Finch bit at her lower lip. "Sir, generally if the Other People tried to take something like this away from us, the Director would tell them to go pee up a rope."
Dowding leaned back in his swivel chair and tapped the knuckles of one hand with a pen. "Exactly.
So the truth about this evidence must be so terrifying that the Director or someone just below his level
wants
to hand it over to somebody else."
"I have a bad feeling about this, sir," she said.
Dowding nodded. "Finch, I trust you."
She looked up, startled. He was holding a disk in his hand, one of the new read-write opticals. "This is that DNA report on the skin samples that Quantico did," he said.
They shared a glance. The powers-that-be hadn't really grasped how difficult it was to get rid of every copy of inconvenient data, yet.
"Here's what we're going to do," he said. "Strictly off the record, of course. I think our highly-unusual mystery suspect will be back . . ."
***
It was also quite dark, now.
"Gwen, this park is . . . this is not a safe place," Dolores pleaded.
"Even less so, now that I'm in it," she chuckled.
The air bore a confusion of scents; mostly bad, but not as much so as New York. The temperature was quite pleasant as night fell; a fair number of people were out strolling. Fewer and fewer as she led the ex-stewardess away into the back streets.
"Gwen—"
She stopped, impatient, and gripped the Colombian by her upper arm, jerking her close. "Dolores,"
she said quietly, staring into her eyes. "Lets get one thing settled about this relationship, right from the start.
I'm in charge.
Understand?"
"I—" She could hear the others heart accelerate, smell the acrid tinge of fear in her sweat. Pupils dilated.
"I understand."
"Good. Shall I send you back to the apartment?"
No, the Columbian subvocalized.
Not alone, not now.
She shook her head.
"Good."
I don't want you on your own for long, not for a couple of weeks yet.
It would take that long to get her settled in and accepting the situation. The alternative was to snap her neck, but that would be wasteful; besides that, she was likable.
"Now, let's keep going. Do you know the Rule of Seven?"
"No. Seven?" Dolores was trying to keep the quaver out of her voice, Gwen noted with approval.
"Nobody is more than seven acquaintances away from anyone else. For instance, you know this Señor Mondragón—"
"Just his name, from the papers. I don't know such people."
That seemed to be a general attitude here in Cali. People who did know such people or said they did had a tendency to vanish.
"—and someone we meet will know someone who knows someone, and we'll be led to Señor Mondragón, soon enough."
Why does she want to meet a criminal?
"Because I have some business to conduct,
mi amiga.
Now shut up."
Gwen patted her gently on the back to take the sting out of the words. She
had
been very useful, and it was a great relief to finally have her biological needs taken care of on a civilized basis. If something of a strain for Dolores at first.
They had wandered into an alleyway; dark enough that it was a little dim even to Gwen's eyes, and Dolores was blundering along in a literally blind panic. It stank as well, of cat-piss and less savory odors, starting with spoiled garbage. Gwen smiled, her ears cocked forward a little. Two sets of heartbeats, they were accelerating as she and the Colombian walked down the cracked and slimy pavement. Two shapes spreading out, black silhouettes outlined against the slightly brighter street beyond. A light flared under a heavy brown acne-scarred face as one lit a cigarette. Dolores whimpered slightly, but kept to her position in Gwen's wake.
The short man's face looked a little puzzled as the women kept coming toward him. His companion was four inches taller and much heavier; a blank bovine expression over shoulders and belly that stretched the grubby white cotton of his T-shirt.
"
One for each of us,
" the short man whispered aside to his friend. Aloud:
"Good evening, ladies! You shouldn't be wandering alone around here. Perhaps we can help you."
"I think you can," Gwen said, smiling. "We're looking for a Señor Mondragón."
Both the men stiffened slightly; she watched the play of muscles around mouth and eyes, listened to the involuntary intake of breath. Not enough for a human to notice, but meaningful. Both men recognized the name, of course; but their fright was direct and personal. Fear produced anger.
