False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I caught sight of Leo sensibly stumbling toward the relative safety of the far end of the office and returned my attention to Stephen, just in time to get one of his nicely calculated impello-palma to the stomach.

  As Nightingale always says, never take your eyes off your opponent—and Stephen would probably have put me down with the next spell if there hadn’t been a sinister “pop” from back where the old folks were fighting.

  And a concussion wave blew us and every loose bit of furniture five meters further down the office. I found myself, with no intervening period of consciousness, in the dark and wedged under a sheet of plasterboard. I have, for both personal and operational reasons, a slight phobia about being buried under rubble. So I was probably a bit more forceful than I might have been getting the stuff off me. There’s a spell that dates back to the Victorian era called the coffin bell, designed to allow a skilled practitioner to dig himself out from his own grave. It’s a fourth order spell, so I reckon you’d have to be a pretty good practitioner to be able to cast it after being accidentally buried alive. I also have doubts about whether it could shift four cubic meters of loose earth, but it certainly made short work of the pile of office furniture I was under.

  The lights were out, but there was enough reflected street light for me to see the room. Because I’ve learned to respect Stephen’s ability to sucker-punch me at every opportunity, I immediately shifted position and did a visual sweep.

  Whatever had gone “pop” had cleared a circle in the middle of the room. The Faraday cage had resisted being blown down, but the copper mesh had been stripped off the steel pylons—they would still be digging fragments out of the wall weeks later. Beyond the immediate radius of complete destruction the cubicles had been knocked over, rather than flattened, and they seemed intact at the far ends.

  At the center of ground zero was the nylon carry case containing the Mary Engine. Amazingly, the bag was intact but judging by its malformed, half-crushed shape its contents were not. Next to it someone had placed a miraculously spared office chair on which Mrs. Chin sat with her hands primly clasped in her lap. Behind her, as per regulations when dealing with dangerously Falcon-capable prisoners, stood Nightingale.

  “Ah, Peter, excellent,” he said. “Would you be so good as to check for casualties?”

  Part Four

  Cyberdyne

  I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music.

  —Siri

  16

  Nice Job Breaking It, Hero

  I FOUND LEO Hoyt, dazed but unharmed, tucked into the far corner. I cut the ties on his wrists and told him to stay put until someone came and got him. Judging by the state of the room, that somebody would probably be the fire brigade. Then I went looking for Stephen, who had been half buried—but unlike me he was pinned under a heavy wooden desk. Once I established he wasn’t being crushed, I decided to leave him for the fire brigade, too.

  “I think the building has been compromised,” said Nightingale, when I joined him and Mrs. Chin.

  He pointed a hand at the ceiling and I saw that the hanging tiles had been blown away, revealing the actual concrete roof which was marked by an alarming starburst of cracks. Positioned, I noticed, right over the squashed remains of the Mary Engine.

  “Did you do that?” I asked Mrs. Chin.

  “Patricia Chin,” she said formally. “Chief Librarian, 020:131.”

  What with giving the fire brigade and the London Ambulance Service priority, finding an alternative access to the emergency stairwell, and then making sure Mrs. Chin and Stephen were led out separately but with appropriate Falcon-capable escorts—i.e. me and Nightingale—it took two hours to quit the building. By that time Tyrel Johnson had turned up along with Bradley Michael Smith, and a couple of other SCC employees were out the back. I got a glimpse of Johnson’s face as I accompanied Stephen to the prisoner transfer van. He didn’t look happy.

  The van with Nightingale and Mrs. Chin arrived at the Folly first, which meant we had to park in Bedford Place while it maneuvered in and then out of the Folly’s courtyard. While we waited, Stephen sat quietly with his handcuffed hands in his lap. I sat opposite and kept my eyes on him. I had no doubt that he was perfectly capable of blowing the doors off the van if he wanted to, but he stayed suspiciously subdued even when it was our turn to unload.

  In a nice purpose-built nick, your prisoner vans back up to a rear door carefully recessed so that the suspects are funneled into the building. It’s as much a psychological ploy as anything else—resistance is futile, and all that. Retrofitting a building that had been designed as a gentleman’s club in the middle of central London meant compromises—starting with the fact that we could only unload one prisoner van at a time.

  We were still short of uniforms, so it was Guleed who threw open the van’s back doors and grinned as I helped Stephen out.

  “Welcome to the Folly,” I said, but if he knew the name he gave no reaction.

  I led him down the brand new access ramp to the basement where a large steel door had been set into a reinforced concrete casing. On the other side, where the Folly’s small gym used to be, was a little vestibule with clean whitewashed walls, a second fuck-off steel door, and on the other side of that, our brand new PACE-compliant custody suite. You could still smell the fresh paint.

  As the designated Falcon-qualified officer I had to continue with Stephen to the search room, where he surrendered any personal possessions, assured me he wasn’t carrying anything up his bum—we took his word for it—and stripped him down to his knickers so he could be inspected under UV light. There was a long painful-looking scar on his upper left arm and a puckered circular scar on his stomach.

  “Not a bullet hole,” he said.

