That’s funny, the part of me that never sleeps registers, didn’t I see that guy before—
Fuck it, what do I have to do to get away from work?
Two men about fifty or sixty meters behind me on the other side of the road cross over hastily to keep me in view when I turn the corner. One of them is unfamiliar but something about the other reminds me of somebody I half-noticed back in the pub. Or maybe it was earlier this evening; I didn’t really register it at the time. Now there’s a woman with a pram twenty meters ahead, and that’s when I know I’m in trouble because something is wrong with the baby: I can’t hear its mind. The thing about babies is that what they see is what you get: a constant stream of random sensory impressions and emotions with the volume cranked up to eleven as long as they’re awake. While they’re asleep? Violent, chaotic dreams. Adults are much quieter. This one’s either in a coma or dead or warded up to the eyeballs, or, and I know this is paranoid, it makes me feel like something I encountered in a hotel in Denver a few years ago—
I open my inner ear and hear the sleepy crunching half-thoughts of blind, segmented nightmare parasites possessed by a vast and bottomless well of faith.
Fuck, it is them. And I pick up on something else at the same time—
Fuck. They’re tailing me.
It’s a classic box tail with a twist: there are the usual two blokes behind me, but rather than another two in front there’s a mother-and-baby combo instead. I don’t know why it took me so long to pick it up; maybe it was the bus journey and then the mostly empty pavement and I’m just not paying enough attention. But that’s not the only thing that’s wrong with this picture. Normally a box tail is all about making sure you don’t lose your target in a crowded city, but something about this one has snatch written all over it, if not hit. I can see it all unfolding in my mind. If I try to break the box I’ll have to get past her, whereupon she’ll make a loud scene (baby snatchers are perennially popular) and her two “white knights” will close in. If I try to break past them, she’ll start screaming that I was stalking her. There’s probably a fake police van and a couple of bodies in equally fake uniforms shadowing us, waiting to make the pickup, but I can’t sense them this far away (not through bricks and concrete and dozens or hundreds of bystanders), so all I can see is the immediate threat.
They’re clearly coordinated and they’re converging on me, and they probably saw me pick up Bill’s package—which means it’s an intercept and they’ll make their move before I get to the New Annex.
Fuck.
The New Annex is a secure government site. We have CCTV on all the approaches and armed officers outside the front door these days. But the plod clocked off at six and I’m out of range of the site surveillance and secure is not the same as secret, as the residents of 85 Albert Embankment in Vauxhall4 can testify. And after my Newsnight slot I’m very much not secret at all. I’m not sure how they traced me to the office in the first place, but to have a snatch squad on the pavement waiting outside for me to leave is bad: very, very bad indeed.
And it gets worse. I can’t tell what’s in the pram, but the adults are all using MilSpec wards. MilSpec wards like the one Jeremy was wearing when he interviewed me, not something knocked up in a spare half hour by an amateur warlock. I can count the number of organizations able to make that kind of kit on my fingers without cheating and using binary arithmetic, and after this evening’s fun and informative pub chat I don’t need to make any guesses. I abruptly feel so sick I wonder if I’m going to throw up. It’s the adrenaline spike from being hunted—I’ve been here before and it’s something you never get used to. But at least I’m not paralyzed. I know what to do and I’ve done it before: I need to evade and escape, then take them down before they hurt anybody.
It’s late enough that most of the shops on this street are shuttered. There’s a kebab joint up ahead on my side and an off-license on the other side, but neither of them have multiple customer exits, which makes breaking out of the box problematic. Nor am I armed, at least in conventional terms. I palm my phone, hoping they can’t see me in the failing daylight, and dial the first number on my contacts list. Ten seconds of suspense carries me fifteen meters further towards the next crossing, and I’m in luck: the phone rings twice, then she answers. “Yes?”
Mo sounds tense. Unexpected midevening phone calls from separated not-quite-an-ex-at-this-point will do that.
“I’m in a box tail heading towards the New Annex front door, I just made a pickup for the SA and I think the oppo are planning on lifting me. Please alert the duty officer, CODE RED.”
