He’s not just after power brokers, ministers, and business contacts in the outsourcing and security sectors; the newspaper magnates are a clue, and as the evening rolls on a sprinkling of reality TV stars, actors, and pop celebrities arrive to leaven the mix. Mouthpieces, she thinks. What are the consequences when the government, the media, and the leaders of commerce all speak with one voice? Why, it means that if you hold opinions other than the ones you are told to, you are out of step, and if so, it is best to bite your tongue and be silent. The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.
Mo looks around, and what she sees is the embryonic outline of a new national order taking shape in a salon hosted by a charming, magnetic personality who intends—somehow—to weld them into an establishment that serves his will. It wouldn’t work under normal circumstances (politicians and celebrities are as easy to herd as cats: that’s how the Chief Whip earns the residence on Downing Street), but these are strange days indeed, and if Schiller is the channel that brings the Sleeper’s power to bear on a couple hundred movers and shakers …
She’s making a second, more leisurely pass along the second-floor corridor when she notices a gaggle of discreet private security staff and police officers forming in the grand hallway at the bottom of the staircase. This is of interest: it’s unlike anything she’s seen so far. “CANDID to MADCAP, do we have any VVIPs inbound?”
“Please hold—yes, we have the PM and the Chancellor’s motorcade about two kilometers out. Four cars and four police outriders. Why?”
“I’m seeing preparations at reception. Will update on arrival. CANDID out.” The police and security are dispersing. Most of them exit through the front door, but two take up discreet positions below her, and one armed officer turns and briskly climbs the stairs.
Mo comes to a halt near the top of the staircase, opens her clutch, and palms her warrant card. The uniform has seen her—she makes no attempt to conceal herself from him—but as he sizes her up she pulls her ID. “Security Service,” she tells him, pushing power into the card from Continuity Ops. “Should I assume the PM is arriving?”
Suspicion dissolves instantly beneath the impact of the warrant card’s geas, backed up by Mo’s conviction that she is, in fact, supposed to be here: it’s the unvarnished truth, in fact, for there’s still a Mo-shaped box on MI5’s org chart. “Yes, ma’am. If I can ask you to clear the landing for a few minutes while we conduct our sweep?”
“Certainly. I’ll be in the viewing gallery above the ballroom if you need me.” She turns on her heel and walks towards the balcony, having installed herself in the officer’s awareness as a member of the home team. She sits at one of the tables to take the weight off her feet for a few minutes while a pair of SO6 officers discreetly check the upper floor of the house before taking up positions at the top of the stairs. They’re carrying the usual—MP5s, Glock 17 sidearms, and bulletproof vests—just in case Hans Gruber decides to crash the party. Neither of them notices when Mo pushes back her chair, wraps herself in night and magic, and walks back towards the landing. She leans against the wall behind their backs, smiling at a private joke, as the front door opens and Schiller and his gowned and tuxedoed greeters move in to welcome the two high-value assets and their attendants.
The Prime Minister enters, accompanied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer—both in ordinary evening suits rather than white tie and tails, for this is an informal event—and there is handshaking and greeting, as Schiller introduces them to his handmaids. “Pleased to be here tonight,” Mo overhears the PM saying, “and very pleased to meet you at last! Norman sings your praises, I must say—” Mo’s eyes narrow. It’s the ice-blonde, of course, the Special Political Advisor to Norman Grove, soi-disant Minister for Magic: Anneka Overholt. She’s all teeth and smiling eyes in the presence of Jeremy Michaels, MP for Witney and leader of Her Majesty’s Government. Mo senses something predatory and just slightly putrid around her, an unclean aroma of old blood and decay: but perhaps it’s psychosomatic? It’s inconceivable that Schiller would accept personal hygiene issues among his retinue—
“You look lovely tonight, is that a”—Mo notices that the Chancellor is clearly taking a fancy to Schiller’s other handmaid, whose mane of copper-orange hair hangs in carefully curated locks that artfully suggest wildness—“you must show me the ropes! I must say, I’m really looking forward to—”
“CANDID to MADCAP, Schiller, companion number two, auburn, one-sixty centimeters, who is she?”