  “No?” I asked.

  “Crossbow bolt,” he said.

  Because he was only our second paying customer, he got a choice of brand new alternative raiment and went for the gray tracksuit bottoms with matching gray sweatshirt, all still in their plastic wrappers. Once he had some paper slippers on he was ready to meet his new best friend and guardian of his well-being—the custody sergeant.

  Probably the only advantage of belonging to an organization that is being relentlessly downsized in the name of austerity is that if you do have a budget, it’s easy to pick up some talent. In this case, Sergeant Anthony Finnegan, who was a large, imposing white man with no neck and, in a savage response to a burgeoning bald patch, no hair. We picked him because his performance reviews were littered with words like “solid,” “dependable” and, more than once, “unflappable.” When, as the final part of the interview process, Nightingale demonstrated how unexpected magic could be by conjuring a werelight in front of Finnegan’s face, he’d merely nodded.

  “You learn something new every day,” he’d said.

  He was one of four custody sergeants we kept on the books for twenty-four-hour cover, although we lent them to various other London nicks when our cells were empty—which up until now had been all the time.

  Finnegan was still processing Mrs. Chin when we emerged from the search room.

  She’d opted for the stylish navy blue tracksuit bottoms and a soft cotton smock and was explaining that no, she had no allergies or urgent medical needs, but she did want a lawyer and a phone call.

  Finnegan explained that once she was processed all that could be arranged, and the sooner she was processed the sooner it would all happen.

  “I could call the American embassy if you like,” I said.

  Mrs. Chin shot me a poisonous look.

  “Where’s your master?” she asked me.

  “Gone back out,” I said. “Why? Are you ready to answer some questions?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Chin with a tight smile. “And much as I appreciate the change of clothes, I believe it’s time Stephen and I were leaving.”

  She raised her
right hand, little finger extended—and nothing happened.

  In the Newtonian magic tradition you don’t actually have to make a gesture to cast a spell—it’s all in the way you line the formae up in your head—but everyone does, even Nightingale.

  Mrs. Chin’s gestures became more emphatic, but you don’t get to be a master of the forms and wisdoms without being quick on the uptake. She gave me an accusing look.

  “How are you doing that?” she asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said.

  The answer, of course, was that I wasn’t doing it at all.

  Along with the gym and the showers, we’d sacrificed the Folly’s underground shooting range to install a custody suite of six modern cells with toilets, one medical examination suite, an exercise room, prisoner showers and, located at the north end of the suite so it could have windows into the front area, a large airy studio. Here Foxglove, when she wasn’t running naked through the Folly or sketching people in the park, worked and slept. And generated a sort of field that negated magic. We call it the MSA—the Magical Suppression Area—and we’d put in some work hours testing its limitations, although none of us had any idea how it actually worked.

  Now, my theory was that this field was a boundary effect caused when Foxglove draws one of David Mellenby’s allokosmoi, specifically the one colloquially known as Fairyland, closer to our reality. But I haven’t devised a way of testing that hypothesis yet. At least, not a safe one.

  Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

  Mrs. Chin and Stephen exchanged horrified looks and for a moment Mrs. Chin looked like a frightened old woman—but only for a moment.

  Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.

  Mrs. Chin took a deep breath and then nodded at Stephen, who sighed. After that the pair allowed themselves to be fingerprinted, cheek swabbed and photographed but refused to answer any questions beyond their names.

  Once Stephen and Patricia Chin were safely banged up, I went upstairs, wrote up my notes and changed into my emergency work suit. I looked at my face in the mirror as I attached my clip-on tie. Judging by my expression, I wasn’t happy about something.

  My shrink has “suggested” that it might be “useful” if I were to spend more time exploring where my emotions originate. This has always struck me as good advice, so having determined that I was, in fact, discontented, I set out to track down the source.

  After popping downstairs to check that Foxglove’s Magical Suppression Area was still working, I went looking for answers—starting with what was left of the top floor of Bambleweeny. I arrived via Clare Street and slipped in through the police cordon—I wasn’t ready to run into Everest or Victor. And I certainly didn’t want to meet Johnson just yet.

  The fire brigade had declared the building structurally sound, forensics had finished their sweep and the three computers with intact chipsets had been carted off for analysis. The rest of the electronics had been powered up during the fight and their insides reduced to a fine glittery sand.

  “That last blow was deliberately noisy,” said Nightingale. “Mrs. Chin was making sure that nothing electronic survived.”

  He was stalking around the middle of the room, slowly retracing the fight from Mrs. Chin’s perspective, stepping where she stepped and holding his arms as she had. Occasionally he would rewind, reversing his steps, before making the same move again—it looked a little like minimalist t’ai chi.

  “That last spell was completely out of character,” he said. “Loud, flashy, destructive. Pointless.” He stopped moving and straightened up. “She was the best practitioner I have ever fought, Peter.”

  “Better than you?” I asked.

  “Overall, who can say?” he said as he checked his cuffs. “In combat magic—no. Although we were close enough that I believe she initially thought she might win. It was only when it became clear the outcome was inevitable that she changed tactics.”

