‘Perhaps we’re dealing with a type of Fae that uses fear as a defence,’ said Reynolds.
‘Why not a practitioner?’ I asked.
‘It seems too reactive,’ she said, and she had a point. Practitioner magic was all about thought and control. This fear projection did seem reactive. ‘And it didn’t do the perp much good, now, did it?’
Assuming that Anthony Lane, our gunman, had been the source of the fear. I pointed this out and we knocked it back and forth, but agreed we didn’t have enough data to be sure.
‘Another thing you might find familiar,’ said Reynolds, ‘was Lane’s profile.’
‘Don’t tell me – mild-mannered, apparently normal. Friends and family baffled?’
‘Yep,’ said Reynolds. ‘Worked at the 7-Eleven on McLaughlin Avenue – less than five hundred yards away. Never showed any interest in guns until he drove to Reno the previous weekend and bought his Glock at a local gun store.’
In other words, a similar profile to William Lloyd, who also gave no indication he was about to go postal until the day he did.
‘Do you know if he’d joined any chat rooms or had spent time on social media?’ I asked.
‘What – you mean more than anyone else?’ said Reynolds.
‘You can ask your friends at the NSA,’ I said. ‘They’re bound to have the metadata.’
Reynolds put down her coffee mug and leaned in closer to the screen. I noticed then that the mug had life-sized fingerprint smudges painted on the side.
‘Hey, guys,’ she said. ‘How about it – you can get favours on both sides of the pond.’
We gave them a couple of seconds to reply but of course they didn’t. The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching you when you want him to.
Work pretty much covered, I gave Reynolds the Bulge update and she told me she’d leased a new car, a proper off-road SUV this time. We promised to keep each other, and presumably the NSA, regularly updated and hung up.
There was a scratching at the door and when I investigated I found Toby sitting on his haunches and looking at me with an expectant expression. I glanced over to the first floor opposite and saw that the lights in the breakfast room were on. Toby obviously needed me to open a silver salver and liberate some sausages.
When I’d first arrived at the Folly, Molly had insisted on cooking breakfast for twenty instead of an actual complement of three – not counting Toby. Since then the numbers of people demanding bacon, sausage, eggs and kedgeree have fluctuated, culminating in Operation Jennifer, where we must have had more than thirty people eating in shifts. It was during that period that fruit and baked goods first appeared, so that it is now possible, against all police tradition, to eat a balanced breakfast. There was a flare-up again when we had the builders in, which also saw the introduction of zacusca˘, sheep’s cheese, popara and – my personal favourite – a sort of open-topped sandwich with cold meat and salad.
At some point Molly had learnt how to manage her supply to match demand, so I was pleased to note that we were back down to just the five salvers and one table set with cutlery.
Toby bounced around my feet as I hunted for the sausages, but looked disappointed when I put some on a plate under the table. Still, he nommed them all up, I noticed. There was a pot of tea waiting on the table, kept warm by a crudely knitted blue and white tea cosy with a bobble on the top.
I poured myself a cup and considered Deep Thought.
It had to be one of three things. A genuine Artificial General Intelligence. An intelligence that used to be a real person housed, somehow, inside a contraption constructed by mashing up a Mary Engine and one or more intact Rose Jars. Or, finally, a fake run by Skinner. The last would be a scam to create false value for the Serious Cybernetics Corporation, so that a larger competitor could be lured into buying the SCC at a hugely inflated price. According to Officer Silver, this sort of thing was currently all the rage in Silicon Valley.
The last seemed unlikely – Skinner didn’t seem to be the type. Hype his product beyond its actual capabilities, maybe. But run a long con on this scale? Besides, if he was truly looking to generate false value, then he should at least be hinting at Deep Thought’s existence.
I wasn’t qualified to tell whether it was a real AGI – it passed a rough approximation of a Turing Test with me, but as Everest and Victor would no doubt love to point out, that actually proved nothing except that Skinner might have produced a very sophisticated person emulator.
