Shadows of Annihilation Page 39

  Her own muzzle flash and the battering of the gunshots covered the presence behind her almost to the last instant. Something in the night alerted her just as the slide locked back again, a sound like the whisper of air, a smell of old sweat and mules. A hand grabbed at her head to immobilize her, burying its fingers in her hair. Alarm and terror flashed through her, through her and past her to a place where she could let it return later, in some night when it was safe.

  Luz dropped the gun and spun as the wig came loose in the man’s hand, ignoring the painful pull at the short strands of her own hair drawn through the lace. The curved extension at the back of the navaja’s hilt snagged on her forefinger and the brass and mother-of-pearl slapped into her palm as the other’s knife whirred through the air where her neck would have been.

  Snick, the blade said as it opened, and Pedro El Andaluz’s coldly impersonal teacher-voice spoke too in her mind:

  Now you are ojo a ojo, eye to eye, and someone will die very soon.

  “¡Estás muerta, puta!” the man snarled—what he’d planned to say, but he was starting to stare at the wig bunched in his left fist with the incredulous look of a man who’d seen a fish fly.

  “No, you’re dead,” Luz replied, the scarred tip of his nose only inches from hers and the stink of his breath in hers.

  The six-inch blade of Toledo steel slid into him below the ribs in the same instant, angled upward, twisted free, came up for the slicing backhand stroke under the angle of the jaw, and his eyes rolled up in his head as the blood dropped out of him and the brain failed.

  She continued the motion in a blur, using the torque to bring her up on the roadway in a crouch with the blade flickering back and forth before her, ready to lunge like a striking snake.

  Then Horst von Dückler was there, the big Colt automatic looking rather small in his massive, capable fist. His grin showed dimly through the darkness, and Luz prepared for a lunge that could end only one way.

  “So, Winnetou is dead, but Shatterhand lives on,” he said mysteriously.

  Sin duda, el que las hace las paga, Luz found herself thinking. Things did tend to come around.

  “I’ll finish off your technician bitch afterward, if the first shot didn’t get her—”

  I must get to him before I die. For her sake! she thought, and knew it was impossible.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  Horst staggered, looked down at the three black dots in his midriff, and folded to his knees.

  “Mutti,” he whispered. “Heim—” then fell on his face and died.

  “For my momma!” Henrietta Colmer half screamed, as she stood and slapped in another magazine and emptied it into the body and the dirt around it. “For Poppa! For Anne and Mary-Lou! And Elisabeth and Pearl and little Beulah!”

  Luz blinked again. “You shouldn’t have stopped to say anything, Horst,” she said. “Gloat afterward. Before is unprofessional.”

  Then she paused just long enough to wipe and close her knife, not even bothering to scoop up the pistol as she trotted back and lifted the radio transmitter with a grunt and slung it into the backseat of the Guvvie. Henrietta was frantically finishing a rough tying-off of a bandage across Ciara’s arm; she got the other woman onto her feet and into the back of the little vehicle, then dove into the passenger seat as Luz turned the car.

  “I can hear engines!” Ciara said through gritted teeth, pointing upward with the bloodied fingers of her right hand.

  Luz couldn’t, her ears knocked into temporary dullness by the two dozen rounds she’d fired. She didn’t reply, or acknowledge Dicot as the Guvvie sped past him into the night; Henrietta pointed frantically back in the direction they’d come from and made gestures, and the intelligence officer ran that way with a dozen soldiers at his heels. There was no way of being absolutely sure that more of the conspirators weren’t there.

  She did hear the rasping stutter in the air nearly three minutes later; heard it swell, and then a banging chunk! in the sky as the engine of the air torpedo cut off.

  THUD!

  She wrestled with the wheel as the explosion tried to flip the little auto and compressed air punched at her eardrums, and it banged down again after the left wheels raced crazily in the air for a moment; then that tried to flip them too.

  “The wings fell off! The wings fell off! It’s designed that way—more accurate—no, Henrietta!”

