“Packages.” Jim grins boyishly, his face losing thirty years in a second.
“Packages. Hur hur.” I stifle a yawn. “It’s too early for bed and I’m getting hungry. How about we freshen up, and once they deliver the engagement presents we find something to eat?”
“Sounds like a plan,” he agrees, and retreats to the bathroom before I can stake my claim, the bastard.
* * *
About the “engagement presents.”
This is the post-9/11 era, and we spooks have to run the gauntlet of airport security whenever we travel. Which puts a little bit of a crimp on our activities, as you can imagine. When you enter the USA or the UK, before you are granted admission by the passport officer, you exist in an uneasy legal limbo. You are technically outside the rule of domestic law, and your civil rights don’t quite exist. Smartphones, laptops, and personal electronics are all subject to search and seizure at the border. Bags can and will be searched. Body cavities can be searched. So if you are an illegal, carrying any equipment on the job will cause you to run an unacceptable risk of exposure. Hence our faked-up phones with the fabricated social media bread-crumb trail and sanitized address books, and my irritation at being unable to work en route.
Which brings me to supply-chain logistics, and our saviors Amazon, AliExpress, and eBay.
As a power couple on an engagement celebration, nobody really blinks at us receiving gift-wrapped packages delivered poste restante to our hotel. There are greeting cards, of course, mailed the usual way. A few pieces of discreetly packaged clothing for me, to help with my sunburn vulnerability. Some Mall Ninja toys like pocket knives and LED flashlights for Jim. And some other stuff.
The postal service inspectors scan everything, and UPS and FedEx check the contents of parcels for explosives. But it’s astonishing what you can get your hands on if you buy on the big e-commerce sites and know how to use drop-shipping services. Some of the drop-shippers Derek uses will forward anything inside the continental United States. I suspect their main customer base are small-scale drug dealers.
For starters, our real phones arrive in tamper-proof packaging from the factory, as do a couple of SIMs from a local phone company. Then magic happens, once both of us type in some really long and annoying passwords we memorized and download the flashable firmware upgrades waiting for us on a website, check some even more annoying long numbers to ensure the firmware hasn’t been tampered with, and boot them up. That gives us an encrypted messaging system, OFCUT software—a standardized suite of magic-sensing apps—and dual rear-facing cameras for that extra special sauce. (It’s only a matter of time before the powers that be ban the manufacture of dual-camera systems and then brick all existing ones in the name of security; but in the meantime, it’s convenient as fuck for us that they haven’t.) The phones we traveled with go in the trash. They were set up in anticipation of being searched or infected with malware by the opposition as we entered the country, and even though we didn’t get searched, they were probably logged on our way through the airport and can be used to ID us as recent arrivals.
Now we get to the dangerous stuff.
Derek, in his capacity as mission planner, fucking loves Amazon. Amazon doesn’t sell firearms, but it does sell tasers, handcuffs, batons, and pepper spray. There’s also a suit of black Kevlar and ceramic body armor for Jim, more Darth Vader than Mall Ninja. As it happens, neither Jim nor I are certificated for firearms—but we’re not the only act in this circus. For example, one of our earlier plans involved members of the SRR (the successor to the SAS) armed with locally sourced Glocks and AR-15s—with aftermarket bump stocks to convert them to full auto, of course. God bless the NRA. But that’s not going to be necessary now, thanks to another of Derek’s suggestions and an idea of mine.
If we arrived as a single team, carrying all these toys in our luggage from Heathrow, we would be as conspicuous as we’d be if we came with a marching band and passports in the name of James Bond. But because we flew in via different routes in small teams, and our kit came piecemeal on various slow boats from China, piling up in different hotel mail rooms over a period of a week, no single pair of eyebrows are going to be raised. It worked for Mossad in Dubai and it can bloody well work for SOE at three target sites in America. At least that’s the theory.
* * *
The plan is intricate, and because it involves multiple teams converging on the target from different directions, perhaps some further background is needed.