“Bob—understood.” Her voice catches. “Keep the call open for updates, I’ll be on the landline to the Duty Officer.”
I switch to speakerphone and slide the gadget back into my pocket without hanging up. Mo is a total professional and will get the ball rolling in the time it would take me to authenticate myself over the phone to whoever’s on the Ops desk. Every second counts now. I walk ten more meters, estimate another ten meters of pavement ahead before the pelican crossing, note that the lights are against me (not that there’s much traffic), and observe that the lead element of the trap is stopping and not pushing the WALK button. The two behind have just crossed the road at a brisk clip, dodging between two cars that have slowed to weave between speed pillows, and now we’re all in a classic kill zone. Out of the corner of one eye I see a white van turning into the main road behind me.
I stop in the middle of the pavement, ten meters short of the mother with pushchair and unidentified contents, and take a deep breath, knowing that this is going to be really unpleasant even if I’m wrong—
I’m not wrong.
There’s no such thing as telepathy … at least not for the likes of me. There are some really nasty brain parasites that can blur the boundaries between their victims’ minds, and there are destiny entanglement rituals as well, along with all the concomitant risks, but I’ve got no way of peeking inside someone else’s skull and pulling out anything but the owner’s current sensory impressions and emotional tone. Especially when they’re warded. But as I focus hard and crank up the metaphorical gain, I begin to burn through their wards and pick up a common sense of feral intent and frightening dedication. I take in one of them sliding a telescoping baton out of his coat sleeve as the other raises a spray can, and they’re both watching me with anticipation. Can’t be having that, part of me thinks, and then that part of me yawns, a sensation like a deep sea angler fish spreading its jaws infinitely wide, and I bite down on their minds.
Yes, they have high-powered MilSpec wards. They crunch all the same, a mild fizzing note of bitterness and gun smoke tarnishing the desiccated fragments of their souls as they go down hard. There’s something wrong with them: they taste gray and drained, half-eaten from the inside out by something that got there before me. I gag as I swallow their minds, feel their last thoughts spiraling down in surprise and dismay as I shred their souls. They have pepper spray and a baton with a three-centimeter ball of tungsten on the end, but that doesn’t save them. What I do is clearly self-defense within my terms of engagement. Even so, I feel sick to the tips of my toes and take an involuntary step towards the bodies. I don’t get enough practice at killing people to not feel bad about it; I hope I never do, although that’s looking like a forlorn wish these days.
The vehicle turning the corner is stickered up to look like a police van, one of the regular ones with seats and no light bar used for ferrying bodies around rather than snatching people, but the driver is just as intently focused on me as the box tail duo—
There is a flat crack-crack behind me and something tugs sharply at my hood.
I reflexively reach my imaginary jaws behind me and bite down hard as my heart starts pounding and I dive at the pavement. This one’s soul squishes. They’ve got a stronger ward and there’s an indescribable sensation, somewhere between wasp-stung-my-tongue and the memory of standing by my father’s graveside and letting a handful of so
il trickle onto his coffin (which is odd, because he’s still alive). As I hit the ground there’s a clatter as pushchair girl collapses, dropping the suppressed pistol. The baby buggy topples over into the road.
I hear a screech of tires and an engine revving as the white van takes off. It sideswipes the pushchair, then careens round the corner, running a red light. The pushchair is flung into a shop doorway; there’s no baby, but a life-sized doll and something else, a horribly familiar olive-drab casing. Claymore mine. This isn’t good, this is very bad indeed: it may have started out as a snatch but they were willing to use massive lethal force if it failed, high risk of collateral damage. The van was there as much to evacuate the survivors as to collect the captive.
“Oh fuck,” I say and my voice comes out shakily.
“Bob? Bob? Sitrep!” Her anguished voice is muffled through my fleece.
