The Annihilation Score (27 page)

Superintendent Christie barrels out of the command center, followed by a pair of bobbies: “Why are you back again?” she demands.

I point at the front door of the mosque. “You need to search the classrooms in back. You're looking for a man with a book, ritual trappings, and a sacrifice.” A black goat would be standard, if they can rustle one up at this kind of notice, otherwise a chicken. I'm pretty sure it's considered
haram
to do that ritual at all, let alone in the grounds of a mosque, but then—

“What for? We can't just storm a mosque!”

“There's your reasonable grounds for suspicion,” I say. I point up at the circling clouds which briefly form the visage of a scowling man's face: “You're looking at a weather control invocation. Officer Friendly is busy pacifying your Übermensch and the rest of us don't have your legal authority.”

Christie follows my finger, then nods jerkily. “You'd better be right.” The implicit
or else
hangs in the air as she turns to her two escorts: “Follow me!” Then she storms up the steps to the front door of the mosque and hammers on it. “Police!”

The door opens. I take the steps two at a time behind her. The caretaker—or possibly imam—falls back. “You can't come in here,” he says half-heartedly.

“Yes, I can. I've been informed that a crime may be in progress on these premises.” Christie glances over her shoulder at me: I don't need to be a telepath to know she's thinking,
If you're wrong about this, it's your ass.
“Which way are your classrooms?”

“Round the corridor, but miss, you can't—” He falls back in front of her, protesting all the way.

She's polite but firm,
very
firm, taking no shit. “How many classrooms do you have here? Are there fire exits? Which way are they? Where—okay. You have two seconds to open this door or I'm going to do it myself, don't make me wait—”

Our unwilling guide opens the door and walks in. He does a double take: “Hey, Anwar, what are you do
ing
—”

There is a crimson flash of light and a deafening bang from across the room, then it's raining indoors and Lecter's strings flare the light electric. I take two steps forward, shoes slipping on the suddenly wet floor as I pass a cop in riot gear who is standing in place, smearing the blood around on his visor in a desperate attempt to see what's happening. I pluck notes from my instrument, notes that absorb the thunder and fall flat and oppressive on my ears like atonal anti-music. Lecter nimbly drives my fingertips as I raise the blood-spattered bow and draw it across electric-blue strings that leave purple after-images in my vision, after-images like warped and melted prison bars that wrap around the silhouette of the man who stands chanting in the center of the summoning grid, holding a knife and the bleeding body of a black cockerel.

***
Fun!
*** sings my instrument as the perp brings the knife to bear, pointing it at us and chanting the lightning down. There are green worms spinning in his eyes because of course you don't get to run this kind of summoning without shielding and still keep your soul intact: this is classic suicide-cultist territory and Anwar isn't alone in his head anymore.

There's another pink-blue flicker-
bang
and I am dazzled and deafened, nearly thrown off my feet as Lecter absorbs a direct lightning strike at point-blank range.

“Police! Drop it!” yells the other officer—the one who hasn't lost
his lunch all over what's left of the caretaker. He's drawn his Glock and he's given warning and he's about to double-tap the summoner, which would be fine by me if he was dealing with a regular armed lunatic. Unfortunately he isn't. The revenant in the grid is still chanting, and now he turns his knife in a circle, waving it in all the cardinal directions. My skin tries to crawl off my body with the intensity of the thaum field he's gathering around him.

***
May I?
*** pleads Lecter.

Yes,
I say, and he takes full control of my hands and—

Hiatus.

The next thing I am aware of is Alice Christie speaking rapidly into her Tetra mike. “We're in the back of the mosque, entry with probable cause. Two confirmed dead, one officer down needs urgent medical support, dead include prime suspect in earlier lightning-induced fatalities—”

Someone takes my elbow. “Ooh, tasty. Come on, Mo, let's get you out of here.” They tug insistently, and I turn, mind fogged and numb. “
Damn,
I really need a drink. What a waste. Come on, walk, dammit.” Mhari shoves me towards the door. “That looks nasty, I hope you've got a change of clothes back at the office. I guess now we know why real superheroes wear artificial fibers.” I slip and slither across the caretaker's intestines, which have somehow untangled into a complicated gray-pink maze between the upper and lower halves of his torso. Mhari steers me around the Tactical Ted who, having lost it, is now shivering by the door. The smell of blood and feces is a sullen reek in my nostrils, nauseating and fierce.

