Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  Julie rose and stuck her head out the door as Luz said: “Special Agent Denkins? Executive Field Operative O’Malley here . . . Yes, the one Washington warned you about, I’m afraid . . . It’s an emergency—”

  Nudelman was waiting at a discreet distance outside his office, talking to his secretary; he looked up alertly.

  “Lieutenant, use your secretary’s phone and get me a line to the Jerez police station—”

  * * *

  —

  The drive to Jerez took less than ten minutes, through scattered rain lifting as twilight deepened; Henrietta drove, Luz and Julie sat in the backseat with a street map illuminated by Julie’s flashlight between them, and Ciara knelt on the front passenger seat, facing backward to watch and listen as the station chief outlined the geography and her plans. Luz let her handle that, because she knew her friend’s abilities, she was more familiar with the ground, and there was no time to waste.

  They all also finished off the leftover empanadas as they went, though Henrietta had to choke hers down despite a pretense of nonchalance. It was usually a good idea to eat something sweet before going into an action involving stress and heavy effort, if you had the time.

  Jerez was a big town or small city, twelve thousand people or a little more counting recent migrants from the countryside, lying on both sides of a north-south-flowing river that actually had water in it this time of year, and they were heading for the southern edge of the older, western part. The evening vehicle traffic was sparse with the late-ish hour and the recent rain. There were more autos than horse-drawn wagons or coaches, though now that the clouds had broken up there were plenty of people strolling and visiting and listening to bands. Much of the land along the river itself looked muddy and torn up and littered with tools and materials, since a big chunk was being turned into a park and two new bridges were under construction.

  “Do you think they’ll still be there?” Luz asked. “I don’t, really.”

  “About even odds, I’d say,” Julie replied. “Granted, most of my experience isn’t with Germans.”

  “We’ll have to assume they are still there, anyway, until proven otherwise,” Luz said noncommittally. “I would really, really like to wind this up fast. That’s worth some risk.”

  I could just take over here, but that would be counterproductive.

  “Agreed,” Julie said, as Henrietta pulled over by the police station. “It’s about a thousand yards that way.”

  The Jerez police headquarters was a new building differing only in details from hundreds of others built over the last few years across the Protectorate to help nail the country down and maintain the new order and incidentally reduce the number of murders, assaults, rapes, and robberies; this had never been a very orderly country, even during the Porfiriato. It was a square a hundred feet on a side with a squat round three-story tower at one corner, and contained the local lockup and the lower-level courts as well. If Luz remembered correctly, this block had been scorched rubble in September 1913, the result of some holdouts encountering a battery of field guns and trying to reply with dynamite bombs. The replacement stood out by its newness, and because it was done in a style that was slightly out of place.

  Ironically that was because it was an Andalusian-derived neo-Hispanic architectural fashion popularized in California as the latest successor to the Mission style, all roofs of red Roman tile and walls of pure white stucco, two things that weren’t all that common in this particular district where flat roofs and bright varied color schemes were popular above the jacal-and-adobe-hut level. The main doors—which, like the walls, were discreetly stout and bulletproof under the veneer—were open.

  They hopped out, and Julie pointed southward. “That roof there, see?”

  Luz nodded, taking a deep breath as the sharp awareness that she might be about to die surfaced for an instant. Pushing it down—or aside—or acknowledging it without letting it affect her—was a practiced reflex by now. And the added fear for Ciara paradoxically made it easier to control; they had to wear the mask of unconcern for each other.

  I value my life more now and have to show fear less, if anything, she thought wryly, and went on equally so aloud:

  “Back in business at the same old stand.”

  Most of central Jerez was stone-built but single-story save for churches and the Cathedral of Our Lady of Solitude, the Hinojosa Theater, and the scattering of government buildings right downtown around the Plaza de Armas. A few town houses for wealthy landholders and some of the storage buildings (usually owned by the same families if not individuals) were substantial, and the warehouse was one of them, two tall stories and about ten feet higher than any of its surroundings.

