Conflagration (36 page)

“Hurry please. Get in the car.”

Cordelia did not argue or question. The man with the pistol opened the left rear door of the car for her, and she climbed in. A young woman had already installed herself in the left corner of the car’s rear seat. “Cordelia Blakeney.”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Sera Falconetti.” She leaned forward, extended a gloved hand, and tapped on the glass partition that separated them from the driver and his gun-toting companion. “Drive on, Jacques. We need to be away from here.”

Only jolting slightly on the ruts in the alley, the car smoothly accelerated, and Cordelia was off once more into the night, to a still-unexplained destination.

To say that Sera Falconetti was elegant was a severe understatement. Sera Falconetti had straight raven black hair that was worn long. Her skin was dead-white ivory, pale enough to be almost eerie in the dim interior of the car. Her black fur stole, her tailored leather coat (a superior version of the ones worn by the men), and her long satin skirt were perfect. The high double-laced boots with the stiletto heels and platform soles were out of date by London, and even New York standards, and, even back when they were in vogue, might have been considered a little slutty and overly provocative, but, except for this single error, she could pass for a carefully turned-out fashion plate, and Cordelia felt at a great disadvantage in her whorehouse hand-me-downs and garish makeup. Cordelia, however, was not going to allow herself to be placed in any subservient position by Falconetti’s finery, her car, or her armed retainers. “Is anyone going to explain what I’m doing here?”

Falconetti folded her gloved hands. “I’m not insensitive to how you must be confused and mystified, and even very anxious after what’s been happening to you.”

Cordelia knew she had to keep anger and resentment in check for the moment. “That would be one way of putting it.”

“I fear that, right now, for reasons that you’ll understand later, I can’t tell you much; more will be revealed to you when we reach Paris. Right now, the less you know the better. My associates and I have to protect ourselves should anything go wrong.”

Cordelia made her expression as noncommittal as she could. “I can appreciate your care, but it hardly makes me any happier.”

“This is one of those occasions when security takes precedence over happiness.”

“But I’ll hear all about it in Paris?”

“You certainly will, and if it’s any consolation, I’m not an agent of Her Grand Eminence or the Zhaithan.”

Cordelia glanced round the opulence of the car. “That had crossed my mind.”

“I regret that’s all I can tell you right now.”

“You could maybe tell me about Paris. That would hardly be endangering anyone’s safety. It comes as quite a surprise that it’s there at all. I was always taught that it was leveled, as the pinnacle of the Mosul invasion of Western Europe.”

“That’s what you learned in Albany?”

“Our history teacher tried to drum into us how the Franks built the Clouseau Wall to keep the Mosul from attacking through the Lowlands, but, instead, they came through the supposedly impenetrable Forest of Arden, and up the Rhone from the south. That the last of the Frankish Grand Army made its stand at Amiens, and that was that, except, instead of occupying Paris, that huge bloody gun was hauled in so the Franks could be shown who was boss.”

“The Great Paris Gun.”

Cordelia nodded. “Right, the Great Paris Gun. The boys all liked that part. How the young Hassan held off and pounded the city with these huge shells for four straight days. They loved all the gruesome stuff about the poison gas, and the firestorm, and all the burned bodies. I must confess I really didn’t pay a lot of attention back in those days.”

“You had the luxury of being a girl?”

“I suppose.”

“More than fifty thousand people are now living in Paris.”

“In the ruins?”

“In the ruins and what’s been made of them. Over the years, there’s been a lot of burrowing and building. In the beginning, it was just a criminal hideout, but now you have refugees and outlaws from all over the Empire. Freethinkers and wandering Roma find sanctuary, most of the resistance groups use Paris as a bolt-hole and supply center, there’s runaways, heretics, polyamory thought-criminals, denounced deviants, and the just-plain-on-the-lam.”

“And the Mosul let all this exist?”

Falconetti shrugged. “Every so often, they mount some kind of offensive, although, in recent years, they have really only gone through the motions. They know it would be a murderous fight, cellar by cellar, sewer by sewer, and bunker by bunker, and, if they press the Parisians into any kind of last stand, we’ll poison the Seine, and that would cause unthinkable chaos. Besides, both sides now clearly know the secret.”

