The Annihilation Score (39 page)

“Here.” The reply comes from upstairs.

I close the door and open the safe in the under-stairs cupboard and shove Lecter inside. But I do not lock it—not just yet. I head for the kitchen, where I smell something delicious in the convection oven and see the table is laid for two. A flash of gratitude is followed by a stab of resentment: then a moment of self-interrogation—why am I resentful of my husband for making assumptions about my desire to dine with him? I shake my head, then go to the cupboard and haul out the cafetière and the jar of decaf.

A few seconds later I hear Bob's footsteps on the stairs. He gets as far as the kitchen doorway, then stops. “Who died?” he asks, looking me up and down.

“My career, if I'm not lucky.” I pour hot water over the coffee grounds. “We were ambushed by the Home Secretary this afternoon. Be a dear and keep an eye on this while I change?”

“Sure.” He takes over while I head upstairs and replace my suit in its carrier and pull on jeans and a tee shirt. Wearing office formal at home is too much like surrendering to the job. And it was making Bob uncomfortable—he's in his usual, which this decade is combat pants and casual shirt.

I find him downstairs in the kitchen, stabbing a roast chicken to
death with a meat thermometer. “You could have mentioned you had dinner plans,” I chide.

“Sorry, I didn't think you—” Double take. “You have alternatives?”

“Yes.” I sit down. “Ramona and Mhari ganged up on me, so I'm taking three nights a week off. Going to the opera, eating out with co-workers, anything at all really: just as long as it stops me burning the candle at both ends every day.”

“Oh, well: that sounds like a good idea.” He nods ruefully. “Next time I'll check in advance.”

“Sorry, I should have warned you.” Apologies are the keystone of an enduring relationship. Failing to apologize for mistakes, or getting onto a treadmill of belittling insults, is a bad warning sign. So far we've avoided it, but . . . “I thought you were in Australia this week?”

“That was
last
week.” (I rummage in the wine rack while he talks.) “You wouldn't believe how many sites Angleton worked at during his career. Even if he only left behind one a year that needs checking out, if it takes me an average of a week to handle each of them, I'll be running around with my tail on fire for the next eighteen months. Week before last, it was the sealed collection of a library in Cardiff that held the foul papers of a guy who wrote mathematical puzzle books in the sixties—it's got all the stuff Angleton made him leave out of the published editions. He was an ex–Bletchley Park analyst, nothing to do with our mob, but it had to be inspected. Angleton didn't confiscate his notes—he just put the frighteners on him and told him not to do it again. So now
I
have to check them out, and either confiscate them and fend off the angry librarians or write a memo explaining why potentially hazardous papers are lying around in a library we don't control . . . And
last
week I had to go check the cleanup on an Aboriginal site in Western Australia, two hundred miles east of Perth, south of the big mining complex. Angleton got all over the map.”

I plant a bottle of sauvignon blanc on the table. It's from a New Zealand vineyard—extravagant, but I've got my husband back for the evening so what the hell. I attack the screw cap and pour two glasses. “How long are you in town for?” I ask.

“I've got three days, mostly for filing reports and catch-up meetings.
Then they're sending me to Leeds for a week to poke around a proposed new headquarters site for buried hazards.” He shudders. “That's why I'm raiding my side of the wardrobe. What are we going to
do
?”

“Eat,” I say. It comes out sounding like either a promise or a threat or something. To tell the truth I have no idea what we're going to do, or even if we're still a
we
.

Bob dishes up slices of roast chicken breast and drumstick, roast potatoes, carrots, and swede on the side. For all that it comes in supermarket pre-packs, it's welcome. We eat in companionable silence for a while.

“You've got a lot of travel going on,” I say eventually, “but when things quieten down . . . do you want to see if we can make things work again?”

Bob chews mechanically, eyes staring right through me. Man-boy, thoughtful. He swallows. “I don't know if that's even possible anymore.”

“Go look under the stairs.”

Suddenly he looks round. “Where's your violin?”

“Go look under the stairs.”