  The coping around the exterior of the flat roof was probably about a yard high, or a little more. She swung down the small baggage compartment at the rear of Julie’s Guvvie, took out the Thompson gun racked inside and a drum of ammunition, and handed them to the station chief, who clicked it home and looked a question at her.

  “No, I’ll stick with this,” she said, and pulled the shotgun out of its canvas-and-leather case.

  It was a pump-action Remington weapon, with a seven-round tube magazine, a barrel only five inches longer, and in this case the stock cut down to a pistol grip ending in a steel-capped knob.

  “You always did like that model,” Julie said as Luz thumbed fat red cardboard-and-brass rounds of double-ought buck into the tube magazine. “Old friends meet again.”

  Then she gave a very false melancholy sigh as she racked the action of the Thompson and added:

  “Ah, how the sight of that scattergun brings back memories of our innocent girlish pleasures of yesteryear.”

  Ciara grimaced slightly as she checked the magazine of her own pistol and reholstered it. Luz had used the same shotgun to clear out the gondola of the German Navy semirigid they’d stolen in Staaken near Berlin last December, in an assault that had lasted about four and a half very eventful minutes. Which for Ciara had meant wiping the crew’s blood . . . and sopping bits of uniform, sticky bloody hair, and gelatinous shreds of skin . . . off the controls as she helped get them into the air immediately afterward. Being basically sensible she’d seen them as perfectly legitimate targets, uniformed men in the service of an enemy country, but she was still a little squeamish about things like that.

  “I don’t suppose I can persuade you to stay here, sweetie, since putting the knuckle on isn’t your specialty?” Luz said quietly in her ear as she slipped a box of the shells into the pocket of her coat.

  “When frogs grow hair,” Ciara replied likewise, with a brave smile; she was a little pale, but controlling it well.

  That Spanish saying about frogs was a phrase Luz was fond of for not going to happen, and she smiled wryly to have it turned back on her.

  “Stay behind me, then,” she said.

  “We’ll do backup together, Ciara honey, we non-knuckle-specialists,” Henrietta said. “They didn’t teach me about this at the Clerical-Vocational Institute in Baltimore, either!”

  There was a very slight quaver underlying that. Ciara caught it—she’d been getting better at reading people—and patted her on the shoulder.

  “I hadn’t done anything . . . active . . . like this either until late last year,” she said. “And I had to learn from Luz and on the spot too. Don’t worry. Thinking about it is harder than doing it! Once things . . . start, if they do . . . you just forget about it and get through moment to moment.”

  Henrietta nodded with a smile of thanks. That slid away as she took a deep breath and said with quiet grimness:

  “I hope we meet this German agent that Executive Field Operative O’Malley was talking about, Ciara. I purely, surely do, God’s truth. For my momma and poppa and my sisters.”

  Luz nodded very slightly to herself; it was always good when your snap judgment about someone panned out, and having a
sound record at that was an essential skill in her line of work. As a motivator, blood revenge was always a good bet. There was a slight but definite chance Pancho Villa might be alive today, for example, if his men had managed to kill all the O’Malleys back in 1911.

  “I hope we take him alive, too,” Henrietta said. “So I can sit there taking notes while he’s squeezed dry.”

  Luz looked over sharply at that. “Don’t try for a capture, Miss Colmer. Not with this man. Just . . . don’t. Kill him if you get a chance, and count yourself very very lucky if you do.”

  “Understood,” she said, and Julie and Ciara both nodded.

  I was lucky the high command wanted so badly to take Villa alive. Though someone would have killed him eventually. ¡Por Dios, but he was a profoundly annoying man! And since Horst was deeply involved in the Breath of Loki, he’s a perfectly legitimate target for Henrietta on a personal as well as a national level. But the mission comes first. Always.

  “Ah, Captain Menendez,” Julie said, greeting a man as he came down the stairs. “Good to see you. As I explained, we have a bit of a problem.”