"Shut up,
puta.
Miguel, you take the other one."
"I don't think so," Gwen said, as he reached past her for Dolores.
She grabbed the wrist; it was thick, a thin layer of blubber over solid muscle and bone. A quick jerk, and the big man stumbled forward, sending his lighter companion spinning aside to crash into the flaking stucco of the alley's wall. At the same time she squeezed, feeling the small bones of the wrist grate and splinter under her grip. The man gave an incredulous grunt, eyes and mouth flaring open in three O's of surprise. She jerked again, bracing her feet—he was heavier than she, even though she weighed over a hundred and ninety pounds, much more than a human of her size. When a lighter object reacted against a heavier, the lighter tended to move regardless of energy outputs; it was a matter of leverage, not strength.
He stumbled again, to his knees. Gwen pivoted on her left heel and kicked with her right, into his throat, releasing her hold as the blow impacted. The body snapped backward several meters and fell limp, head lying back between the shoulderblades. She took a deep breath and stepped closer to the survivor; he was standing with his hand half under the tail of his zippered jacket, eyes bulging in shock.
"Miguel?" he said, halfway between a croak and a whisper.
Humans are
slow, she thought.
Not just their reaction time, but their ability to assimilate data.
"Miguel is dead," she said. "Now, I need some information."
The hand came out with a knife, curved and sharp, moving quite quickly for a human. Gwen swayed her upper body back just enough for the cutting edge to miss as it ripped upward, her hand snapping out to grab and span the others fist where it clenched around the hilt. She continued the natural path of the weapon until the point touched the man's throat just below the angle of the jaw. For a long moment they stayed locked, a trickle of blood running down his throat from the knifepoint. His pulse fluttered on the edge of shock and then steadied a little; there was a irritating edge to his scent, a hint of metabolic wrongness.
Some sort of drug interfering with the metabolism,
she decided.
"Who
are
you?" he shrilled. "What are you doing?"
"What I'm doing," Gwen said, leaning a little closer and increasing the pressure of the steel,
"depends on you. If you're not cooperative, I'm going to torture some information out of you and then kill you. If you were better looking and didn't smell so bad, I'd rape you first. Or you can tell me what I want to know."
"
Si, si,
anything you want to know, lady, anything! Look, I know where you can get kilos, the real thing, cheap, I'll—"
"That's my boy!" Gwen said cheerfully, patting him on the cheek with her free hand. His made vague pawing motions at the air. "Now, Señor Mondragón."
"Oh, Jesus and His Mother,
no soy nadie,
I don't know him."
"But you know someone who knows someone, don't you, little one?" she said softly.
The drops of blood flowing down his neck became a steady trickle. Tears and mucus from eyes and nose joined them. Unconsciously his right arm kept trying to jerk the knife away from his throat, but she controlled the surges without allowing more than a quiver in the metal.
"
Si,
I know Pedro, Don Pedro, and he—"
Gwen waited until the babbling began to repeat
itself.
"That's all," she said, and pushed with quick, savage force.
The knife slid through neck and throat and into the small man's mouth, then crunched into the bones of the palate. She pushed a little harder, and there was a yielding crackle as it slid into the brain. The body arched in spasm, a thin trickling whine blowing out of clenched teeth, then slid to the ground, voided, and died. Gwen sighed and turned.
Dolores was backed against the wall, hands pressed to either side of her head, her mouth trembling.
Trembling with terror and a dreadful reluctant excitement.
Ah,
Gwen thought.
Got to watch the pheromones.
"Come on," she said soothingly. "Enough outdoor work for one night."
***
"You make me tired. Just
looking
at you makes me tired, Carmaggio."
Looking at you generally makes me want to puke, Captain,
Carmaggio thought. He could feel the back of his neck flush, which was usually a bad sign; probably Captain McLeish could see the thought printed across his face like an LCD display. McLeish smirked and leaned back in the swivel chair behind his desk; there were pictures of himself with several commissioners and mayors on the walls, and a slight smell of old socks. He looked Carmaggio up and down, letting the contrast between the other man's rumpled off-the-rack and his own beautifully tailored suit speak for itself. He was in better shape than Carmaggio, too, which the tucked waist showed off quite well.
