Mo approaches a small cluster of silverback banking executives and their younger, prettier partners. “Do you know what’s going on?” she asks, deliberately cutting into a mansplaining monologue.
“There’s some sort of incident out front”—the sixty-something with the five-hundred-pound haircut leers down her cleavage unconsciously—“police are handling it, nothing to worry about, I’m sure.”
Mo stares at him. “I heard shots.”
“I should think that was the police—”
Silverback’s partner is tugging at his arm and giving Mo a very obvious side-eye, one second away from escalating, so she nods and turns away, dismissing the guy even as he carries on monologuing at her back. She heads across the room towards a side table and picks up a glass of bubbly for social camouflage. As a single woman in this crowd she’s going to stand out, but Silverback and his company were just too sleazy to put up with. She casts around and sees two men and women of roughly comparable age near the French doors, glancing nervously at the guarded entrance. Arts people, she guesses, not pretty enough to be rock stars or actors, slightly unconventional and thus unlikely to be politicians or business magnates. She plasters a smile on her face and minces over.
“Hi. I’m terribly sorry about this, but do you mind if I stand with you people and pretend to be making conversation?” She tilts her head, briefly indicating Silverback and his friends. “I just ran into my ex and he’s a lot less likely to be a nuisance—make a scene—around other people.”
“Oh, honey.” One of the women smiles sympathetically—thirty-something, fifties-vintage butterfly glasses, and cherry red hair—“been there, done that, join the club.”
“Thank you.” Mo glances at her companions. Tall, thin, academic-looking guy in a bow tie and tweed jacket rather than a dinner jacket; bald bloke with a beard and a ruddy wine-drinker’s nose in a dinner jacket that is at least a decade out of date; and an older woman with distinguished silver hair and a purple velvet frock. “Sorry to be a nuisance. I’ll just stand here and smile and nod if you don’t mind?”
Red-Nose speaks: “If he’s trouble, do you want me to talk to the cops—”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” Mo thinks fast. “He has lawyers. I just wasn’t expecting him here.” Across the room, out of the side of her eye, she spots a blonde woman in a white shift stalking past. She’s got something in her right hand down by her side and for some reason trying to focus on it makes Mo’s eyes hurt and a prickly sweat stand out on her forehead. Right. “He tried to screw me over the settlement,” she extemporizes. At the other side of the room, a jacketless man, his tie draped around his open collar, dark stains on his trousers (which are tight around the crotch). She looks away hastily. “He’s the overcontrolling type.” She has no idea whether she’s libeling the silverback executive or not but she’s desperate to keep talking because now her conversational gatecrashing gambit has paid off and her four companions are nodding and looking sympathetic, as if she’s been here all along. She smiles at Red-Nose. “What brings you here?”
“I think I’m part of the comic relief,” he says self-deprecatingly, before launching into a purportedly amusing anecdote about internal politics between dueling BBC directors who can’t decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series—Mo tunes it out, nodding and making encouraging noises at appropriate intervals as she scans the room for threats.
Two more handmaids slip into the ballroom behind the back of the policeman, who pays them no attention. Mo pulls out her phone. “Excuse me, I think someone just texted,” she says, smiling as she glances down at it and fires up a scanner app. She turns away from her companions and raises it to eye level, seeing the telltale flares of light limning the heads and crotches of the possessed. “Sorry, my son wants to see what it’s like,” she says, turning back.
Woman in Purple raises an eyebrow. “Really? I thought you were playing Ingress.” Mo suppresses the urge to scream; Purple must have glimpsed the scanner display.
She makes a snap decision: she can’t rescue everybody but she’ll save as many as she can. “I don’t expect you to believe anything I say, but it would be a really good idea if we all stepped outside onto the patio before the people who have just come in start to herd everyone into the basement.”
Purple’s eyes narrow. “That’s not your husband—”
The jacketless man is approaching. “Sorry to interrupt, but we have a security situation. There are intruders in the grounds. Please go into the main hall, then take shelter in the basement.” He doesn’t make eye contact or wait for any acknowledgment but proceeds to the next knot of conversation, evidently unaware of the effect of his writhing priapism. The eye-warping blur at his right hand stings Mo’s eyes for a moment, then resolves into a squat-looking machine pistol.
