Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  Much of Grosvenor Square, particularly the road and square itself, was surveilled from within the Roost. Faces, cars, trucks, and DVLA number plates could be put on-screen, magnified, and analyzed with a suite of recognition and consciousness-probing technologies that could penetrate facial BodyMods and even, it was rumored, insert understated, subtle ideas in targets, although in Britain a Crown Court order was—strictly speaking—necessary for cognitive interventions, and only to British subjects.

  The shaky frightcopter lowered itself in one of the corners of the enormous square. An attractive, dark-eyed young woman with long black hair alighted from the copter, and the frightcopter immediately shot back up to the safety of the air.

  “What the fuck is this?” asked Mason. The woman’s uniform resembled a minor British police agency’s. She certainly wasn’t Watch.

  “I want to know who that woman is,” barked Mason. “I want to know why she’s here. I want to know what brand of organic strawberries she slices into her muesli for breakfast. Jesus fucking shit. Is this the animal catcher?”

  Mason was not an arrogant man, but he felt better than this animal silliness. The entire spectacle struck him as too sloppy and absurd to be professional or terror related. The ambassador and her family were on holiday in Greenland—one less headache. But the frightcopter and this woman and the animal reports worried him, if only because of their absolute total fuckedupedness.

  “Seriously, get me some data, people!”

  Astrid’s face popped onto half a dozen screens. She seemed to be looking for signs of something, but tentatively.

  A squinty-eyed, frail-looking cognitive specialist, a so-called Cog on loan to the embassy, sat nearby in one of the “meat chairs”—it used a lab-cultured flesh whose bioware flaps, skin-to-skin, partially garmented the Cogs. He said to Mason, “Sir. I’m getting into her now, a little. I think she’s . . . a British citizen. Astrid . . . Sullivan.”

  A new group of people, about a dozen, began shuffling in through the steel doors of the Roost. The Cog flinched a little when he saw them.

  “Excuse me. Who are you?” Mason asked.

  One of the newcomers, a tall man with short cropped hair, rehearsed the pass-phrase: “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch,” he said, sounding oddly amused with himself, “you must first invent a universe.” It was from the old twentieth-century astrophysicist Carl Sagan; Mason had seen it on yesterday’s last brief.

  “Well,” said Mason. “OK. But we’re busy here, folks. Are you . . . ?”

  “Yes,” the tall man said, grinning at Mason. “Tertiary operations. We’re everywhere.” The man snickered.

  Mason said, “Just, please, try to stay out of the way.”

  The Cog was waving at Mason. Cogs were highly trained if far more conventional cousins of the controversial, shriveled-legged mutant PreCogs he had heard about. Although trained in NYPD’s PreCrime Agency alongside PreCogs, the Cogs were only faintly empathic—a little empathy went a long way, as Mason saw it—yet far less vulnerable to directed brain attacks than PreCogs. Still, Mason didn’t like them much. All the cognition stuff rubbed him the wrong way. The Cogs could see inside anyone, after all—and mess with things. He’d had enough messes.

  “OK, lessee,” said the Cog, petting his meat chair’s pink armrests in a way that unnerved Mason. “An inspector with the Royal Parks Constabulary. She’s upset. Under stress, sir. The Watch . . . they’re looking for her. I don’t know why. Possibly mixed up with the cults. And there’s something else: I’m feeling . . . um, lessee . . . an incursion of some sort? Really vague. Possibly one of the cults, sir. She’s not . . . uh.”

  “What?” asked Mason. “Come on, man. Fuck the ‘vague’ shit.” The Cog looked at Mason, wincing bitterly, and started jiggling his knee.

  “She’s not carrying guilt—at least, not normal guilt.”

  “What’s that mean? Who cares about that?”

  “What I’m trying to say is . . . she’s . . . she’s—I don’t know. That’s it. I’m out now.”

  “Stay on it,” said Mason. “If she’s cult, I want her kept at a distance. I want her to be thinking of nests of baby bluebirds and nothing else.”

