False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Yeah!” I said. “Grab him and run away. Go sharp left and keep going.”

  “Until when?”

  “I have no fucking idea,” I said.

  There were deep shadows moving in the darkness and an impossible wind brought a charnel house reek to our noses.

  The freight door wrenched itself upward. I didn’t need to sense the tick, tick precision of Nightingale’s signare to know he was doing it. Guleed ducked under the edge, dragging Skinner with her—I heard her yelling at everyone to get clear.

  “Peter!” said Nightingale from outside, in as urgent a tone as I’ve heard him use.

  I told him to hold the door where it was.

  “And get ready to drop it as soon as I’m out,” I said.

  I’m not sure, but I think I heard him sigh.

  And suddenly something was looking at me out of the darkness—huge and cool and unsympathetic.

  God, I hope I make my sanity check, I thought, and threw the biggest skinny grenade I could conjure at the Mary Engine.

  Then I ducked out into the gray Medway daylight.

  Nightingale gestured with his hand and the freight door slammed down behind me. I took off to the left along the side of the warehouse—hoping that the half a meter of magic-resistant wall might provide a blast shadow.

  Ahead I could see Guleed, Skinner and half a dozen TSG officers legging it as fast as full riot gear would allow. They’d all worked with us before, so they knew not to hang around when the wheels came off.

  Nightingale kept pace with me.

  “How long?” he asked.

  The skinny grenade was one of the first things I invented when I became an apprentice. Skinny comes from scindere, one of the formae used in the spell—it makes what is basically a big time-delayed fireball stick to whatever I threw it at. Nightingale didn’t approve, because apprentices, especially early on, are supposed to concentrate on precision and correct forms. And, to be fair, I’ve had to do quite a bit of remedial work over the months to correct bad habits I’d fallen into.

  Also, I’ve never managed to get the timer to work with any kind of precision.

  “About—” I said, and then the warehouse exploded.

  Or rather didn’t.

  Nightingale flicked up his shield behind us—he can do that while running, the show-off—but there was no blast. At least no physical blast. Instead, a great pulse of vestigium rolled over us and it was as if my ribcage and head rang like a bell made out of hamburger. I stumbled, but Nightingale grabbed my arm and kept me steady.

  We reached the road where Guleed, Skinner and the panting TSG officers were waiting.

  “Not again,” said Guleed, looking over my shoulder.

  I turned, but as far as I could tell, apart from a plume of white smoke rising from the far end, the warehouse was still upright.

  “You know what they say,” I said. “Any building you can walk away from . . .”

  20

  Don’t Get Distracted by the Subtext

  YOU’D BE AMAZED how often the police never get to the bottom of a case. You can investigate a crime, identify a suspect, and put together enough evidence to send them up the steps to await Her Majesty’s pleasure and still never know all the whys and wherefores.

  That the ghost of Anthony Lane piggybacked on the fake personality of Deep Thought to gain access to the workers in Bambleweeny is undisputed. He probably suborned William Lloyd early on and used him to gain wider access to the internet and set up the Print Shop. There were others involved—a joint effort by the NCA and the Folly identified three more SCC employees who helped move equipment in and out of Bambleweeny. Getting in and out was easy because Deep Thought controlled access to the hidden freight lift and what Deep Thought controlled, so did Lane. All three employees claimed they thought they were following legitimate instructions from management—and I tend to believe them.

  What we don’t know is where Lane learned how to manipulate people so completely. I’d have sworn he was a lone madman with a manifesto when he murdered Branwell Petersen, so I reckon he must have had access to skills and techniques from outside. I’m guessing that the badly named Against Spiritual Usurpation is a real group, and planning its campaign against LEECHES and USURPERS—wherever they may be. Although, fortunately, that campaign is mostly Reynolds’ problem, not ours.

  To add to her woes, we asked her to pick up the Librarians and take them home. She said that she was doing these repatriation flights so often that the check-in staff at Dulles had bumped her up to business class. Using evil European-style red tape as an excuse, we fixed it so she stayed over two nights, which gave me a chance to show her around the changes at the Folly and introduce her to Foxglove. Reynolds took notes on practitioner containment and the subsequent portrait American Woman With a Notepad and a Small Annoying Dog, acrylic on canvas, currently hangs in the breakfast room. After that, Beverley had her round for afternoon tea and Bulge appreciation.

  “Are you two going to get hitched?” she asked.

  “It’s complicated,” said Beverley.

  The next day Nightingale and I escorted Reynolds, Mrs. Chin and Stephen to the airport, where they caught a scheduled flight back to New York. It was our treat, and although we shelled out for premium economy seats, the Librarians didn’t seem at all grateful to be traveling with an FBI agent.

  “Don’t think we will forget this,” said Mrs. Chin, as we waited in the secure departure area Border Force maintains at Heathrow.

  “Good,” I said, and deliberately leaned into her personal space. “You came to my city uninvited and put members of the public at risk. You tell all your friends and allies and whatever else that they don’t come to my city without asking permission first.”