  He looked at the pattern of cracks in the ceiling and down at the matching set on the floor. At the precise center there was a rectangle of undamaged carpet tiles where the Mary Engine had sat in its bag.

  “She destroyed the Mary Engine so we wouldn’t get it,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Nightingale. “It might be wise to find out why.”

  “She doesn’t seem keen to talk to us,” I said. “And Stephen even less so.”

  “Perhaps your Mr. Skinner can enlighten us,” said Nightingale.

  But Mr. Skinner didn’t want to talk to us either, and Silver, who’d already had a go, warned us off making another approach.

  “It’s possible we might be able to salvage our investigation,” she said, “But Skinner’s going to be on his guard now—we need to calm things down.”

  It was sensible advice. While we hadn’t recovered the Mary Engine, or the Rose Jars, or the Enchantress of Numbers music book, they were definitely no longer missing—so that had to be something. Right?

  I was missing a night’s sleep by then, so in the absence of any useful work I went home. Beverley was out at a lecture, so I flopped down on the bed and went out like a light.

  The next morning I had one of those vivid half-dreams you can get when you’ve just woken up to the happy revelation that you don’t have to get out of bed just yet and you have time to snuggle up to a friendly neighborhood river goddess and go back to sleep.

  I was back on the top floor of Bambleweeny, only it had been redesigned by Ken Adams, the Faraday cage replaced by a useless Perspex cylinder enclosing a clanking mechanical Difference Engine from which a tangle of fantasy lab glassware sprouted into two huge jars the size of telephone boxes. Around the cylinder were arrayed ranks of fridge-freezer-sized reel-to-reel magnetic tape drives and among them men and women, many I thought I half-recognized from the SCC, all dressed in Lycra catsuits, wandered with clipboards or stared at blinking lights.

  “So we meet at last, Mr. Bond,” said a voice.

  The huge jars were filled with a swirling mixture of amber and yellow liquids and curled inside each, like a wizened fetus, was the shrunken body of a man. In my persona as James Bond—as played by Colin Salmon—I stepped forward and one of the curled figures lifted its head to stare at me with glowing red eyes.

  I got the strong impression that the man in the jar was about to tell me his dastardly plan, but my bladder woke me and I had to get up. Once I was in the bathroom I thought I might as well have a shower, and after that I was up and ready for action. It might have been a Saturday, but below the rank of chief inspector weekends are an entirely notional concept.

  Also that day, I was back on the job as proper police which, as any modern copper will tell you, starts with an hour in front of an AWARE terminal catching up with your emails and trying to interpret the gnomic and often contradictory directives that flow downhill from senior management.

  Then I had a meeting with the duty solicitor, who’d been drafted in to represent Stephen and Mrs. Chin.

  “I didn’t even know there was a station here,” she said.

  I explained that we’d been reactivated due to the general sell-off of police assets—an explanation she found all too plausible. You can always get on the right side of legal aid lawyers by having a mutual moan about austerity. It’s one of the many ways that adversity helps bring people together.

  I then had a meeting with the CPS about what to charge Stephen and Mrs. Chin with, in which we decided that obstruction, fraud and various immigration offenses would do to keep them banged up for the duration.

  What duration that was depended on them, and so far it was going to be the maximum the law allows followed by deportation.

  * * *

  —

  I spent the rest of the day up in Hornchurch being debriefed by Silver’s mob. One of the advantages of the circumstances su
rrounding my particular covert operation was that I was able to keep my notes up to date during the course of the investigation. My main problem during the debrief was explaining the difference between a pen and paper RPG, a console-based JRPG and a board game such as Firefly. And why the gaming sessions had served as an important intelligence-gathering platform.

  “Couldn’t you have got them drunk?” asked one of the interviewers.

  “Trust me,” I said. “This was more effective.”

  Silver herself was off at an inconveniently scheduled wedding, but arrived back in the evening to tell me to go home and take the next day off. Which suited me perfectly right up until the moment I got home and Bev told me that Skinner had fired Tyrel Johnson for cause.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. “They needed his salary.”

  I wouldn’t count on you bowing out gracefully, Silver had told me. These operations always end messily and nobody likes to be betrayed—however good the cause.

  “Did you know that before Tyrel got that job they were this close”—she held her finger and thumb a centimeter apart—“to selling their house?”

  Unwisely I asked whether social services didn’t pay them to foster, which got me a glare, the cold shoulder and the growling Bulge. Although the last one might have been hunger, since I was still cooking dinner at the time.

  “You’ve seen those kids,” she said. “They need special care and that costs—you know that.”

  I wanted to say it wasn’t my fault, but it sort of was—or at least close enough for me to feel guilty about it.

  “You lot are always complaining that everyone expects you to be social workers,” she said. “You saw what happened with Oliver—you know with boys like that it’s one slip and they’re sucked into the prison ecosystem. They don’t get second chances.”

  She wasn’t mollified even when I plonked a hill of rice topped by my mum’s patented groundnut chicken—spontaneous tongue combustion guaranteed—in front of her. Although the Bulge stopped growling.