Free Fall. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ hesitated, and looked to her left, where her group members sat. “We should have the underlay in place within four days. It has yet to be tested, however.”

      The room went still.

      Duncan considered the words, and Andre considered Duncan, carefully, observing their leader no more and no less obviously than anyone else in the room. His lean and angular form, draped in a suit of very expensive, quietly classic cut and fabric, gave nothing away. Duncan was a natural mute when it came to body language. It was part of what made him so dangerous.

      “You can test it without disrupting the original security?” he asked Christina after due consideration, just long enough to make her sweat.

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Then get it in place and run the tests.” He dismissed her almost casually, to imply his greatest faith in her ability to perform perfectly, and she fell back into her seat with the expression of a woman who had been kissed by the gods. That was the other part of what made Duncan a real and present danger: charisma. “What’s next?”

      “Sir.” A solidly built Asian man stood, formally waiting to be recognized. “If I may?”

      “Please.” Their leader oozed both charisma, and a disarming grace of manners. Duncan had not gained any of his power by being rude, even the politely confrontational manner of the new speaker’s posture did not trigger anything but graciousness in him.

      “This intrusion, it is the work of these so-called Talent?”

      There was a burst of nervous laughter, quickly stifled, from someone sitting in the row of straight-backed chairs lining the far wall of the conference room. A junior, someone’s assistant, who would catch hell later for that.

      Duncan almost reacted, leaning forward to deliver a rebuke. “There is no so-called about it, Reese. They are quite definitely talented, and should not be underestimated. I believe that the events of last January should have brought that home to everyone in this room?”

      There were nods around the room. Not that any of them had been there; shock troops had died on the Bridge, not these privileged officers. None of them had been on the front lines…none of them save Andre, and Duncan himself.

      And Duncan’s hand-picked lieutenants, including Poul Jorgunmunder, who had once been Andre’s own protégé/right-hand man.

      Poul was no longer with them, dead at Andre’s own hand. Dead, after he had first killed one of their own, his former teammate Bren, Andre’s left-hand woman and trusted aide d’office.

      It had been a bad day at the bridge, that cold winter morning. Bad all around.

      Andre wondered briefly what cold hell Poul was populating now, and then gave his attention back to Reese, who was still speaking.

      “Sir, why have we not struck back at them? We know where they are, we know who they are. What is to stop us from simply making them…”

      “Disappear?” Duncan asked, his voice dangerously soft and inviting.

      “Sir. Yes, sir.” Reese was cautious, but he did not back down.

      Duncan looked at him, and then looked across the room at the rest, some thirty bodies all eager to prove themselves, to please their master. “Andre.”

      “Sir?” Oh, it grated on him to say that, and Duncan knew it grated, damn him.

      “Would you be willing to make a Talent…disappear?”

      “Not alone, sir. I know firsthand what they are capable of.” Maybe half of the people sitting in this room had started out in Ops, the active field unit Andre had worked with for twenty of his thirty years with the organization. Maybe ten people in this room had ever been Handlers, had ever directed an Operative. None of them had ever worked with a FocAs, a Talented Operative. The Handlers who were assigned FocAs did not go to Duncan.

      Andre knew for a fact, thanks to his researcher, Darcy, that most of the Handlers who worked with Talented Operatives were either dead or in “rehab” now, recovering from reported emotional breakdowns. A comfortable, secluded rehab, on the Silence’s tab, of course.

      Andre had worked briefly with The Wren, Genevieve Valere. He had been the one to coax her to the Silence’s side, if only for a short time. Everyone in the room knew that. They assumed that was why he was here, to give Duncan the inside scoop on the lonejacks’ unwilling figurehead.

      For all Andre knew, that was what Duncan himself believed. But he doubted it. Duncan understood Andre well enough to know that whatever information Andre were to give up on the young Retriever, it was limited and out-of-date. Ms. Valere had never trusted him, and Sergei—now dead-set against him—would be sending them no further details of the Cosa.

      Sergei had been there that day as well, when Poul killed an innocent on Duncan’s orders. Duncan had given the order, and then left before it was carried out. He had not been there when Andre turned his coat back to its original color and killed Poul, striking while the man’s back was turned and his attention was elsewhere. Andre and a touchingly shocked Sergei had arranged the scene afterward, making it look as though, rather than the Fatae killing Bren as originally plotted, that Poul had done the deed, and a Fatae had killed him in retribution. No one could argue with a little street justice, on a day already so bloody.

      “Lies built on lies, to protect the truth. This world turns on chaos, and we all fall into the fire.” He had said that to Sergei, before they parted. He had known, as he said it, that they would not meet again.

      He missed the boy.

      Shutting off those thoughts, Andre returned his attention to the meeting, turning his hands palm-up and considering the mahogany skin of his fingertips as though his script were printed there. “The Cosa knows where we are, physically.” They had left two bodies on the front steps earlier that year, as a message, although Sergei insisted that the Cosa had not done it. “They know where we are cybernetically, that much is clear, and they are showing us that we are vulnerable to them even through our electronics, where they should not dare to go. And yet, the attacks they have made? Are not even half of what they are capable of, if driven to it.

      “To this point we have been protected by their own disorganization, and the fact that even the most arrogant of Talents is hesitant to take a life. If we were to push them over that line…”

      Duncan definitely leaned forward now, waiting to hear Andre’s concluding thoughts, as though anticipating they would match his own. “Yes? If that hesitation were to be pushed, by action on our part? If these Talent were to lose that inhibition, that veneer of civilization?” Duncan sounded honestly curious. That worried Andre, but he couldn’t hesitate. His answer would not change, anyway.

      “Then we would be in trouble. Sir.”

      “We” was such a curious word. The others in the room took it to mean all of them, as the alpha lions of the Silence pride. Where “we” went, the Silence followed. Andre meant the Silence itself, the Silence he joined, the one he wished to preserve. And it had no room for Duncan or his cadre of faithful fanatic in it.

      Duncan? Who knew what Duncan thought, or believed, or planned? He spoke often and convincingly of a humans-only city, a humans-only civilization, where the reliance on superstition and magic was a thing of embarrassed memory, but for what reason? What end?

      Andre СКАЧАТЬ