“The secret?”

“The secret is that the Mosul need Paris. They need it in the same way as they need Amsterdam, and they need Palermo and Naples. They need their cities of sin as an interface with the rest of the world. And Paris is the greatest of them, because it is also a city of terrible ghosts. They may have their Provincial Capital in Lyons, but Paris is the fountainhead of all of their corruption. It’s the source of their forbidden fruit; it’s where they get their luxury goods, and their modern medicines, and their exotic women.”

Cordelia began to like the sound of Paris. If she were going to be kidnapped to a strange location, she could think of worse places. “And that’s where we’re going now?”

Sera Falconetti nodded. “With a single detour.” She paused. “There is one other thing I believe I should tell you here and now, so you will be able to use this travel time to react and get over it before we get where we’re going.”

Cordelia looked at Falconetti warily. “What are you talking about?”

“News just came that your Albany Prime Minister has been assassinated.”

“Jack Kennedy.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you because I know you knew him, but Jack Kennedy is dead.”

Irrationally, Cordelia thought of Jesamine, and specifically how she had once categorized her crush on Kennedy as “terminal.”

ARGO

“How are they reacting in Albany?”

Gideon Windermere looked uncomfortable. “From the telegrams we’ve received, the whole kingdom is in shock.”

Argo was becoming angry. “This is going in every direction at once.”

Raphael nodded. “He’s right.”

Argo numerated points on his fingers. “We have four dead assassins who could have been pros or fanatics, and what would seem to be another shooter was using a rifle from a window or rooftop, and he or she has gotten clean away.”

Sir Harry Palmer looked coldly over his spectacles. “This fifth shooter is pure supposition.”

Jesamine’s counter-look was icy. “You saw the film the same as everyone else.”

“Are we sure what we saw? It was only for an instant.”

Jesamine was implacable. “I’m sure.”

Argo ignored Palmer and continued. “One of the assassins was a swarthy sonofabitch with a fresh scar under his arm like a Zhaithan tattoo had just been removed. Another was a Nordic blonde who could have been one of Hassan’s Teutons or possibly one of your home grown, polytheist Odin worshipers. The other two were nondescript fuckers who could have come from anywhere in Northern Europe. Their pockets were empty, their clothes were untraceable, and their weapons could have been bought in any underworld pub within a mile radius of where the assassination took place. Am I right so far?”

Palmer sighed and rolled his eyes. “Son, have you considered leaving all this to professionals?”

Argo came close to combative. He was very slightly drunk, and intended to be more so before the night ended. In the meantime, a poor boy from Virginia could take only so much. “Don’t call me ‘son.’”

Before Palmer could respond, Jesamine had jumped in. “If you’re so fucking professional, how is it that your professionalism didn’t extend to seeing any of this coming. Didn’t your intelligence people have an inkling that a plot was being hatched?”

“This isn’t a police state.”

“But you’re the police.”

While the coroners, diplomats, and regular detectives did their work, cables flew between Oslo, London, and Albany. They had left Great Scottland Yard and sought sanctuary in a public house called The Bow Street Runner for the restorative effects of beer, roast beef sandwiches, and scotch whiskey. Even in crisis, repairing to the pub when office discussions became either deadlocked or too heated for the participants’ good seemed to be an English tradition, and it had Argo’s full approval. On their way there, they had heard the shouting of leather-throated newsboys out on the street, as they sold the hot-from-the-press, special, late-afternoon editions of the three London evening newspapers, the
Star,
the
News
and the
Standard
.

“Read all about it! Horrible assassination! Jack Kennedy murdered!”

“Get yer special! Kennedy murdered! Read all about it!”

The Bow Street Runner was known as a coppers’ pub, frequented by off-duty policemen and a few civilians with nothing bad on their consciences. Sir Harry Palmer’s rank afforded him the use of a back room, a private telephone, and an aproned waiter to keep their refreshments coming. Also, their conversation would not be overheard, even by the rank and file of the Metropolitan Constabulary, some of whom were grouped around the piano in the saloon bar singing a mournful popular song that seemed to suit the prevailing mood of gloom.

