Shadows of Annihilation Read online

Though we had separate rooms and nothing untoward happened apart from a few stolen kisses, not with my parents there, Luz thought. But I can scarcely say that in public. Damn you, Julie, you always did have a fine hand at needlework.

  The station chief was thirty, with pale blue eyes, a long regular windburned Anglo-Saxon face that would have been horsey if it weren’t for a strong-boned prettiness, dense pale flaxen hair done up in a practical bun, and a trim athletic figure much like Luz’s, though she was closer to Ciara’s five-four than Luz’s five-six.

  “And do call me Julie. A friend of Luz is a friend of mine,” Durán went on to Ciara. “Luz has needed someone she could really rely on as a true . . . partner . . . for a while. I’m very glad you’re there for her now.”

  The slight hesitation before partner, and the glance at the Claddagh pledge rings Luz and Ciara wore on their left ring fingers, showed she understood the situation without being too blatant. What wasn’t openly named didn’t have to be officially denied.

  Julie can be unobnoxious. When she wants to be, and she believed me when I told her back in the spring that this was dead serious for me.

  “It’s Ciara, then, um, Julie,” Ciara said, thawing a little.

  She emphasized the K-sound, being a little sensitive about the proper pronunciation of the uncommon Irish name, which sounded like Keera, not Sy-ar-a. Erse-Gaelic spelling accomplished the difficult feat of being just as nonphonetic as English.

  “And the way it’s built around a courtyard here is similar to our home,” Ciara said . . .

  Laying the very slightest emphasis on home, as if to say and she ended up with me, so there, you vamp.

  “The legacy of Greece, via Rome, via the Moors, via the Spaniards,” Luz said; architecture was a much safer topic.

  This arrangement of rooms around a central arcade-court had been born and elaborated around the Mediterranean and points east; it made for a very private, easily defensible home that kept out heat, drafts, prying neighbors, thieves, unauthorized boyfriends, tax collectors, and other such vermin.

  All the old colonial-era mansions on Zacatecas’s narrow, winding, hilly streets had been built to that pattern, with wealth wrung out of the sweat of indio laborers in the silver mines. This one was two flat-roofed stories of reddish stone with grillework over the outside windows and a stout door, now topped by a brass plaque reading Universal Imports, Inc. Since 1913 the Chamber had cut passageways through to the remodeled houses on either side that held more office space and staff accommodations, and doubtless there were the usual clandestine tunnels and deliberately sinister underground holding cells and other fruits of a long gradual sprucing-up process.

  “It certainly has nicer atmospherics than the Black Palace,” Luz added with a grin.

  El Palacio Negro de Lecumberri was an ill-omened pile on the outskirts of Mexico City, a prison of dark repute for political enemies of President Porfirio Díaz until 1911, and the southern HQ of the Black Chamber since August 1913. Mexico hadn’t been the Chamber’s exclusive focus since the Great War started, but it was still crucially important.

  “Lecumberri?” Durán said with a snort; they’d both worked out of the place and neither had enjoyed it. “Just going there makes me want to cackle like a wicked witch in a fairy story—”

  She gave an unnervingly convincing laugh redolent of insane evil.

  “—and commit atrocities on random passersby. I should hope Bob and I could do better than that!”

  Working spaces in the Black Palace were mostly repurposed cells, since the client list was still extensive but more select than in Díaz’s day. Julie’s office here was a high-ceilinged second-story room done in pale plaster, uncrowded even with the long oak table at which they were seated as well as a big desk with telephones, a smaller typist-secretary’s station with a massive Underwood, a Dictaphone machine and its wax cylinders, bookshelves and map hangers and filing cabinets.

  A brown tile floor was scattered with colorful Zapotec rugs from Teotitlán del Valle, and windows opened onto the interior arcaded walkway that ran around the courtyard at this level. Roses and wisteria and jasmine vines climbed trellises on the pillars and arches outside, scenting the damp air that came through the half-open windows now that the rain had stopped.

  “You have done better, Julie,” Luz said. “Pass the tortillas, please, Miss Colmer?”

