“Wonderful,” I manage. Trying to match her mordant humor seems to help with the chore of holding things together: “This day just keeps on getting better.”
“Yes, it does,” says Superintendent Christie, her grim reaper voice just behind my right ear. “Because you do not get to bugger off back to London and leave me carrying the can. Once I get that bloody chopper out of the picture, you and I” – she pokes me in the small of my back – “are going to have a little chat about what happened in there. Because my boss is going to ask me for an explanation, and it had better be one which won’t set this whole city on fire by nightfall. Is that clear?”
We end up in a briefing room in a police station on Barn Street. At least it’s not a cell: that’s a hopeful sign.
We are not, it seems, expected to shoulder the blame for Übermensch going off his trolley, throwing six assorted vehicles around, upending an ambulance, severely injuring half a dozen Anti-Fascist Action members, and nailing a middle-aged taxi driver to the back wall of his home for the crimes of having been born in Peshawar and dyeing his beard with henna. In fact Officer Friendly is quite popular with the force hereabouts, having saved any number of his non-superpowered colleagues the trouble of having to tackle the aforementioned juiced-up thug themselves.
However, we’re getting rather less love for how we dealt with Anwar Kadir, a regular at the mosque and all around good egg – until he pulled out the extremely dodgy textbook, inscribed a summoning grid in the number two classroom, sacrificed a rooster, and got himself taken over by a class four manifestation (commonly known by the locals hereabouts as a Djinn).
The death of Mohammed Nasir, the unfortunate mosque committee member who let us in, is not going to be easily brushed under the carpet. Neither is that of Mr. Kadir, although the fact that he was throwing lightning bolts around at the time and threatening a Superintendent weighs in our favor.
But the steaming turd in the soup tureen is the fact that we went inside a mosque in hot pursuit and killed him. This is not good. In fact, it is extraordinarily bad. It would be bad enough if we’d done it in a church or a synagogue, but doing it in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood in the middle of a race riot…
Paradoxically, what saves the day turns out to be the TV news cameras showing me stumbling out into the daylight with my arm over White Mask’s shoulders, both of us absolutely covered in gore. Mhari was right – my suit’s utterly ruined – but it takes very little effort to imply that I’ve been injured in the course of taking down a superpowered monster. Superintendent Christie simply arranges for an ambulance to back up to the front door and for me to be taken away on a stretcher. Mr. Nasir was not the only member of the mosque committee to be sheltering on the premises. When the Super invited them to examine Kadir’s little pentacle, there were many sharp intakes of breath. Then the imam picked up the book Mr. Kadir was working with – disturbing the crime scene, but we’ll let that pass – and started swearing loudly in Pashtun. It was not a copy of the Koran; it was not a holy book at all. In fact, it was very, very unholy indeed, positively unclean – and he wanted it removed from his mosque as fast as possible.
We (I am using the corporate “we” here: I, personally, wasn’t involved at this point in time) were happy to make it go away. The Laundry is always happy to expand its archives.
But this leaves us dealing with the unpalatable task of explaining our role in a multiple fatality police incident involving two separate riots and a superhero dust-up. If I was an authorized firearms officer and I’d just shot someone – hell, if I’d so much as drawn my gun and pointed it, never mind discharging it – I’d be facing a lengthy period of suspension on pay pending an IPCC enquiry to determine if in fact I had behaved lawfully, with possible prosecution at the end of the process if I hadn’t. I’m not a police officer and I didn’t use a firearm and I’m actually supposed to be running a new type of quick reaction force with backing from the Home Office, and the procedures we’re supposed to follow start out murky, then drive off a legal cliff.
Which makes it a very good thing indeed that the only witnesses were Mhari, me, Superintendent Alice Christie, Constable Ed Carter (hospitalized for shock: under heavy sedation, may never work again), and Sergeant Barry Samson, who had actually drawn on Mr. Kadir and was about to pull the trigger when I beat him to it and maybe saved his life.
