The Language of the Dragon Read online

  Osborne folded and re-folded the sheet of yellow lined paper that he’d removed from Sienna Brown’s leather folder when she left it for a moment at the coffee shop. It was completely damming, made a mockery of her claim to know nothing. The entire page was covered with her scribblings in German script. They didn’t make any sense; she started with raving about Jesus and ended with “The relationship between God and man is not a quid pro quo transaction, you idiot!”

  A religious maniac? Oh well, it didn’t matter. The important thing was that she wrote German script; ergo, she could read those notes Koshan Idrisov had been hawking as well as he could.

  And the very last word on the page – ysh!mqvad – was too like the phrase he’d learned from Idrisov for coincidence – oh, not literally like it, but in form and style it had to be another word of Alt-Shaimaki. He wondered what it did. Nothing much, to judge from his experience in the living room.

  He still had those three scans that Jackson had pulled off Idrisov’s laptop and printed out for him. The logical next step was to go through those and see if he could find any more phrases of power, anything to give him an edge against this sassy young woman. What a pity she hadn’t turned out to be the frail old lady he’d imagined Idrisov’s landlady to be! This one, armed with the gun the P.I. had reported, could be trouble.

  He’d just have to use Alt-Shaimaki to get control of her, make her give up the papers she had clearly stolen from Idrisov and hidden for her own profit.

  Or… maybe he could use other resources to get the papers without personally appearing in the matter. Little Mira Martinez probably knew the right sort of people, and she was as dependent on him for dissertation approval as Carrie Jackson.

  He didn’t have to make Sienna Brown disappear, though in the long run it might be the only way to deal with an inconvenient woman who knew too much about the Language.

  Anyway, it would be a mistake to go that far before he had his hands on the actual papers.

  9. The projectile is accurate

  “Do you need to take a break and get a cup of coffee? You’re not going to hit anything if you can’t open your eyes wide enough to see the target.”

  “I’m fine,” I told the annoying man. Who died and made him my own personal gadfly, anyway? I might have been up a bit later than I’d planned last night. My eyes might be slightly tired from poring over that blasted notebook by lamplight last night and by daylight all morning. But I was perfectly well able to hit a target at an indoor shooting range. It was just a matter of awakening the muscle memory from the lessons and range time I’d put in eight years ago. Wasn’t it? And if it wasn’t, well, Koshan’s notebook had suggested a little fix for that problem. Not that I believed for one minute it would work; Laura had been right, there was no such thing as magic. Still, I did remember the relevant words. Just in case. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Ah, yes. Just the attitude I like to see in women I ask out.”

  “Maybe you should consider more romantic destinations than Red’s.”

  I put on the ear protectors, loaded my gun and took up a standard shooting stance, prepared to blow the paper target…

  Well, hell. I had at least expected to place some holes in the thing! I’d been able to do that much after the lessons, hadn’t I?

  Michael’s mouth was moving. When wasn’t it? I pushed the ear protectors off.

  “If I’d known you were that bad,” he said, “I’d have been more frightened, the other night, when you stopped aiming at me. That would have been when I was really in danger.”

  “It’s just a… a knack. I’m out of practice.”

  “You sure are!”

  I glowered at him. “Like you could do so much better?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  I for sure hadn’t expected him to put a super-close grouping in the center of the damned target.

  “Your turn,” he said. “But your stance is all wrong.”

  I gave him a dirty look and prepared to make my own grouping just as close to the center.

  Well, okay. At least this time I winged the target.

  “Hot shot,” he jeered. “You’ve got that piece of paper running scared now. Look, you need to get your wrists up more.”

  Without even asking permission, he stepped behind me and slipped his hands under my wrists. He was tall enough to make it work.

  I started feeling shaky. There’s nothing remotely erotic about the atmosphere of a shooting range. All the same, I was reacting in a way I didn’t really like to the closeness of his body.

