Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  It hurt, but he was prepared for it . . . and his forehead was much stronger than the smaller man’s nose. That organ cracked as it flattened, and Horst struck again a split second later.

  He dropped the now-limp body, extending one booted foot so the Mexican’s head bounced off it and didn’t fall full force on the rock beneath, which might well have killed him. Pablo lay moaning and stirring feebly with bubbles of blood swelling and bursting on his mouth and nostrils. Horst carefully, neatly blotted his own forehead with the loose cotton sleeve of his long tunic-like shirt; most of the blood there was Pablo’s, though a little had leaked out through a pressure cut in his own skin. He opened his canteen, drank a little of the mezcal-cut water, and poured some into a palm that he rubbed across the minor wound as a stinging antiseptic.

  “Well?” he said after he’d taken another swig and capped the canteen, with the same flat lack of affect, his pale eye meeting each man’s in turn. “Does anyone else have anything to say about my looks?”

  Suddenly he grinned. “And I’m a country boy, not from a city.”

  Someone murmured: “¡Qué chingón!”

  Which meant what a fucker literally, and very manly in effect, and was about the impression he’d wanted. As much as he’d wanted anything but the pleasure of beating someone bloody and letting free some of the rage that roiled in his mind like acid in a sour stomach.

  Ernst Röhm chuckled from where he leaned against a near-vertical face of rock with a stubby, ugly-looking automatic rifle cradled in his arms, one with a curved detachable magazine and a wooden handgrip on the forestock. Now that the diamond-point concentration of the brief fight was fading, Horst more or less recalled hearing the click-clack of the weapon being cocked. Which might have been just a precaution, or might have turned Pablo’s hypothetical friends into pure spectators.

  “I am belief we should all making these mules under cover to be, so we can the Yankees be fighting, not with each other the dance doing,” Röhm said, in barbarously bad but comprehensible . . . mostly comprehensible . . . Spanish. “And the first of the presents you can see Germany has for your good fighting-ness to you sent.”

  I am back in the game, Horst thought, and smiled. And who will the opposition be, this time?

  TWO

  El Paso–Mexico City Express

  American National Railways

  Approaching City of Zacatecas

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 15TH, 1917, 1917(B)

  This is a bit of a change,” Luz O’Malley Aróstegui said with a reminiscent chuckle as she came back from the ladies’ WC.

  She stood for a moment before the observation car’s curved stern of knee-to-ceiling windows, reluctant to get back in the perfectly comfortable chair. Luz loved to travel . . .

  Except for all the sitting. Right now I would kill . . . or at least maim . . . for a brisk three-mile walk.

  Standing here gave at least the illusion of personal motion.

  “A change, dearest?” Ciara Whelan asked, glancing up from the book she was reading and putting a finger to mark her place.

  Luz had a trained spy’s ability to read quickly, at a distance, and upside down. The finger rested at a line that went:

  Ca3(PO4)2 + 5C + 3SiO2 → 3CaSiO3 + 2P + 5CO

  Whatever Ca3(PO4)2 + 5C + 3SiO2 → 3CaSiO3 + 2P + 5CO means! Luz thought affectionately.

  Luz wholeheartedly admired her partner’s extraordinary self-taught grasp of the practical sciences without in the least envying it.

  The cover of the weighty tome in Ciara’s lap proclaimed it to be Outlines of Industrial Chemistry, written by one Warren K. Lewis, Ph.D., Professor of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Third Revised and Enlarged Edition, 1916), useful as background for their current assignment and also something she might well have read just for the fun of it, though electrical engineering remained her first love.

  And like the man Luz called Uncle Teddy and the rest of the world knew as President Roosevelt, Ciara could read several books a day at speed and remember them verbatim years later.

  “Quite a drastic change from my most vivid memories of this stretch,” Luz said.

  “Good for you,” Ciara said, rolling her eyes with a sigh of very mild sarcasm.

