Though the walk had an unpleasantly catlike quality to it, now that she thought of it. A sense of creeping menace came with Adrian’s sister, a fear that she hadn’t noticed until it returned.
“Five minutes to the Seversk call, Ms. Br?z?,” Theresa said. “Do you want me to cancel it?”
“No, no, it’s important. Hmmm. There’s an idea. He makes a great noise about his progressive attitudes but is fond of high Shadowspawn attitude… A pity David isn’t photogenic right now.”
She looked at Ellen. “Take off your clothes.”
“What?” Ellen said. Then an involuntary yelp of: “Ouch! ” as her neck twinged.
“That wasn’t a request, ch?rie. This is business. The underwear too. My, that dress is quite ruined, isn’t it?”
She tousled Ellen’s pale-blond hair, studied the results and nodded.
“Theresa, your pendant for a little.”
The manager compressed her lips, but reached behind her head. The slim gold chain held a disk with the same black sun and golden trident that she’d noticed on David’s wrist. Adrienne dropped it over Ellen’s head, and gave it a twitch so that the sigil was visible just above her breasts.
“Excellent,” she said. “Now, I will be talking with an associate named Dmitri Usov. He’s an able man but has some quirks. Ah, well, don’t we all, eh? Don’t speak unless spoken to; if he does speak to you, answer him quickly. Theresa, bring coffee and brandy. Ellen, stand by my chair within the pickup angle and serve them if I move my hand, so.”
The chair was a deep lounger. Adrienne lay back in it and touched a clearpad control surface in one arm. A sixty-inch screen swung down from the ceiling with a very faint whir of servos, and lit. After a moment it cleared with the pellucidly sharp outlines that meant a high-bandwidth dedicated satellite link.
Ellen blinked. The room that showed in it looked like a set from a Bakst ballet, with samovars and Persian rugs and colorful drapes and icons, clashing horribly with a tumble of electronic equipment. A man in an open embroidered caftan and loose drawstring pantaloons sat on a chair that wasn’t quite thronelike-it looked too comfortable-but came close. Two naked teenagers stood on either side; the boy holding a tray with small glasses, a bowl of caviar and strips of toast, the girl the mouthpiece of a water-pipe. They looked Asian, with the extremely high cheekbones, ruddy skin and flat faces found from Mongolia northward.
The man was quite different, sharp-featured, with long pale hair and gray eyes and a thin pointed nose, his torso lean but the muscles sharply defined.
What Vladimir Putin wishes he looked like, Ellen thought. What he’d look like if he were in his thirties and not ugly.
She flushed as his eyes slid over her. She’d thought she knew what it was to have a man look at her like a piece of meat.
But I didn’t. That’s a flip-her-over-and-fuck-her glance, all right, but it’s also a literal piece-of-meat look. Or a bottle-of-good-hooch look. Oh, Jesus this is scary. I wish I could wake up! “Dobry den’, Dmitri Pavlovitch,” Adrienne said. “Kak vashi dela?” in “I’m in fucking Siberia in February, Adrienne Juliyevna,” he said in good English, only about as accented as hers. “It’s cold, and that is how I am, and to make matters worse I am in fucking Seversk, which is not even the arsehole of Siberia. It is a chancre upon the lower intestine of Siberia. And I am stuck here until the Council relents. Where are you?”
“On my jet, bound for California.” She smiled. “Just think how much better it would be if you were in a castle without central heating or plumbing, and I was traveling by coach or rowed by galley slaves, talking to you by telepathy.”
He laughed. “The galley slaves would have their points.”
“Not as a means of transportation.”
“Certainly not here! If you spit, it freezes before it hits the ground. Though the long nights have been convenient. I have gotten in some excellent hunting.”
“What game?”
“Bears by day. Chechens or Tartars by night, mostly. And the odd wandering tourist. Nobody misses them, and they look so surprised. One had but the guidebook said tigers are extinct here as her last words, I swear to God.”
He smiled. “But we are impolite. First we should honor our ancient heritage with the traditional signs.”
He made a gesture with his left hand. “Hail to the Dread Empire of Shadows and the Secret Reign that is to come!”
Adrienne raised her right hand, divided the first and second fingers from the fourth and fifth to form a V, and solemnly intoned: “Live long and prosper!”
Ellen bit back a startled snort. Then they both stuck their index fingers in their ears, waggled the little fingers and chanted: “Uga-Chuga… Uga-Chuga… Bow! Wow! Wow!”
With both fists in the air: “Goooooo TEAM!”
Both dissolved in laughter. “Ah, Adrienne, it does me good to speak with you again, after dealing with the Gheorghe Br?ncu?i matter for so long. If you knew how many times I had to actually go through those pseudo- medieval rituals, as if I was some legend-besotted Victorian secret-society occultist like our ancestors…”
“You haven’t had to deal with the Demon Daimyo of the West Coast as long as I have, Dmitri. Any real progress?”
“Yes,” he said. “Progress that can be laid before the Council. Let us toast success!”
He made another gesture, one that seemed natural; forefinger to thumb, like the sign for OK, and a finger tapped to the neck. Then he reached for the tray, dipping a strip of the dark toast into the caviar, and taking one of the small glasses.
Ellen almost missed Adrienne’s signal. She turned and took the service from Theresa and bent to put it on the sideboard and pour; it had a dark rich aroma, different from anything she’d smelled before. Her flush grew deeper as her full breasts swayed with the gesture; the whole thing made her feel horribly like an extra glimpsed in some obtrusive pop-up ad for an Internet porn site.
“Za vashe zdorovye!”
He downed the whole glass, Russian-style.
“? votre sant?,” she answered and sipped the cognac, following it with black coffee.
“The plutonium was definitely from here,” the man in the screen went on. “The cattle who sold it to the Brotherhood agents thought they were selling it to the Iranians; I suspect a small, subtle Wreaking on their memories. They have all been dealt with, but the successors… I do not know if they will be any better.”
Adrienne hissed a little between her teeth. “We really have to do more about this, Dmitri. We are… vulnerable.”
“Tell me. In my opinion we should never have closed down the Communists, at least their security around closed sites was competent and we only had to control a few key men to control all. That there are so many to deal with now is why I’ve been trapped here, like some exile in the days of Stalin or the Czars.”
His face darkened a little. “As if I were responsible for Gheorghe’s final death! Have you seen my report on his security? A farce! Tzigani with knives and shotguns and bandanas around their heads. All that they needed was violins and balalaikas. Maybe their grandfathers were at least formidable savages, but these were merely drunken louts putting on a show, as if for tourists! You expected to see the movie cameras and fog made from dry ice at any moment!”
“Yes, one must move with the times,” she said.
There was a short significant pause; they met each other’s eyes and then looked away.
I missed something there, Ellen thought.
“I use Gurkhas, as you know,” Adrienne said into the brief silence. “They stay bought, too.”
“And how was your visit to Santa Fe?” Dmitri went on, taking the mouthpiece of the hookah and drawing a deep bubbling lungful. “You spoke hopefully of it last week.”
“Rather productive.” Another short pause. “In more ways than one.”
“Ah, ochen’ horosho,” he said. Then he looked at Ellen.
“Either you are developing a sense of style, Adrienne, or this is some sort of subtle mockery of mine.”
“I? Mock? Impossible, Dmitri. Oh, well, possibly a little of both. I acquired her in Santa Fe, yes. Previously my brother’s. Perhaps that explains my desire to show off a little, although he got surprisingly little use out of her. Guilty, I suppose. Such a grubby human emotion, guilt.”