“Well, that was special!” Purple’s eyes are wide.
Mo reaches into her purse and pulls her warrant card. “MI5. If you go downstairs you will die: this is a terrorist incident. We need to leave now.”
“I say! You’re—” Producer Guy nearly crosses his eyes until Butterfly Specs takes his arm.
“Come on, Gary, if it’s a joke you can write a letter to the Guardian tomorrow,” she hisses, giving Mo a wide-eyed look as she hauls him towards the open French windows.
Purple looks Mo in the eye. “You’re not MI5, you’re one of them,” she says with a gleam of recognition. “But your agency was dissolved weeks ago. What’s happening?”
“Come on and I’ll tell you.” Mo takes her arm and tugs. “I suppose you are MI5.”
Purple follows. “Have I seen you … oh. Home Office briefings last year?”
Mo nearly stumbles but manages to keep going. “Transhuman Police Coordination, and yes, it was an SOE false flag op. I’m not kidding about the danger, the bodies herding everyone into the cellar are the reason we were officially shitcanned.”
“That man, there was something in his pants that looked like, like—and his eyes—”
They make it across the threshold and onto the flagstones. They’re chilly and rough beneath Mo’s stockinged feet; she looks around for the steps down to the lawn. “He’s under a mind-control parasite. So are Schiller’s other people. I don’t suppose you’re carrying?”
Purple looks at her as if she’s insane. “Going armed at a reception for the Prime Minister? Do I look mad?”
Mo sighs. “Well, fuck.” The crowd in the ballroom is already thinning, mostly drifting back into the great hall and the stairs beyond. She taps her earpiece. “CANDID, MADCAP, sitrep.”
“MADCAP, OCCULUS is pinned down outside the perimeter. Still awaiting support; you’re on your own. Sitrep?”
“In the garden with civilians, Schiller’s people are herding everybody into the basement and sending out armed patrols. I don’t anticipate a hostage situation or siege, it looks like a Jim Jones setup.” Purple’s face is wan in the glow shed by the floodlights on the terrace. Mo gestures impatiently towards the lawn. “I’m going to try and find Zero. Over.” She heads towards the lawn, meaning to circle round behind the stable block.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“Follow me and find out.” Mo regrets it instantly. “Look, we’re in big trouble. Stay back, don’t make any noise, and if anyone shoots me, run away as far as you can, then hide. Better still, find your friends”—they’ve moved away and are standing around in the middle of the terrace, looking gormless—“and get them to do the same.”
Without waiting for a reply she turns and heads for the steps, then down onto the grass (it’s cool and slightly damp, a welcome balm for her sore toes), and heads diagonally away from the house, skirting the big pavilion on her way towards the stables.
But she’s only halfway there when a pulse of released occult power sweeps across her—and then the shooting starts.
* * *
Driving is a lot like riding a bicycle, Iris finds: it feels very s
trange at first, but the skills come back rapidly, and within an hour it feels almost as if she hasn’t taken a six-year break.
Of course, this is a dangerous delusion, and Iris is very aware that she’s at risk. Before everything went wrong, culminating in the fiasco at Brookwood and her arrest and trial, she’d driven an older Honda. The new hire car is a Jaguar—only the best will do for this job—and it’s fifteen years newer, a gleaming, streamlined, black and chrome monster that seems to be about fifty computers flying in loose formation. Everything is computerized, including the controls, and it’s totally bewildering, as if sixty years rather than a mere six have passed her by.
At least the basics are in the right place—steering wheel, go pedal, stop pedal, indicators—so she resists the urge to fiddle beyond working out the basics of the satellite navigation system, and sticks to concentrating on moving forward and not hitting anything.
“I say, are we nearly there yet?” Her passenger sounds archly amused, but she still cringes slightly at the faintest implication of dissatisfaction.