  There were four of them at the table, since Durán had included her confidential secretary in the dinner-cum-meeting, someone Luz knew only from a quick run through her file. At the beginning she’d known everyone in the organization at least by sight and name, but that was years ago, years of constant expansion. Not to mention heavy casualties.

  Henrietta Colmer was a striking young woman from Savannah, Georgia, with smooth dark-brown skin, softly curly black hair held back with a red ribbon, full handsome features, and a quiet manner. Luz didn’t know if she’d picked up the personal dynamics at all . . . but she was willing to bet that was the case. Julie most emphatically did not tolerate dimwits, so she was undoubtedly sharp as well, given that she’d reached such a responsible position so quickly. Plus being around Julie sharpened whatever wits you started with; you had to run fast to keep up.

  And that’s a haunted look in her eyes, Luz thought. Not surprising, with the load of sorrows she got handed by fate and the Germans.

  Colmer’s dossier said she’d been away in Baltimore learning office skills and about to graduate from one of the new Department of Education’s even newer vocational scholarship schools when the U-boat launched its load of horror-gas at her home city. That was the only enemy submarine in an American harbor that hadn’t been captured or destroyed when Luz and Ciara brought the plans for the Breath of Loki back from Germany. There had still been some warning, but her parents and five younger sisters had been among the unlucky minority who couldn’t evacuate in time.

  It was Party policy to help the relatives and survivors. Through some combination of chance, desire—Luz suspected a wholesome lust for revenge—and circumstance, she’d ended up in the Black Chamber’s CSS—Clerical Support Section. And probably assigned here in Zacatecas by some woman-hater who thought he was playing a malicious joke on Julie by saddling her with a “charity Negress” she’d be reluctant to refuse.

  Though the joke’s on him, not her. It’s a sign of good strong character and a fundamental sense of duty that she’s dealing with her grief through action and service to the country, not going passive and sucking her thumb because her feelings hurt so bad. Action’s what I did, and Ciara did . . . and what Uncle Teddy did when his wife and mother died.

  “The food’s better here than the refectory in the Palacio Negro, too,” Luz added.

  The local dishes were very different from the Cuban style she’d learned from her mother, but she’d spent long stretches here in Mexico from childhood on, and shorter ones in Central America as her father built plantation railways and sugar mills and coffee factories. Her parents had always tried the cuisines of the places they lived—as her father said, if he’d enjoyed boredom and long winters he’d have stayed in Boston.

  “Not hard. They use Army cooks,” Julie said. “God have mercy, creamed chipped beef on toast in Mexico City! No wonder the prisoners all talk!”

  Well, there’s the Water Treatment too, Luz thought as she chuckled; that was a more scientific and efficient version of the Water Cure used in the Philippine Insurrection.

  Julie waved again to indicate the building. “Here it’s more a matter of living over the shop, but I do want to hand it on in good order to whoever my successor turns out to be.”

  Her voice in English had a Philadelphia Main Line sound, similar to but not quite the same as Uncle Teddy’s Hudson Valley patrician tones, with a crisp -oah sound at the end of words like four strained through slightly clenched teeth. They were speaking mostly in Spanish, though, and Luz noted . . .

&nb
sp; “You’ve shed the last of that antique nuevomexicano accent you picked up from Bob and his family, Julie,” she said.

  In central Mexico the Spanish of people from Taos sounded very rustic and very old-fashioned, roughly the way the rasping twang of hillbillies did in California or New York. She’d heard Appalachian English described as “Shakespearean,” which wasn’t even completely untrue . . . if Shakespeare had lived and died as an illiterate peasant from the hills of Northumberland or Galloway.

  Luz added: “Now, if only you could walk around with a bag over your head, mi amiga, you could go undercover here easily.”

  You also had to learn to push back a bit at Julie, or she’d walk all over you without even trying.

  “Or I could pretend to be a leper,” the station chief added. “Speaking of disguises, are you two wearing wigs?”

  They were: close duplicates of their natural looks and chosen hairstyles, a raven-black, shoulder-length high-style bob for Luz, long and bright strawberry-blond for Ciara. She looked slightly alarmed, and Luz touched her shoulder.