So, two weeks earlier, in the south of England …
“It’s preposterous. We’re not, not head-bangers! If he insists on us doing it this way, it’s going to get people killed.” Derek shakes his cupped right hand when he gets agitated, as if he’s rolling a set of dice. “Anyway, it’s ridiculous! What does he think he’s playing at?”
“Fantasy spy games,” I say absent-mindedly. “Oh look, we’re landing.”
“What?” He cups his hands around one side of the bulky green headset: “I can barely hear you!”
That’s not surprising: the army helicopter we’re hitching a ride in is so loud that even with noise-cancelling headphones I can feel the vibrations in my bones. It’s early evening, there are no convenient reading lights back here, and I’ve been unable to read or write during the flight, so I’ve had altogether too much time to stare past the flight crew’s helmets at the dark front window, imagining what could go wrong. Now we’re descending towards Camp Tolkien on Dartmoor, which means that in about an hour I’m going to be interviewing the final candidate for the team. No, we are going to be interviewing the final recruit, I remind myself. And seeing whether Derek’s idea for how to use her will work.
There is a helipad outside the front gate to the compound, some distance from the stack of Portakabins and unpaved car park around the entrance in the razor-wire-topped concrete wall. Our helicopter wallows briefly, then settles with a bump on the pad. “You can unfasten your seatbelts and climb out when you’re ready. Captain Perceval is waiting for you at the guardhouse,” says the pilot. He sounds relieved to be rid of us.
I scramble out of the back of the flimsy scout chopper and help Derek down—he’s middle-aged, with creaky knees and poor eyesight—and then walk, shoulders instinctively hunched, towards the guardhouse. “Mhari Murphy and Derek Blacker to see Captain Perceval,” I say, holding up my warrant card in front of the camera. “We’re expected.”
An apologetic throat-clearing comes from the grille of an entryphone. “Can’t let you in without authorization, ma’am.”
For an instant I see red. “I’m on your list,” I say. “Can’t you just—”
Another voice interrupts. “I’ll take it from here, Private. Ms. Murphy, please come inside the guardroom.” The door opens and I step inside. The room is cramped, mostly a bench beneath a wide armored window, with a side door opening into a back room. A squaddie stands in the far corner of the room, watching me warily from behind a big black gun. Cameras whirr and point at me.
I hold up my warrant card to the unblinking gaze. “Satisfied, Captain?”
“Yes.” The soldier lowers his gun to point at the floor as the back door opens and an officer, presumably Captain Perceval, enters. (But he doesn’t look away from me, or blink, not even once.) “I’ll escort you inside the perimeter, Ms. Murphy. And your colleague, Mr.—”
“Blacker. Is Yarisol’mün ready for us?”
“Jar-Jar? Yes, she’s waiting.”
I wince at his casual disrespect as I follow Captain Perceval into the rear. We wait for a minute while Derek goes through the same airlock rigmarole with the armed guard and the dual cameras that double as remote-controlled Basilisk guns, then follow him along a windowless corridor. The ceiling is dotted with strange-looking unlit lights. “Ultraviolet LED strobes,” Captain Perceval comments, not looking my way, “in case of mages like yourself.” I don’t bother to correct him. “They’re safed for now, but make sure you’ve got clearance before you enter.”
Ah. “Get many break-out attempts, do you?”
“Oddly, no.” We come to the end of the tunnel and then another guardroom. “The magi are actually quite tractable, now that they’re part of an established hierarchy of bindings again. More so than the regular Host knights, anyway.”
“I thought they’d shipped out?”
“Most of them have.” He side-eyes me. “What can you tell me?” he asks, his tone cautious.
“Don’t trust the PM’s sense of humor.” Camp Tolkien is two-thirds empty right now, most of the invading alfär expeditionary force having been forcibly bound to the Will of the Black Pharaoh and sent to Aleppo, where they are bloodily crushing the Caliphate. What’s left are not so much the dregs of the Host of Air and Darkness as an unstable explosive precipitate. “Tell me about Yarisol? In your own words? Why the nickname?”