  Or maybe I liked it too well. Whatever: time to put an end to this. I shook his hands off. “Don’t distract me.” Under my breath, I muttered, “Dzhla#m qto! ghri.” My vision darkened until all I saw clearly was the target, and I felt invisible forces pulling me as if to draw me into a spiraling path down the cone of light that led to that little piece of paper. Taking a deep breath, I braced my feet and took aim for my third go at a distant target.

  I winced with pain as the gun went off. Suddenly I might as well not have been wearing the earmuffs at all. I squeezed my eyes shut against the stabbing pain and pulled the trigger five more times.

  “How did you do that?” Michael’s tone conveyed equal parts amazement and respect. I squinted at the target that came back to me. Nice. Tight. Grouping. Just like I’d expected to do on the first round.

  “Told you I wasn’t that bad, didn’t I? But my head’s killing me. Can we go now?”

  He actually looked worried as we left the shooting range. “You’re awfully pale. What happened?”

  “Migraine,” I managed.

  “That happen often? With no warning?”

  Not before this last week or so, it hadn’t. I shrugged. “Maybe Austin has found one more weed that I’m allergic to. It happens.”

  “Want me to take you straight home?”

  I would have shaken my head, but didn’t want to risk it. “I’m hungry. You know a nice dark sports bar?”

  “My favorite kind,” he said, cheering up, “especially when I’m with a pretty girl.”

  “Who just happens to be a very good shot.”

  “I, ah, wasn’t thinking so much about that part.”

  The place he took me to was not only dark, it was also cool and – after he persuaded the proprietor to turn the TV down – quiet. That, plus food, plus caffeine in the form of a Diet Coke, alleviated the headache remarkably fast. The only problem was, I felt oddly confused. I stared into Michael’s eyes and tried to make sense of what he was saying.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  I had to confess that I hadn’t been listening. “I said,” he repeated impatiently, “that Osborne guy is bad news. And you’re in a bad position now, because he obviously doesn’t believe that you aren’t concealing Koshan Idrisov’s papers. He’ll be back for another try, and I can’t guard the house 24/7.”

  “You don’t need to,” I said. “I can take care of myself.” That had been the whole point of this trip to the indoor shooting range in Pflugerville. Hadn’t it?

  “You’ll be safer,” he said, “if you just give me whatever you’re hiding. I can let him know I have it, and that’ll focus his attention on me instead of you.”

  It was actually a tempting suggestion. But I wasn’t through studying the notebook yet. All I’d done so far was skim through the notes, getting a feel for the language without doing any formal analysis. If I could just have one reasonably quiet day without people demanding things of me, without confrontations and shooting practice and headaches, maybe I could… could… Could what? It was hard to concentrate. I couldn’t even quite remember what Michael had just said. I blinked and tried to focus.

  “You want me to give you something?”

  “The notebook! Before Osborne steals it from you, and quite likely hurts you in the process.”

  I considered that through my haze of confusion and fuzzy memories. Had I ever told Michael about that stained, perfect-bound ledge
r I’d found when stripping the bed in Koshan’s room? I must have; how else would have he have known about it? Still, I tried to stall.

  Eins, zwei, drei… “What notebook?”

  “Oh, I think you know what I’m talking about,” he said. Quiet, but with the same hint of steel in his voice that had been evident when he told Dr. Osborne to get out of the house.

  I concentrated on my burger to give myself some time. “Nope,” I said when I’d counted to ten in Latin and reduced the burger to a sliver of crust and some limp lettuce. “I don’t know. Haven’t a clue.”

  “Do you want that maniac to come after you again?”

  I trailed a stray French fry through the ketchup on my plate. “You are talking about a highly respected tenured professor with more publications than I’ve had real estate closings.”

  “To hell with his publication history. Did you look at his eyes?”

