“Sit down!” the thick-necked blond barked in a South African accent. The room went silent, and everyone settled back into their seats.
Mia nodded in thanks and carried on. “As I was saying, we have a more important mission. Tonight, and tonight only, we know where the Senior Auditor will be. I’ve hired a number of civilian contractors to drive our vehicles in pursuit of the escapees, but they are a diversion. Instead, our full strength will be at the Bank of England…”
She spent the next hour detailing the plan, during which I was relegated to a tertiary role of protecting against the very unlikely possibility that he’d find a way through the Dreamscape. Jack left to act as a liaison with the suddenly cooperative Mammonites. I was a bit annoyed; when I’d claimed that the Senior Auditor was the killer, Dennis had been reluctant to act, but one call from Mia had completely changed his tune. That’s politics—and that left me alone with my thoughts, which were shitty companions, so I did what any other man who had gotten his wife killed and his daughter kidnapped would do: I went to the pub.
I made an excuse about needing to fetch some implements and slipped out around noon, which found me bellied up to the bar at the Royal Exchange half an hour later. I didn’t know his name, but I recognized the bald-headed bartender as I sat down, and he gave me a nod in return. I sipped a glass of rum and Coke, trying to get my thoughts in order.
For one thing, I still didn’t understand why the Senior Auditor had been stirring up riots across the city and then suddenly stopped a couple days ago. When I’d asked Mia, the young woman had been busy trying to make a call to someone in the Home Office, and she’d given me a hurried explanation about Brown trying to foment unrest to undermine the power of the Mammonites, which metaphysically rested on wealth and security. I wasn’t sure that her reasoning made sense, and I wondered if it wasn’t a chicken-and-egg scenario. There was another detail tickling at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t lay my finger on it.
Another thing that didn’t make sense was why he had taken my daughter. If he wasn’t going to be able to use her as a battery, and he already had Toscan as a hostage, then what was the real reason for taking her? I thought about Miranda’s warning—“He’s going to sacrifice her!”—and shivered. She’d said it before Brown had grabbed Olivia, but perhaps he’d already planned the act? I just didn’t know. I realized that I’d finished my first drink and signaled to the bartender for another.
Finally, I wasn’t appreciably closer to finding Dana. I’d done months of research and played piggy-in-the-middle to a plethora of organizations that had all promised to help me, but in the end, nothing had come of it. I was a failure. I couldn’t sink any lower.
“Mr. Adler. I’d like to place you under arrest.” The cut-glass voice could only belong to one man, and when I swiveled in my chair, downing my drink at the same time, I wasn’t surprised to see the moleish, Coke-bottle-lensed form of Detective Inspector James Badger, accompanied by two uniformed constables.
“And I’d like to place you under the ground.” Oh, shit. What had I just said? Alcohol wasn’t the answer to my problems. Damn you, Homer Simpson. One of the uniformed bobbies took a step toward me. If I were arrested right now, it would be the end of any hope I had of getting Olivia, let alone Dana, back.
“Halt!” Badger’s parade-ground voice ensured that any eyes not already on us snapped in our direction, and everyone froze.
“I—I’m sorry, sir,” I said, and my face flushed as I realized that there was a lump in my throat. I closed my eyes and fought to hold in a sob that was trying to claw its way out of my chest. I was so tired. I held out my hands to be cuffed.
“Oh, put your hands down, Mr. Adler. We aren’t going to do things that way if you just promise to behave while we head down to the station,” the DI snapped, and turned to his subordinates. “Go take a load off for a minute or two, lads.”
“But, sir, he—” rumbled the man who’d taken the step toward me.
“Lads, I owe Mr. Adler this courtesy—now please go take a seat,” Badger said, and gestured to a cushy booth in the back. The two bobbies pissed off and left us alone. “Mr. Adler. I’ve been sent to arrest you on charges of suspected kidnapping,” Badger said, putting a friendly hand on my shoulder.
A snort of derision burst out before I could stop it. “I’m the one being accused of kidnapping? My wife is missing, my daughter is missing, my mother disappeared over ten years ago, and I haven’t heard from my family since I woke up from my coma, yet you’re accusing me of kidnapping?” I vented my spleen on the detective inspector, who only twitched his walrus mustache. I stopped and thought about what I had just said. Maybe it did look a bit suspicious when you put it all together like that.
“As I was saying, Mr. Adler, I’ve been asked to take you in on suspicion of kidnapping. Nearly twenty counts.” He paused to take a deep breath, and I wrinkled my brow and shook my head. “Each one of the individuals in question went missing two nights ago, and all of them, including two of your colleagues, Janice Davis and Richard Klein, were members of a Facebook group, The UnAdled. The only member of this Facebook group who hasn’t disappeared is you,” he finished, leaning in close enough for me to smell his aftershave. Old Spice. Just like my gramps used to wear.
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“I didn’t think it was,” he replied, and I flinched away in surprise. This was the same man who had spent weeks hounding me, trying to put me in jail when there was a supernatural creature trying to devour London. Then a horrible thought percolated through my gray matter. When I had made my attempt to protect the priestess of Mammon, Miranda, Senior Auditor Brown had boasted of doing something terrible to trap the woman in her own dream. Jack had suggested that the half-dozen pensioners found nailed to the wall of a stately manor were his “terrible” act. I hadn’t bought it—and now I was pretty sure I was right.