“Let's go home,” I mumble. It's funny: now I'm no longer in play, trying to hold on to my own stomach contents is turning out to be a real chore. I
hate
wet work. It triggers hideous flashbacks, and I can't get the mental taste of Lecter's gloating satisfaction out of my mouth.
Not
letting him off the leash whenever he feels like it is about 80 percent of my job. It's small consolation that the feeder animating Anwar's body was gearing up to zap us repeatedly until crispy, or that the man himself had died some time before we got here. Why does this stuff always have to happen to
me
?

We stumble out into the daylight, blinking (and cringing, in Mhari's case). The clouds are thinning rapidly, the rain has stopped, and I can see a blue patch of sailor's pants beyond the rooftops across the road. Ramona's not-so-yellow submarine is parked beside the command truck, still disguised as a white Mercedes van. I stumble straight towards it, when there's a thunder of rotors directly overhead, and I look straight up into a big telephoto lens poking through the open door of a helicopter.

“Don't say anything compromising,” Mhari reminds me, “we're on candid camera.” She pushes me back towards the mosque doorway, then pauses, body language telegraphing distaste: “And you're
really
going to have to bin that suit before the press conference, dear. Those bloodstains will
never
come out.”

“Wonderful,” I manage. Trying to match her mordant humor seems to help with the chore of holding things together: “This day just keeps on getting better.”

“Yes, it does,” says Superintendent Christie, her grim reaper voice just behind my right ear. “Because you do
not
get to bugger off back to London and leave me carrying the can. Once I get that bloody chopper out of the picture,
you and I
”—she pokes me in the small of my back—“are going to have a little chat about what happened in there. Because my boss is going to ask me for an explanation, and it had better be one which won't set this whole city on fire by nightfall.
Is that clear?
”

*   *   *

We end up in a briefing room in a police station on Barn Street. At least it's not a cell: that's a hopeful sign.

We are not, it seems, expected to shoulder the blame for Übermensch going off his trolley, throwing six assorted vehicles around, upending an ambulance, severely injuring half a dozen Anti-Fascist Action members, and nailing a middle-aged taxi driver to the back wall of his home for the crimes of having been born in Peshawar and dyeing his beard with henna. In fact Officer Friendly is quite popular with the force hereabouts, having saved any number of his
non-superpowered colleagues the trouble of having to tackle the aforementioned juiced-up thug themselves.

However, we're getting rather less love for how we dealt with Anwar Kadir, a regular at the mosque and all around good egg—until he pulled out the extremely dodgy textbook, inscribed a summoning grid in the number two classroom, sacrificed a rooster, and got himself taken over by a class four manifestation (commonly known by the locals hereabouts as a
Djinn
).

The death of Mohammed Nasir, the unfortunate mosque committee member who let us in, is not going to be easily brushed under the carpet. Neither is that of Mr. Kadir, although the fact that he was throwing lightning bolts around at the time and threatening a Superintendent weighs in our favor.

But the steaming turd in the soup tureen is the fact that we
went inside a mosque in hot pursuit and killed him
. This is not good. In fact, it is extraordinarily bad. It would be bad enough if we'd done it in a church or a synagogue, but doing it in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood in the middle of a race riot . . .

