The Annihilation Score (24 page)

“Yes? I'm in with a candidate—”

“We have trouble,” I interrupt. “Jim's in my office and we've got a problem,
our
candidate has a glamour, level six or higher, maybe even an eight. It's a full-blown you-gotta-believe-me field and I need backup to get the bastard out of the building. Put your candidate on hold and meet me at the front desk
right now
. Over.”

I put the phone back in my pocket and head for the front. Mhari arrives a moment later, followed by Ramona. They seem to have caught my sense of urgency. “What?” asks Ramona, looking up from her wheelchair. I offer her the mascara tube. “Is this what I think it is?” I nod.

Mhari shakes her head. “Level six or higher, you say?” She takes
my left wrist and I suppress a violent flinch as she touches the bracelet: “Like
that'll
do you a lot of good.” She tries to look me in the eye. “Mo, stop that. Don't freak out on me now! Listen, are the blinds in your office down?”

“I—I—” I swallow. “Yes.” I breathe deeply, trying to center myself again. “He sneaked in under the radar and he's got Jim's undivided attention, and worse: my violin's inaccessible. Under my desk.”

Ramona pauses in the middle of applying the brush to her lashes. (
Ew, sharing mascara brushes,
part of me thinks, but it's not as if we've got spares: that stuff is worth at least three times its weight in gold, and they're not going to be manufacturing any more of it once the supply of ingredients runs out.) “You should be safe from him with this,” she says. “It's pretty potent stuff.”

“Right.” Mhari taps her toes, waiting for Ramona to pass her the makeup tube. “So you want to get him out of the premises as fast as possible? Do you want him to leave via the window or the lift shaft?”

“I think he'll go willingly if he realizes we can see through him,” I say. “The big problem is Jim. If he decides to stand his ground and tells Officer Friendly to neutralize us . . .”

Ramona glances at Mhari, who is now working on her own eyes. Our clumpy lashes make us look like a failed goth revival. “Right, so that's what we plan for. How about you and I distract Jim, while you”—she's looking at me—“go in, avoid engaging the target, retrieve your violin and order him to leave?
If
he doesn't leave—
then
we tackle him.”

“Wait one,” says Mhari. She hands me the mascara, then she disappears. I mean, she
literally
disappears: she dashes back towards her windowless cubbyhole of an office so fast that I can't track her. A couple of seconds later she comes screeching back, all but leaving scorch marks on the carpet. “You'll need these,” she says, offering us a small, translucent box.

“What.” I focus on it. “Earplugs? Good thinking.”
Why does Mhari keep silicone earplugs in her office?
Ramona takes the box, extracts a pair, and passes it to me. I have second thoughts and pass it back to
Mhari: plugs will get in the way of me deploying Lecter. “You need these more than I do,” I tell her. Then I beckon: “Follow me.”

It all goes down in a matter of seconds. I open my office door and march directly to my desk. Mhari follows at my left shoulder, and Ramona wheels in behind her and zigzags to clear the doorway. I pay no attention to the two sapient cauliflowers from Arcturus but instead bend down, pick up my violin case, press the eject stud, and bring my instrument to bear on Fabian Everyman in one fluid movement.

“Freeze,”
I say, glaring at him along the fretboard. Lecter hums under my fingertips: he seems edgy, even nervous. Mr. Everyman turns to look at me, and with my Pale Grace™–enhanced vision and my defensive wards cranked up to eleven I see him for what he is. The fine hairs on the back of my neck rise and I burst out in a cold sweat as Mhari and Ramona grab Jim and pull him out of the firing line, shoving him towards the door with
go, go, go!
urgency.

“Well, this
is
a surprise,” says the Mandate. He grins widely. I'm not sure which is more disturbing: the gaping jaws crammed with pointy carnivorous ivory, the red-rimmed eyes, or the scaly green skin. “I really didn't think you had it in you, Dr. O'Brien. May I congratulate—”

“This interview is terminated,” I announce. I draw my bow lightly across a string that shimmers as it vibrates, bringing a note into being that is so pure that it threatens to rip apart reality. Firmly: “Your application is rejected with prejudice. You will leave this building
right now
and never return. You have ten seconds to comply.”