“That sounds like Bernadette McGuigan. GP Security, Schiller’s new PA, in charge of site security at Nether Stowe House.”
“Roger that. The Chancellor of the Exchequer just offered her his arm and they’re”—Mo blinks rapidly—“update, the PM is with Overholt. Is Schiller running a dating agency or something?” (Both men are married with children, but they’re also products of the English upper classes, pedigrees back before the Norman invasion and relatives in the Lords. They’re children of privilege, still in early middle age and with enough connections that only an idiot would discuss their private affairs in public.)
“You mean like Berlusconi? Uh, your guess is as good as ours?”
As the new arrivals drift towards the ballroom Mo clears her throat quietly and walks towards the staircase, making no attempt to hide. The cops nod her through, then forget she was ever there. Schiller and his coterie of assistants are following along in the wake of the two senior politicians and their arm candy; the road is now definitely clear. As she reaches the bottom of the stairs and glances at the discreet door with the keypad and the sign saying PRIVATE she taps her left earpiece and subvocalizes: “CANDID to CHIPMUNK, time for your toilet trip. CANDID to ZERO, go to alert state amber. Over.”
Then she calmly and confidently walks up to the door, punches in the combination, and lets herself inside.
* * *
I don’t know what I expected to see beyond the entrance to the warehouse zone, but a cubicle farm surrounded on all sides by airline cargo containers is not it. A cubicle farm from which Schiller’s minions have been shooting at us. Cubicle farms make really good mazes, even though the partitions aren’t bulletproof, and if Partridge’s merry men didn’t have thermal imagers we’d be pulling back and looking to smoke them out with tear gas at this point—but partitions aren’t terribly heatproof. Nor are the flimsy aluminum airline shipping containers. As Partridge’s piratical crew race through the cubicles and confirm nobody is left to twitch a trigger finger at us, I persuade Johnny to follow me around the edge of the farm until we come to a breeze-block wall. I stop. “Other side,” I tell him. “About five meters thataway there’s probably a fish tank full of something well and truly fucked up. A big one—think in terms of a saltwater wood louse the size of a sheep, surrounded by baby critters.”
“Huh. Can you kill it?”
I wince. The thing’s already nibbling on the edges of my ward. I can hear its demented singsong lullaby, broadcasting calm and love and worship at me. “I think I can do better,” I tell him. “I just need to get close.”
I brought along Angleton’s happy fun sticker book of doom. They’re blocking wards, able to lock out just about anything if you can get close enough to apply one. The mother-thing is in semi-permanent communion with the Sleeper. What I’m hoping is that if I can lock it down with a blocking ward I can cut off all its children simultaneously. Friends don’t let friends try to conquer the world using an army that has a single point of failure, right? I’m pretty sure Schiller’s immune, and the hideous crotch-worms he uses for controlling and coordinating his Inner Temple insiders are probably not so vulnerable—the tongue-hosts were pretty clearly a version one demo program before the real pod person app release—but if I can shut down the gun-toting mooks with one shot we can get to work applying that Anton Piller order for
the preservation of material evidence. And the fun begins.