“But I think I know who did take them,” I said, clenching my hands into fists. When I had defeated the puca, I’d inadvertently hurt people, a lot of people. Some of them had died. I’d initially been crushed by guilt, but in time I’d come to understand that while the difference between a man and a boy is that a man takes responsibility for his actions, the difference between a man and a wise man is that the wise man knows which of his actions to take responsibility for. If I hadn’t done what I’d done, then a lot more people would have gotten hurt. However, what had gotten me through the days until I’d gained that wisdom was the balm that I had managed to save some people too. Brown had decided to erase the one positive that had come out of the shit-storm of my last year. “That fucker,” I whispered, slamming my hand down on the counter—and half a dozen bottles behind the bar shattered with a loud crack.
**********
I regained consciousness on a cot in Paddington Green nick. I was in a small interior room that seemed to have been set up for overworked cops to catch forty winks. Blessed air conditioning hummed, and I wondered if this hadn’t been a server room as some point in the past. I was also a bit surprised that I hadn’t been placed in a holding cell. When Badger walked in a couple of minutes later, I asked why I wasn’t behind bars.
Badger concisely explained that the uniformed constables had thought that the noise of the bottles breaking was me taking a few shots at their beloved detective inspector, so they’d rugby-tackled me to the ground. Luckily for me, I was already unconscious before I hit the floor, passed out from my foolish, unintentional use of extradimensional energy, so I only found out about their overenthusiastic protective instincts when I asked Badger about the bleeding lump on the side of my head. Being ginger, I figured that no one would even notice another shade of red mixed in my hair, but it was important that I understand just how concussed I was so that I could view my plans with the appropriate amount of skepticism.
“I couldn’t formally issue the charge sheet while you were unconscious. However, now that you’re awake,” he finished, dropping a pile of paper on my chest.
&nb
sp; “I thought you said you didn’t believe I was guilty?” I said, my heart leaping into my throat. I glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that it was nearly five in the evening already. If they held me in the station, I wouldn’t have any time to prep. I could, of course, still go into the Dreamscape, but without some kind of link to the Senior Auditor, I could very easily end up protecting some kid from the monster under the bed instead of carrying out my part of Mia’s plan.
“I don’t believe you’re guilty, Mr. Adler, but it isn’t my decision to arrest you. It was my decision, though, to relay to Superintendent Singh your assertion that you know who was responsible for the kidnappings and that you were happy to cooperate in the investigation.” He paused and looked me in the eyes; I could see myself, pale and bruised, in his thick lenses. “You are happy to cooperate, aren’t you, Mr. Adler?” he asked.
“Yeah…” I said, comprehension slowly dawning. I nodded.
“Excellent. I had assured the superintendent that you would. Well, in that case, if you’d oblige me by explaining who has abducted these individuals?” Badger said, gesturing to the door. The bed felt damned good, but the tone of the DI’s voice informed me that, polite though he had been, his words hadn’t been a request.
I spent the next twenty minutes in an interview room, bringing Badger up to speed on the events of the past few days: the meetings with Dennis, my vain attempts to protect the priesthood of Mammon, and my failed assault on the Sons’ headquarters in the Dreamscape. He sat attentively, scribbling notes with the nub of a pencil and sipping from a large cup of black tea.
“…and Ms. Noel believes that Senior Auditor Brown is going to launch an attack against the Bank of England tonight, so she’s pulled together a force made up of the Reddertons, all of the Sons’ she could call back, and any regular law enforcement that she or Dennis can finagle out of the Home Office,” I explained.
“Ahhh…the Senior Auditor is a powerful sorcerer, and it sounds like he might not even be fully human anymore, but that still seems like overkill for just one man,” Badger stated and slurped his tea. I blinked a few times; the detective inspector hadn’t believed me when I’d told him about my Dreamwatching the year before, yet now it sounded like he knew a hell of a lot more than I did. I opened my mouth to ask him about it, but he beat me to it and continued speaking.
“And on top of that, why does it have to be tonight?” he said, and set down his tea.
“Ummm…” I said, displaying my famous wit and trying to gather my thoughts. “Mia claimed it has to be tonight because if the Senior Auditor wants to drive off the extradimensional entity known as Mammon, this is one of only three nights per year, the mundus of Ceres, when, according to the old Roman rites, the gates around this world are open, and the old demon of avarice is vulnerable,” I said.
I leaned forward and rubbed my chin. “When the Senior Auditor bugged out, he sprang a number of dangerous people from their holding cells, and Mia thinks he’ll use them in some way to help get into the bank. She’s convinced that he doesn’t have access to the Dreamscape anymore, so I’m only supposed to keep an eye on it”—at this point, I pulled a small chip of the building out of one of my trench coat pockets—“on the odd chance that he put something in motion before tonight. However, it doesn’t make sense to me. Brown went to a lot of trouble to clear the puca away, to kill the priesthood of Mammon, and to subvert or neutralize me,” I mused, stifling a yawn. “A head-on attack doesn’t seem like the right answer.”
