'It's not quite certain yet,' Adrian said as they went out the door and turned right into the bustling night; Duquesne was walking towards the nearest metro station. 'The world-lines are coalescing… yes. Two normals, renfield muscle, and a Shadowspawn. He will intervene only if the normals fail.'
'You'll take care of him?'
'Exactly. I'm afraid you must keep the normals occupied.'
Gulp.
'I wish Harvey were here to help.'
So do I!
CHAPTER SEVEN
'You!
The man who called himself Jose Figuerez froze in the corridor with a spray of files against his chest. Harvey Ledbetter raised his hands in a soothing gesture.
'Hey, Dhul Fiqar-'
'You know my name?'
' Obviously.'
'How did you get in here?'
The man's eyes darted to the stairwell. Obviously he was wondering how Harvey had gotten up here unnoticed; there was an inconspicuously armed guard on the front door and at the vehicle entrance, and the rear was locked, with steel reinforcement on the inside. Nothing out of the ordinary here in Veracruz, though the concealed stash of automatic weapons would raise eyebrows if anyone knew about them.
'I walked,' Harvey said. 'Let's talk, shall we?'
The man waved him through the door of the office. There were only two chairs in the little third-floor room, the office model on casters that Dhul Fiqar went to behind his desk, and a plain molded-plywood-and-wire type near the louvered window that cast bars of savage light and ink-black shade on the plain polished concrete floor. The air that came in past it was hot and rank-heavy with rancid smells, traffic stink and petrochemical plant effluent and the smell of a warm sea not far away and far too full of rotting garbage and raw sewage and the odd dead pig, dog or inconvenient human.
Veracruz was big. Not quite the thirty million-plus monster that Mexico City was, but bigger than New York or Tokyo, with a lot less in the way of frivolous infrastructural luxuries like sanitation than a first-world city.
The Arab seated himself behind the desk, keeping his hands on the edge. His left thumb was pushing an alarm trigger that would alert some of his followers, or at least would have if Harvey hadn't bent the path of some electrons, just so. The other was twitching with readiness. Which meant…
Yeah, gun in the upper right drawer. And that's making him feel safer, Harvey thought. He probably thinks he's got me trapped. Silly bastard.
'How did you find us?' the man behind the desk said tightly.
'Well, Dhul, ol' buddy, consider that we got seventeen kilos of weapons-grade plutonium out of Seversk-'
' Seventeen kilos?'
'Y'all weren't the only destination. Sorry, fourteen kilos for you.'
I used the rest to kill Brancusi. Well, kill his postcorporeal energy matrix. Sorta debatable whether that was the same him who was a bouncing baby boy 'round about 1911.
He went on aloud: 'We brought it all the way to Port-au-Prince with every security service in the world lookin for it, and handed it over to you intact…Are you really surprised we can find out what we need to?'
Dhul Fiqar-the name meant Sword of the Prophet, and Ledbetter assumed it was a nom de guerre-was quite believable as a Mexican here in Veracruz even apart from his accentless command of the local Spanish dialect; he was olive-skinned and had a few gray hairs in his bushy black mustache.
In fact he was from Lebanon, originally, and Harvey suspected he'd been placed here as a sleeper agent by an organization that no longer existed to any great extent. He was extremely fit, even a little gaunt, with the face of someone whose compulsions were eating him slowly from the inside. Right now he was obviously thinking hard.
'Perhaps it is not so surprising,' he said after a moment. 'You knew to whom you were selling the material?'
'Is that a surprise either?'
Contempt glinted in the dark eyes; he might as well have sneered mercenary aloud. Then a hint of caution. But a capable one.
'You were well paid,' Dhul said. 'Ten million euros is a great deal, even in these times.'
'Yep. And you did get the material, and it's the real goods. That's a first.'
Light kindled in the man's face, an exultation that nothing could suppress for long.
'Always, always before something has blocked us. The most accursed strokes of bad luck! But by the Lovingkind, the Compassionate, this time victory will be ours!'
'You reckon?' Harvey asked, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
'?Perdone usted?'
'You think so?'
'It is fated!' An effort at control, and Dhul went on. 'But sit, sit, my friend,' he said; the affability sat very poorly on him, if you could sense emotions directly.
'Thanks, but I won't be here long,' Harvey replied.
He's certainly been a busy little bee, and he's built up quite a little operation on his own. They're like cancer cells – usually there're a few left to grow back.
'How'd you manage to machine the plutonium?' Harvey said.
This was an older section, near run-down docks but not very close to the modern container facilities. Most of the buildings were from the same period, built during the booming days of the Porfiriato from blocks otpiedra muca, coral stone. Some were pocked with bullet holes under the cracked stucco, from the revolution and the brief American occupation that had followed, or the drug wars of recent years. Nowadays they held a tangle of struggling small businesses or cheap rooming houses with the odd spot of renovation. The metal desk and antique ASUS-S6 computer would fit right in.
'When you love death more than life, these things are not difficult,' Dhul Fiqar said.
Ah. A suicide machinist. Wonders never cease.
Plutonium was toxic chemically, violently dangerous as a radioactive substance, and a stone bitch to handle- for one thing, if you exposed it to moist air it was liable to more than double in volume as it turned into a flaky paste of hydrides that would then spontaneously burst into flame at room temperature. The job wouldn't be impossible, with computer-controlled machine tools as common as they were these days. You could set up an improvised clean room for it, though you'd be well advised to use a cellar and pump it full of concrete afterwards.
It would all be much easier if you didn't mind the operator dying a couple of weeks later. And this bunch had the advantage of being completely obscure-that was why he'd picked them, rather than hire some unemployed Russians or whatever. They had the best possible reasons not to talk, too.
'Besides, it was already formed,' Dhul Fiqar acknowledged. 'You saved us much time with that, since we had only to alter the angles on the wedges. I would like to know how you gained access to those components!'
Well, you make a deal under the table with these werewolf-vampire-sorceror-psychopath types, then -Harvey thought ironically.
Dhul went on: 'You will receive the last payment as agreed.'
'Well, that's what I'm here about. We'd like to discus the possibility of delivering it for you. With an additional fee, of course. After all, we got the material to you in the first place, right?'
A wave of savage suspicion and utter refusal roiled through the man's mind. Harvey sighed, though he wasn't surprised. When Dhul spoke, his voice was smooth.
'I will consider your offer to transport it to the target for us.'
Dhul Fiqar was lying; the Texan had enough of the Power to tell that easily, from someone without