  The young woman from Savannah was leaning back and twisting in her seat, about to throw the transmitter over the side.

  “There are two more, we have to keep them following us away from the gas!” Ciara shouted. “I love you, Luz!”

  “I love me too!” Luz shouted with a wild laugh, as the Guvvie accelerated to its not-very-impressive thirty-miles-per-hour maximum. “And you even more!”

  “You bookra are both crazy!” Henrietta shrieked, but she waited for the signal.

  I’m driving through the night being pursued by air torpedoes following us by wireless signals . . . Burroughs has nothing on this . . .

  A ratcheting snarl in the air, and even more nerve-racking the sudden clanking and then silence and her mind filled in the torpedo arching toward them—

  THUD!

  The rear wheels came off the ground like the hooves of a kicking mule in a blast of hot air and gravel. Her face knocked painfully into the wheel, and then the Guvvie smashed back and the front bucked into the air for an instant. Luz’s teeth clicked together painfully and she tasted blood. Something parted with an unmusical twang in the suspension, and the wheel fought back against her.

  “Now, Henrietta, now! Next—” That was Ciara, but the voice was interrupted by a shriek as their passage jarred her wound and she clutched at the sopping bandage.

  Henrietta’s hand pushed the transmitter over the side of the Guvvie.

  “Now is the last one!” Ciara said, as the bang and chunk! sounded in the air behind them, far too close. “Here it com—”

  Pain. Blackness.

  EPILOGUE

  Casa de los Amantes

  Santa Barbara, California

  JULY 1ST, 1917, 1917(B)

  Theodore Roosevelt waved the bodyguards aside, suppressing a flash of irritation when they looked at Director Wilkie instead of obeying instantly. They were brave men doing their duty, which might involve throwing themselves between him and a bullet, and he wasn’t in their immediate chain of command. He was their responsibility, and he could give the Secret Service orders through its hierarchy, but their obligation was to their task, not his whims.

  “John, I’m not having dinner at an old friend’s house with two men standing behind my chair with Thompson guns, any more than I did when we were here for New Year’s. I’ve been visiting and coming to parties here most years since I got back from Cuba in 1899!”

  John Wilkie, who was head of the Secret Service in his public hat as well as the Black Chamber more privately, looked slightly pained, but nodded confirmation.

  “It’s a new world now; you can’t expect to party as if it were 1899. But if you insist, Mr. President,” he said, and then to the agents:

  “Agent Crowfeather, your unit will watch the entrances. See to it.”

  “Mr. Director! Liebgott, Russo, you’ll take the front door,” Crowfeather said, his hawk-nosed brown face impassive. “Smith, Duquesne, you’re on the vehicles. The rest of you follow me and I’ll assign you your posts.”

  The first two men turned outward, their conservative suits and homburgs clashing a little with the Thompson guns they carried, and the chief of their detail moved off to set the others in position.

  “You still think you’re my mother, John,” Roosevelt chuckled. “After all these years.”

  “Someone has to be, Mr. President. The country can’t spare you just now.”

  “Nonsense . . . the Negro girl will recover? Henrietta Colmer?”

 
; “Two broken legs are no joke even with modern medicine, but yes, Mr. President. Apparently she was the one who shot this Horst fellow—a very dangerous man, then killed by a slip of a girl from Savannah.”

  Roosevelt smiled grimly. “Bullets are no respecters of persons, John. And they don’t care who shoots them. I agree that she should be transferred from Clerical Support Section and ranked as Junior Field Operative as Luz and the station chief recommended . . . but assign her to the Zacatecas station, it’ll cause less disruption. One mild concussion, one arm broken by a pistol bullet, and two broken legs . . . your people got off fairly lightly this time.”

  Luz O’Malley was waiting at the head of the four broad semicircular stone stairs that led up to the solid rectangular stuccoed bulk of the big house’s frontage, the long light of a summer sunset throwing the comely high-cheeked face into silhouette and giving a hint of how it would look when age had taken youth’s beauty and left a handsome strength. She was in a striking but simple long dress of striped wool that he recognized as a North African djellaba, perfectly suited to this area’s mild summer warmth and occasional cool nights.