“I agree with you, Mr. Adler. Sorcerers aren’t well known for their directness, and I believe that there is a factor that Mia is overlooking. She isn’t aware that he has your associates. They’ve all been touched by extradimensional forces too, and even if he had to sacrifice some or most of them to power his attack the other night, just one of them should be enough to get a sorcerer of his caliber back into the Dreamscape,” Badger said, continuing to scribble in his notebook.
“I’m sorry, Detective, but what the hell? Last year, when I was trying to convince you to help me, you acted like you didn’t believe a word that I said. Yet now you’re talking about sorcerers and extradimensional forces?” I blurted out. I’d spent a lot of time running errands and being battered all over London, and I’d been rewarded with less information that I’d just been given by Badger. There was probably a lesson in there somewhere, but it could wait until I wasn’t dead on my feet.
The squat little man adjusted his tie, pulled down his coat collar, and cleared his throat. There was a pause of another ten seconds: “I apologize for that little charade, Mr. Adler. We were in a train car full of people, and I couldn’t risk having my cover blown. You might have noticed that I was at your side at the end of the battle against the puca. I am merely guessing, but I presume that you have found that many things that you thought were coincidences are now turning out not to have been.” The detective inspector spread his hands and shrugged.
“Great, so you being assigned to my case wasn’t a coincidence either? What, were you keeping tabs on me, waiting until I did something, anything, that would show up on the Met’s radar?” The gratitude I had felt for the man a moment before was buried like a skier in an avalanche as I ground my teeth at the idea that yet another group had been actively monitoring me for who-knows-how-long.
“The British government has not existed for many hundreds of years without being cognizant of the goings-on of groups such as the Sons of Perseus. When they serve our interests, we work with them. I mean, we couldn’t not know about them. They’re hardly being very secret, with an office on Temple Avenue. We were keeping an eye on them, and, by extension, you,” Badger said while rubbing the bridge of his nose. He rolled his rounded shoulders and went on. “Now, Mr. Adler, if, based on information that the person planning the defense of the bank does not have, you believe that the Senior Auditor is going to be attacking from the Dreamscape, then who should you be calling?”
I was tired. I was beaten. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t have to literally bite my finger to hold back the urge to yell, “Ghostbusters!” Instead, I got out my phone, set it to speaker, and punched the entry for Mia. I thought it was going to go to voice mail, but she picked up on the eighth ring.
“Julian, where are you? You should be on site and bedded down.” Her vowels were bitten off sharply, and she sounded annoyed, but I knew that the information I had was vital, so I steamrolled ahead.
“Mia, it’s a feint. Brown is going to attack from the Dreamscape, he has—” I was cut off midsentence.
“He’s pulling the Anarchist shtick again, and the crowd of nearly ten thousand people gathered outside of the bank, howling for blood, would seem to disagree with your statement. The police are holding them back for now, but I don’t know—” A loud noise cut off her words, and the line went dead.
I turned toward Badger. “I guess we’re on our own.”
“Aye, lad. Let me know where you can do the most good, and I’ll get you there. All in the name of hunting down the kidnapper, of course,” Badger said.
My first instinct was to follow Mia’s plan and ask Badger to get me to the bank, so that I could fall asleep there. Frantic sounds of preparation carried through the interview room door, and I guessed that only an emergency response to the latest riot could cause that much commotion. It would have been relatively easy to join the convoy. However, one of my mentors, back when I had been a simple procurement officer, had drilled into me the need to “do the opposite,” which meant that you should always at least consider the polar opposite of your initial reaction. It had kept me from blundering into quite a few financial traps; now I had to hope that it kept me out of a real one. I closed my eyes and thought. After a couple of minutes, I could hear the detective inspector shifting in his seat, but to his credit, he didn’t interrupt my train of thought.
I had spent years wanting to be the hero in the real world that I had been in the Dreamscape, and it had cost me my wife. When I’d woken from my coma, I’d
told myself that I’d quit being the hero, do only what I needed to get Dana back. I’d ignored the needs of the dreamers of London, but I’d still charged into the plot to kill the Mammonites, and it had cost me my daughter. Now Brown would be expecting me to keep playing the hero. To run toward the latest fire. In fact, he had done everything he could to create the largest blaze possible. A conflagration that I couldn’t miss. I knew where we had to go. For Olivia’s sake, I’d better not be wrong.
Chapter 28 1800–1900, Monday, October 5, 2015
The early-evening air was cool as I laboriously unfurled myself from the unmarked Ford Focus patrol car. I used the tube to get around nowadays, but I’d learned to drive in a boat-like 1984 Buick Electra Coupe. Sure, the new Ford Focus had fancy “extras” like power steering, an engine that got more than eight miles to the gallon, and seat belts, but could you fit an entire football team in with room to spare?
“Are you sure that you couldn’t, you know, just ‘accidentally’ leave one of those MP5s where I could just happen to pick it up?” I asked Detective Inspector Badger as he checked his revolver and the two armed-response unit officers got geared up, strapping on the aforementioned automatic carbines as well as bulletproof vests that had been stored in the trunk of the car.
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