  I shivered involuntarily, took a long swig of my beer to conceal the reaction. Yes, the highly respected professor had wild eyes behind those square spectacles. “He’s always been kind of strange,” I admitted. “But that has nothing to do with me. Ten years ago his grad students used to say that if he took his glasses off, it was time to run.”

  “But you’re not running.”

  Sowo, tali, tsoi. I can actually count up to nine in Cherokee, but this was the first time I’d found one-third of my vocabulary useful. “I don’t have anything he could possibly be interested in. I’m sure he’ll come to his senses and realize that soon, and then he won’t be a problem any longer.”

  “Sienna Brown,” Michael said, “has anybody ever told you that you are a really bad liar?”

  Actually, Laura had touched on that once or twice. I just figured it was part of my general social ineptitude package. But with Michael Ryan’s blue eyes drilling into mine, it seemed like more of a problem than I’d thought before.

  “It’s getting late,” I said. I must have lost track of time; it was dark outside already. “Take me home.”

  There weren’t any parking places left outside my house. “I’ll let you off here and go find somewhere to park,” Michael suggested. Sounded reasonable to me. I stepped out into the warm, soft darkness of an Austin summer evening. Street lighting on my block wasn’t great, but you didn’t really need it in the summer; the light from other people’s houses and screen porches was enough to go by.

  It was, for instance, enough to show the gang-style tattoos on the fat guy who came barreling out of my front door and knocked me down. Laura followed him, screaming. He exhibited a surprising turn of speed, rounding the corner before I’d done more than pick myself up. “Get him!” Laura panted. “He took your real estate notebook!”

  I saw red.

  Then I saw lights; Michael, still driving, had pulled up in front of the house for the second time. I jumped into the passenger seat and pointed in the direction the fat guy had disappeared into. Something about that outline had been extremely familiar… Michael stood on the gas and screeched around the corner. Nobody was visible, but the shaking of branches showed where someone had just been.

  “Down the alley!” I gasped. The car slewed around and went bucketing along the narrow alley behind the houses. I saw a bulky shape several houses away, screamed and pointed. Just before the intruder reached a cross street, Laura’s little Audi pulled across the alley and the guy thudded into the side of her car, unable to stop in time. I leapt out of Michael’s car and threw myself on him. Yep – a very familiar outline.

  “Sammy Martinez, what the hell are you doing breaking into my house?” I demanded.

  Michael’s car crept towards us and the headlights shone on the unlovely sight of an overweight, sweaty young man wearing a wife-beater T-shirt and two full sleeves of what looked like gang tattoos. “And what’s with all the ink?” I added.

  “Rub-on… rub off,” Sammy panted.

  Michael got out of his car without turning off the lights. His shadow fell across Sammy. “You know this son of a bitch?”

  “I took Accelerated Russian with his big sister. Mira Martinez.” I turned back to Sammy and snatched my precious folder out of his hand. “Give me that! What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  Rather than answering directly, Sammy scrubbed at one shoulder. “See? They come off.”

  Yes. I could see the heavy black-letter “13” starting to peel away from his skin. And below that I could see some long, angry welts. It appeared that Cath Palug hadn’t approved of the invasion.

  “Halloween isn’t for two months yet. And if you’d been caught by somebody who didn’t happen to like your big sister, I don’t think the cops would have taken rub-off tattoos as proof of your innocence. Especially after that mess when you were in high school. Once again, Sammy, what the hell were you up to?”

  “I did it for Mira,” Sammy said.

  It was the kind of answer that led to all of us sitting around the kitchen table, digging into ice cream while Sammy scrubbed off his temporary gang tats with a paper towel – using up most of my nail polish remover in the process– and I applied antibiotic cream and bandages to the claw marks on his arm.

  “Mira’s about to get her Ph.D,” he said proudly. “But her major professor’s one weird dude. He wanted her to, get this, hook him up with some really bad drug cartel dudes.”

  “Mira?”

  “He thinks anybody with a Hispanic last name is just one step removed from the cartels. She said Dr. Osborne—”

  I groaned.