  Then she smiled and was a young woman again, though one with fading bruises and healing scrapes on the left side of her face.

  May she live long enough to grow into what I saw for a moment, he thought. She came too close to dying again this time!

  The stab of guilt was more personal than the burden of sending men into combat generally; he’d first seen her here, when she’d still been a girl of nine, not long after the return of the Rough Riders. Her father had gravely introduced her to Colonel Roosevelt, and he’d said as he looked down into the solemn pigtailed face . . .

  But you must call me Uncle Teddy, since your father was my brother-in-arms in Cuba.

  Her smile was wide and white now against the sun-darkened olive of her face, and she opened her arms.

  “Uncle Teddy!”

  They embraced and she kissed his cheek; then he put his hands on her shoulders for a moment, met her eyes, and nodded a brief, silent Well done.

  “And John,” she added, turning to Wilkie and shaking hands briskly. “Good to see you.”

  “Good to see you again too, Luz,” Wilkie said. “And for once, after a mission and yet not convalescing from wounds!”

  She and the Director were on social terms outside business hours, and this was theoretically a social occasion, dinner with the daughter of an old comrade of Theodore Roosevelt’s and the friend and colleague staying with her.

  It was that, but he knew it was not only that.

  “Miss Whelan?” Roosevelt asked.

  “Recovering well. The arm will heal—there’s no nerve damage—but it’ll take a while. The doctors were afraid there was some internal abdominal bleeding from when she was thrown out of the car, but if there was it’s stopped since.”

  “Thank God!”

  She crossed herself. “Amen! Do come on through to the patio,” she added more cheerfully, linking arms with both of them once they’d handed their hats to—slightly to his surprise—a maid, who took them with wide-eyed awe. Luz added to her:

  “Gracias, Jimena. ¡El presidente tiene dientes muy grandes pero no muerde!”

  Roosevelt snapped slightly—Luz had just said he had very big teeth but didn’t bite—and the girl bobbed and fled giggling.

  They strolled through the tile-floored entrance hallway between the curling twin staircases and toward the open wrought-iron doors that led to the central courtyard of the Hispanic-style house. They framed a fountain of stone shells around a central pillar, water dancing white beneath the azure California coastal sky dotted with clouds tinted pink by sunset.

  Luz’s father had built the casa to remind her mother of the Cuban homeland she’d eloped from with the dashing young American engineer whom her family considered far, far beneath her. It was just the sort of building Luz’s hacendado sugar-planter maternal ancestors might have built anytime in the last four centuries, at least as far as layout and general appearance went.

  “Belén will have dinner on the table in a little while, bless her, but there’s no reason we can’t have an aperitif while we wait,” Luz said.

  “You finally broke down and got a cook?” he said, a little surprised again.

  Luz had relied on a cleaning service and kept no permanent staff here since she went into the Black Chamber not long after her parents were killed. Operatives spent a lot of time on assignment in the field.

  “A housekeeper and a couple of maids, at least,” she said. “Cooking I intend to keep in my own fair hands as much as I can—and just because I enjoy it as a hobby, frankly. We’re having Baracoa-style shrimp in coconut milk tonight, Costillitas . . .”

  Roosevelt groaned with pleasure, exaggerating it for comic effect, but only a little.

  Costillitas were Cuban-style baby back ribs, marinated in a mix of sour orange juice, lime juice, oregano, garlic, and olive oil, and grilled over charcoal while being basted with more of the same sauce. The dish was sweet and tangy and richly meaty at the same time, and he’d enjoyed it in Cuba during his spell there with the Rough Riders and at the O’Malley household since, but the last time had been years ago. The White House kitchens under Edith’s supervision set a wonderful table, even a far-famed one these days, and he didn’t interfere in her bailiwick. But his wife was a traditionalist of a deep-dyed Knickerbocker style, and the chefs concentrated on French-inspired menus with some East Coast American specialties like terrapin and shad and canvasback thrown in, very much like Delmonico’s.