  They’d be at their destination soon; she inserted a ribbon and closed the book before she went on:

  “Because I can’t see that anything’s changed since we got east of Riverside the first morning out of Los Angeles! Golly, but America is big! And a lot of it is full of bushes and sand and rocks and lizards and buzzards and underfed livestock!”

  Wet steel rails receded endlessly behind them as the Mexico City Express ground away the miles between El Paso and the Protectorate’s capital. The metal gleamed and then vanished over and over again, distance fading into the murk beyond the cone of light. This was a comfortable train and fast, if not as fancy or fast as a luxury hotel on wheels like the 20th Century Limited or the new Aztec Chief, which ran from Chicago to Mexico City four times a week. But photographers tended to show up where those stopped, seeking fodder for the society pages of national newspapers.

  Which the two of them very much did not want, even if they were only tiny figures in one upper corner of a shot centered on cinema celebrities like Chaplin and Mary Pickford, or Party bigwigs like Jane Addams and Herbert Croly. The enemy read the newspapers too, read them very carefully, and they had people who could recognize Luz’s face, and Ciara’s.

  “We always were big enough that getting around took time,” Luz said; she’d traveled all her life.

  She put her hands on the brass rail and took the opportunity to stretch discreetly, using a routine that set muscles working against each other. Then she sat, gripping the arms of the chair rhythmically and unobtrusively, pushing herself backward and relaxing, then lifting her body just a little on one foot against the foot rail, holding it until the muscles began to quiver and hurt, and then the other, then both . . .

  “But a lot bigger now, thanks to el jefe,” she added.

  That was the way Black Chamber operatives usually referred to President Theodore Roosevelt, or less often with the English equivalent: the Boss. The Chamber was his personal creation, begun even before his landslide victory in 1912 and operating months before he was back in the White House; that had been before the amendment that moved Inauguration Day from March to January, of course. Things had been moving fast as people abroad and at home realized that the new Theodore Roosevelt and the New Nationalist movement and the new-minted Progressive Republican Party meant a change of regime, not just of names and faces and policy, and there hadn’t been time to wait on formalities—which was the Chamber’s modus operandi to this day.

  “The United States has nine million, six hundred forty-eight thousand, three hundred ninety-five square miles currently,” Ciara said, in the voice she used when quoting some card file in her head.

  Luz found it fascinating; the finer points of human speech were her field of interest and expertise. And Ciara was never wrong when she spoke like that, not about anything quantitative.

  Unless her source was, I suppose, Luz added to herself. Ciara went on:

  “As opposed to three million, eight hundred sixteen thousand, seven hundred forty-two square miles before Mexico and Canada, umm . . .”

  Her voice went from information-transfer to ordinary-conversation mode.

  “. . . joined us. And then we . . . umm, bought . . . Greenland and Iceland from Denmark just now.”

  The price had been ten million dollars, accompanied by destroyers and battalions of Marines as real estate agents.

  “It’s understandable that the Danes let the Germans resupply U-boats in their waters, given that Berlin has a gun to their heads, but . . . Uncle Teddy certainly makes things happen. Never a dull mom
ent with him in charge!” Luz said.

  Ciara nodded, but not entirely in agreement:

  “Not geopolitically dull, but if you’ve seen one mesquite or cactus, you’ve seen them all. Or glaciers in Greenland, I suppose.”

  “We’re just about on the edge of that, says the voice of experience! The shrubby and dry bit, not the glaciers.”

  South of here fifteen hundred miles of very-to-somewhat-arid land gave way to the fertile, closely tilled upland basins of the Bajío, and the gleaming cities the Spaniards had built on silver and Indian slaves in the days when their rule spanned continents and kings in Madrid dreamed of universal empire.

  Ciara laid the chemistry textbook aside with a regretful glance; she’d been making little sighs of contentment and ah and oh and murmurs of Yes, I see! as she read.