  The woman’s flowing black hair swayed as she drifted along the edge of the square, gazing off into the mottled sycamore stands, up toward the sky, then all around the building facades. She appeared both otherworldly and sprung from earthy soil and water, and Mason found himself entranced. A faint nimbus of green—raw, vernal, and fecund—reflected off the budding limbs of the sycamore and lime trees, enveloping her. She hadn’t looked at the chancery with any more interest than the rest of the square, and Mason now felt convinced that this Astrid Sullivan, whoever she was, posed no threat to the embassy.

  Astrid now seemed to be looking straight into some of the hidden cameras, in a way that didn’t feel quite human to Mason, and he got a hard, close look. She wasn’t young or lithe, but tall and powerfully built, with the liquid muscles of a swimmer that swelled against her white and dark navy uniform.

  In this woman’s face, Mason saw something larger than another entitled aristocrat’s or angry republican’s call to arms. It was deeper and stronger and older and more British than just about anything in England Mason saw. It was more than some ridiculous through blood and law catchphrase.

  Some of the diplomatic cops in the Roost were astir.

  “Shit! Look, shitheads,” one of them was saying. “It’s that goddamned monkey.”

  “Not a monkey, dumbass,” said another. “Ape.”

  Mason had also seen flashes of the gorilla’s face, and the humped, retreating backside of an elephant, and the giant legs of elephants, and now the gorilla again, with a strange, pained expression, looking right into one lens. There was another animal, too, but it was harder to make out—a tiger? No one had said anything about tigers.

  The gorilla’s face came up again on several screens, but Astrid seemed to vanish.

  “Britain’s under attack—by its own zoo? But now I don’t see the woman—this Inspector Sullivan,” said Mason. “We’ve got lots of gorilla.” The animal looked sad and frighteningly sentient.

  “Nope. Not a face we’re going to find on the databases,” he said, turning to a square-faced black rookie agent from Baltimore who was manning the master CCTV console. Mason really liked this rookie, Navas, an agent who also had strong empathic skills (it was getting to be a trend in FBI and CIA recruitment). But Navas wasn’t exactly trained in using them, and for Mason, that made him far more trustworthy.

  Navas smiled and shook his head, then asked in a serious tone, “What about the woman?”

  “I think we’re sort of stuck,” said Mason. “I don’t actually see how her presence rises beyond a UK internal security matter. But I’m still thinking we’ve not seen the end of this. I hope she’s OK. I see no threat with her. I just don’t—but, for now, I think we’ve got to leave her to the fucking Watch. Damn shame.” He hesitated for a moment, then turned back toward the squinty-eye Cog.

  “Is she or is she not a threat to America?” Mason asked the Cog.

  “I don’t . . . think so?”

  “OK,” said Mason. “But the Crown doesn’t like her.”

  “Good ’ole King Harry,” Navas muttered. “If he’s after her, she must be competent.”

  “Damn right,” Mason said, leaning down toward him.

  “Heh-heh,” said Navas, smiling awkwardly. Several of the CCTV monitors were swinging wildly in a way that made it impossible to see what they were recording. “My concentration’s shit,” said Navas. “I’m losing focus. I’m feeling like there’s something in the chancery building. Sir?”

  Mason took a deep breath. He said, “What do you mean?” He glanced over at the Cog, frowning.

  “What do you say, Cog?”

  “I don’t know. I notice . . . something, too? Something’s in my thoughts. Something’s in here.”

  “What the fuck do you mean, ‘in here’?�
�

  “I don’t know. I think . . . my thinking’s . . . it’s like it’s sort of rippled, sir.”

  Mason looked over toward the group of newcomers who had come in with the pass-phrase.

  It could be nothing, Mason knew, but a Cog’s distraction usually meant trouble. For all his dislike of Cogs, he recognized that they possessed a talent. They would clamp onto others’ minds like sharks and never let go.

  “OK,” said Mason. “Let’s sweep the building.” He nodded to one of the few actual armed U.S. Marines who stood guard in the Roost. “See if there’s anyone in the building who’s not on crew—or authorized.”

  “The woman,” said Navas. “We should help her. We have to.”

  “Maybe,” said Mason. “It’s complicated. Is there a valid, concrete threat? Where are these . . . animals?”

  Navas spun around, back to his console, and worked his cameras. A blur of images from the square—sycamore leaves, black bollards, mullioned windows—flashed across the screens. Finally, two big shots, at separate angles, of an exhausted pachyderm appeared on the main CCM screen, its trunk held rigidly out like a visible bolt of anger.