She checks the satnav for an updated projection. If they hadn’t hit tailbacks due to a contraflow on the M40 they’d be there already. “Five minutes, sir.” She squeezes her right foot on the accelerator and the big cat purrs very quietly and pushes forward, nosing into the darkness faster than she’s entirely comfortable with.
Dr. Armstrong had told her to take it easy: just a light liaison role, he said. But her Lord had other plans. Plans that involved a brisk afternoon’s shopping for clothes—both his and hers, for he has firm ideas about appropriate business attire for his personal assistant—then a friendly chat with a luxury car rental agency. No money or credit cards pass hands when her Lord wishes to buy a suit or a phone or a helicopter; Saville Row tailors and Bond Street jewelers practically queue up to throw their wares at him and his entourage. “One must make the right impression; first appearances are important,” her Lord explained, “and my staff’s presentation reflects on me.” So Iris, an old biker girl, finds herself encased in a black Hugo Boss suit, white shirt, and matching heels—which are playing hell with her pedal control.
“I do believe the festivities have kicked off without us,” her Lord says, faint disapproval evident underneath his light tone. “Too bad they couldn’t wait, say I.” He snaps his fingers and the darkness beyond the reach of headlamps roils and cringes away, giving her a clear view forward. Iris doesn’t need to be told: she floors the accelerator and the Jaguar snarls forward, around a tight bend telegraphed with illuminated chevron signs, then uphill into a 30 mph limit—the village nearest their destination. “I do so hate to be late to a party,” Fabian sighs.
Iris takes the high street at eighty, then hammers the brakes and yanks the car into a tire-screeching turn into the estate driveway leading to Nether Stowe House. She passes a 20 mph signpost, still doing upwards of double the speed limit, but reluctantly brakes as the drive snakes between trees. The planting is thinning out ahead, under the moonlight, when she sees a big fire truck parked athwart the drive and barely has time to stand on the stop pedal. There is a juddering of antilock as the Jaguar skids to a standstill just short of the OCCULUS truck, and very scary men with guns materialize from the darkness to either side and she finds herself staring into the grooves of a machine gun barrel.
The door is yanked open abruptly—they’ve got some kind of remote locking override—and a hand grabs her shoulder roughly. “On the ground now!” says the soldier.
“I don’t think so.” Fabian Everyman, also known as the Mandate, unfolds himself from the backseat and stretches as he steps clear of the car, his voice a low singsong that nevertheless wraps fingers of steel garroting wire around the throats of everyone who hears him. A nerdy-looking young man in jeans and a hoodie appears out of the darkness and blurs towards him; but he merely snaps his fingers and the youth collapses to the gravel, motionless. A faint popping and stench of burning skin betrays the disintegration of every military-strength defensive ward within hearing range. “Captain Stevens, make yourself known to me. Everyone else, be still”—he pauses—“you may breathe,” he adds, as if it is an afterthought for the benefit of the human statues frozen on every side. “You too,” he nudges the fallen—civilian? Laundry operative?—with the brightly polished toe of one dress shoe.
Iris is perturbed to find that she is free to move. Clearly her Lord’s intent privileges her. She steps out of the car and walks around to his side as one of the soldiers stumbles, almost sleepwalking, away from the big truck. Beyond it, something sparks and crackles in the gravel—a line bisecting the road, and the plantation of trees. A ward of some kind, and a big one if she’s any judge of things.
“I’m—I’m Stevens. H-he”—a faint gesture at the ground—“Dr. Schwartz, our Continuity liaison.” He stops moving.
Fabian smiles in the darkness. “I did wonder about him—not terribly military, is he? I believe Dr. Armstrong told you to expect me. Report, Captain.”
“Yuh … yessir.” Stevens clearly finds it a painful effort to speak, much less to think. “The, the police marksmen inside opened fire as we approached. One injured, condition stable, then the big ward went up around the house. Our K-22 shows a thaum field off the scale and the cops aren’t answering on Airwave or mobile phone—”
“I can clear the ward for you, Captain. Tell your men who I am and I will release them.”