My target raises his arms in surrender—arms that end in green-skinned webbed hands, their fingers tipped with claws. I tense, nerving myself for the next note in the killing symphony, but he seems to mean it: “As you insist, I will depart peacefully. There's absolutely no need to be nasty about this! But please, I urge you, don't say anything you might regret after the next election?” His smile gapes wider, but thanks to the Bathory™ brand mascara I'm immune to his charms.

I track him, alert, bow at the ready. “Which party is going to select
you as a candidate?” I demand, as he stands and turns to leave. “Not that it matters, but I want to know who to vote against.”

“Which party?” The lizard-man spares me a saturnine grin from the doorway. “It doesn't really matter: I'll be running for whichever party wins the election. Toodle pip, dear girl. I expect to see you in my office sooner or later . . .”

*   *   *

Late morning, the day after.

We're having a post-mortem on the interviews, and have reached a consensus that none of the applicants are even remotely suitable. Mhari and Ramona have just finished swearing about their last exploding clown-car of an interview with TV Channel Changing Boy. (He can fast-forward through advertising intermissions by snapping his fingers and pointing at the TiVo, crack the DRM on Blu-ray discs by squinting at them, and he's the Federation Against Copyright Theft's worst nightmare; Home Office superhero candidate, not so much.) “
Definitely
no more interviews with open applications,” Mhari complains. “We had seven meetings with highly dysfunctional no-hopers and one plausible nightmare that was
entirely
too close for comfort.”

Jim sits, hunched and uncharacteristically quiet. “Indeed,” he says thoughtfully. “That was a teachable moment.”

“Was he applying to be a superhero or a supervillain?” Ramona asks plaintively.

“It depends on whether he fills out his parliamentary expenses form right. Damn, we're
definitely
going to have to keep tabs on him. I have a feeling there was something else inside the lizard-skin . . .” I stop, convinced I'm jumping at shadows, but Ramona picks up on it.

“Yes, I think so, too,” she says. “The super-politician front with the level seven glamour is just a cover—the first secret identity. When you got him to drop it, the lizard-man wasn't his real identity either—there was something even deeper going on. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it's onion skins all the way down: just a vacuum wearing an empty suit.”

Jim speaks up. “I think we may just have met our first genuine five-sigma superpower. The question of whether he's a superhero or supervillain is, at that level, strictly irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant, why?” Mhari crosses her arms.

Jim leans back: he looks almost bored. “Crime isn't always black and white. It's easy enough to finger petty criminals, but the high-level ones get really complicated. Was the 2007 financial crisis a crime? Certainly there were criminal actions involved: it flushed out Mr. Madoff's pyramid scheme, for example. Over ten billion pounds were stolen. But that was just the ripple on the surface, as trillions of dollars of derivatives evaporated when the market lost confidence in their existence. Were
those
losses criminal? Were the naked short-sellers who gambled against the market and undermined confidence in it criminals? Or was something else going on? Sometimes bad stuff—crimes, even—happen, but there's nobody to blame. And sometimes you get people who commit criminal acts for what they consider to be good moral reasons.”

“I don't think—” Mhari begins, and I'm about to interrupt because I don't want to get derailed into an argument over fraud between our super-cop and our former investment banker, but Jim rolls over her.

“Criminology,” he announces, “is the study of criminal behavior and criminal psychology. But it has an Achilles heel”—
good grief, a cop who uses classical references and expects his audience to follow him
—“insofar as we can only study the criminals who, through happenstance or stupidity, manage to get themselves arrested. Designated or self-proclaimed supervillains are
idiots
. They're damaged narcissistic personalities acting out their needy cravings in the public gaze. They're creating the spectacle of the absurd, Warholian junkies searching for their fifteen minutes of fame. Supervillain teams are even worse: they get locked into group-think and end up with the same failure modes as the homicidal maniacs who fly packed airliners into skyscrapers. But
those are just the ones we know about
.”