  “Nobody but a trained observer would notice, believe me, except at very close range,” she said.

  Then to Durán: “Close crops for operational reasons, on our last field mission—about seven months ago. Damned inconvenient, but in the line of duty.”

  That was an oversimplification. Luz had had her hair cut down to the stubble to fit in with a group of French forced laborers in Berlin. Ciara had dyed hers to be less conspicuous, and when they got back it had been simpler to cut the mouse-brown result off and let it grow out naturally, avoiding a spell of startling half-and-half. The specialists the Black Chamber kept on retainer made the best disguise wigs in the world, lace-based and hand-tied, with methods culled from everything from the theater to modern medical science.

  Durán and her secretary were both in businesslike shirtwaist outfits with turn-down collars and man-style neckties that would have been perfectly normal for women working in offices in Washington or New York, and with the jackets off it showed their shoulder holsters.

  “I see they finally got around to designing a set of shoulder rigs for us,” Luz said. “Bless the Technical Section!”

  Conventional ones simply didn’t go with having breasts, even her own middling-sized bust, much less a deliciously full figure like Ciara’s.

  These were like the back half of a skeletonized sleeveless bolero jacket fastened with an elastic strap across the sternum; they had the pistol on the left, presented nearly horizontally and butt-foremost just under the bosom.

  “I had two made up to your and Miss Whelan’s measurements when I heard you were coming; you can adjust it to be snug with the buckles,” Julie said.

  “Thanks! And those aren’t 1911s you’re carrying,” Luz said, naming Browning’s famous Colt .45 and the Chamber’s field pistol of choice. “But there’s a family resemblance? Like a little sister.”

  “It’s designed by Browning, pretty much the same mechanism except for a double tilting link instead of single. And a four-inch barrel. Made for concealment and clandestine work, not as a soldier’s pistol. They’re calling it the Browning Amazon.”

  “¡Ay! So that’s where the rumors of a new standard issue came from.”

  “Right you are. The round’s new as well, a .40, or 10 mm if you want to be European about it. Hundred-and-forty-five-grain hollowpoint bullets at eleven hundred feet per second, which gives nearly as much wounding power as the .45.”

  She nodded to Henrietta, who fetched two wooden cases of blank polished ebony about the size of a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and put them by the plates of the visitors. Luz slid hers open; one of the pistols rested in a molded recess in the lining of black velvet, along with three magazines, thirty-six rounds resting point down in shaped holes, a small flask of lubricating oil, a multitool, pull-throughs, and other oddments. Luz picked the weapon up, reflexively worked the action, and eye-checked the chamber with the muzzle elevated—she had been well taught, starting considerably before her father gave her the cherished Belgian FN automatic in its special pocket.

  Then she extended the new pistol. “Nice,” she said, judging and relishing the balance and heft; guns didn’t delight her aesthetically the way blades did, but she had a professional’s solid respect for her tools. “Light compared to a .45!”

  “Framed in a new airship-grade aluminum alloy,” Julie said, and Ciara’s eyes lit with interest at the metallurgical note. “Which is corrosion resistant, too.”

  “How’s the kick?”

  The 1911’s .45 ACP round was a brutal knock-down man-smasher, but it had always felt a little too heavy for her. A light bullet that hit was infinitely more effective than a heavy one that missed, and she was usually very accurate.

  But this might be a useful compromise.

  “My wrist reads the recoil at about three-quarters of a .45’s,” Julie said. “Unscientific, but there you are.”

  “Hmmm, I like the finger grooves but the butt’s a bit wider than I’d have expected . . .”

  “Staggered-row clip, twelve rounds, the very latest thing,” Julie said, rather as if it were a new hat—she’d always been a bit of a fashion plate.

  “¡Ay! That could be useful! And the .380 isn’t very much bullet. There’s no margin for error with the light cartridges designed for straight-blowback guns. Thanks very much, Julie. I’ll shoot this in as soon as I can.”

  You don’t need a pistol all that often in this line of work, but when you do, you need it very badly and you need the target to stay down. And there may be more than one target.