  And reading a textbook in public is merely eccentric, Luz thought. Reading a set of Black Chamber briefing files with the Winged Dagger and All-Seeing Eye on the page headers would be both conspicuous and reckless, so in the secret compartment they stay. I do wish we’d had more than a few days’ notice for the mission. I’m starting to worry that the Director and Uncle Teddy have an even higher opinion of us than I do.

  On the arm of Luz’s chair was her choice of recreational reading, when she wasn’t indulging her weakness for French symbolist poetry by the likes of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud: the latest All-Story Weekly, with a tale by Edgar Rice Burroughs set in California and involving hobos, a missing heiress, a mysterious Gypsy girl living in the woods, private eyes, a car chase, a puzzling body, disguise, mistaken identities, and a grizzly bear named Beppo by someone very eccentric who was keeping it as a pet.

  It was enjoyable blather, but then she and Ciara had done things almost as wild themselves . . .

  Hijacking a German airship to escape from Berlin with a secret electronic range-finding device, for instance . . .

  “So what do you remember differently?” Ciara asked. “This landscape looks as if it’s been the same since it had mastodons on it.”

  “Not the scenery, the circumstances,” Luz said. “I was remembering coming down this line through Zacatecas to Mexico City in June 1913, when Pershing took First Army across the frontier and we were running interference ahead of his Brute Squad, keeping the enemy confused and slow and helping him trap them. And again about six months later, after I’d done some . . . work . . . in Mexico City and Puebla and Cuautla with . . .”

  Done things to might be more accurate.

  “. . . the revolucionarios and Zapatistas. And it was different then.

  “Solo un poco,” she added with ironic understatement; just a little. “That winter and spring were the worst, when it looked as if the Intervention might fail and take the Party and the movement down with it. Not like this at all.”

  She waved a hand at the comfortable and not overcrowded car as they clacked south through the rainy night at a steady fifty miles an hour behind the American National Railways’ workhorse Pacific Standard 4-6-2 locomotive, with a smoothness that told of recently relaid track and a good roadbed. The table between them held cups of steaming Mexican coffee—brewed strong with piloncillo sugar and cinnamon and orange peel and topped with melted chocolate ice cream, the rich dark scents overcoming the leather-polish-fuel-oil smell of modern rail travel. And also a plate of crumbly, cinnamon-rich polvorones de canela.

  “That was when we all had to become . . . hard.”

  If they spoke quietly, they were effectively as private as a locked room.

  “What was the trip like then?” Ciara asked; they were still learning each other’s pasts, though no longer trying to swallow decades at a gulp.

  “No pastries, I imagine!” she added, as she finished off her own buttery cookie, dusting her hands and brushing off a few crumbs from the front of her blouse.

  They’d missed dinner so far today because they planned to eat at their destination and there had been a scheduling problem. And also to get their bodies accustomed to Mexican rhythms. Down here local custom kept the old pattern with the main meal, the comida, in the early afternoon and a cena—a dinner-snack—quite late.

  Soldiers could afford to live in a bubble of home they carried around with them; spies could not.

  “We were living on stale tortillas and dubious beans we scavenged,” Luz said. “And Libby’s canned corned beef when we were lucky—every supply convoy from the north had to fight to get through. It was like swatting clouds of wasps while they tried to sting you to death.”

  “That must have been . . . exciting,” Ciara said, giving a good game try at hardened indifference to risk.

  Two very eventful missions together was more than enough for her to pick up the principle that excitement wasn’t a desirable quality in their line of work.

  “Very exciting,” Luz admitted ruefully. “But . . . we all got very good at swatting wasps before they could sting. Well, the survivors did.”

  The main annoyance for the Black Chamber operatives this time had been from men who thought two attractive young women traveling by themselves must be wasting away for want of male company, which had necessitated a number of chilling set-downs and one smacked face.

  “And at that, it was better than . . . the last ocean cruise you and I took back from Europe,” Luz said with a smile.