  Mrs. Chin sneered at me—it was a good sneer, and I was almost convinced.

  “Is that clear?” I asked.

  She jerked her head in what might have been a nod. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and stepped back.

  * * *

  —

  Terrence Skinner remained our problem. He retreated back into his billionaire’s money cocoon and defied us to make something of the scant evidence we had. His legal team even demanded the return of any materials seized at either the SCC or the Gillingham warehouse. Where the Mary Engine and associated organ had stood, there was nothing but a twisted, half-melted mass of metal and plastic, although interestingly the wooden dais was scorched but relatively undamaged. The vestigium, that vomit-inducing rotting prawn aroma, coupled with the sensation of millions of little feelers exploring your skin, was so strong that even non-practitioners were creeped out. Even if they didn’t know why.

  The hundred million quid’s worth of HPC in the rest of the warehouse had made it through relatively unscathed, so me and Frank Caffrey cut out a chunk of the composite wall under the guise of taking evidence and carried it away for further study. You never know when a bit of magical shielding might come in handy.

  Thinking of the way the darkness had fixed me in its gaze, I felt that the added protection might be needed sooner rather than later.

  After a long and acrimonious three-way discussion between Silver, Seawoll and the CPS, it was decided not to charge Terrence Skinner. The murder of Leo Hoyt would remain an open case until such time, as Seawoll put it, “We can nail that smug bastard against the wall.”

  I’m not holding my breath, but I am maintaining a watching brief. I know what the demi-monde is like. And Skinner has acquired a taste for it—he’ll never go back to being a straight tech-bro now.

  Meanwhile, some other people seemed gloriously unaffected.

  Like Everest and Victor, who I met up with at the Paradice Board Games Café in Bromley which has coffee, snacks and big tables you can play games on. They even have a large selection of games you can borrow if you didn’t bring your own. Which was just as well because when
I was younger I never had enough money, and now I have enough money I have other things to spend it on.

  “You’re a Cylon,” said Everest.

  We were playing Battlestar Galactica, which is a cooperative game where the gimmick is that at least one of the players is secretly a Cylon who wins by destroying the Battlestar. The other players have to identify the Cylon before it can carry out its dastardly yet strangely non-specific plan.

  “That’s outrageous,” I said.

  Oliver Partridge gave me a suspicious look. I’d brought him with me so that Tyrel and Stacy could have a romantic night in. Part of my penance for having got Tyrel fired—although I still don’t think it was my fault. Beverley was keeping Keira entertained at Wandle’s latest pop-up boutique—now currently in Summerstown—doing what, I didn’t like to speculate.

  Victor moved his Admiral over from Colonial One.

  “So is it true?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I am not and never have been a Cylon.”

  “That Skinner integrated a ghost into his IT architecture.”

  “How would I know?” I said, looking at Everest, who was frowning at the board. “I’m just here to keep you guys safe.”

  “But not employed,” said Victor.

  “We’ve already been headhunted,” said Everest without looking up. “And why would it be Peter’s job to keep us employed?”

  “I really think you’re a Cylon,” said Victor.

  As it happened it turned out that Oliver, the cheeky little git, had spoofed the Loyalty Deck so that we’d all been playing Cylons right from the start.

  * * *

  —

  There was really only one place secure enough to store the original Mary Engine. So, once we’d cleared the cells and put them back to standby, me and Nightingale wheeled it down a short corridor with a gray steel door at the end. There were multiple overlapping circles scored into the metal.

  Nightingale put his hand on a seemingly random section of the door, there was the merest suggestion of magic, and the door swung ponderously inwards. Disappointingly, it was less than three centimeters thick. But then I suppose its physical mass was probably the least of its defenses. Likewise the room beyond was just that—a room. The walls were lined with shoulder-high gray steel filing cabinets, each drawer with a label in faded type on card—EB1945/1, EB1945/2, EB1945/3 . . . The walls were of unpainted brick and it was lit by a pair of bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling at either end. There was plenty of room in the corner to stash the Mary Engine, and Nightingale waited patiently while I checked yet again that the locking bar that prevented the engine turning was in place.

  We still hadn’t located whoever it was who had reverse-engineered the Mary Engine for Skinner, which meant that somewhere out there were people who knew how to build one from scratch. Our only hope was they didn’t know what it was for.

  Once something is known, it’s almost impossible to retain control. I looked around at the filing cabinets and wondered what secrets they contained. A large chunk of Nightingale’s peers had died to recover those cabinets. I wondered why they’d never been opened—or destroyed.

  “You never had any plans to use this information,” I said. “Right?”

  Nightingale put his hand, gingerly, on top of one of the filing cabinets.

  “Right?” I said again—louder than I meant to.

  “No,” said Nightingale. “To what end, Peter, would I turn it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what worries me.”

  “No,” said Nightingale. “Never again.”

  “So why don’t we just burn it?” I said.

  “I did give serious consideration to doing just that, but Harold talked me out of it.”