I poured myself another cup of tea.
So it could be a ghost, revenant or some other incorporeal entity trapped inside the Mary Engine or a Rose Jar – or a combination of the same. A ghost would be sad but harmless. But a revenant – something that could eat ghosts, and directly affect people’s minds? That could be really dangerous. According to the literature, the bloody things entrenched themselves if left in place too long.
I heard running feet and Foxglove charged into the breakfast room, naked except for a white sheet that she held over her head so that it billowed artistically behind her. She did a circuit of the room and then charged out again with Toby barking at her heels.
Molly appeared suddenly behind me just as I raised my teacup and almost caused me to spill tea down my front. She whisked away the teapot and went gliding off. In the distance I could hear Toby barking as he and Foxglove did a lap around the second-floor balcony.
Nightingale once had a friend called David Mellenby, who was the closest thing to a modern research scientist the Folly has ever produced. I have his unpublished notes and, while much of the maths is beyond me, he did record his ideas in a sort of waking dream journal – bits of which I understand.
He postulated that there were other planes of existence which he called allokosmoi, from which the various supernatural types, including practitioners, drew their power and their influence. He speculated that if a revenant stayed in a fixed location, then that place would start to overlap with the particular allokosmos from which it drew its power. I think he thought vestigia were a boundary effect of this overlap. I’m not sure if he was right about that, but it would certainly explain invisible unicorns and many other instances of weird shit.
Molly placed a fresh pot of tea on the table – this one had an orange and brown knitted tea cosy in the form of a broody hen.
‘The builders uncovered a chest while they were finishing up,’ said Nightingale from the doorway. ‘Judging by the tea cosies and other things, I think it must have contained items from the downstairs mess hall.’
Which was a polite way of saying the servants’ quarters.
Nightingale sat down and paused while Molly fussed around him laying out cutlery, and a fine white porcelain cup, saucer and milk jug. I thought of Beyoncé Knowles and the over-sugared latte and smiled.
‘You seem remarkably cheerful for this time in the morning,’ he said.
‘We have to do the raid tonight,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ said Nightingale, pouring a cup of tea. ‘I see. What’s your thinking?’
‘Someone, or something,’ I said, ‘is using the internet to assemble an army of magical drones. We’ve identified one manufacturing cell, but we can’t be sure there aren’t more.’
‘Agreed,’ said Nightingale, and thoughtfully stirred his tea.
I read him into the briefing I’d got from Reynolds, and he drew the same conclusions I did.
‘I believe that there is a better than even chance that the “something” doing the organising is located on the closed top floor of Bambleweeny,’ I said. ‘We need to get in there and find out, one way or the other.’
‘This makes sense, of course,’ said Nightingale. ‘But why the urgency? Surely, if you’re right about this Deep Thought, then caution would be advisable.’
‘The situation is too unstable,’ I said. ‘I have two suspects under my roof w
ho even as we speak are probably plotting to double-cross me. At work, Leo Hoyt is definitely getting suspicious. But, most importantly, the Print Shop in Gillingham was wound up voluntarily. I think that means their preparations are done, and whatever they wanted those drones for is about to happen.’
‘You want to seize the initiative?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Our one advantage is that they seem to have no idea we exist. If we act now we might be able to roll them up before they know what’s hit them.’
Nightingale frowned into his teacup.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
‘What have we got to lose?’ I said.
Nightingale looked up and gave me a strange, sad smile.
‘Oh, everything, Peter,’ he said. ‘But then, such is life.’
15
A Strange Game
It was go to work in black that night, although most of it was really dark blue. And as casual as we could get, because – amazingly – when going equipped it’s better not to look like you’re planning a burglary. Believe it or not, the police are trained to spot such subtle signs as balaclavas, nylon climbing harnesses and big shoulder bags that go ‘clonk’ when you put them down.