And which also explains why at ten o’clock at night I’m sitting in a briefing room, wearing a set of exercise sweats borrowed from the GMP ladies’ basketball team and drinking a bottle of Coke Zero while Alice, who has spent the last four hours on damage control, explains what’s going to happen in words of one syllable. Mhari – who escaped the worst of the mess when Mr. Nasir exploded because she was standing behind me – is also present: she’s removed her mask and is looking surprisingly subdued.
“I am not going to charge you with manslaughter, Dr. O’Brien, because it is patently obvious that you were acting in self-defense and, indeed, in defense of myself and my officers. Personally, I would like to thank you for what you did back there. Nevertheless, I and my force commander would be extremely pleased if your team could refrain from visiting us again in an active front-line role until all your people are officially on the books as sworn-in constables. If the Met would see fit to discover that they’ve misplaced the paperwork and you simply forgot to tell me that your attestation was held the day before yesterday, that would be amazingly helpful. Oh, and if you could remind your friend from ACPO that he designated you as an Authorized Firearms Officer as well? You will need to talk to the IPCC about establishing due procedures for investigating fatalities resulting from the actions of officers on your, ah, force, and for controlling the use of potentially lethal weapons. I assume you have no objection to my division filing the preliminary paperwork to refer Mr. Kadir’s death to the IPCC, and will supply your own sworn testimony in due course.”
“I understand,” I say woodenly. There’s no credit to be gained by pointing out that in my parent organization we regularly use lethal force with minimal oversight: quite the contrary. I’m not in Kansas anymore, and the Security Service is supposed to leave this kind of head-banging to SCO19 and, in extremis, the Army.
Alice rolls her eyes. “You would not believe the shit-storm that’s going to land on my head tomorrow, and on yours the day after. IPCC fatal incident investigations rattle on for years; they don’t terminate until the weight of paperwork exceeds the fully loaded coffin and the gravestone on top. Sometimes they result in a manslaughter prosecution. I’m pretty sure this one won’t, but your delayed or misfiled paperwork is absolutely not going to make things better. You can expect a dressing-down from Professional Standards, at the very least. And I’m serious about not coming back here until you’ve got your ducks in a row.”
“Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to do that,” I tell her. Yes, a three- to six-month paid vacation would be just fine right now. I instinctively nudge my violin case with one foot. I spent a couple of hours cleaning it, but there are still patches of dried blood that will take specialist attention. “I’m not sure we’ve got time, though. My unit didn’t even exist until last Tuesday —”
“You’d better make time. If this was your organization’s first outing, you might be able to roll over it, or not: but it all depends on whether the Home Secretary is feeling merciful and how the press spin things in tomorrow’s broadsheets. At least Officer Friendly is on the books, and tackling that tanked-up chav is going to earn credit in the right places.”
“We’d better head back for London,” I say tiredly.
Mhari sniffs. “Ramona can drive. Officer Friendly took off a couple of hours ago under his own power.”
“You go.” Alice shakes her head. “I’ll walk you to the car park. Oh, and we haven’t had this conversation. Understand?”
“Absolutely,” I say.
“Yes,” agrees Mhari.
“Good. Because if we had accidentally discussed ways of working a
round an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation, that would be very bad indeed – for all of us.”
And that’s how our superhero team’s first clash with the forces of evil comes to an end.
It’s after eleven at night by the time Ramona, having driven out of town in her white van camouflage, takes us up into the starry vastness of the stratosphere while the abyssal ghosts hoot and trill in existential pain behind us. We blaze a cometary course southeast before descending somewhere north of the M25 to drive back into town along the A1 in dug-out canoe mode. Consequently, we don’t slither and slide into the car park until shortly after midnight.
As soon as the hatch dilates, my smartphone beeps repeatedly, announcing a slew of messages. “Wait,” I say. The very first one I glance at is an SMS from Dr. Armstrong. See me in your office as soon as you arrive. Bring everyone who is traveling with you. “Damn.”
“What?” says Mhari.
“We’re meeting the Auditors, upstairs, right now.”
“Shit.” It occurs to me that Mhari is getting just a tad repetitive: I resolve to find a way to tackle her about her language – but not right now.