He stands and walks through into the hall. A minute later he comes back and sits down again, then takes a mouthful of wine. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes.” I nerve myself for the next step. “It's warded, Bob. The violin lives there . . . for the time being.”

He puts his glass down. “You're trying to give it up?” He sounds appalled and hopeful all at the same time.

The words come in a rush: “It's too strong for me, Bob! It's getting more powerful all the time, and I'm getting older, and there's going to come a time when I can't control it anymore. Michael—the SA—says I'm now the second-longest carrier it's ever had. We're looking for someone new, someone it can't Renfield. But if we can't find someone to replace me, it's going to have to go back in the inactive inventory.”

He stares at me, clearly surprised. “What changed, love?”

“You did. I did.” I grab my glass and take a gulp of wine and then set it down hastily because my hands are shaking. “If you can, can do
something, I'll meet you halfway.” I don't know if it's a promise or a plea, but either way I mean it.

He takes a deep breath. “I can't give up the Eater of Souls, Mo. Not,
don't want to
—I mean, I
can't
.”

“Can you make it safe?” I ask. “I mean, safe enough to be around me without, without . . .”

He stands and walks around the table: I stand, lean against him, let him hug me. “I really need to talk to someone about applied containment theory,” he says. “When I get time.” Which would be a diplomatic way of saying
no
.

“You're very busy,” I tell him, trying not to sound as broken as I feel.

“I'm sorry,” he says. Letting go of me he repeats: “When I get time.”

“We've got all the time in the world.” I sniff, determined not to get teary.

“I don't think so.” He looks at me, anxious and needy. We make a dismal pairing: barely treading water on our own, so weighed down by our personalized curses that we're each looking to the other as a life raft. “It's been well over a month already. Please don't let this become the new normal, Mo. Please?”

But all I can do is mutely shake my head. It's not up to me anymore. I've given up a lot to be here: if Bob can't meet me halfway, I don't see what possible future we've got.

*   *   *

On Friday morning I go to my weekly with Dr. Armstrong. I tell him about last Saturday's dream, and my subsequent dealings with my instrument.

“That's a rather worrying development,” he says after I wind down.

“The violin intruding in my dreams? Do you think it's time for me to—”

“No, you're still perfectly able to control him if you set your mind to it. I meant the
location
.”

“What? The ruined city?”

“The King in Yellow.” The SA closes his eyes for a few seconds. “I haven't heard that name in a while. It's disturbing.”

“What is it?” I did some digging, of course: there's a thick file on it in the Stacks, but I didn't have time to trudge round to Dansey House and sign myself in for an afternoon of reading dusty archives: I'm too busy fighting administrative fires. I told the analysts to follow it up for me, along with all the other manuscripts Freudstein stole, and it's somewhere in their work queue.

The SA opens his eyes. “Carcosa is one of the legendary lost cities. Or rather, a legendary lost Neolithic civilization, nearly pre-agricultural, drowned like Doggerland and the great cities of the Nile delta and the Arabian Gulf when the sea levels rose after the last ice age. They had elaborate court rituals centered around the worship of the King in Yellow. Subsequently the foundational material for some not inconsiderable occultist foofaraw in the late nineteenth century. It's a rite of binding, Dominique. Not unlike the ritual that certain meddling fools—who should have known better—tried to use to bind the Eater of Souls a couple of years ago.” His unblinking stare makes me feel very small. “They wrote an opera around one of the invocations. One of the solos—I do not know which; it's too dangerous to read the score—installs a very small execution loop in the auditory cortex of anyone who hears it. If warded, one is safe, but if not, well, the first invocation anyone feeds you starts executing on your brain.
Not
nice. Carcosa is lost, and it is widely believed that it is lost because the King in Yellow bound his subjects in that manner, and unintentionally carried them all to a hell of his own conception or fed them to a god of his own devising or some such.”

“That particular manuscript was part of the British Library heist.” I don't like where this train of thought is going.

The SA turns his lizard-heavy gaze on me for a moment. “Do you suppose it was Freudstein's real target?”

