Curse the Dark. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ it, but for what his operative told him.

      Not that Sergei’s cause of concern—a whisper campaign to discredit one of their operatives—was anything to worry about, not when the whispering wasn’t about the Silence itself. If anything, the Council’s attempts to discredit Wren worked to the Silence’s benefit, binding her more closely to them, if only fiscally.

      But part of their deal with Sergei had been that they would protect Wren in the case of attack by the Council, and the means of attack had not, in their agreement, been specified as purely physical.

      And it bothered Andre a great deal that no one in the organization had heard about this “whisper campaign” earlier. Information wasn’t the name of the game, it was the game.

      Picking up the phone, he ignored the glowing message light and dialed a three-digit number. You didn’t keep Logan waiting.

      “You got my report?” Andre asked.

      The answer was affirmative, followed by an interrogative.

      Andre picked up a rough-edged chunk of marble from his desk and rolled it in his right hand as he spoke. “I don’t know. It could be nothing, it could be good for us—or it could be potentially very ugly.”

      The baritone on the other end of the phone got louder, just a shade too vehement for it to have been a polite comment. You didn’t hedge in front of Logan, either.

      “We don’t know enough about what the Council knows. Truthfully, we don’t know anything, really. If our sources were compromised, then everything in the file is suspect.” He didn’t think that had happened, but it was a contingency they had to cover. That was the real reason the upper levels of the Silence needed Wren working for them; she was their conduit into the Cosa Nostradamus and the gossip therein. Gossip about the magical world that was so often the cause of the situations the Silence existed to clean up.

      Although her admittedly extraordinary ability as a Retriever was a very useful thing to have in the toolbox, indeed. And the P.R. value of letting it be known—selectively, oh so selectively—that she was on their roster, that could not be overlooked or undervalued, either. “We didn’t hear anything because we’re not the ears they’re whispering into, no…and none of our clients have reported anything in their nets. It’s not likely…Sir, yes…Yes, sir. Yes, I would say that it is entirely possible that our involvement is being whispered as well.”

      A pause, and he reached for the bottle of antacid sitting on his desk, shaking out three pills but not taking them just yet. Bad form to chew while getting chewed out by your boss.

      “Yes, sir. We’re already on it.”

      Andre hung up the phone and exhaled sharply through pursed lips. That hadn’t been as bad as it might have been. Logan was a bastard, even for the Silence, but a decent Division manager despite that. Or perhaps because of it; he knew that praise and beatings had to be carefully balanced for maximum result. Being reamed by a senior administrator the way Andre just had was always a learning experience.

      And the only thing to do with experiences like that was to learn from them.

      Andre mentally sorted through the list of people available to him, and jabbed a button on the phone.

      “Darcy. Pronto.”

      While he waited for his researcher to arrive, Andre went through the list of “while you were aways” and dropped almost half into the shredder placed discreetly beneath his desk. The rest could wait until he had a spare moment to deal with them.

      “You rang, oh mighty one?”

      When Darcy Cross was born, office gossip claimed, the presiding doctor had asked her mother if she wanted to file a complaint, since clearly not everything had been delivered. The ensuing years hadn’t done anything to refute the doctor’s comment: now in her mid-thirties, Darcy could claim four foot five inches if she wore heels, and her bone structure was so frail it reminded one, inevitably, of a baby chick. People always stepped carefully around her, as though she might shatter from a sharp word. But the mind in that delicate body was first-rate, and the Silence paid very well for the use of it.

      “Two of our ops are getting pressured from an external source, creating doubt as to their effectiveness, their veracity. Subvert, nothing concrete, nothing provable.” He pulled a three-inch-thick folder from the pile to his left and handed it to her. Everything was on disk, of course, but the surest way to keep something secure these days was to keep it offline.

      “You want me to find the source?” The remote expression in Darcy’s hazel-blue eyes made it clear that she thought she was being undertasked.

      “Not exactly.” His headshake made her perk up, more interested. She perched on the edge of the sole guest chair and waited to hear more.

      “We know who is doing it, and why—more or less. The current situation is to our benefit, but only so long as it remains…imprecise.” So long as his players remained off balance and uncertain, but not irreparably damaged in mind or reputation. Logan had been quite emphatic about that. “We need to know exactly what is being said, and to whom, on an ongoing basis. Monitor the flow. And if the pressure is ramped up in any way, or you feel that there is any cause for alarm—”

      “Insert counterpressure in such a way that it would appear to issue from the same source as the original pressure to confuse the issue and weaken the first source.” Skin that sunlight rarely saw had its own glow as she processed the intricacies of the assignment. “Will I have support on this?”

      “No.” The fewer people who knew anything other than “we’re looking into it” the better, just in case. “But you’re hereby released from anything below a St. George-level priority.” He’d catch hell for that, but Logan would have to cover for him.

      “Most excellent.” She weighed the folder in her hand, as though that could tell her anything. Who knew, maybe it could. She wasn’t a Talent, but her mind was nonetheless impressive. And not a little terrifying, if she looked at you the wrong way. Santa Claus might know if you were naughty or nice, but Darcy could give you details about what, with whom, when and how much you paid for it.

      He was quite reasonably glad that she and he worked for the same side.

      “Go on, then. Shoo.” He made a “go away” motion at her. “Go be dangerously brilliant elsewhere. I know for a fact that your office is larger than mine.”

      “Because you’re never actually in your office,” she said in return, then stood to leave, folder in hand. But as she turned to go she hesitated, as though something in her brain had clicked over unexpectedly.

      “Yes?” He leaned back in his chair, watching as whatever it was she was processing worked its way to the front.

      “I was just remembering—it may be nothing…but I was working on another situation, and part of that involved interviewing a couple of FocAs, and one of them said something…okay, Cross, what did he say?”

      FocAs was slang for Focused Actives, field agents who were also Talents. There weren’t many, and none of them were overly gifted—until Wren Valere—but still useful enough to warrant their own category.

      “Right.” She snapped her fingers, making Andre blink. “He said that there’d been rumblings back home…. They were talking to each other, actually, so I was only half-listening, and yeah, ‘my dad says СКАЧАТЬ