  Professor Postmartin was against the destruction of historical records on general principle, but he had a specific objection in this case.

  “The Germans may have kept meticulous records. But Able Company”—the strike team assigned to take the camp headquarters and research labs—“didn’t have time to keep the filing intact. Everything was carted away willy-nilly and dumped in the gliders.”

  As a result the forbidden material, the product of the obscene experimentation by the Ahnenerbe, was mixed up with routine camp records—including those of the prisoners.

  “He said that we needed to keep them against the day when no one was alive who remembered what happened,” said Nightingale. “He said this would be their only chance of a memorial and an explanation of how they’d lived and died.”

  “It all happened seventy years ago,” I said. “That day is tomorrow—at the latest. And what did happen to the inmates? Do you know?”

  “Baker Company was assigned to liberate them,” he said. “But they were the weakest—we assumed that the Germans would put the bulk of their defense around the manufacturing complex.”

  Instead Baker ran head first into the men and tanks of the SS Panzergrenadiers in at least company strength. And among them there were things that were not men and not tanks.

  “They never got near the barracks,” said Nightingale. “They were thrown back upon our landing zone and we had to commit our reserves to stop them from being overrun.” His fingers drummed on the filing cabinet. “The Germans didn’t seem to care about defending the plant at all, but they fought like mad to stop Able Company flanking them and reaching the barracks. It was as if keeping us away from the prisoners was all that mattered.”

  And so Operation Spatchcock came apart and Britain left the cream of its young wizards scattered among the broken trees of the Grosse Ettersburg. There was no mass prisoner breakout, no British-aided disruption behind German lines, or any of the foolish advantages the planners thought they might win. Only the Black Library. Bought at such cost to the British and their allies.

  “What happened to the prisoners?” I asked.

  “We think the vast majority were murdered,” said Nightingale.

  One of the British survivors, Hugh Oswald, had been with Patton and the Third Army when they liberated nearby Buchenwald. There was nothing left of the plant or barracks but scattered rubble and nightmare vestigia. There were mass graves, of course. There were mass graves of prisoners all over Germany and occupied Europe, and once you were shot in the head and dumped in a pit nobody could tell a wizard from anybody else.

  “I was ill for most of the latter part of 1945,” said Nightingale. “So I saw none of the aftermath myself. At least not in Europe.”

  He made an after-you gesture at the still open steel door.

  “Perhaps it will be a suitable project for my retirement,” he said as we left.

  “And when will that be?” I asked.

  Nightingale touched the door again and then stepped back as it swung closed.

  “I think that rather depends on you,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  * * *

  —

  A couple of nights later I woke up in the middle of a summer’s day with dust motes dancing in the sunlight pouring in through French windows and the light summer curtains rustling in the breeze. Outside I could hear birdsong, much louder than normal, and smell distant woodsmoke. Beside me, Beverley had kicked off the duvet and lay dark and perfect across the white sheets.

  But there was a white man beside the bed, a pale hand resting on Beverley’s stomach. He was half naked and swirls of blue paint ran up his arm, across his shoulders and down his chest and belly. He had a long face with a straight nose and a wide mouth that was crooked into an expression of mingled joy and grief. When I tried to scramble out of the bed, he held up his hand to stop me and put his fingers to his lips. Then he smiled and I recognized the smile.

  This was the old god of the Beverley Brook from ages past—a son of Old Father Thames, dead for over a hundred and fifty years. Killed, if you believed his brothers, by the tide of filth po
ured into the river by the thoughtless denizens of London.

  Never mind that development on the South Bank had barely reached Battersea at the time.

  He looked down at Beverley’s face for a moment, nodded, and then looked back at me. Gravely he bunched his fist and thumped it on his chest and then, without any fuss at all, he vanished.

  Taking the summer’s day with him and leaving me in the dark with rain against the window and Beverley a shadow in the darkness. It might have been a dream, but I’ve learned to distinguish the two.

  Beverley shifted and rolled onto her side. I put my hand on her—it was like touching a radiator. So far her pregnancy had been free of any medical complications, but this felt like a terrible fever. I switched on the reading lamp and said her name.

  When I shook her shoulder she opened one eye and gave me an annoyed look.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Apart from being awake.”

  “You’re burning up,” I said.

  Beverley touched her own cheek with the back of her hand.

  “Huh,” she said. “Yeah, it’s a hot flush.” She snuggled back into her pillow.

  I touched her shoulder and found her skin temperature felt normal again. She took my hand and drew me down until we were spooning.

  “Tyburn said this might happen,” she said sleepily.

  The air in the room was cool against my legs and back. I let go of Beverley long enough to hook the duvet and draw it up over us.

  “How often did she say it happened?”

  “Not that often,” said Beverley. “Until the last week before she popped. Then she said they turned off the central heating and let her warm the house. Said it saved tons off her gas bill.”

  “Did she say if anything else happened?” I asked.

  But Beverley was fast asleep.

  Technical Note