  “OK, sir. Got one. It’s outside,” he said, with a sigh of relief.

  “Fuckinay,” said Mason. “This is—goddangit—it’s England, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about. Y’all think? Why does this kind of shit always happen here?” He leaned in to look at the screens more closely. “Anybody read War of the Worlds? Typical Englishness.”

  A different, boyish agent turned around, about to speak.

  Mason interrupted him, “That was rhetorical.”

  It seemed to him now that the newcomers—austere-looking goobers with ultrashort haircuts as tidy as helmets—were crowding around the screens. Where did all these folks come from? Mason wondered. Few wore the dark bland wool suits and ties of his agents. Mason didn’t want to overthink their presence; one of the hassles you learned to tolerate in security around the Company was being monitored and visited by shadowy, parallel organizations within the service. (And the pass-phrases were redundantly protected and knowledge of them sacrosanct.) But Mason felt nervous. He noticed that many of the kooks also wore the same white Nike trainers. They were in one of the most secure rooms in London, six floors below the surface (not the commonly believed three), encased in a full ten-foot-thick socket of lead and steel-buttressed well-being. They could survive a direct hit from most hydrogen bombs—for a few hours, at least. Apart from the mysterious newcomers, they all adored Mason. He was cantankerous and popular, and he inspired loyalty. But something was slipping past him.

  “Seriously,” he suddenly announced to all, “the pressure’s sort of off on you all.” Not everyone turned around to listen.

  The Met and the horrible king’s special paramilitary units were working this weirdness, he explained to the crowd in the room. American security personnel—diplomatic police, a small, specialized marine detachment, the CIA agents and liaisons, and a few British security “contractors” whom everyone accepted as MI5—would spectate. No one seriously believed that an embassy attacker was going to fill an elephant with ammonium nitrate and attach an Opticall detonator.

  “Gorillas are buckchuck cool,” said the boyish agent. Everyone looked at him. He zoomed in with one of the deep-infrared cameras, making a red-orange bloom fill the screen. “That’s its brain. Lot of energy there.”

  A soldier standing by the door laughed.

  And that was about the time when Mason’s own brain, still recovering from a deep sleep, truly awakened.

  “Holy shit—the applicants, the fucking visa applicants!”

  A collective gasp arose. No one had remembered. Even as early as 4:00 A.M., there was always a queue for the visa services section of the embassy. Men, women, often children—usually Indigents—huddled in blankets, walked in place to keep their feet warm, whispered reverently in a hundred languages. The problem was, they normally gathered so close to the front of the chancery, they were not visible, on-screen, until the embassy officially opened for business at 8:30 A.M., when they would filter into the building’s indoor battery of metal detectors and snaking queues and undergo a terrific, multitiered, marginally legal scrutinizing.

  Mason said, “Goddamnit, we need to get the fuck out there.” He could see the Mirror/WikiNous’s headline already: HEARTLESS YANKS LEAVE REFUGEES TO BEASTS.

  He looked at the marines in the Roost. “Jesus. Wait a second. You can’t go out there.” What to do, precisely, turned out to be not so simple. The applicants stood on British soil, for now.

  U.S. soldiers could not go out onto the pavement with weapons to protect foreign nationals on English territory. Even assigning diplomatic police to the pavement could cause an international row. The “special relationship” between America and the United Kingdom had long gone. If nothing else, Henry IX was majestically, deviously fickle. You just never knew what was coming next. Last year, Henry had actually lobbied to reopen the Treaty of Ghent; there were some twenty million acres of mineral-rich Maine and Upper Michigan that he felt Canada, now a Crown colony (apart from Quebec) again, had a historical claim to, at least in part, and tensions between the two countries were rising. Weeks later, he was calling the struggling America of the twenty-first century “a continuing inspiration for all.”

  “You could invite them in,” said the British contractor. “The people, obviously—not the elephants.”

  “No, no elephants,” Mason nodded, smirking. “That’s good.” He turned to one of the diplomatic police officers. “Do it.”

  The officer started patting his neuralzinger belt.

  “Goddamnit,” said Mason. “Do it fast or I’ll cut your cock off with a dull deer antler.”

  A few of the men laughed. The Cog was shaking his head in apparent disgust.