I roll over on my side, breathing hard, and reach for my phone. My right upper arm is a searing ache, an old injury coming out on strike in sympathy. There’s a siren in the distance, then another. The phone screen is shattered where I fell on it but it’s still working. I’m gasping for air, skin clammy, and my hands are shaking. “It was a hit. Shots fired, three down, UXB on site, I’ve been, I’ve been”—I reach up and fumble at my hood—“shots missed me, but get me backup right now.”
It’s one thing to go into a fight expecting it, another thing entirely to come through a hit by the skin of your teeth and not lose self-control. Pram woman missed me but one of her shots punched a neat hole in my hoodie, missing my carotid artery by about five centimeters. There’s a wall beside the shuttered corner shop and I roll again and sit up halfway, then lean against it, feeling gray and dizzy. If I hadn’t been moving towards my other attackers, turning and ducking, she’d have landed a double-tap in my center of mass. It’s as much as I can do to listen to the sirens getting closer, keep a weather eye open for signs of a follow-through, and concentrate on keeping what’s left of my shit together. I don’t want to lose control: I could accidentally shred the souls of everyone in all the buildings around me if I let myself slip.
It’s going to be a long night.
* * *
Time speeds up and everything seems to move very fast for a while once the real police arrive on scene, which they do, mob-handed, within five minutes. I have my warrant card out when they get officious in my face, which short-circuits no end of shit until they get the message that I’m a Victim of Crime. But at that point they turn all checklist-solicitous in a very unhelpful way. About two minutes later the real police arrive: an Armed Response Unit with the new kit—ward-inscribed body armor, mirrored helmets, and scary-looking automatic weapons, issued at short notice from some depot or other where we’ve been sitting on a stockpile of heavy kit. I resist the urge to say where were you when shit got real on my doorstep because that sort of thing really isn’t constructive, and anyway, it’s not their fault. I finally start to unwind once I’m sitting in the back of an ambulance, clutching my messenger bag, and surrounded by machine guns pointing outwards. Which is a sign of how bad a turn my life’s taken recently, if you think about it.
The ambulance crew check me out on the way to A&E and verify that I have a minor graze on the right side of my neck and a scraped knee, and that I’m uninjured but showing signs of shock. They think it’s because I’ve nearly been shot, but I know better. Either way it’s enough for them to light up the Christmas tree on the roof and drag me off to a hospital where I can expect to spend six hours sitting on a bench watching an endless stream of heart attacks and drunken party animals take priority. I try to argue, but they’re firm: discharging a patient who subsequently goes into cardiogenic shock is really bad for their customer performance metrics, sorry guv’nor. I am considering pulling my warrant card on them, regardless of whether it’s bad form or not, when my phone rings again. It’s Mo, and she’s got her shit together.
“Where are they taking you?” she demands. I tell her which hospital. “Right. Go with the flow and I’ll have a car pick you up at the Acute Receiving Unit door. The DO’s lining up a secure safe house and I’ll get the on-call doctor to visit you there. I’m on my way back to the office right now to audit the lockdown, but I’ll come visit as soon as things settle down.”
“Why, what’s going on?” I ask, weak and shivery and somewhat slow on the uptake.
“Someone tried to kill a senior member of staff,” she says drily. “Do pay attention, we take a dim view of that sort of thing. Sit tight and I’ll send you a babysitter.”
Mo’s idea of a taxi service for her husband, in the wake of a snatch attempt, is an SO19 sniper team. The heavily armed cops are lurking around the hospital entrance when I arrive, scaring the crap out of the smokers clustered under the awning. Nor did she mention in her call that the DO’s “secure safe house” is an entire floor of a terrifyingly luxurious apartment block in the East End (upstairs from a bulletproof lobby with a very comprehensive security system). Apparently it belongs to the Sovereign Wealth Fund/Oil Sheikh equivalent of Airbnb. It’s so heavily warded that I can’t sense any minds in the flats above and below me—it’s almost like we’re alone in the building—and there are more armed police in the lobby. It reeks of diplomatic passports and numbered bank accounts.
