational disease was hoarding information.

  “Last year,” she said carefully, “I saw a man . . . a tall blond man . . . throw another man, an elderly one about my weight, over his shoulder and run with him. Run across a railway trackside, vault onto a four-board fence, then do high-speed broken field running across three hundred yards of ridge-and-furrow potato field covered in knee-high vines. His name was . . . is . . . Horst von Dückler. Freiherr Hauptmann Horst von Dückler, Abteilung IIIb. Code name at that time . . . Reichsschwert.”

  Which meant Imperial Sword, literally. Though Blade of the Realm might be more accurate as a colloquial translation.

  “Horst, here?” Ciara said, her eyes going wide in alarm. “Well, he did escape from the prisoner-of-war camp in El Paso . . . The Director told us that last New Year.”

  Luz stilled a flash of irritation; she would have said that herself, but not until she’d thought carefully about it. One reason she and Ciara made a good team was that they were on opposite ends of the insane-suspicion scale and so corrected each other.

  Julie smiled. “What does he look like?”

  “We’ve got pictures on file. Short form . . . did you ever see a picture of that German fighting-scout pilot, the one they call the Red Baron because he paints his aircraft red? Manfred von Richthofen?”

  “Mmmmm!” Julie said appreciatively. “Impressive specimen, then!”

  “Horst is a distant cousin of his and the resemblance is striking. It was even more so before I shot him in the face last October,” Luz said. “I hoped I’d killed him, but I was firing from a moving automobile. Instead I just destroyed his left eye. He wears a patch on it now.”

  Henrietta started to say something, and Julie made an air-patting gesture: Don’t ask. She’d undoubtedly put two and seventeen together—starting with the horror-gas attacks last October. And the rumors about the Telemobiloscope, and how a German intelligence officer had been captured when Theodore Jr.’s tanks overran the wreckage of an airship equipped with it.

  “I gather he’ll be . . . peeved with you?” Julie said cautiously.

  “Very, because of that and some other things,” Luz said. “He was peeved after I shot him, and then even more peeved when . . . our subsequent meeting ended with him being captured in France. He was unconscious at the time. Because he’d been shot . . . and pounded with a large rock . . . and penultimately because I’d kicked him in the head. With hindsight, I should have just killed him with malice aforethought in the heat of the moment, but I wanted him taken for interrogation. Alas, that ended up with him being interrogated by Military Intelligence, not us.”

  Military Intelligence were usually quite competent, but they operated by an entirely different set of rules, especially when dealing with POWs captured in uniform. If the Black Chamber had been in charge, von Dückler would have been interrogated by what was antiseptically known as the third protocol and then privately shot in the back of the head and anonymously, hygienically, and progressively cremated. He was entirely too competent and motivated to be allowed to live if there was an alternative.

  Julie suddenly smiled like a cat; Luz could tell more things were going click in her friend’s cynical and crafty brain. Things that her husband had heard from the Deuxième Bureau in Algiers, things Luz had said about the French thinking she was a German asset during a mission in Europe before the 6th . . .

  “Ah, well, yes, he would be a bit annoyed,” Julie said. “Being taken for a fool and shot in the face and then thinking you’re going to get revenge for it and being beaten again will do that. And men . . . delightful creatures often enough, but . . . so emotional.”

  Luz looked around the bleak bare room, gathering her thoughts. The
picture of Uncle Teddy was a minor inspiration; as he said, if you had to hit . . .

  Hit hard, never soft, and don’t stop until the enemy is down.

  “Miss Colmer . . .” she said.

  The secretary’s mechanical pencil poised over a fresh page on her steno pad.

  Luz went on: “Wire to HQ, requesting transmission of full . . .”

  She stopped herself before using the name Bildtelegraph for the system of sending pictures over the wires, which would be tactless nowadays, though it was a German invention. With Henrietta here it would be a violation of her self-imposed rule of never causing someone she knew personally unintentional pain.