Last time I ran into a brood-mother it nearly got me: they’re stronger and much more insidious than their tongue-eater offspring and I was falling under the influence until Persephone nailed the fucker. But I’m a lot stronger these days and I know what I’m dealing with. It’s like having the world’s most annoying earworm on auto-repeat inside my head, a ghastly remix of “Things Can Only Get Better” by way of “I Kissed a Girl,” performed by Rick Astley’s evil twin. So I push back, forcing the rhythmic chatter into one corner of my skull, and as Johnny slows down, mouth drooping open, I step around the corner into the loading bay. As I expected, there’s a bloody great fish tank sitting on a fork lift pallet. It’s plugged into the electricity mains and a water hose next to a sluice, and I briefly consider the Hazard approach to cleaning out fish tanks—a gallon of concentrated bleach—but you never know: I might need the thing alive. The glass walls of the tank are scummy with algae, but not so opaque that I can’t see the gigantic carapace humping up inside. It knows I’m here, and the mindless chittering rises to a crescendo. It loves me, it holds nothing but benevolent compassion towards me, it’s inviting me to join it in the warm bath of God’s goodwill—
I grit my teeth and slap a self-adhesive sticker on the nearest side of the tank, then tear off another and move around to repeat the process on each side. The tank sits on a box containing pumps and filtration kit, and it’s capped by a lid, and each time I slap a ward on it the love gets fainter and the chitinous crackle of mandibles scraping glass gets more audible. Finally I stick the last ward down on the lid, and the inside of my skull falls silent. It’s lovely, like the moment of stunned disbelief immediately after you finally snap and tell the world’s most annoying office-mate to shut the fuck up—the moment of silence when they have no comeback and you finally had the last word. I take a shaky breath and turn as Johnny shuffles through the doorway, whey-faced. “You did it,” he says breathlessly. “Fuck me.”
“No thanks … hang on a moment.” I’ve unconsciously fallen into a crouch under the weight of the mother-thing’s loving regard. Now I straighten up and open my inner eye again. There are bodies out on the warehouse floor, and in the windowless three-story office block at the opposite side of the shed from where we entered—that’s a nasty surprise, it’s not on the floor plan from the airport security office—but they’re comatose. “I can’t feel any hostile actors right now, though that could change in a hurry. Let’s clean them all out, then begin the search.”
“Begin?” Johnny raises an eyebrow and nods at the tank. “I’d have thought this would do for starters. Ain’t there regulations banning the import of invasive species?”
“Yeah, that’s a good angle to start with: Chris will know. And there’s the office complex. It’s not on the airport map: that’s a planning infringement for sure and probably an offense under the air navigation act and maybe the Terrorism Act.”
None of this is giving me the warm fuzzies, but we already knew there were a bunch of tongue eaters in London; this is just joining up the dots for the prosecution, proving the connection to Schiller. It’s a start, but it’s not enough to hang him—especially with the friends he’s made.
There are three levels of offices tucked away in this high-security bonded warehouse. He could be hiding literally anything in there, including a haystack of paperwork—and I’m worried that we might not have time to unearth the poisoned needles before he counterattacks.
* * *
The rattle of the front door keypad is what Persephone remembers most vividly afterwards. “Get in the master bedroom, go hide right now. Leave this to me—”
Mhari is already gone in a living blur, thudding as she caroms off the wall opposite the kitchen door in a crazed exhibition of indoor parkour. Persephone scans quickly. The under-sink cupboard space is promisingly empty but it’s too small and too low. She makes a snap decision and follows Mhari out the door, trusting that the geometry of the main living room will shield her from the entrance unless the guards enter at a run. The nearest spare bedroom door is closed but unlocked, and she smoothly spins through the doorway before it’s half-open, and has it softly closed behind her just ahead of the shuffle of shoes entering the lobby.
Moving from memory in the darkened room, Persephone hunkers down behind the far side of the bed, underneath the window frame, in the gap between the mattress and the wall. Staying out is a calculated risk, but she doesn’t think the guards are likely to snoop around Anneka Overholt’s bedroom and it gives her two possible exits: through the doorway and past the guards, or through the window. Neither of them are terribly good prospects but she’s been in worse fixes before. While she waits, she loosens her hair from its elaborate knot, removes the ebony hair clip it was held with, and re-ties it in a ponytail. The hair clip is a small, lead-weighted dumbbell, and she hopes she won’t have to use it. Contrary to movie mythology people don’t always recover from head injuries, and it’s not her intention to kill the guards if she can avoid it.
