Free The Council of Shadows by S. M. Stirling Page A

“We’re interested in a party of two at one of your tables last night.”
    He held up his notepad with Tarnowski’s face.
    The waiter laughed—it was almost a giggle. “Oh, them . Yes, I remember them well. They ordered—well, Ms. Brézé ordered—”
    He rattled off a list of things, most of which Salvador had never heard of. He held up a hand.
    â€œWhat did that come to?”
    â€œWith the wines? About . . . twenty-five hundred.”
    The manager was working his desktop, and nodded confirmation. Cesar gave a smothered sound that had probably started as an agonized grunt, passed through indignation, and was finally suppressed with a tightening of the mouth.
    â€œTip?”
    â€œVery generous. Seven hundred.”
    Outside, Cesar shook his head. “Seven hundred for the tip ? And you went there?”
    â€œI was starting to get worried about Julia, wanted to show her I thought about something besides my job. Didn’t work. Three weeks later she told me I was just as far away living here as I had been when they deployed me to Kandahar.”
    â€œAi!”
    â€œYeah, sweet, eh? And I didn’t leave a seven-hundred-dollar tip, either.”
    â€œWhat’s the next stop?”
    â€œI’ll try to see if anyone around saw the van that Adrian Brézé and Mystery Man in Leather were using after they left the burn site.”
    Salvador laughed. “And I’ll get back and catch up on my paperwork, and keep trying to locate that phone number. Don’t you wish this were a TV show?”
    â€œSo we could just work one case at a time? Sí , the thought has crossed my mind. Along with a lot else. Like, who was the old guy in black leather? How does he fit in?”

CHAPTER FOUR
    H arvey Ledbetter leaned against his pickup and pushed the sunglasses up on his forehead before he crossed his arms on his chest. He was a lean, grizzled man a little below six feet, his close-cropped brown hair shot with iron gray above a long, bony face, extremely fit for his early sixties. His eyes were startlingly blue against the weathered tan of his face.
    Hot metal pinged in the engine, and the summer sun was pleasantly warm, without the humid rankness he’d grown up with. The breeze from the west held a little coolness; the Big Sur coastline wasn’t far away. This dirt road ended in a field of long golden yellow summer grass that smelled like old hay, above a ravine that cut down through a redwood grove to the sea. Wind soughed through the grass, and birds chased insects in swift, swooping curves.
    He drew on his cigarette and savored the harsh bite. The Wreakings that shielded his mind were a teasing feeling at the corner of perception’s eye, like a slight continuous buzzing. Nicotine helped long-learned mental disciplines to keep him reasonably calm, despite the knowledge of what was coming towards him. A click sounded through the bud in his right ear: alert.
    It was some comfort to know that hidden snipers were covering the meeting site with rifles firing silver-jacketed .338 Lapua magnum rounds. Some comfort, but not too much. Tōkairin Michiko was a pureblood. She could sculpt the probabilistic foam underlying reality at a level that made his own meager talent look like a toy water pistol compared to an Apache gunship. Despite defenses as elaborate as he could make them, at close range she could probably simply make his ticker give out, or block a vein in his brain for a few crucial seconds. She could certainly do it if given time to use glyphs and Mhabrogast to focus the effect, or if she used something preactivated.
    A quiet burble of engine, a singing and crunching sound of gravel under wheels. The car snaked up the switchbacks of the road towards him, trailing dust. His brows rose a little when it was close enough for him to see the make: a Nissan GT-X, low-slung sleek elegance, with a double-turbocharged engine that put out more power than most