Down in the valley

Down by the river

In the night I held you

And I felt you shiver

But now you left me

And gone to the town

And I have a notion

In the river to drown.

The gathering in the back room consisted of Argo, Raphael, Jesamine, Sir Harry Palmer, Gideon Windermere, Jane Tennyson, and the leader of the plainclothesmen who had brought Argo, Raphael, and Jesamine from Whitehall. His name had turned out to be Huntley and he held the rank of Superintendent. As an impasse had been reached between Palmer, Argo, and Jesamine, Windermere attempted to steer the discussion in a different direction. “There is also the matter of the autopsies.”

This, however, only increased the ire of Sir Harry Palmer, who glared blackly at Windermere. “I thought we’d agreed not to talk about that?”

“I don’t see how we can avoid it. We have a paranormal factor involved and these three are, if nothing else, paranormal combat veterans. They may also be targets. Let’s not forget that one of their number is already missing.”

Argo carefully put down his drink. “What paranormal factor? What else are we not being told?”

Now it was Palmer’s turn to ignore Argo. “We can protect them.”

At this, Jesamine snarled. “Like you protected Jack? Like you protected Cordelia? So far we’ve been really fucking secure. The leader of our delegation is dead and one of us is missing.”

Argo looked coldly at Sir Harry. “It’s time to cut the crap and start leveling with us, Sir Palmer.”

Tennyson, who was, of course, Navy, and therefore not under Sir Harry Palmer’s command, spoke up in support of Argo. “I don’t see how we can guarantee their safety if we don’t know what to expect.”

Windermere looked tense. “That’s the real problem. We don’t have a clue what to expect.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Windermere glanced at Palmer. “They have a right to know.”

Raphael’s voice was quietly dangerous. “We have a right to know what?”

Palmer threw up his hands. “So tell them, Windermere, but it’s on your head.”

“I’m very well aware of that.”

“So what’s the big revelation?”

“Aside from all four of the assassins being loaded to the gills on benodex, the coroner also reports that the brain of one of the assassins had already exploded before our lads shot him.”

“That makes no sense.”

“The benodex might indicate that the assassins on the street were a crazed and hallucinating diversion, providing a cover for the real killer, our possible sniper, if what we saw on the celluloid was what we surmise.”

Argo was mystified. “And the exploding brain?”

Windermere shook his head. “I have no idea.”

Raphael asked the obvious question. “Can too much benodex make your brain explode?”

Windermere shook his head. “It can make you feel like it is. But no, in actuality it isn’t possible. I was hoping that you might have encountered something like it, and could tell me.”

Both Argo and Raphael shook their heads, but Jesamine hesitated. Everyone at the table stared at her. “What?”

“It was something Cordelia said. After the battle, after Newbury Vale, she helped Slide interrogate a prisoner and, just as he started to spill his guts, his brain blew up.”

“Blew up?”

“As in physically. As in the bastard’s brain liquefied and flowed out of his eye sockets.”

“No shit.”

“Couldn’t Slide have done it to him?”

Jesamine shook her head. “According to Cordelia, Slide said it was smart posthypnotics with an advanced destruct conjuration. Whatever that means.”

“What the hell was Cordelia doing interrogating prisoners?”

“Slide apparently thought she might have a talent for it.”

Raphael nodded. “I can buy that.”

Jesamine ran her finger round the rim of her glass. “But I think she found she enjoyed it too much and it kind of spooked her. She was still kinda spooked when she told me about it one night on the
Ragnar
.”

Argo spoke without thinking. Booze was starting to loosen his tongue. “One of the few nights the two of you were alone on the
Ragnar
?”

Jesamine shot Argo a murderous look. “Just shut the fuck up, Argo Weaver.”

Argo felt bad. She and Kennedy had first become involved on the
Ragnar,
but it was too late to take back the quip. Sir Harry was shaking his head. “Do you people always go on like this?”