We arrived separately using three different Tube stations and rendezvoused inside a green late-model Transit van that I told Stephen and Mrs Chin I’d stolen earlier from a building site that had shut up for the night.
For all I knew, this was true. Because Silver had supplied the vehicle, and God knows where she got it from. For extra verisimilitude it came with a ramp attachment as if I truly intended to move something bulky, say a mechanical computer and a couple of Rose Jars. I told them we had to wait in the van until at least 1 a.m.
‘Why the hell are we here so early?’ asked Mrs Chin.
‘This is a big crime,’ I said. ‘The police will pull footage from every CCTV camera in a five hundred metre radius. This looks less suspicious.’
‘Apart from the bit where we all climb into this van,’ said Stephen.
‘Ah, but Mr Skinner didn’t want any cameras pointing at his secret lift,’ I said. ‘So this is a general blind spot. And, ditto, none of the Vogon cameras cover this area either.’
‘There’ll be something,’ said Stephen. ‘A segregated closed circuit system linked to the top floor – at minimum.’
‘We snuff those on the way in,’ I said. ‘And since we were going to have to sand everything once we were up there anyway, that’ll take care of any recordings.’
‘Sand?’ asked Mrs Chin.
‘Destroy with magic,’ said Stephen. ‘What happens to silicon chips if you cast a spell too close to them.’
Mrs Chin nodded and glanced at her watch.
‘More than two hours?’ she said.
‘If we want to be safe, yeah.’
‘The problem here,’ said Mrs Chin, ‘is that it may be okay for you young people but some of us are going to have trouble holding our pee for that long.’
‘Got you covered,’ I said, and held up two empty two-litre Diet Pepsi bottles.
‘That’s not going to cover it,’ said Mrs Chin, so I showed her the nice clean medical funnel I’d brought along to avoid spillage.
‘First working bathroom we find is mine,’ said Mrs Chin.
Obviously variable bladder capacity had been a failure in my contingency planning but there wasn’t anything we could do about it now.
Stephen unfolded the stepladder I’d brought so that Mrs Chin could sit in comparative comfort while me and Stephen sat on the floor with our backs against the side of the van. With Mrs Chin perched above us, I had a terrible urge to put my hand up whenever she asked a question.
Partly for its entertainment value I pulled out my Airwave and set it to cover NI (Islington nick) and City.
‘What’s that?’ asked Mrs Chin.
‘Police scanner,’ said Stephen.
I interpreted a couple of incidents for them – the assault near Liverpool Street station, the noise complaint in Hoxton, the constant moaning by overworked response officers and, reading between the lines, the gnashing of teeth by their skippers because they didn’t have enough manpower.
‘Skippers?’ asked Stephen.
‘Sergeants,’ I said.
‘They don’t get a lot of action around here, do they?’ said Mrs Chin. ‘New York is much livelier. Or at least it used to be.’
‘Oh, yes, Mrs Chin,’ said Stephen in a monotone. ‘Tell us about the good old days.’
‘Do you get a lot of action in New York?’ I asked. ‘Our kind of action, that is?’
‘When I was a junior we spent most of our days underground,’ said Mrs Chin.
‘Still do,’ muttered Stephen.
‘There’s a whole world down there,’ she said. ‘Subways, sewers, steam tunnels, the old rivers. A whole population that went underground during the winter – vagrants, criminals on the run . . .’
‘Mutant turtles?’ I asked, and Stephen sniggered.
‘You joke,’ said Mrs Chin. ‘But personally I wouldn’t have been surprised. Vampires were a problem, of course – they always are. You burn out one nest and another would pop up. Got real bad in the ’70s until a bunch of homeless vets went after them with home-made napalm and flamethrowers – quite a war by all accounts.’
‘You didn’t intervene?’
‘I was a teenager at the time, but the Association stayed out of it,’ said Mrs Chin. The Association being the New York Libraries Association, the militant magical wing of the New York Public Library Services. ‘Although we’re all members of the Green Machine as well.’ That being the AFSCME, the union that most mundane librarians belonged to.