“It would make sense.” Played on a non-occult instrument the loop would just be an earworm: a short melody, very hard to dislodge from one's head. But played on a device able to perform
polydimensional chromatic transforms, it'd leave the audience vulnerable to demonic possession by the first trivial feeder to come along. “But they'd need something like my instrument to, to install the loop.”

“Yes.” Dr. Armstrong is thoughtful. “There are certain disturbing rumors about the reason Dr. Mabuse commissioned the white violins—rumors along those lines.”

“Mabuse?” He was a man of whom many stories are told, none of them good. “But surely he didn't actually stage a performance of
The King in Yellow
?”

“I don't believe he had the opportunity to do so. Then all known copies of the score were destroyed during the war, or collected by institutions that were, shall we say, uninterested in sponsoring a performance.”

“It'd be grossly irresponsible to play it without working a protective ward into the refrain—”

My phone rings. Before I entered his office I set it to do-not-disturb: only a very short list of people can get through.

“'Scuse me,” I say.

The SA swallows whatever he was going to say. “Certainly,” he says, slightly stiffly, as I pull the smartphone out.

“Ah. It's important,” I tell him as I glance at the screen. “O'Brien here. Speak.”

“Mo?” It's Mhari. “We have an incident call-out.”

“Where?”

“Downing Street. It's the Mandate.” She fills me in quickly. He's somehow penetrated the security cordon, and is visiting the Government Chief Whip for tea and a chat in that worthy's official residence. What he didn't reckon with was the face recognition software running on the computers fed by the CCTV cameras around Whitehall. He can beguile a human watcher, but not a database system.

I get hot and cold and shivery with adrenaline, reflexively reaching for a violin case that isn't at my feet. “How long has he been there?” I ask.

“Only ten minutes so far,” Mhari says eagerly. “We can get there if we hurry. Jim's in the office with Torch and Bee—”

“Okay. Tell them to go ahead and deploy around the area, don't wait for me. Don't let the Mandate leave the scene but don't interfere with him until I give the go-ahead. I'm coming back to the office to—no. Scrub that. Mhari, you know what's in the safe in my office?”

“Ye-e-s . . .” She doesn't sound happy.

“Tell Ramona to open the safe and bring the violin, in its case, then deploy. I'll give her the combination over the phone. If there's any trouble or if it tries to resist, don't bother; I'll swing by the office to collect it myself. Main thing is, I want everyone, and the violin, on deployment: I'll meet you there directly. Can you do that?”

“Let me get this straight? You're deploying without your—”

“No! I'm relying on security-cleared personnel to bring it to me: I'll collect it at the incident scene. You, Ramona, and Jim are all aware of its capabilities. I trust you know better than to mess with it.”

She laughs, slightly shaky. “No shit! It's sunny outside.”

“So go as White Mask.”
The Home Secretary wants a show? Let's give her one.

“Yes, Mo.”

I end the call. The SA is watching me patiently. “Yes?” he asks.

“It's the Mandate,” I tell him. “He's gone too far this time. I've got to go—”

“I'm coming with you,” he says, unfolding himself from his chair. “You said it's happening at the Chief Whip's residence, didn't you?” He rummages in his desk drawer and pulls out a bunch of ancient-looking keys.

“Yes—”

“Follow me.” He walks towards the curtained windows at the far end of his office. I stand and follow him, and he pulls back one of the ceiling-to-floor drapes at the side to reveal a narrow wooden casement, paneled, in which is set a keyhole. “Now let me see . . .” He works his way around the bunch of keys until he finds one to his liking. He inserts it in the keyhole, turns it, and the casement hinges open like a very narrow doorway. Beyond lies utter darkness. “Follow me,” he repeats, and slips sideways into the night.

I take a deep breath. “Where does this go?” I ask, tiptoeing after him.

“Sideways.” I can feel a smooth surface in front of my nose, and there's another wall behind me: it's so narrow I have to turn sideways, hoping I won't get stuck. The air is cool and fresh, and for some reason I know in my guts that there's no ceiling overhead, just an infinite expanse of not-sky. I glance over my left shoulder and see the rectangular column of light from the SA's office dwindling with each crabwise shuffle. “Not far now,” he reassures me.