I’m dizzy and so tired that I’m beyond surprises as I enter the safe apartment’s front door and shuffle along a hand-woven Adraskan rug that’s probably worth more than I earn in a year. I assume it’s ’Seph’s bolt-hole; it’s far too luxurious for normal agency business. At the end of the hallway I find myself in a living room the size of an aircraft hangar, if aircraft hangars came furnished in Louis Vuitton with a view of the Thames. The bobbies with bazookas are camped outside the apartment door; I gather they have orders to start World War Three if anyone without a warrant card tries to get in. I plant my bag on the sofa, then for some reason I decide to make myself useful and set out in search of the kitchen in order to make them a placatory cup of tea, but I get about as far as a Louis XIV chaise in purple crushed velvet and gold leaf before my knees turn to water and I sit down, just for a minute.
I’m still there a quarter of an hour later when Johnny McTavish bounces in.
“Wotcher, cock!” he says cheerily. “How’s life treating you?”
“I’m fine,” I try to say, but it comes out as an inarticulate gurgle.
“Heh!” He looks amused. Johnny is about two meters of special-forces-surplus muscle in stonewashed denim, despite which, he’s not dumb. You don’t get to be Number Two in the Hazard Network by being dumb; the monosyllable is Johnny taking time out to evaluate me. The entryphone buzzes. “That’ll be the flying doctor service for you, I’ll bet,” he says helpfully, and disappears. He returns with a medic in tow. Fussing and blood pressure monitoring ensues. One adrenaline shot later (and a sermon on the side about bed rest, fluids, and not overdoing things) and I’m feeling a lot perkier. “Well then,” he says, pulling up a gratuitously ornate chair and crunching onto it. “What’s all this about? ’Ave you picked up some new fans from bein’ on TV?”
I stare sullenly at the nighttime London skyline, the stench of rotting minds catching in the back of my throat. “It’s those fuckers from Denver. They had a Claymore mine.”
“But they’re dead and you’re not, me old mate. So what’s wrong?” He pauses expectantly.
I close my eyes. “Their souls had third-degree god burns. Also, one of them tried to shoot me when the snatch failed.” I can’t stop hearing gunfire, feeling the sharp tug at my collar and the hot burn on my neck. I swallow. “They bungled it, but they nearly had me. I think they followed me all the way to and from the pub, but I was too dozy to notice until it was nearly too late.”
I hate guns. I can use them, but I don’t like being around them; they add this terrible random-act-of-no-god-at-all angle to any fight. Bang, you’re dead, even if you weren’t the person the shooter was aiming for, even if it’s an accidental discharge. At least I onl
y kill people I mean to kill, when I grab them with one or another of the Eater of Souls’ notional appendages.
Johnny looks at me warily, as if I’m made of fine bone china and he’s afraid I’ll break. He’s got this rough-diamond-geezer pose that I think he copied from a Bob Hoskins gangster movie. It’s actually about as authentic as a three-pound note. He’s got a chip on his shoulder a mile high about not being middle or upper class, but there’s a very sharp mind behind the abrasively casual exterior, and you don’t get to be a staff sergeant in the Légion Étrangère without a good working grasp of how people are put together, and more importantly, how they fall apart under stress … much less rise to be ’Seph’s Number Two. Right now the way he’s looking at me is setting alarm bells ringing in my head. “What do you think is going on?”
Now a second set of alarms go off. Johnny is an External Asset, kept at arm’s reach from the agency, officially deniable and off-the-books but working directly for Mahogany Row. He and ’Seph turn up for meetings in the New Annex but they’re not on our regular payroll and they don’t carry warrant cards. Ostensibly retired, ’Seph founded and ran the Hazard Organization, about the most terrifying private sector occult intelligence organization I’ve ever heard of (and one I’m very glad I never ran up against in an adversarial capacity). ’Seph and Johnny retired a decade ago, winding up the company and moving to a life of comfortable luxury in London, and today they’re part of the organization’s plausible deniability capability, so if they’re being dragged into this something deeply alarming is going down.
The Delirium Brief Page 7