The war had raged until the early 1980s, when things had gone creepily quiet. But there was much less in the way of vampire incidents after that.
‘Still get them, though,’ said Stephen.
The most dangerous thing Mrs Chin had personally dealt with was a possessed shade at the notorious Willowbrook State School on Staten Island – which I had to look up later.
‘When you say shades, what do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean Fae?’
‘I mean everything that’s not normal,’ said Mrs Chin.
‘Like New Jersey,’ said Stephen.
Mrs Chin nodded at me.
‘He knows what I mean,’ said Mrs Chin. ‘He should do, considering his domestic arrangements.’
But yes, I teased out of Mrs Chin, the shades were what we would call the Fae, or rather anyone who inhabited the demi-monde for anything other than style reasons. Shades were tolerated in New York – who wasn’t? But part of the Librarians’ job was to keep an eye on them.
‘What about the rest of the States?’ I asked.
She confirmed that the Bureau of Indian Affairs held down the reservations, but she seemed to think the FBI dealt with the rest of the country. Which probably would have come as a surprise to Agent Reynolds, all on her lonesome in the Office of Partner Engagement.
I wanted to ask about the rivers, but the Airwave, which had been merrily squawking away in the background, said, ‘Two seven eight show state thirteen.’ Followed immediately after by the response: ‘Confirmed two seven eight state thirteen.’
This was the signal that Silver and Nightingale were in position. I waited a couple of minutes before checking my watch and telling the others it was time.
Outside the van the air was moist and cold, and after a quick shufti to make sure no one was watching, we scuttled down the slight ramp to the entrance.
First up was the mechanical lock on the metal roller door that guarded the loading bay. Stephen did that with a neat little spell which, as far as I could tell, disassembled the lock from the inside. While he did this, I threw an infrared chip killer at the CCTV camera concealed in the door frame. By the time Mrs Chin strolled along we had t
he door up and open with a theatrical flourish.
‘Thank you, boys,’ she said as she walked inside.
Inside was a two-metre-deep loading bay complete with concrete dock at a convenient height for access by a large two-axle lorry. I leant the metal stepladder against the dock and held it fast while Mrs Chin daintily climbed up. Stephen vaulted up in one fluid motion and examined the closed heavy-duty doors of the goods lift.
‘Now what?’ he asked as I hauled up the stepladder.
I pressed the lift call button and the heavy doors opened and we stepped inside. The interior was your standard metal box with a non-slip corrugated floor and heavy rubberised padding on the walls that rose to waist height. The floor was scuffed and the padding had been scraped so hard in some places that the metal was showing through.
What there weren’t were any floor selection buttons, although there were two red domes containing CCTV cameras mounted at either end.
Stephen brushed his hand across the blank panel where the buttons should be – there wasn’t even an intercom grille, alarm button or fire safety override key. The Fire Brigade would have had a fit if they’d found out.
‘It’s a very elegant system,’ I said. ‘If you want to go up you have to call someone on the top floor and they press the button to activate the lift mechanism.’
‘So you have a man on the inside?’ asked Mrs Chin.
‘I wish,’ I said, and told them to stand flat against the walls.
In the old days lifts had hatches in the roofs to allow nervous Edwardians the prospect of escape if trapped. In these days of health and safety gone mad, it’s generally considered safer if members of the public stay in the nice safe metal box rather than expose themselves to limb-mangling heavy machinery and fatal falls down adjacent shafts. The hatch is still there. It’s just that it’s now bolted down from the top – nice big bolts, though, so the Fire Brigade can open them quickly.
Or a bright young wizard with a new spell can punch them out one after another. Especially if he has the blueprints and knows exactly where they are. Stephen snorted as the locks fell into the cab and I impello’d the hatch up and to the side.
False Value (Rivers of London 8) Page 24