Paradoxically, what saves the day turns out to be the TV news cameras showing me stumbling out into the daylight with my arm over White Mask's shoulders, both of us absolutely covered in gore. Mhari was right—my suit's utterly ruined—but it takes very little effort to imply that I've been injured in the course of taking down a superpowered monster. Superintendent Christie simply arranges for an ambulance to back up to the front door and for me to be taken away on a stretcher. Mr. Nasir was not the only member of the mosque committee to be sheltering on the premises. When the Super invited them to examine Kadir's little pentacle, there were many sharp intakes of breath. Then the imam picked up the book Mr. Kadir was working with—disturbing the crime scene, but we'll let that pass—and started swearing loudly in Pashtun. It was not a copy of the Koran; it was not a holy book at all. In fact, it was very, very unholy indeed, positively unclean—and he wanted it removed from his mosque as fast as possible.

We (I am using the corporate “we” here: I, personally, wasn't
involved at this point in time) were happy to make it go away. The Laundry is always happy to expand its archives.

But this leaves us dealing with the unpalatable task of explaining our role in a multiple fatality police incident involving two separate riots and a superhero dust-up. If I was an authorized firearms officer and I'd just shot someone—hell, if I'd so much as drawn my gun and pointed it, never mind discharging it—I'd be facing a lengthy period of suspension on pay pending an IPCC enquiry to determine if in fact I had behaved lawfully, with possible prosecution at the end of the process if I hadn't. I'm not a police officer and I didn't use a firearm and I'm actually supposed to be running a new type of quick reaction force with backing from the Home Office, and the procedures we're supposed to follow start out murky, then drive off a legal cliff.

Which makes it a very good thing indeed that the only witnesses were Mhari, me, Superintendent Alice Christie, Constable Ed Carter (hospitalized for shock: under heavy sedation, may never work again), and Sergeant Barry Samson, who had actually drawn on Mr. Kadir and was about to pull the trigger when I beat him to it and maybe saved his life.

And which also explains why at ten o'clock at night I'm sitting in a briefing room, wearing a set of exercise sweats borrowed from the GMP ladies' basketball team and drinking a bottle of Coke Zero while Alice, who has spent the last four hours on damage control, explains what's going to happen in words of one syllable. Mhari—who escaped the worst of the mess when Mr. Nasir exploded because she was standing behind me—is also present: she's removed her mask and is looking surprisingly subdued.

“I am not going to charge you with manslaughter, Dr. O'Brien, because it is patently obvious that you were acting in self-defense and, indeed, in defense of myself and my officers. Personally, I would like to thank you for what you did back there. Nevertheless, I and my force commander would be
extremely pleased
if your team could refrain from visiting us again in an active front-line role until
all
your people are officially on the books as sworn-in constables. If the Met would see fit to discover that they've misplaced the paperwork and
you simply forgot to tell me that your attestation was held the day before yesterday, that would be
amazingly
helpful. Oh, and if you could remind your friend from ACPO that he designated you as an Authorized Firearms Officer as well? You will need to talk to the IPCC about establishing due procedures for investigating fatalities resulting from the actions of officers on your, ah, force, and for controlling the use of potentially lethal weapons. I assume you have no objection to my division filing the preliminary paperwork to refer Mr. Kadir's death to the IPCC, and will supply your own sworn testimony in due course.”

“I understand,” I say woodenly. There's no credit to be gained by pointing out that in my parent organization we regularly use lethal force with minimal oversight: quite the contrary. I'm not in Kansas anymore, and the Security Service is supposed to leave this kind of head-banging to SCO19 and, in extremis, the Army.

Alice rolls her eyes. “You would not
believe
the shit-storm that's going to land on my head tomorrow, and on yours the day after. IPCC fatal incident investigations rattle on for years; they don't terminate until the weight of paperwork exceeds the fully loaded coffin and the gravestone on top. Sometimes they result in a manslaughter prosecution. I'm pretty sure this one won't, but your delayed or misfiled paperwork is absolutely not going to make things better. You can expect a dressing-down from Professional Standards, at the very least. And I'm serious about not coming back here until you've got your ducks in a row.”

“Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to do that,” I tell her.
Yes, a three- to six-month paid vacation would be just fine right now.
I instinctively nudge my violin case with one foot. I spent a couple of hours cleaning it, but there are still patches of dried blood that will take specialist attention. “I'm not sure we've got time, though. My unit didn't even exist until last Tuesday—”