Suddenly Mhari focuses on him like a guided missile that's just locked onto a target. “Like vampire elders,” she says thoughtfully.

Jim looks puzzled. “Elders?”

“Let me tell you the first law of vampire school.” She stands up and paces across the office to stand against the wall, daringly close to the window blinds. “The first law of vampire school is, if I can tell you're a vampire, I must kill you. Because if
I
can tell, the sheeple—no offense, that's how the elders think of you—might also notice, and institute national noonday naked roll calls or something.” She frowns at Jim. “Functional supervillains would be like vampire elders, staying out of the limelight, maybe even finding ways to dispose of the narcissists who risk drawing public wrath down upon the superpowered. Yes?”

“Possibly.” He looks pensive. “But there
are
super-criminals—I'm sorry, that's unclear. I don't mean criminals with superpowers, I mean criminals who overachieve spectacularly and get away with it. They're so successful that they pass laws to legitimize their past actions: we don't call them criminals, we call them the Prime Minister of Italy or the President of the Russian Federation. ‘Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.' Add superpowers to
that
kind of super-criminal and they could plausibly go where you're pointing.” He looks up at Mhari. “But the Mandate isn't a supervillain: he's not damaged enough. He's something
worse
.”

I sigh and shove a stray wisp of hair out of the way. “I'm going to get Sam and Nick to open a file on him,” I tell them. “I also need to seek advice from Legal—maybe even the DPP. We need guidance on how to handle political cases. The blowback could be immense if we start monitoring a candidate and it turns out he isn't guilty of anything. But this bears further investigation. Just in case we've got a two-meter-tall flesh-eating lizard running for Parliament.”

“I really wouldn't take the reptile face seriously,” Ramona chips in. Her smile is acid: “He's riffing off David Icke, the whole lizard royal family conspiracy thing. It's a double-blind to make anyone who sniffs him out look like a crank. I don't know for sure what he is, but you can be certain the truth will be much,
much
worse.”

I start to shove my hair back into shape again, but end up clutching my forehead. A half-breed mermaid sent by the Deep Ones is telling me not to worry about shape-shifting lizards disguised as politicians? And a Chief Superintendent is telling me that there's an entire category of criminal he can't collar because they're so successful they end up running the country? What next?

Mhari grimaces, baring her canines. “Which brings me to the next topic. I need you to follow up the requests for Nick and Sam to get access to TEMPORA, Mo—it's been four days and we haven't heard back from CESG. And Jim, these PNC and SIS login authorizations you offered to sort out are becoming an urgent priority. Without those information systems they're not really able to pull their weight. Once they've got access I'd like to requisition at least two more analysts; we're going to need bodies to build up a general database of known three-sigma and up superpowers, and more bodies to weed out potential employment candidates and, from the other end, persons of interest to monitor. If we can get those authorizations sorted out by tomorrow, they should be rolling out reports by the back end of next week—”

My smartphone vibrates for attention and I grab it. It's Dr. Armstrong's office line.
Oh dear, this can't be good.
“Yes?” I say.

“Trouble,” he says crisply. “You can expect a major incident call to reach you within half an hour. Assemble your team, you're going to have to deploy prematurely and at short notice.”

“Wait, what—”

“Can't stay, got to run.” He hangs up on me. Meanwhile, Jim is answering
his
phone. “Yes? Yes? I see, sir. Can you repeat that—” He pulls out a pocket notebook and begins to scribble furiously in it. “Yes, certainly, yes, we can do that. Give me your number—” More scribbling. “All right, on our way. I'll call you back once we're mobile.”

He hangs up. “That was the Assistant Chief Constable for Greater Manchester. The GMP have got a major incident developing and they want our help
right now
.”

Well, fuck.
We don't even have a proper superhero team to deploy, just a bunch of managers suffering from post-traumatic interview syndrome. “What can you do?” I ask Jim.

He stands up. “I'd better suit up. Be right back, don't go anywhere without me . . .”