  “Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!”

  The officer ran out of the room.

  “Open the main doors!” A voice was shouting up a stairwell. “Let the applicants in.”

  Mason turned to Navas.

  “What a mess. Get Five and the Circus up to speed. Tell them that we’re getting our logistics in place, that we’ve got a few minor jurisdictional queries out to Legal—wait, no, wait, don’t, don’t do that. God, we’ll never hear the end of it. The ‘rights of Englishmen’ this, EU treaties that. Wait till Harry gets a hold of that! Just request assistance.”

  “Sure,” said Navas. “What about the woman—the inspector from the Royal Parks? The one the Watch is hot for?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to talk with her. I think I need to get out there.”

  “Are you fucking nuts?” asked Navas.

  “Well,” said Mason. He punched in the code on a rectangle of numbers by the door of the lift. The lift, which had just two stops—ground level or six floors below to the Roost—opened with a sibilant woosh.

  “I’m good with animals,” said Mason.

  The applicants needed help. Mason remembered Ephesians—how it was important to “be ye kind to one another, tenderhearted.” He himself had come up hard from the impoverished hamlet of Mingo Grove, a foggy holler in the shadow of Spruce Knob Mountain. After high school, he joined the air force and excelled. He later worked his way through the state university, managing a BodyFriendly’s ice cream restaurant at night to pay the bills. Despite the stereotypes of insular Appalachia, Mason’s attraction to “furn service,” as his family called it, was admired around his pine-forested, precipitous home. Getting out was the right thing to do, as everyone said once you’d done it. The applicants had it much worse, he knew. There was no comparison.

  As for animals, he had grown up around aggressives, both sentient and otherwise, and he loved them. His older sister had bred and sold at half-market price Perro de Presa Canario puppies and kept, of all things, a pet bobcat, called Snaggle, caught as a kitten in the hills. Snaggle had grown up to be dangerous; it had once attacked Mason’s mother and killed a visiting Presa stud as well as another p
et in the Gage home—a big raccoon. Still, no one, especially not Mason, thought for a moment that Snaggle didn’t have a place in their household.

  As the lift opened to an anteroom of the chancery and Mason loped out into the square to survey the applicants, he felt a keen sense of destiny—and confidence to a fault.

  Tenderhearted, he had to repeat to himself. Tender. Hearted.

  the brave man from zanzibar

  OUTSIDE THE CHANCERY, A QUEUE OF AROUND two dozen people, mostly men from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and central China, seemed to be standing with remarkable poise. Few of them came from places wealthy enough to implement the Seoul International Open-Comm Accords, which made WikiNous flesh-implantation a human right. Consequently, almost none of them understood what was going on in the rest of London. When the gorilla and elephant—and something else—entered the square, they froze.

  But it wasn’t composure. It was terror.

  “Dà xîngxîng!” a Chinese woman finally began screaming, and a clamor of cries and shouts followed. “Dà xiàng!”

  Suleiman Ghailani had been sitting upon his “Ghana Must Go” bag,* as some of his queue mates kept calling the huge plaid nylon tote, which contained all his possessions on earth. These mostly comprised secondhand clothes from charities in Zanzibar whose supply of ugly, ancient polyester clothes from Kentucky and Bavaria was apparently inexhaustible. (The world had plenty of T-shirts and garish jumpers for Africa, Suleiman had discovered, long ago. To Zanzibari eyes, the old prebiodegradable fibers seemed to last decades longer than the inscrutable fashions they chased. There were things more injurious than poverty. Who in the world needed tight purple leggings with twelve zippered pockets?) There were also a pair of very weathered Reverend Awdry’s Railway Series books to help him learn English (the haughty blue engine, Gordon, made him laugh), and two packages of his cherished ballpoint pens, which he had purchased prematurely (and expensively) upon arrival at Heathrow. He planned to post the pens back to his father and young sisters in Tanzania as soon as he finally made it to America. (No one attached to the WikiNous/Opticall web used pens or pencils, but the poorest parts of the world treated them with reverence.) He would put a crisp, new $500 note in the letter, too, as he had seen done in the kung fu movies everyone in Tanzania watched on the old electric dalla-dalla buses. Once safe in the USA, he was going to make his family feel big.