  “. . . photo-telegraphic record of subject Horst von Dückler, Abteilung IIIb agent, and print file updates from all sources sent soonest. Alert that subject has been detected in the vicinity of Zacatecas; photographic posters to be distributed by FBS to local police forces soonest repeat soonest. Advise general alert subject highest threat level: Kill on sight.”

  They packed up and were rising to go when Lieutenant Nudelman put his head discreetly through the door.

  “Mrs. Durán?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” she said.

  “It’s your office, ma’am. They say it’s urgent and that you’ll need to make a confidential call to a third location. You can use my office, ma’am, it’s private and we can route it through the base telephone exchange.”

  Julie didn’t glance aside, and her expression was still the polite social smile.

  She’d have given her second-in-command notice of where she’d be, Luz thought. But she’d also have ordered there be no calls except in an emergency.

  Emergencies were always bad news for a spy.

  THIRTEEN

  Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge Army Air Corps Base

  Town of Jerez

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 21ST, 1917, 1917(B)

  Lieutenant Nudelman’s office had doubtless started as a bare cube painted in the usual institutional-bile color that had always struck her as being just the shade you’d expect from the vomitus of a bureaucrat’s soul given physical form.

  Now besides the usual office furniture there was a reprint of a rather impressionistic treatment of sunflowers by a very obscure European painter, and a few family pictures, including one of himself having his bars pinned on his shoulders with his parents in the background looking fit to burst with pride, and another of a pretty Jewish-looking girl who was probably his wife, with a baby in her arms. Julie Durán sat in his chair and raised the one-piece military handset, giving the number of the warehouse in Jerez to the base operator.

  Luz waited through the nonconversation until the other operative replaced the handset in the cradle, keeping her mind occupied by looking at the bookshelf. Which, besides the usual items common to those in the trade, had the usual suspiciously crisp and unmarked-looking copy of The Promise of American Life; those who were really concerned with appearances often marked them up deliberately, and all the way through.

  But the shelves also included a Complete Works of Freidreich Nietzsche in the original German (in the most recent edition, the one not edited by the unpleasant and very intrusive hand of the dead philosopher’s sister) . . . and a slim volume of Emily Dickinson. Which was a useful reminder not to trust entirely to your initial summary of a human being.

  The interval lasted about twenty seconds; Julie’s mind was obviously working overtime.

  “¿Disculpé, lo iré a buscar de inmediato?” she said.

  The station chief was staring at the handset in her palm and obviously repeating the last thing said to her. Then she swore comprehensively . . . in ancient Greek, quoting from Aristophanes.

  “And he hung up on me? Sandoval’s been made!” she said. “Probably he’s dead and that was whoever just killed him.”

  “Who was talking?” Luz asked sharply.

  “A man, youngish . . . deep voice but not a bass, a bit choppy,” Julie said alertly. “There was something about it . . . Can’t put my finger on it . . . Are you going to do your party trick, Luz?”

  They could both speak accent-free Spanish and French and German, to a level that let them pass easily as native speakers.

  What I can do that Julie can’t is sound convincingly like a Mexican or a German or a Frenchwoman speaking one of the other languages with a typical accent, and vice versa.

  “Like this?” Luz said.

  She repeated the phrase the station chief had quoted, but let just a little of a staccato accent into it, as little as she could and still identify it to her own ear.

  “Yes, that’s it, but I can’t place it,” Julie said.

  “It’s a fainter version of this,” Luz said, and repeated it, this time letting the r-sounds go a little more flat and clipped and deepening and biting off the vowels. English was spoken farther back in the mouth than Spanish, and German farther still.

  “German!” Julie said, as her suspicion was confirmed.

  “I’m afraid you have an infestation, and it’ll be as annoying as cockroaches, and probably as difficult to get rid of,” Luz said.

  “You don’t get to play on my territory, Fritz,” Julie snarled at the telephone.