“Do they want me, too?” Ramona sounds mildly anxious. It occurs to me to wonder if she’s made the Auditors’ acquaintance yet.
“Yes, they want all of us. Follow me,” I say, and I stumble tiredly towards the lift. I’m still wearing the borrowed sweats, violin in one hand and bagged-up remains of my second-best work suit in the other. I don’t so much feel like I’ve been dragged backwards through a hedge as I feel like I’ve been stomped flat, chewed up, and spat out by the Cape buffalo that lives on the other side.
The lift door opens onto the twilit lobby. There is a trail of light leaking along the corridor from the boardroom doorway. My mouth tastes of ashes and I’m exhausted: I really don’t feel up to another grilling today, but needs must. I slowly walk towards the inevitable reckoning.
I’m about to touch the door handle when someone opens it from the other side. “Ah, Dominique,” says the SA. His smile is polite but strained. “Do come in. And you, Ms. Murphy, Ms. Random.” He looks past us. “Chief Superintendent Grey is elsewhere? Excellent. Do make yourselves comfortable —”
“Yes, do,” echoes the silver-haired elder from the Audit Committee who confronted me the week before. “Please seal the room, Dr. Armstrong.”
They’ve brought food. My nostrils flare: the odor of pizza drifts from a stack of square boxes in the middle of the table. They’ve even brought drinks, or at least bottles of mineral water. I’m instantly on edge, scenting a setup. “I expect you’ve missed your tea,” says the Mouse Lady from the Audit Committee. (The only one who’s not here is the woman named Persephone.) “Do sit down, ladies.” Her attempt at emulating domestic hospitality is a washout, I’m afraid: she’s even less good at doing motherly than I am.
The SA paces the perimeter of the room, sprinkling white powder from a silvery Thermos flask. Mhari looks at me apprehensively, then takes a seat; Ramona rolls up beside her. “I don’t understand,” I say, glancing at Dr. Armstrong.
“He’s establishing a field-expedient grid,” says Silver-Hair. “Total privacy is required. In the meantime, feel free to tuck in; you must be famished. Oh, I nearly forgot.” He picks up a different thermally insulated container, decorated with biohazard symbols. “This is for you, Ms. Murphy. I suggest you consume it within the next hour; it will be nonviable by tomorrow.”
I shudder and look away, suddenly nauseous. Oh God, they did it. They went and did it. PHANGs need a blood meal at least once every two weeks or their V-parasite runs wild. The trouble is, it has to be blood from another living human being. The commensal parasites that give them their superpowers, by way of the law of contagion, use the blood as a bridge into the brain of their victims – which they chew holes in. Blood is just a communications channel, not the meal itself, and V syndrome is a horrible neurodegenerative affliction I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy – similar to K syndrome, except at one remove. Hideous and terminal, and —
Mouse Woman notices me staring: “The donor is in a hospice, Dr. O’Brien, in the end stages of malignant melanoma. In this instance, she is already unconscious and will be dead of natural causes within twenty-four hours – she won’t have time to suffer from V syndrome.”
Mhari gives me a guilty sidelong look, her shoulders hunched. I look away and swallow. My stomach rumbles and the pizza smells wonderful, but I don’t feel right about dining at this table.
“Please go ahead and eat,” Mouse Woman tells me, a note of iron creeping into her voice. “This meeting is going to take some time.”
Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. I can still taste the metallic strangeness of Mohammed Nasir’s blood on my lips. (I spat and rinsed with bottled water but it doesn’t seem to go away.) I pull the nearest box towards me and open it. Pineapple and mushroom and ham: doubly damned I am. I nibble on the edge of a slice as Dr. Armstrong repeats his circuit of the room, chanting quiet mnemonics in Old Enochian. He sketches a ward on the boardroom door, then connects a crude-looking black box to the salt trail using a ribbon cable, takes his seat at the table, and switches on an LED camping lantern. “Is everybody ready?” he asks.