Perceval looks unhappy. “You know the scene where Jar-Jar Binks steps in the shit? There was a stupid accident in the early days. She was on a detail mucking out the stables. The name stuck because unicorn droppings stink like nothing on earth and bored squaddies think that kind of thing is funny. Also, she is a bit clumsy.” I feel a chill of foreboding. “That’s why she didn’t make the cut for Syria. What do you want with her?”
“Oh, just a chat.” Behind me, Derek is making frantic hand-gestures signifying deep unease. “You don’t think it’s odd that she’s female?”
He shakes his head as we wait for a guard to unlock the next set of gates and admit us to a central hub with corridors radiating off in six directions. “No, why?”
Because she’s a female alfär mage, I don’t say. The only female alfär PHANG. Half the alfär regular soldiers are female, but all but one of their bloodsuckers are male. Formerly male. “Just curious.” The gate unlocks with a whine of motorized bolts and Captain Perceval waves Derek and myself through.
Eventually we arrive at an interview room. There are doors on two opposite walls, a transparent window bisecting it, tables and chairs on either side. The far side of the room contains some elaborate security devices: defensive wards on all surfaces, nozzles designed to spray salt and rice grains everywhere, ultraviolet flash bulbs and paired camera turrets. I’ve seen the like in the custody suite under Belgravia nick where they hold paranormal arrestees, the so-called supervillains. These are the sort of precautions you’d want for debriefing battle-hardened vampire sorcerers, which makes me wonder what the hell we’re letting ourselves in for here.
“I’ll be outside,” says Captain Perceval. “Phone when you’re done.”
He points at a wired telephone handset on the table, then turns and leaves. The door locks behind us and I look at Derek. “Thoughts?”
Derek looks apprehensive. “You’re sure about this?”
I shrug. “We’ll see.” I’m not sure at all, but the PM’s little list of people to bring on board was worryingly specific. And I did a little background reading—just enough to tell me that something smells wrong here.
The alfär, our bloodthirsty hominid relatives from the universe next door, inflict PHANG syndrome on their combat mages to enhance their lethality. To make them a little more tractable, and keep them out of the lines of hereditary succession, they also castrate them—the male ones, that is. The female ones are another matter. Or rather, the female one. I don’t know if the Host that invaded us last year was atypical, but all their magi, with one exception, were male eunuchs. And the PM has sent me here to recruit the shy, weak, klutzy, pathetic excuse for a soldier who is the exception. “Do you suppose—” I begin, just as the door on the other side of the room opens and Jar-Yarisol’mün shuffles inside.
H. alfarensis is our species’ closest surviving relative. So close that, like Neanderthals (if any were still alive), they’re probably inter-fertile with us and could just about pass for normal on the high street, if you did something about the distinct points on their ears and the psychopathic attitude. They’re slim and graceful and look as if they wouldn’t be much use in a fight, but appearances are deceptive. Among the first things genome sequencing established was that they’ve got a variant FOXP2 gene—vital for language acquisition, and implicated in ritual magic performance—and a frameshift mutation in their MYH7 gene that actually makes their skeletal muscles a lot stronger per unit mass. The combination is utterly deadly. When a desperate force of a couple of thousand soldiers, exiled survivors of a devastating necromantic world war, trashed Yorkshire and went head to head with the British Army and the RAF on their home turf, they only lost because of systematic intelligence failures on their part (and their leadership being as mad as a box of frogs).
But the woman on the other side of the glass window isn’t the graceful and deadly exemplar of the elven master race I’ve been expecting.
Yarisol’mün—that’s her bare-naked identity, although I mustn’t use it to her face unless I’m willing to kill her: alfär sorcerers take a really dim view of people misusing their true names—shuffles through the door, eyes downcast and left shoulder hunched defensively. Stripped of all glamour she’s a skinny wee thing, of indeterminate age, with pallid skin and lanky blonde hair. It trails to her shoulders and looks like she hasn’t washed it for a month. Alfär look different enough from us that I can’t guess her age, but her file says she’s thirty-two and has been a mage since she could crawl, which means she’s consumed the lives of maybe three or four hundred helots. (I flash for a moment on Mr. Kadir’s expression as I filled the sample tubes with his blood. Who am I to judge?) She wears a grubby orange boiler suit and wrist and ankle cuffs. There are no obvious chains in sight, for her fetters are abstract, and vastly stronger than steel. Her feet are bare and slightly grubby.