But they’re between her and the escape portal—and she can’t use the front door unless she takes one of their key cards, not with the hounds patrolling outside—and she’ll just have to hope that Mhari has enough common sense to handle them if they stumble across her.
As the minutes tick by, Persephone gradually becomes worried. She recognizes the sound of a body being dragged or carried, and hears the low voices from the master bedroom. There are no sounds of fighting, which is good, but a body complicates things. Schiller told the guards to clock off after running their errand, so she waits patiently. But it gradually becomes apparent to her that they’re waiting for something.
Her phone vibrates. Mhari has sent her a photograph. It’s grainy and somewhat out of focus but it raises the hackles on Persephone’s neck. A few seconds later Gary texts her an update: Mhari is in the master bedroom closet, they’ve passed the one-hour mark, the woman in the bedroom has been roofied and is out for the count, and what do you think we should do about it?
Persephone closes her eyes and tries to relax, then opens her inner eye to the other place. She’s an experienced ritual practitioner, and the ability to see into the soulscape comes easily to her. The guards are obvious—she’s seen the host-ridden initiates of Schiller’s Temple before—as are Mhari (chilly, cold, not entirely human, surrounded by a swarm of buzzing hunger) and the woman on the bed (alive, unconscious, fully human). The hungry nightmares patrol the floors above and below this one, and the corridor outside the residence’s door: there’s no escape in that direction. She can feel Gary’s unease two floors up, just as she senses the private security guards in the lobby, five floors below. Casting her perceptions further she feels the hum and blur of the vast metropolis spreading out around her in the vibrant evening twilight.
She opens her eyes again and considers her options dispassionately. A thought occurs to her and she texts Gary: Did the StingRay grab the guards’ IMSIs before they entered the flat?
All cell phone transmissions within Schiller’s flat get diverted through his tame picocell and the VPN it’s feeding back to his base in Colorado. But the guards, and the call girl they kidnapped, came in through the public spaces, the elevator and the corridor outside.
Stand by, Gary replies. A couple of minutes later: I have three new candidate IMSIs in past 25 minutes.
Persephone is too professional to feel a flash of triumph at this point—wait until it’s in the bag is her motto—but she nods unconsciously. Can you identify the devices from their carrier settings? she asks. The carrier settings are a small chunk of data that cellphone companies send to phones to tell them the best frequencies to use for that network’s base stations, and they vary from phone to phone.
Phone 1 is an iPhone 5s. Phone 2 is a Galaxy S3 Mini. Phone 3 is a Galaxy S3 Mini. Why?
Persephone smiles humorlessly in the twilight. She’s half-surprised that Schiller’s men haven’t been issued with BlackBerries
, but perhaps there’s some sort of company-side secure messaging app … the odd phone out is the current Apple flagship phone, a luxury item that low-rent security guards aren’t likely to carry. Please copy and send the next message to both Galaxy S3 Minis via SMS, she instructs Gary: Schiller returning to apartment early, your services no longer needed, you can leave now.
She settles back to see if they’ll rise to the bait.
* * *
Once upon a time—a very long time ago—there was a wine cellar carved out of the chalky rock below the foundations of Nether Stowe House.
Over the years, as wings were added to the house, collapsed through neglect or fire, and were refurbished and replaced, the wine cellar was also extended and refurbished and replaced. During the middle years of the twentieth century it was converted into a bomb shelter, and then a Home Guard bunker; then the bunker was forgotten about. In the 1970s it was rediscovered and part of it was fitted out as an on-site spa and sauna; but it fell out of use in the 1980s. Then in the late 1990s, during the most recent renovation of the house and grounds, an impish echo of a folk memory of the Hellfire Club and other eighteenth-century distractions of the rich and powerful caught the fancy of the architects. And so to the most recent renovation and reincarnation of the cellars under Nether Stowe House—this time as an underground venue for very exclusive parties.
The Delirium Brief Page 34