I nod, mouth full. Mhari is sucking liquid through an opaque straw. Ramona shakes her head. “Not really,” she says quietly. She’s been unusually subdued since we came up here. I wonder if she knows how she’s been set up?
“Tough.” The SA smiles humorlessly as he bends down and presses a button on the black box.
The office, and the faint traffic noises from outside, vanish.
We sit around a boardroom table floating atop a circle of carpet surrounded by total blackness, eating pizza and drinking blood. The only illumination is the SA’s camping lantern.
“We have some questions for you,” says Dr. Armstrong. “One at a time. Starting with, precisely what happened between the time you left the car park below this building and the time you returned. In your own words, without compulsion. Mo, you first.” He raises his fingers and the quality of sound in the ward deadens until the only things I can hear are the Auditors and my own voice. (Great: they’ve put the others in a cone of silence.)
Fever-chills run up and down my spine. “What about Jim?” I ask.
“You have no need to know.” Mouse Woman’s eyes are shadowed.
Oh dear. “Well then.” I lick my lips. “Ramona led us to her vehicle, and then…”
It seems to take forever to tell the tale, but the Auditors listen patiently. Then they release Mhari from the cone of silence and ask her to recount her version of events. I’m allowed to listen in but not contribute: as their manager I may have to defend them later if they say anything inadvisable.
I cringe when she gets to the sequence where Officer Friendly broke into the taxi driver’s backyard and found what Übermensch had done there. Disgusting doesn’t begin to describe it. Stomach-churning? Yes. But his sadism was constrained in the end by his lack of imagination: it was vile but petty.
Mhari describes the events in the classroom at the mosque and our subsequent discussions with Superintendent Christie. She makes no attempt to dissemble or self-censor, which surprises me: I didn’t know she’d encountered Dr. Armstrong and his colleagues in their professional capacity before, but her body language is totally cowed, submissive. Not what one would expect from one of the self-identified lords and ladies who rule humanity from the shadows, setting interest rates and offering credit – not even what you’d expect from a vampire.
Finally it’s Ramona’s turn, but at this point she’s pretty much just confirming what Mhari and I told the auditors. At the end, the Mouse Lady nods. “I believe your accounts are consistent,” she says. “Michael?”
“Yes,” the SA says slowly. “Yes, indeed. Dr. O’Brien” – he leans forward – “did you at any time see Chief Superintendent Grey? From the time you entered the basement to the time you arrived back here?”
Wait, what? “Of course,” I say, confused. “He was sitting right behind me in the flying submarine —”
“I’m sorry, but I believe I have not made myself sufficiently clear. You have said that you saw Officer Friendly sitting behind you. Did you at any point see James Grey’s face?”
“Whu-well!” I sit back, and glance at Ramona. She looks bewildered. “Well no, but he had his armor on the whole time. Why would I see his face?”
“Ms. Random, Ms. Murphy – did either of you see Chief Superintendent Grey? Or just a suit of armor?”
“Ulp.” Mhari pushes her biohazard container aside and licks her lips. They glisten black in the dim glow of the lantern. “I don’t believe so,” she says hesitantly.
“It was definitely Jim in there!” Ramona insists. “I mean, he may use a voice distorter but his diction and body language…?” She looks around the table uncertainly. “You’re serious,” she says in a small voice.
“Didn’t he say he couldn’t get a satellite signal inside the flying sub?” asks Mhari.
“We only have his word for it,” I remind her. I look at the SA. “Are you serious?” I ask. “Do you really believe Jim wasn’t inside that suit of armor?”
“I have heard no conclusive testimony to the effect that he was,” says Dr. Armstrong, “merely conjecture based on diction and body language.”
Oh god. Officer Friendly was sitting behind me for the whole flight out. Standing behind me. Whoever was in that suit could have leaned forward and garroted me and I wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“I do not believe you were in immediate danger,” the SA says calmly.
“We are merely investigating one low-probability contingency,” echoes the Mouse Woman. “That information received from a sister agency is of questionable accuracy.”
Silver-Hair leans back from the table and makes a steeple with his fingertips. “There are lessons to be learned,” he says.
The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files) Page 23