  “Señora Durán,” the municipal police officer said in a neutral, respectful tone that implied he’d met her fairly often, saluting and not apparently much surprised by the party of armed gringas on his doorstep either.

  He was a hard-faced man of about thirty, whose close-clipped mustache and haircut—short on the sides and back, just long enough to comb on top—was notably on the modern American model for men and of the type favored by the military, by people in the secret services when not imitating something else, by Party activists, and by the rising generation in general. It made you look youthful, hard-driving and efficient and Progressive, like a smooth precision-engineered product of alloy steel and ball bearings.

  His uniform was blue and brass-buttoned; the FBS had re-formed the Protectorate’s town police forces along American lines, down to the way they looked, although the riding boots and the big-roweled silver spurs were local preferences.

  They clinked on the cobbles. Some of the Jerez streets had been paved, but the Department of Public Works’ insatiable appetite for pouring concrete on anything it could pin down long enough for the stuff to set hadn’t gotten around to this bit of country-town road yet.

  A pair of local civilians followed him, a young lower-middle-class couple in ordinary and slightly shabby dress including a standing collar and an ankle-length skirt of a cut Luz’s mother’s cook might have worn ten years ago. At a guess they were a clerk and his wife, or possibly small shopkeepers, and definitely looking distinctly apprehensive.

  “This is Señor Luis Gutiérrez and his wife, Señora Juanita González. The señora saw something of importance.”

  “Thank you very much for your cooperation, Señor Gutiérrez, Señora González,” Julie said in a tone at once polite and firm.

  She handed the Thompson gun behind her to Henrietta for a moment—you were much less intimidating without an automatic weapon in your hands—and stepped a little closer. Mexicans started feeling comfortable talking to you at about the distance that most Americans felt slightly crowded and encroached upon.

  “Please tell me what you saw, señora,” she said briskly but with a slight smile. “I do not wish to detain you and your husband longer than necessary.”

  Which was a hint to get on with it, Luz thought.

  “I was walking home,” Mrs. González said, keeping her eyes down and her voice flat and quiet, though she might well have been reluctant to talk directly to a man at all. “It was just after the rain stopped. And I saw Señor Sandoval. He . . . he was out of the window of his warehouse, the one that looks out of his office. Hanging out, you see?”

  Julie nodded encouragingly, which hereabouts meant I hear what you say rather than necessarily full agreement.

  “He was hanging out . . . headfirst. He had pushed aside the bars on the window—I do not know how, they are iron, as such things are. And he was shouting: ‘Call the police,’ that first, and then a scream of pain, of fear.”

  She swallowed, her olive-brown face underlain by gray. “And . . . and then he went backward. Quickly, as if something very powerful had pulled him. Like . . . my uncle Juan once told me of seeing a man in the water, in Veracruz, pulled under by a shark. Like that. And I heard another scream, from inside the warehouse, and men’s voices. So I ran home, quickly, quickly, and my Luis—”

  She looked at her husband and he moved closer to her, putting an arm around her shoulders.

  “—said we must report this.”

  “Thank you very much, Señora González, Señor Gutiérrez,” Julie said. “You have undoubtedly done the right thing, and those who harmed your neighbor Señor Sandoval will be punished. Your commendable sense of civic duty will not be forgotten.”

  Her hand began a movement toward her pocket, then stopped before anyone who didn’t know her could have detected it.

  Good for you, Julie, Luz thought. Having a Black Chamber agent publicly hand you money on the steps of the local policia HQ is not the way to reward someone, even now. For that matter this may blow my local cover for good even keeping in the background with the brim of my hat down, but it’s worth it.

  The young couple were looking unhappier by the moment; getting involved with something political was much more than they had bargained for, as opposed to reporting a common crime against a respectable neighbor; everyone feared and detested robbers and burglars. Instead of bestowing a reward, Julie caught Captain Menendez’s eye; he murmured to the couple and they went back inside. There he would drop them a modest but welcome amount from the contingencies fund privately, later, when this was settled. And they’d be owed a favor or two, which would make them happier when they remembered it. Successful administration ran on favors and obligations, whatever the rulebooks said.