  “Thank you very much, Station Chief Durán!” Ciara said in turn. “This pistol is a beautiful piece of work!”

  Julie and her secretary both blinked a little as they realized that while Luz spoke, Ciara had unfolded the cloth tucked into the inside of the lid, spread it out, disassembled the automatic, laid the parts out neatly with mathematical exactitude, examined each closely, and was now putting it back together with cheerful interest and no hesitation at all, despite it being the first time she’d touched the pistol.

  “Mr. Browning is so talented!” she said. “His designs are so . . . are so . . . so crisp! Elegant. But not fancy at all. No extra weight! No unnecessary parts or complications!”

  She shook her head and made a disapproving clucking sound. “I had to disassemble a damaged Lewis gun last winter and replace a broken return spring and put it back together, and in a terrible hurry with my fingers cold—”

  In a burnt-out French farmhouse with Stoßtruppen about to attack us with machine rifles, Luz thought fondly. And it was the first time you’d touched one of those, too.

  “—and it’s much too complex. It’s . . . fussy. Fiddly. And too many of the operating forces are redirected instead of keeping them in line, lateral stresses that weaken metal parts and make them likely to crack . . . that circular return spring below the action, just like a clock’s . . .” she said.

  Her eyes rolled in disdain.

  “All you’d need to do is put a coil spring and hydraulic buffer in the butt instead and you’d cut a pound of weight and make it more reliable and reduce the felt recoil even with less weight.”

  Luz smiled to herself with a glow of pride. Ciara wasn’t particularly interested in weapons or fighting skills in themselves, though she practiced assigned lessons dutifully and diligently, despite a tendency to murmur Oh, sorry! when she hit a sparring partner.

  Machines interested her, though, very much, and she had an uncanny ability to put a working model into her mind very quickly indeed, as if its parts and the way they moved together were the notes of a piece of music she could play and watch and halt or put into reverse.

  She did it even better with electro-magnetic fields, which Luz knew were real but couldn’t mentally visualize at all.

  “You’re very welcome,�
�� Julie said, taken a little aback by the casual display of technical virtuosity.

  Then she dismissed her surroundings with another wave and a charming smile for Ciara:

  “But this place isn’t really a home, of course. Bob and I have bought a ranch down near Jerez . . . that’s—”

  “A country town about thirty miles west of here and a little south,” Ciara said absently, showing she’d done her homework.

  “I was surprised when you told me, Julie,” Luz observed.

  Though I wasn’t at all surprised you didn’t want to rusticate for long on the Durán estancia north of Taos dancing attendance on the abuela and four widowed great-aunts, Luz thought. The older part of Bob’s family didn’t really think you were at all the sort of blushing virgin bride their gallant boy deserved, though I’ll bet the great-grandchildren thawed them a bit.

  Aloud she continued: “And even more when you started talking about barns and sheep-dip and seed selection and the family trees of bulls in your letters. You being the most completely urbanized human being I’ve ever known.”

  “Urbanized or not, I’ve always liked Hesiod and Virgil and an occasional picnic in the country,” Julie said, in a slightly defensive tone.

  “Those are classical poets who wrote about rural life,” Luz said to Ciara. “Though I doubt either of them did much of the pitchfork-and-shovel work themselves.”

  “Well, I’ve never wanted to go that far either; μηδὲν ἄγαν—nothing in excess,” Julie said. “The casa grande there was a bit battered and scorched, which made it affordable—a little tiff between the Huertistas and the rebels.”

  “Which rebels?” Luz asked with interest.

  There had been about five major armed factions in the field in 1913 when the Americans crashed over the border and ashore in Veracruz and Tampico, and all the self-proclaimed saviors of Mexico had been living off the land and what they could levy as loans and contributions and with a shifting set of alliances and betrayals and splits and mergers. Plus the minor players, ranging from overambitious would-be caudillos with a few hundred thugs to plain old-fashioned bandits taking advantage of the chaos and yelling vivas in the name of whichever leader was most convenient while they robbed, killed, raped, and burned. Doing said leader’s popularity no good at all, especially when someone hired the gangs on officially . . . which had happened fairly often.