Shadows of Annihilation Page 37
“First threats to put him in fear of them, you see, and then the money to put him in fear of the authorities, because he would think they would punish him harshly for taking a bribe from terrorists and German agents. To put him between the devil and the deep blue sea, as they say in English.”
We’ll pay him too, eventually. Partially because the information is worth it and partially for exactly the same reason . . .
Luisa thought, blanched a little as if she’d seen a dish cover lifted at dinner to reveal maggots, then nodded with a queasy expression.
“He will not be punished?” she said, her eyes pleading. “Even if he has taken such . . . such tainted German money?”
“No,” Ciara said. “Not if he cooperates once he is taken into . . . protective custody.”
“Oh, he will,” Luisa said absently, obviously thinking hard; that offhand judgment betrayed an exceedingly low opinion of her brother-in-law, even allowing for what she’d said explicitly. “What must I do?”
“Nothing,” Luz said. “You have already done enough to save your family and your city. You must show no sign that you know anything and leave tomorrow with your brother-in-law. The train will be stopped out of sight of anyone and you will all be taken into protective custody until this . . . matter is over. Then you may return, or possibly go to live elsewhere, but that will be your choice. You understand that your brother-in-law cannot be allowed to speak to anyone until then?”
Luisa swallowed; protective custody could potentially cover a multitude of sins. Her eyes flicked to Ciara, who gave a reassuring smile and a slight nod; that relaxed her a little, but not completely . . . which confirmed her initial judgment that Señora Luisa Muñoz was nobody’s fool.
“We keep our promises to those who help us,” Ciara said firmly; that was in all the manuals she’d read, and it was generally quite true.
That relaxed Luisa a little more in one way, and increased her fears in another—that was one of the mottos of the Black Chamber, and the Chamber kept its promises for good or ill. And people knew both those things. Luz gave a very slight nod as Luisa’s eyes went wide, judging that it would help her keep her family from suspecting anything until tomorrow morning.
When she’d been given a little more reassurance and sent on her way—every moment they were seen together now was one too many, since there was no way of being absolutely sure the revolucionario underground couldn’t follow all of Efraín’s family—Luz split the last piece of the tarte.
Ciara frowned. “It sounds to me as if this . . . aeroplane thing . . . is on one of the de Moncada properties. Do you think they’re part of the plot?”
“Almost certainly not,” Luz said thoughtfully, eating another forkful and raising her empty coffee cup; the Teffeau daughter hurried over with the pot, spruce in her white apron.
“Not Don Raul, at least, or anyone close to him,” she said thoughtfully. “No, his political record makes that very unlikely indeed; not to mention that he’s too conspicuous to get away with a conspiracy. But one of his mayordomos certainly is, and the family owns enough land around here that there are a lot of them. It’s the perfect place to conceal a distance weapon, an aeroplane, precisely because the de Moncadas have close links to the Protectorate. And they’ll probably be hoping . . . they as in the Mexicans involved with this . . . that we blame him afterward, which would be just peachy-keen from their point of view and stick a piece of pipe in the spokes of our political wheel in the region.”
“We won’t blame him, of course?”
“No. But having one of his employees being naughty like this will put him more in our debt—he’s probably been getting a little above himself, what with being the governor’s father-in-law.”
“What do you think this brother-in-law of Luisa knows?”
“At the least, he knows which one of the de Moncada haciendas is being used to hide the aeroplane; probably it’s east of town where most of the land is in grazing, and not too far from the target. He saw whatever it is, and he has some idea of when they’re going to use it.”
Ciara frowned. “You don’t want to question Luisa’s brother-in-law . . . Efraín . . . immediately?”
“Of course I want to, but the minute we do that . . . They’re almost certainly watching him at least until he leaves town, if not his sister-in-law—he knows too much and he’s not really one of them. That warehouse manager ratting them out in Jerez will have put them on edge, too. If we scoop him up, they’ll know right away and run for it—and come up with another attack we don’t know anything about later. Or worse, they’ll launch the attack before we know the location it’ll come from. Now that we know it’s an air attack . . . or strongly suspect it . . . we can guard against it.”
“But if we wait too long we risk them getting to their launch time. The air patrol will very probably intercept any aircraft they launch, but it’s not certain.”
“Calculated risk,” Luz said with a sigh.
Deciding on those went with higher rank; you had to remember that more conservative decisions didn’t necessarily mean better, or even just safer.
Ciara nodded. “I’m glad it’s you, not me, that has to decide that! We should tell Julie to cultivate Madame Teffeau, I think, too . . . Look at the good she’s already done us!”
Luz chuckled. “Great minds, sweetie—I just thought of that myself.”
“And Luisa’s brother-in-law, what do you make of him?” Ciara said.
“I’m not sure if he’s as innocent as she paints him, but that doesn’t matter—I’m quite sure he’s as weak as she thinks, and that he’ll fold like wet cardboard once we have our hands on him without needing any pressure beyond that. He’ll tell us where it is . . . and once he does that, he’s committed, so we can treat him as if he’s nothing but the brainless, not to mention spineless, dupe she makes out and he will be glad we do . . . either way.”