Looks like a pimp,
Carmaggio thought. Right down to the cool-dude side whiskers, although at least he didn't have letters shaved into his 'fro.
It wasn't that he had anything against blacks. Not after Happy Lewis saved his ass that time he didn't see the claymore; he'd made a private resolution right then and there not to use the word "eggplant"
for anything but vegetables ever again.
It was asskissers and fuckups he didn't like. McLeish was a prime example of both, in his considered opinion. How he'd gotten as far as he had only God and the Echelons Beyond Reality who
thought
they were God knew.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the civil service.
He was profoundly glad that they'd found out ulcers were caused by bacteria, not stomach acid—because every time he had to report to McLeish, he got a couple of cupfuls of the original patented bile spewed out into his gut.
"We've got twenty-three homicides, Captain. With all due respect—"
"How many
thousand
homicides do we have in this shitty city, Carmaggio? You've got no evidence to put a solid link between them, and nothing new has turned up in six months. It's spring—wake up and smell the roses. Serial killers don't stop. That's what our great good friends at Federal Bullshit Incorporated keep telling us."
"Yeah, they
don't
stop. Not permanently. If we let this one go—"
"They've already gotten away." The
you dumb guinea bastard
was unspoken but plain. "Not to mention the FBI say they don't want to hear about it anymore; and whose idea was it to call in Quantico, in the first place? This is not, for your information, some pissant little two-sheriff town without its own forensics department."
Carmaggio felt the flush spreading from the back of his neck to his ears.
"Maybe the tooth fairy did it, Carmaggio. Maybe that Jew cunt at Primary Belway Securities was the one who offed Fischer."
Maybe Jojo beat his own head in against that wall because he realized he'd never be
President,
Henry thought, as his superior went on:
"And maybe you don't have enough work to do. You want me to put a few more on your docket?
Didn't you have a court appearance today?"
"Yessir."
He didn't slam the door as he left. There
hadn't
been any more action on the file, and there
was
a lot of other work to do. He'd long ago resigned himself to the fact that he'd retire not much above his present rank; interviews like this were simply a symptom of that. People got to the top of the greasy pole largely because they wanted to, real bad—sometimes so they could do the job, more often not. He did this lousy job because he wanted to, not to get a better office. Shits like the captain regarded actual police work as a distraction from more important matters.
Whether or not the captain thought it was too much trouble to bother with, they'd be hearing from this particular perp again, closed file or no closed file.
Or somebody would be hearing about them.
This isn't the sort that goes somewhere and hides.
The tropical sun was a flat glare on the surface of the water. The compressor on the barge throbbed tirelessly, pumping water down a thick tube to blow sand off the bottom thirty feet below; that made the sea around them turgid, greenish compared to the usual turquoise of the waters off Abaco. They were eighty miles southwest of Marsh Harbor, not far from Mores Island; that flat sandy speck of land was just visible, but nothing else marred the circle of sky and sea except the barge and its attendant boats. There was a silty undertone to the usual sea-salt smell, faint beneath the diesel stink of the exhaust.
Captain John Lowe looked at the water in disgust, then back at the woman who'd chartered his outfit, in puzzlement.
Nothing here to find.
Sure, there were plenty of wrecks around the Abacos, all over the Bahamas—the archipelago was famous for it. But these waters had been searched bare, long ago.
The money's good.
He'd insisted on getting it up front and in cash. There was a lot of that sort of business in the Bahamas, and a tradition of not asking too many questions. The country lived off being an offshore tax shelter even more than it did from tourism and the . . . unregistered transit trade. An old tradition: Conchy Joes like him had always been smugglers, from cocaine back through Prohibition rum boats and Civil War blockade runners, and before that wreckers and pirates.