  “See?” Michael said in an undertone. “I told you that guy was trouble.”

  “Dr. Osborne told her that an ex-student had stolen some notes from him, and he didn’t want to get the girl in trouble with the police, he just wanted his papers back. He wanted her to get him in contact with somebody who could scare her into giving them back.”

  I choked. “You, Sammy?” He was older now, but I couldn’t quite erase my memory of him as Mira’s bumbling little brother who’d been big enough for high school sports but too fat to play well. It still seemed appropriate.

  “Hey. I’m big,” he said defensively. “And I spent twenty bucks on the baddest temp tattoos you ever seen. What do I do now?”

  I lifted the folder I’d taken from him back in the alley. It was the first time Michael had seen it in the light. Why, I wondered, did he look so disappointed? “How about I write you a note for him?”

  I was in a really good mood after retrieving my brown leather real estate folder. Aunt Georgia had given it to me when I got my license. It was the most luxurious piece of office equipment I ever expected to own, soft brown suede with my name engraved on it in gold letters, opening out with a slot to hold a yellow pad and flat pockets for my bits and pieces of paperwork. Even if most of that “paperwork” was done on my phone nowadays, I treasured the gift.

  Now I tore off the page of notes about starter homes from Hutto to San Marcos and scribbled quickly on a fresh sheet of paper, reading aloud as I did so: “Dear Dr. Osborne, I do not have whatever it is you are looking for. Please quit sending people to steal my things. The notebook your drug cartel henchman almost succeeded in taking was a gift from my aunt and I will not hesitate to involve the police if anybody goes after it again. Yours, Sienna Brown.” I signed my name with a defiant flourish, tore out the page and handed it to Sammy.

  “Hey, cool. You didn’t give me away!” he exclaimed in delight.

  “I wouldn’t want to make trouble for Mira.”

  10. I worked for a living

  When Sammy departed, the two women washed up the ice cream bowls and Sienna disappeared into Laura’s side of the house. Michael could just hear the murmur of their conversation from where he sat in the kitchen.

  He went out onto the spacious front porch. The glider was in front of Laura Jacobson’s spare-room windows; he moved over to the far side of the porch and sat on the floor. From here he could see the two women silhouetted against the light and would be warned if they broke off their
chat, but they – if he kept his voice down – wouldn’t be able to hear him on the phone.

  It would have been smarter to call from somewhere else, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving them alone in the house. The next person that professor sent might not be a bumbling fool.

  “Hank,” he said, “we need to talk. This, this job… isn’t shaking out the way we thought it would. I’m not sure I can do what you want.”

  “Son, my previous experience with you suggests you can do just about anything you want. What’s the hold-up?”

  “Maybe,” Michael said, surprising himself, “maybe I don’t want to do this job. She’s… not what I expected.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? The notes are what matter to me.”

  “Yes. Well… Had you considered just telling her the truth?”

  “You think she’s that easy to con?”

  “I said, the truth,” Michael snapped impatiently. “Tell her you really, really want to know all about this mysterious language that isn’t anything like, like…” He groped for the names Hank had used when they planned this op. “Tazakh or Khaklan or Uugie.”

  “You mean, Taklan or Kazakh or Uighur.”

  “Whatever. And when did you become an expert on Central Asian languages, anyway?”

  “I’m not,” Hank said, “not yet. But I went to Taklanistan when I was younger, I have heard the stories about Shaimak, and young Idrisov showed me… some real interesting things. Ryan, I need that notebook. The one with the page Idrisov copied.”

  “She insists she doesn’t have a notebook,” Michael said, “and after tonight, I halfway believe her! This dope the professor sent to steal it, all he could find was the leather folder where she keeps her real estate papers – and she got that back.”

  “Well, tell the half of you that doesn’t believe her yet to keep on looking.”

  “I’m tired of lying to her,” Michael said between his teeth. “She’s smart and spunky and…”