Daggers in Darkness by S.M. Stirling

Author:S.M. Stirling [Stirling, S.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 1632, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN:

Black Chamber— San Francisco Station HQ

San Francisco, California

October 16th, 1922 A.D., 1922(b)

An hour later Luz looked down at the bodies of the seven dead daggermen. They were laid out on the usual type of big file-drawers arrangement, now pulled out of their refrigerated cabinets. The dark grey metal was stark against the white-tile sterility of the room and the brightness of electric light behind frosted glass globes in the ceiling, and the doctors’ reports were neatly hung on the ends, near the feet of the corpses. Besides the bank of twenty corpse-cabinets the room held glass-fronted cupboards of various chemicals and surgical tools, sinks, worktables with microscopes and other equipment, and several autopsy tables of ultra-modern scrubbable stainless steel further down, with their own overhead lights and prominent drains below for flushing any detritus. There was even an X-ray machine in an alcove at the back, and desks where reports could be written up.

The place was chilly too, and had a slight stale strong-soap-disinfectant-and-meat-locker smell and a background hum from the refrigeration unit. That didn’t surprise Luz because it wasn’t the first morgue she’d visited by a very long way, and some had been much worse and far more improvised. She waved aside the small jar of Vicks the morgue attendant offered, but Ciara and the Taguchis took some and brushed a little under their nostrils.

“We’ll call you when we need you,” Luz said to him.

He looked unhappy, but left with a silent nod.

The other man present—his handler waited outside the door so that he wouldn’t hear anything he didn’t need to know—was an academic-looking one of obvious Japanese ancestry in a suit, jug-eared and rather homely behind thick glasses. He had the slightly baffled air of someone who’d been blindfolded and brought in through a tunnel and who had no idea where he was except that it was… probably… underground.

Luz knew him, though the reverse was not necessarily true; in fact, she’d taken some of his classes at Stanford, where his specialty was economics but where he also doubled as the closest thing available to an expert in Japanese history and literature. That would change soon, but for now Ichihashi would have to do.

The poor professor would be a perfect agent, as far as his looks go, Luz thought. Totally inconspicuous, in places where Japanese are common. What was that Yiddish word Rosa Baumgartner used? Nebbish?

The main difference between this and an ordinary morgue was that the eyes of the bodies had been left open, for information’s sake, and that there were no modesty towels when visitors were present.

“Well, I think we can rule out Turks,” Fumiko said; none of the dead men was circumcised.

The professor swallowed and blanched slightly at the sight of the ones disassembled by Susan Zhou’s hook-swords and rough-sorted back into the semblance of human beings, and then his eyes flicked to the others—stab-wounds, knife-slashes, bullets that left exit wounds the size of a child’s fist or smashed joints into balls of bone-splinters and

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