'Let's get some lunch,' Cesar said, winking.
Yeah, Salvador thought. Got to remember anything can be a bug these days.
'Sure, I could use a burrito.'
They shed their phones; when they were outside Cesar went on: 'How soon you want to start poking around, jefe?'
Salvador let out his breath and rolled his head, kneading at the back of his head with one spadelike hand. The muscles there felt like a mass of woven iron rods under his hand, and he pressed on the silver chain that held the crucifix around his neck.
'It's fucking Euro-trash terrorists now, eh?' he said.
'Yeah. Euro-trash vampire terrorists. Maybe Osama bit them?' Cesar said, still smiling.
'Or vice versa.'
'What sort of shit is coming down?' Cesar said, more seriously.
'Our chances of getting that from those people…'
'…are nada.'
'Somewhere between nada and fucking zip.'
Cesar looked up into the cloudless blue sky. 'Maybe these Brezes are just so rich they can shit-can anything they don't like, pull strings, some politician leans on the FBI and the Company? Call me cynical…'
'Nah,' Salvador shook his head. 'You can't get that just with money. Not with those people, the spooks. They know they're going to be there when any given bought-and-paid-for politician is long gone. You need heavy political leverage. Whoever they were, they were feds, and not your average cubicle slave either. They're not going to tell any of us square-state boondockers shit. The chief didn't know any more than we did, he was just taking orders.'
'You sure?'
'I've known him a long time. We're related, cousins.'
'You old-timers here are all related,' Cesar said. 'It's not fucking fair.'
'You people who just got off the bus don't understand the strength of our family feelings. Can I help it if we're descended from conquistadores?'
'Fast conquistadores and slow india girls. Hell, my family goes right back to Cortes too.'
'It does?'
'Sure. One of my great-many-times-grandmothers was squatting in the dirt grilling a guinea pig when he rode by on his horse.'
Salvador's grin was brief; his eyes made a to-business flick.
'So…' Cesar said. He leaned back against a wall. 'How long do you want to let it cool before we start poking in violation of our solemn promise?'
'Couple of months,' Salvador said. 'First thing, get all the data on an SD card and make some copies and let me have one. Scrub your notebook and anything you've got at the office. None of this ever goes on anything connected to anything else.'
Cesar grinned. 'I like the way you think, jefe.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ellen kept her breathing deep and steady against the fear that made her want to pant as she walked the streets of Paris behind the professor. The professor who's about to be ambushed by werewhatsits and hired killers. What a way to See Europe and Die Screaming. The other parts of this honeymoon trip were a lot more fun.
She pulled the raw, chilly air deep into her lungs, freighted with traffic and cooking and old stone. A little fog lay on the river, with the running lights of boats shining through it like a blurred Impressionist cityscape, and wisps of it were pooling along the cobblestones. Beads of moisture starred her eyelashes, and a lock of hair came out from under her floppy hat and stuck to her brow.
'He's crossing the river on the Pont Marie and heading for the Saint-Paul metro station,' Adrian said. 'Not long now.'
They followed. Already Ellen had a sense that she was in a bubble of nonspace, and it grew stronger with the thronging life of Le Marais moving around; it was that kind of neighborhood. Ellen kept her head slightly down, avoided eye contact, neither hurried nor dawdled.
She spotted the professor's ponytail as he walked along, deep in thought, his hands in his jacket pockets and his head down. The street life was busy this early in the evening, dense traffic, thronged sidewalks, light from lamps on curled wrought-iron brackets reaching out from the walls. Nothing was high-rise-older stone-and-stucco buildings for the most part, in pale colors. But it felt densely urban in a way that even far more built-up American cities didn't, as if you could feel the layers of time here beside the Seine, all the way back to the Lutetia Parisiorum of the Gauls and Romans. The latest included a restaurant that had a menorah in the window and advertised, BLINIS, SAUMON, ZAKOUSHKIS ET VODKAS, and some remarkably well-stocked gay-themed fetish stores.
She eeled through it all, keeping her target in sight without being obvious about it.
God, it's like I've done this a thousand times before! she thought, unconsciously sliding away from Adrian so that they wouldn't be together to jog the target's memory if he turned around, pausing now and then to pretend to look in a window. And I have, in Adrians head.
Tailing, detecting a tail, losing one, in cities that had included Paris and a dozen others, or the equivalent skills in forest or desert…that and a hundred other things, things more arcane and terrible. There in her mind, ready to surface when she needed them.
And I'm not even very frightened. I was frightened at first in there, because it was all so real, but I could keep it under control because I knew consciously that it wasn't. Now when it's really real I'm just…just taut and ready. And a bit apprehensive in a sort of reasoned way, as if this were something I was used to doing. I've even beat Adrian at it a couple of times, the non-Power parts, at least.
'This is weird,' she murmured almost inaudibly. 'Hey, isn't it a cliche that marriage doesn't change you? Well, it has changed me, already!'
Adrian had turned. Now he lounged past her, heading in the other direction, then leaned against a wall like any man out for a stroll and eyeing a pretty girl.
'You are doing splendidly. They will act soon,' he said quietly as she passed. 'And if we had not married, I would still be sitting on a mountaintop brooding.'
Then he ducked behind an elderly Jewish couple, came back through a gaggle of Chinese teenagers chatting in French-there were a lot of East Asian immigrants around here-and strolled slightly behind her. His looks made it easier for him to blend in; her blond height and figure always attracted attention.
Duquense was speeding up when he suddenly turned left into a narrow alleyway.
Wreaking, Ellen thought with a shiver. There was a possibility that he'd do that, no matter how remote. So a little push with the Power, and he does do it, willy-nilly.
Ellen walked past it, stopped and stooped as if to fiddle with her shoe an arm's length along the next building. Adrian came up behind her and turned directly into the narrow curving backstreet. She reached under her jacket and laid her hand on the butt of the little Five-seveN automatic, drew it, then turned and followed him in, holding it down near her thigh. The heavy silver amulet around her neck was tingling, seeming to itch at her skin.
A tableau was frozen for an instant as she and Adrian entered the alley. Three men and Duquesne. The academic's hand was raised in futile protest as one of the men drew a long knife from under his jacket and the other held him by an elbow and the back of his neck. Adrian faced the third, farther in, who'd been standing with his hands resting on the knob of his walking stick as he surveyed the murder-in-progress.
Shoot the one with the knife, her training told her. He's the immediate danger. Don't assume he'll go down with the first round.
Ellen blinked at the calmly ruthless thought, even as her hands came smoothly up with the gun ready. The two men threatening Duquesne were unremarkable, except that they both looked very dangerous, moving like lethal dancers-one squat and a little darker than Adrian, the other with the drawn blade taller, with oddly silver hair.