She stops moving just as the door closes behind her. She turns as if she wants to leave, then stops.
“Jar-Jar,” says Captain Perceval, “sit down, Jar-Jar. Sit.” He speaks loudly and slowly, as if addressing a particularly ill-trained spaniel. For a moment I hate him. I force back the impulse to bite out his throat and drink him dry. It’s not just the contemptible nickname the asshole camp guards pinned on a vulnerable woman: he seems oblivious to the incandescent beauty on the other side of the window, beaten down and broken by—
What?
I hastily self-assess. No, my ward isn’t kicking off, so I’m not under the influence of any external glamour or geas. Yarisol is passive, depressed (I can feel her black dog at the back of my head), grief-stricken. She’s part of my brood, in need of—
What the fuck? Okay, so maybe His Eldritch Majesty knows something that I don’t.
“What do you want me to call you?” I ask.
She stares at the floor.
“Jar-Jar,” says Captain Perceval, “she answers to Jar-Jar.”
Well fuck. “Jar-Jar, look at me,” I tell her.
For a couple of seconds she doesn’t react, but shuffles towards the chair and fumbles her way into it.
“Look at me,” I repeat, then push my will in her direction. “Look.”
She finally gives up her attempted shoegaze and peers at me sidelong from under her fringe. Something about her expression, the way it slides away from my face, rings bells. “Jar-Jar,” Captain Perceval brays, “this is Ms. Murphy from London, she’s a very important visitor—”
“Shut up,” I snarl quietly. “Captain, has anyone done a psych assessment on her?”
“What? Why would we do that?”
She sits upright in the chair and faces us attentively but she’s not making eye contact. And—I focus—she’s tapping the fingers of her left hand on her thigh in a complex, syncopated rhythm that makes me itch to start counting. She’s not much to look at, but in my mind’s eye she’s beautiful, a swirling vision of carmine complexity woven from the strands of a myriad of invocations, her head surrounded by a halo of crimson V-feeders so dense that she glows—
“Service to the All-Highest, Yarisol,” I say haltingly in the de-fanged dialect of Old Enochian that the People use for everyday speech
. “I am Mhari.” Abbreviated names are just about acceptable from leader to subordinate, but I’m damned if I’m going to call her Jar-Jar. My Old Enochian is about as good as my schoolgirl French—coming from the Admin side of things I didn’t see the need for it or get any tuition until about a year ago—but it gets her attention. The elven waifu with fangs looks at me properly for the first time: her eyes widen in surprise, and she gasps slightly.
“Mistress, I meant no disrespect!”
“Peace,” I tell her, then realize Captain Perceval and Derek are both looking at me, baffled and perplexed respectively.
“All-Highest commands me on a quest. He says you will come. Will you do this?”
“What?” asks the captain. I look at him and twitch and he shuts his mouth hastily.
“I obey, mistress,” she says in a monotone, but something about her aura feels happy, as if a missing piece has just slotted into the middle of her jigsaw puzzle of life. Purposeful.
“Do you know the—” I think furiously for a minute. “The rite of face-stealing?” Is it even possible for an alfär mage to steal the memories and appearance of another person without cross-infecting them with V-parasites? I don’t know, but Yarisol is clearly unsuited for this mission without acquiring an additional veneer of humanity that no amount of classroom study will give her, and it would kill two birds with one stone if she can do it.
“I know of it, yes.” She nods, a gesture she must have learned from her captors, and I adjust my assessment of her accordingly. Autism manifests differently between human men and women. I’ve got no previous experience of what it looks like in non-human hominids, so I’ll just have to play it by ear.
“Have you ever performed it?” I persist.
“Why would I?” She’s clearly puzzled.
“All-Highest requires that if, if possible, you take the face and memories of another. Do you need assistance? Agent First of Spies and Liars can help.” Alfär eyes look wide to begin with, and when I mention Cassie by rank Yarisol’s nearly tumble out of her head. She glances from side to side frantically.
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