  Ciara rolled her eyes in agreement; they’d made that under false pretenses on a German U-boat last year, one of the fleet sent to destroy the East Coast cities, and to add a little irony they’d nearly been killed by the depth charges of U.S. Navy destroyers before they got to Boston and broke free in a hail of gunfire to alert Uncle Teddy to the Breath of Loki. The next assignment, undercover in Berlin, had been just as stressful.

  This year had been much more pleasant so far, mostly training and planning in San Francisco, with Ciara enjoying herself immensely doing courses at Stanford and very discreet consulting stints at the plants in the Bay Area that General Electric and Westinghouse were setting up to manufacture an American version of the German Telemobiloscope they’d stolen and doing it as far away from Germany as possible. Nobody on either side hesitated to copy the other’s inventions anymore, beyond giving them a new name or even just a lick of paint in the national colors.

  This mission was supposed to be an important job, but not really hands-on dangerous.

  Which I will believe afterward, if it turns out that way. I seem to have some sort of malignant field around me, like those all-pervading electro-magnetic forces Ciara talks about, one that attracts wretched violence into my life.

  “Sometimes getting there isn’t half the fun,” Ciara said. “But”—she inclined her head to indicate the outside—“this . . . In the adventure stories it’s all lions and tigers and bandits and going over waterfalls all the time. Or magnificent glaciers and storms at sea . . .”

  “Nobody would read them if they left in the seven weeks of flies and sore feet and runny guts. My family went through this way too many times when I was a girl,” Luz said. “My papá built some of the branch lines!” she added proudly.

  Ciara’s turquoise-green eyes showed a quick sympathy, and she leaned forward to give Luz’s hand a squeeze. She knew those travels had ended when Pancho Villa’s men had butchered Luz’s parents during the sack of the Sonoran hacienda where they were staying, while Luz herself hid at the back of a wardrobe in the same room with her pistol pressed under her own chin in case they found her. And crawled out afterward beneath the smoke of the burning casa grande, through sticky congealing puddles of their blood. That had been . . .

  ¡Dios Mio! Luz thought. Going on six years ago now! Another world, not just another time. Before the Great War; before the Party, even.

  She smiled as she returned the pressure of her lover’s fingers for a moment. The memory was still bitter, but it didn’t paralyze her inside with cold murderous rage as it had for so long,
and it had been months since the last nightmare about it.

  Killing most of the men who did it helped. Catching Villa and watching him die did too. And love . . . maybe love doesn’t heal all, but it certainly helps.

  Ciara released her hand with a final squeeze. “I don’t think I’ve told you how much I admire the way you didn’t let that . . . that awful thing you went through make you hate all Mexicans,” she said. “I hated the English, after they killed Colm in Dublin last Easter. And that killed my da, as surely as a bullet. Oh, I hated them, and it was bitter.”

  Luz reached out a finger and playfully tapped the air in front of Ciara’s snub nose, which was set in a round freckled face, fresh and pretty rather than beautiful by most standards.

  Entrancing by mine, she thought, and went on aloud:

  “But you didn’t hate them enough to go along with the Breath of Loki, sweetie, when you found out what was planned,” she pointed out; her partner had been there in Germany as a courier from the . . . extravagantly . . . illegal Irish Republican Brotherhood before she switched sides.

  Ciara waved a hand dismissively and shuddered a little: “That? Killing all those women and little children in London, and all the poor common workingmen who had no politics and only wanted to get enough for the rent and food for their families and a pint at the pub now and then? That would be . . . like spitting on my brother’s grave! He died fighting openly for what he loved, against armed men.”

  “Still,” Luz said. “Mind you, sweetie, I hated the Mexicans who actually did it.”

  She shrugged. “After that I fought Mexicans I had nothing personal against because my tribe was at war with their tribe, and because Uncle Teddy was my war-chief and he told me to fight. I liked Germany and the Germans I knew at school there . . . and I liked some of the ones we met there on our last mission . . . but I fight them too for the same reason.”