  People were more eclectic here on the Pacific.

  “And a few other things Mima taught me,” Luz added. “And some I learned elsewhere. The bread should be still just a little warm from the oven, but nicely firmed up. It’s German style, Bauernbrot. Unconventional, but I think it will go well with hearty dishes like those. And pastel de mango and tarta de crema de plátano con ron for dessert.”

  “My God, you’re an even better cook than dear Luciana was,” he said, rubbing his hands; he wasn’t sure whether he preferred frosted mango cake or liked rum-and-banana custard tarts better, so he’d have to have some of both. “John, you’re in for a treat. And whatever favor you want to ask, Luz, it’s yours. Unless you want to be empress of North America.”

  “Ah, Uncle Teddy, you’re talking to your honorary niece, not your firstborn,” Luz said, with a sly sideways glance.

  “Touché!” he said, while Wilkie bit down hard on a startled bark of laughter.

  Roosevelt also felt a slight inward wince at the thought of Alice Longworth, née Roosevelt, who’d make a ruthlessly capable absolute monarch if she ever got the chance . . . and who’d enjoy every minute of it, now that he came to think of it. Especially signing the death warrants. When the Roosevelt family left the White House in ’08—briefly, as it turned out—she’d buried voodoo dolls of the Tafts on the grounds, with pins struck through head and chest. He wasn’t a superstitious man . . . but poor Taft’s overly ambitious wife had had a crippling stroke not long after she moved in; the man himself had dropped dead of heart failure in the summer of ’12, at what hindsight said was the perfect time for Roosevelt to seize the nomination before the Old Guard could rally; and then the widow passed on not much later.

  Alice had silently smiled like a cat at both pieces of news.

  They walked past the open wrought-iron gates into the patio, and past the tinkling fountain and into the more-than-tropical Californian blaze of the plantings and vines, amid a scent of roses and frangipani and lilac. Ciara Whelan made as if to rise from her chair, despite the sling and bandage on her left arm.

  “No!” the president said. “You don’t stand for us—even if we’d never been raised as gentlemen, Miss Whelan!”

  She smiled a little shyly as he and Wilkie both bowed, and held it just a little longer than needful to show that it w
as in recognition of her deeds for the country and the honorable wounds she had taken to do them.

  She was in the same style of striped robe as Luz, and it flattered her more rounded form—modern fashion favored an athletic slimness for women, which made Luz even more eye-catching in 1917 than nature required anyway, but his tastes had been set in the 1880s, when ample was a term of praise and Luz would have been thought too boyish for perfection. Ciara’s milk-pale complexion was even paler than usual, another disadvantage when an outdoors-style tan was coming to be favored.

  Roosevelt and Wilkie were dressed casually themselves, in ordinary sack suits of the type that a gentleman wore during the daytime, to emphasize that this was no type of formal occasion but instead a family meal with very old friends in the casual Western style. He recognized the importance of ceremony and ritual, but they could be very wearisome, and he’d come to appreciate the looser frontier manner as a young man ranching and cowboying in the Dakotas. And on hunting trips all his life, from the Rockies to Uganda and the Sudan, and to an extent on the family estate at Sagamore Hill on Long Island—what the wits were calling the Summer White House now.

  At that moment an all-black kitten with bright blue eyes poked its head out of her robe’s big hood and claw-walked its way onto her shoulder, regarding the strangers with the hardened self-regard that a well-treated cat six weeks old had, and the utter confidence in its own armor of adorability.

  “Safira!” Whelan began in a chiding, scandalized tone.

  Roosevelt broke into a broad grin, gave a glance that asked for permission, and then scooped it into an experienced hold, tickling expertly under the chin until he got a slit-eyed purr of bliss with paws that were too big for the rest of the little beast kneading at his thumb. Then he set it down to run around their feet and pounce on shoelaces and make astonishing twisting leaps at passing butterflies as they sat at the stone-topped table under its pergola of crimson-blossomed coral vine.