  Julie’s fury turned white-hot; obviously surviving revolucionarios were just part of the day’s work to her, but having Germans operating on her patch was another matter entirely.

  “And if you try it I’ll ἐγὼ δὲ κινήσω γέ σου τὸν πρωκτὸν ἀντὶ φύσκης!” she went on.

  Luz didn’t translate, despite Ciara’s inquiring look and Henrietta’s frustrated one: That was another quote from The Knights, an obscene threat specifying intent to commit an act that if taken literally would require that someone on the other end of the phone line have an anus and Julie to have male genitalia, and invoking a very graphic metaphor involving stuffing meat up into a sausage skin with a plunger and hammer.

  The classics weren’t necessarily very . . . genteel.

  “What—” Henrietta and Ciara both began to speak, almost echoing each other, then stopped, waiting to be told what they needed to know.

  “Whoever answered the call this time had a very faint German accent,” Luz said grimly. “Since Julie’s informant asked her to call back at that location—”

  “It’s Sandoval’s warehouse,” Julie amplified; her voice was absent now, obviously cataloging what she had to do, and in what order.

  Then she reached out and picked up the phone again, giving the number of her hacienda.

  “McNaughton?” she said, when the call had passed on through several hands, and looked at her wristwatch. “Sandoval’s been made . . . yes, that Sandoval, do we have another one on the source list? So get some muscle and evacuate Sandoval’s household immediately—that’s his mother, maiden aunt, wife, and four kids. There’s a northbound train in a little while, that’ll do, so put them on it with a couple of reliable guards.”

  A pause, and then: “Where? El Paso, obviously. Michaelis handles that at that station . . . she can feed them into the Protected Assets system; give her advance notice once you’ve gotten them on the train. Tell her a routine friendly-subject interrogation when they get there, don’t take time for it here. Be as polite with them as you can, but quick is more important.”

  A moment of silence as she listened to his response, and then she barked:

  “No, of course you don’t tell them he’s dead! For God’s sake, man! Just say he’s in danger and they’re being moved for their own safety and we’ll take care of them. Tell Lee to meet me in Jerez at the police station, fast, and bring his sharpshooter and someone to work as his spotter; you hold down the station HQ in Zacatecas after you’ve seen to the family and await further orders.”

  She clicked the cradle down and spoke: “God give
me strength . . .”

  Then she let it rise and spoke again into the instrument: “Operator, get me 2nd Philippine Rangers HQ.”

  Then looking over her shoulder and extending the telephone: “You handle Captain York, Luz, he seemed to like you. Whatever assets he can scramble, fast. We don’t absolutely need more than a platoon’s worth, though more is better, but I want him personally, he struck me as an asset. Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you’d notify the FBS in Hermosillo.”

  Luz raised a brow as she took the handset.

  “Won’t they know you better?”

  “That’s the problem,” Julie said frankly. “I had to smack their CO repeatedly, metaphorically speaking, to get him to pay attention to me—anatomy, you know—”

  All the women nodded, some without realizing they were doing so.

  “—and the experience left him with a set of psychic bruises.”

  “Understood,” Luz said. Then: “Captain York, please,” when someone who identified himself as Lieutenant Larsson picked up on the other end. “Code—”

  She rattled off one that meant Black Chamber, and we need you really fast, and waited through the clicks and murmurs on the other end while people hunted up Captain York, who by her judgment wasn’t the type to sit around in his office if he could avoid it.

  “Any hints on how to handle the FBS?” Luz said, once York had given her a short Surely will, ma’am, we’re on our way.

  Julie nodded: “Tell them to go away and mind their own business until we call them in to sweep the floor and tidy up, but politely, and with portentous formality. They’ll like it better coming from someone sent in from HQ with the Big Dogs behind her, which will make them less likely to try to stick their oar in anyway, and you don’t have a bad history with them locally, which will also help.”