  “I have established a perimeter, Señora Durán,” he said when the couple were back inside. “And evacuated the nearby buildings. Firefighters are standing by, and an ambulance and doctor from the air base should arrive very soon.”

  Julie nodded. The military helped with emergency services whenever it didn’t directly affect missions they were tasked with, on general public relations grounds.

  Menendez went on: “Unfortunately, that leaves me with only five of the policia here at headquarters including the switchboard operator and a guard for the cells and my secretary. That is after recalling the off-duty men.”

  By Protectorate policy there was roughly one urban policeman for every five hundred inhabitants within city limits, which would mean a force of about thirty-five or forty here.

  “Excellent work, Captain, done quickly: I’ll note your display of initiative in my report,” Julie said. “We’ll have troops arriving in a minute or two, which will free up your men for other tasks. Here’s a list of suspects I’ll want you to round up; just note detention by administrative procedure on suspicion of activities prejudicial to the security of the State on the paperwork.”

  He nodded; that was the general form for a political-security arrest here in the Protectorate. Or north of the border, for that matter, though those still had somewhat more in the way of formalities attached even with drastic wartime streamlining—habeas corpus had never been a factor here.

  “And keep them separate, as much as you can, until we take them off your hands.”

  He saluted again and left to alert his men that they were about to be relieved.

  “Dark in half an hour,” Julie said grimly to Luz as she shifted back to English; it was around eight o’clock. “I want to get this done as quickly as possible.”

  “It’s your territory and you’re in charge, Julie—just a warning. I have a nasty feeling that Horst is here. And he’s really dangerous, completely out of the ordinary.”

  Though that simply can’t be as important to you as to me, Luz thought. One of those live-a
nd-learn things.

  She resisted an impulse to check her shotgun or her pistol once more and instead carefully surveyed the street and buildings again, adding it to the information already in her mind from the maps of Jerez and previous visits—though none of those had taken her to this part of town. And did not stick her head out to look down the intersection toward the warehouse that was . . . had been . . . the place of work of Julie’s snitch Zacarías Sandoval.

  From the description, that informant was probably dead and whoever had made him might well be waiting with a rifle. It was far too late for them to make deals, and they could expect nothing but death if taken, after an interval that would make death welcome while they were being wrung dry. Luz had been in places where she faced the same choices herself and knew it made you want to take someone with you.

  Or it does me, and I think whoever’s in there will be hard cases too. If it’s Horst, definitely!

  Field Operative Lee arrived in an unmarked and nondescriptly battered-looking Guvvie at about the same time as Captain York and his five truckloads of cheerful Philippine Rangers with their disquieting, red-stained, file-toothed grins. The Ranger officer took in the situation in a glance and two sentences, sent three truckloads under a lieutenant who looked like a younger version of himself to take over the perimeter duties, and reserved a squad for the actual strike.

  “Brought along some doorknockers, since this affair’s in a town, ma’am,” the lanky hill-country soldier said.

  That meant a haversack full of explosives with a variable fuse. He had the grip of a Thompson in his right hand, propped with the butt on his hip.

  “Excellent,” Julie replied crisply. “Mr. Lee here will be giving us some overwatch from the rooftops.”

  Field Operative Lee wasn’t very formidable-looking despite the Springfield sharpshooter cradled in his arms—the sniper version of the old bolt-action battle rifle, with a cut-down forestock and free-floating heavy barrel and a cheek rest, as well as a telescopic x8 sight. In fact, despite his outdoorsman clothes—dark khaki with lots of pockets and a coil of rope ending in a spring-loaded grapnel slung from left shoulder to right hip—he looked like a very fit jug-eared clerk, and wore a pair of spectacles with big lenses.