“Yessir. Men, this is our back-up-up … new Masterrrr…” Stevens sounds as if he’s having trouble enunciating the words. One side of his face is slackening as Iris watches. His voice drops an octave, slurring drunkenly but gaining an uncanny echo: “All glory to the Black Pharaoh!”
“That’s enough.” Fabian snaps his fingers again. “Be free again to serve me, soldiers of England. You too, Doctor.” The unseen grin fills the darkness again; a million blind, many-legged things cringe in reverence before him in the woods. “Ah, hmm. I shall take care of the crude barrier presently. You and your men”—he nods at Stevens—“will deal with the police and the handmaids of the False Pretender. You will find the worst of their works in the cellars. My priestess will go before me; I shall grant her the power to deal with the Pretender’s minions.” A vast and airy power clamps itself around Iris’s mind and it is all she can do not to cry out in terror and awe as the night falls away before her strange new senses. “I grant you”—his gesture takes in the soldiers—“protection from what you will face this night.” Muffled swearing tells Iris that she’s not the only recipient of her Lord’s weird benediction. “I shall wait in the Grand Hall. When you find the Prime Minister, bring him before me.” He pauses. “Iris? I want you to leave the car open and the keys on the driver’s seat.” A grinning skull wreathed in flames of darkness howls with mirth before her inner eye. “Just a little jape at the expense of the Pretender.”
Iris hastens to prepare the car as her Lord directs. A soldier climbs into the cab of the big fire incident control vehicle and a moment later its engine grumbles and it rolls away from the driveway. Her Lord stands in its wheel tracks, facing the curtain of eerie green radiance that blocks the steps to Nether Stowe House. Other soldiers disperse to either side, behind the tree line.
Does he think he can—she begins to think, just as Fabian makes a gesture and the defensive ward bursts, pulsing outward into the night like a breath of wind from the abyss.
Then the shooting starts.
* * *
The former stable block is a three-story stone building facing onto a cobbled courtyard at one side of Nether Stowe House. The courtyard itself is reserved for parking at these events, both for the catering suppliers and for those guests whose status extends to chauffeur-driven limousines. Here the drivers wait with their cars, awaiting a call to drive round to the front of the house to collect their passengers.
Mo trots around the back of the pavilion and is halfway across the expanse of lawn when the hair rises on the back of her neck, a moment before a crackle of automatic gun
fire thunders out from beyond the front of the building. She flops to the grass, swearing and frightened, pulling her invisibility tight around her like a shawl; but invisibility won’t make a blind bit of difference to a random bullet, and all she can do is pray that all the shooting is around the other side of the house.
“CANDID, MADCAP, shooting just started, is this you?”
“MADCAP, CANDID, can confirm perimeter ward just dropped, OCCULUS moving forward, defenders returning fire. Can you take cover?”
Mo risks looking up, briefly. The floodlights cast long, razor-edged shadows across the lawn she’s lying on, revealing it to be as flat as a crepe. “I’m in the middle of the lawn. How about I head for the cars?”
“Do it. Alex is inbound with help. I’ll direct him your way.”
“Over,” she murmurs, rolls to her knees, and hikes up her skirt—the gown is ruined, but it’ll help her blend in with the shadows if she loses her invisibility—then knots it out of the way, and lurches into a crouching, erratic run, breathing heavily. “I’m too old for this stuff,” she pants under her breath.
The cars are parked in a neat row before the barred stable doors, gleaming in the moonlight like black and silver beetles—only bridal corteges come in white, and for some reason it strikes Mo as ludicrous that nobody ever drives a lime-green or purple candy-fleck limousine—and the drivers are either snoozing at the wheel or have gone elsewhere. She steps off the lawn, wincing at the sharp-edged tarmac and gravel underfoot, and casts around for Persephone’s Bentley. There it is, at one end, windscreen a silvery sheen in the night—
Something tickles the edge of her senses. She focuses, relaxing her invisibility as she peers into the night. The sheen on the windscreen doesn’t shift as she walks forward, it’s as if it’s part of the windscreen, not a reflection; and there’s a black dot at its heart—
She hears the clack of a gun being cocked directly behind her. “Freeze!”
The Delirium Brief Page 38