Ciara clapped her hands together, and then her happy smile died away.
“What’s wrong, darling?” she said. “You’re not as pleased as you should be.”
“There’s something we’re still missing, somehow. How many of those bombs do you think there were?”
“From the looks of things at the warehouse . . . another two? Possibly three, not more than that.”
Luz nodded. “Which means they brought four aircraft, engines and fuselage and all. Each one, even knocked down, is heavy and bulky and dangerous to transport with us watching things. They wouldn’t send more than they absolutely must . . . and I think it’s very likely that Germany could find one pilot willing to kill himself to improve his country’s bargaining position at the peace talks eventually . . . but even in Germany, could you find four? Not for something like this, I’d say, not four competent and reliable ones.”
“Someone with an incurable disease, as well as being patriotic? Hoping for rewards for his family?”
“Yes, but there just aren’t that many pilots, and by definition they’re young and healthy to start with—German medicine is very high-standard and their checks are meticulous. And our prisoner saw only two Germans beside Horst and this Ernst Röhm, and neither of them sounds like a pilot. More like a clerk and a technician.”
“The pilots could have been stashed somewhere else,” Ciara pointed out.
“True . . .” Luz sighed. “No matter how much you know, you never know enough . . . Let’s get over to Universal Imports. We’re going to have to manage this delicately if we want to scoop up the Germans and solve the problem they present, as well as stop the immediate plot.”
They rose, nodding and smiling at young Monsieur Teffeau and his mother as they left.
What are we missing? Luz thought. ¿Qué diablos es ésto? ¡Ay, but I hate that nagging tickle!
On the other hand, it was a lot better than false certainty.
SIXTEEN
City of Zacatecas
United States Protectorate of México
JUNE 23RD, 1917, 1917(B)
The Dakota Project had put up a lot of vehicle parks and associated structures in the western parts of Zacatecas City, some well outside the construction site proper. And some were disused but not yet torn down or repurposed now that the dirt-shifting and foundation-laying stages of the construction were well past.
This particular big sheet metal shed on a concrete pad had been very convenient for assembling the Black Chamber’s strike team; besides their own operatives, there were two platoons of the 32nd Infantry’s reconnaissance battalion and Captain York’s company of the 2nd Filipino Rangers, and their vehicles and equipment. Including enough trucks to move them quickly and a six-vehicle squadron of the 32nd’s Lynx battle cars, boxy vehicles of riveted armor plate, each with three large wheels on either side and a machine gun and one-pounder pom-pom gun in its rectangular turret. The assembled armed might occupied most of the space . . .
But firepower is not our problem, Luz thought. It never is here on our own ground, not from the Chamber’s point of view. Finding the targets to apply it on, that’s the problem.
The engines made the stuffy air acrid with their exhaust, and the noise echoed off the sheet metal, amid the sweat-gun-oil-tobacco-old-socks scents of soldiers. The Bugkalot smelled subtly different, their body odor less meaty and musky but sharper than that of the Americans’; they and the 32nd troopers were passing around baskets of gorditas and nontalking in a friendly way, since they had little in the way of common language.
“Well, he sang like a canary,” Luz said.
She was quickly doing another scan through the transcript from the interrogation of Luisa’s unfortunate brother-in-law Efraín; the main problem with it was that he seemed to want to vomit out his entire life story, starting with the first time he skinned his knee as a toddler in 1885, which was why they’d been using the redacted summary while they waited for the air attack. The Air Corps had assured them that no bombing aircraft could get through the cover, so they could wait and scoop up the Germans and their local helpers . . .
Efraín, his wife, his five children—three girls, two boys, ages ranging from twelve to two; his gimlet-eyed and silently disapproving mother; and Luisa, plus a brace of maidservants—were over in one corner of the big echoing shed, in a sort of room made by piles of crated equipment. With them was the Zacatecas station’s junior operative Dora Parkinson, who was soothing them down and jollying them along, aided by boxes of Madame Teffeau’s best, tea from Julie’s private stock, and some brandy now and then for their father, and sleight-of-hand tricks from her training to distract the children. He’d have drunk himself insensible hours ago if they’d let him.
She’d been cheerful and uncomplaining about the assignment, which Luz liked, even when she had to take crying children to the improvised latrine behind more boxes. A field operative’s business was dealing with people.
And while violence is always a solution to a problem with people . . . it’s not always a good solution.
It was approaching sundown outside; the buzz of the Pumas and Falcons circling over the Dakota Project plant a few miles farther east and over Zacatecas itself had sunk into the background. Luz hated the thought that they’d alerted the enemy to what they knew, but there was no way to be inconspicuous about dozens of fighting aircraft circling. They’d put on acrobatics that had gathered admiring crowds below, and Julie had spread a rumor, soon taken as fact, that this was a contribution to the fiesta of St. John the Baptist, courtesy of Gobernador Don Carlos Seelmann. He’d been informed so he could deny everything with the right polite insincerity.
