The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [83]
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE DIVERS GIVE up. The boat turns, its outboard engine spouting a tail of white foam, and it slowly motors around the headland. Which is just as well because we don’t have any sunscreen and my shoulders and chest are beginning to itch badly.
“You okay?” I ask Ramona.
“Pretty much.” She sits up and stretches. “Your trick worked.”
“Yeah, well. Trouble is, it’s stationary: I can’t take it with us. I figure our best bet would be to head back into town as fast as possible and lose ourselves in the crowd.”
“You really got them stirred up. And their surveillance net is disturbingly good.” She looks at me. “You’re sure it was just Marc you were pushing on?”
“Yes.” I look at her closely. “Marc, and his unfortunate habit of supplying single female tourists to friends with a boat and an unlimited supply of Charlie.” Her expression doesn’t change but her pupils tell me what I want to know. “Virgins aren’t necessary, if this is what I think it is. But they have to be healthy and relatively young. Ring any bells?”
“I didn’t know you were a necromancer, Bob.” She looks at me calculatingly.
“I’m not.” I shrug. “But I do countermeasures. And what I see here is that the island’s defenses aren’t worth jack shit if you’ve got a scuba kit and a boat. Someone’s buying up single women, and they’re sure as hell not shipping them to brothels in Miami. There’s a surveillance net centered on Billington’s boat, and it’s tied in to your friend Marc.” I stare at her eyes. “Are you going to tell me it’s a coincidence?”
She bites her lower lip. “No,” she admits. A pause. “Marc wasn’t a coincidence.”
“What, then?”
“It centers on Billington but it’s not all about Billington.” She looks away from me and stares out to sea, morosely. “He’s got his own . . . plans. To expedite them, he had to hire a bunch of specialists with eccentric tastes and needs. His wife—she’s not harmless. She’s scum.” If looks could kill, the wave crests would be boiling into steam under her stare. “And she’s got retainers. Call it a tactical marriage of convenience. She’s got certain powers and he wants to make use of them. He’s got shitloads of wealth and more ambition than—well, she likes that because it buys her immunity. Eileen . . . her predecessor Erzsebet was probably framed by a rival, a duke who wanted her lands and her castle, but Eileen is the genius who figured out there was a skincare program in the old legend, productized the hell out of it, and sold it as Bathory™ Pale Grace™ 9 Cosmetics, with added ErythroComplex-V. It’s basically a mass-produced level one glamour. She sources most of the wholesale supplies from commercial slaughterhouses and leftover blood bank stock, and on paper she’s clean, but you still need a better than homeopathic quantity of the real thing to make it work. And that’s before you start asking how many regulatory committees she had to buy off to bury the details of her research.”
“Why not go after her directly?”
“Because—” Ramona shrugs. “Eileen’s not the main target. She’s not even the appetizer. What she does amounts to at most a few dozen deaths per year. If Ellis gets what my boss thinks he wants, the whole human species gets to deal with the fallout. So he figured I should get close to Eileen—to introduce you to Ellis, as much as anything else—and meanwhile get enough of a grip on the rest of her project to mop them up afterwards.”
“You were going to get information out of Marc after your Other got through chowing down on his soul?”
“You’d be surprised.” She sniffs primly. “Anyway, you should know, mister computational demonologist: How hard would it be to summon up a puppeteer and schedule a late-binding, voice-directed linkage to keep the body dancing?”
I think back to the dead seagulls. To the bad guys and what they did to Marc after his fatal heart attack. “Not very.”
“Okay, just so you know the score.” She reaches out and grasps my wrist. Her fingers are warm and