“The difficulty is getting him to shut up,” Luz added, pushing the rest of the transcript across to Ciara and sipping vile Army coffee from a tin cup. “I hate it when they babble like that. It’s mildly . . . disgusting. Though it was at least smart of him to tell everything without trying to filter it.”
“Except that it wasn’t, it was just the most complete case of immediate moral collapse I’ve ever seen—and I’ve been doing interrogations since June 1913!” Julie said, after a meditative draw on her Mogul cigarette. “His teeth were chattering but he was weeping with relief at the same time. What do you think we should do with that family?”
“Give them favored status, as things stand, pending the outcome. If the information is confirmed, we should cultivate them, but carefully. Start by telling de Moncada to keep him on in his present job.”
“Efraín is putty to whoever squeezes him, and useful within those limits as long as we keep that in mind, but Louisa is another matter entirely on brief acquaintance.”
“Absolutamente,” Luz said. “I think she resents being dependent on him, and despises him.”
“Agreed, especially after watching him vomit out everything he knew. Not because he was talking, but because he was so abject about it.”
Luz nodded. “She came to us for her own good reasons; we would have had to break her to get anything if she hadn’t made that decision. But I’m guessing she doesn’t let herself fully realize how much she despises him and hates living off his charity, because it would make her miserable and her confessor wouldn’t like it, and she’s devout. And she genuinely hates the Germans. She was very interested in the Vocational Institute project, ostensibly for unfortunate girls but deep down she’d like a job and skills herself; charity and church work and helping with her nieces and nephews aren’t enough to keep her from being bored. I think she also at least somewhat resents her former husband for running out and getting himself killed and leaving her to make the best of it, but she really doesn’t want to admit that to herself.”
“Ah, that might be useful. You think she’s the type who’ll feel obliged to you if you do them favors and don’t ask for anything in return?”
“Exactly. But it would have to be done very, very carefully. Don’t spread the honey too thickly on the bread.”
“In other words, she’s potentially an earnest middle-class idealist?”
“Aren’t we all, in the Party?” Luz said lightly.
Julie smiled, a remarkably evil expression in the lantern light.
“Speak for yourself. You’re upper-upper-middle-class, if you squint the right way, from a self-improving, strive-and-succeed family with an engineer in it and a lot of higher education—you were made to be a Progressive. I’m upper-class and from a family who made just scads of money by their careful choice of ancestors, and a class traitor like el jefe . . . Either that, or we’re saving our class despite their own entrenched stupidity. While having fun and avoiding dying of boredom.”
Luz blinked. “Sometimes your cynicism makes me feel . . . inadequate, mi amiga.”
“That’s because you had to work at yours. I was born with a brimming silver spoonful of the blackest, bitterest variety in my mouth.”
She looked fretfully at her watch. “Pretty soon it’s going to be too dark for the aeroplanes and the fiesta fireworks will start. Has your old . . .”
She paused with malice aforethought, didn’t say boyfriend, and then went on:
“—sparring partner Horst decided to call it off because the fighting scout aeroplanes overhead say we’re onto them?”
Suddenly Ciara spoke, slamming her finger down on the page of the transcript she was reading.
“This man Efraín is an idiot!”
“No, he’s just utterly terrified of several things at once and as el jefe says is the type who has all the backbone of a chocolate éclair,” Luz said. “That numbs the brain and makes you look, speak, and act like an idiot whatever your IQ is.”
“I’ve been terrified, and it never made me stupid! I was terrified when I defused that bomb on Thursday—I cried and shook afterward—and it never made me stupid! We’d all be dead if it had.”
“That’s because you’re
brave,” Luz pointed out. “Courage is dealing with fear so it doesn’t paralyze you. Why? What’s he done that’s particularly stupid?”
“What he’s describing here isn’t an aeroplane at all—but he doesn’t know how to describe it, so he keeps calling it that!”
Luz leaned over to read upside-down, absently turning up the lamp, feeling a hunter’s tickle at the back of her mind.
“Wings, engine, propeller at the rear . . . that’s not so common these days but it’s still done with some models . . . sounds like an aeroplane to me.”
“No. He says it’s on a ramp, not on a takeoff field. He doesn’t mention wheels or a cockpit. And he says there’s a cross at the front, with long metal thorns. What does that mean? And he says they had an electrical cord to it, and when they turned on a switch it whined.”
Then Ciara’s face lost its frown; instead it went white as milk, despite the sun flush she’d gotten in the last few days. She held up a hand to stop Luz’s question and instead scrabbled for paper and pencil of her own. She began to draw, and despite the rough surface and poor light and tools, it was as precise as any draftsman’s working diagrams.
Luz reached out her own hand and put a finger on Julie’s lips; this was precisely the state when Ciara must not be interrupted. When the drawing was finished she sprang up with it and ran for the enclosure where Efraín sat with his head in his hands while Dora did card tricks and his children squealed and his wife, mother, and sister-in-law sipped tea and tried to pretend none of this was happening.
You can still tell she’s not used to wearing pants when she runs, Luz thought as she and Julie exchanged a glance and followed her with their eyes.