The Annihilation Score (43 page)

I see the conductor's face for the first time: or rather, I don't, because I recognize him from his absence, and he's in the high security lock-up at Belgravia where we put him after the takedown on Downing Street, isn't he?

“You can't make me do it!” I shout as I throw Lecter's bow at the Mandate.

Lights snap on overhead, a concussive blast of photons that scorch the back of my eyelids. I cower and cover my face with one arm. Figures step forward out of the photorhodopsin-stained backdrop: two in front, two closing in behind me. Daft Punk Territorial Support Group Judge Dredd Empty Uniforms—the uniforms Ramona had designed for my people—close in around me, raising power-assisted
gloves that contain no human fingers. The Naked Woman versus the Empty Suits.

“You're nicked!” The uniforms chant in unison as they grab me and twist my arms painfully behind my back. I can't breathe. They ratchet a pair of handcuffs closed around my wrists, zip-lock my ankles together, drop a bag over my head, and lift me to shoulder level. I'm suffocating as I open my mouth to scream: but there is no air here, just a tongueful of warm fur.

With an angry chirrup, Spooky plants a surprisingly cold pad on my cheek and stands up, flexing her claws. I realize I'm lying alone between damp, chilly sheets, breathless and heart pounding in the wake of a suffocation nightmare. I resolve never to complain about Spooky sleeping on my face again, then I get out of bed and go downstairs to check the wards on Lecter's safe.

Because you can never be too careful.

*   *   *

Sunday is as Sunday does: I spend it prosaically, catching up on housework chores and trying not to ask myself whether what I feel for Jim has the potential to turn serious. This is, of course, like trying not to think about green elephants: once you start consciously trying to avoid it, it becomes impossible. So I pop a sleeping pill at bedtime, and it is a distinct relief when Monday morning rolls around and I can dive back into a distracting office.

The first thing I do when I get to my room is to park Lecter in the securely warded safe. Then I fire off an email to Dr. Armstrong, asking if he has a spare hour. To my surprise, he gets back to me right away: this lunchtime is available. So that corner of my diary is penciled in for a chat about these dreams I've been having—and by extension, about Lecter—and other, more worrying things.

Last week I decreed that from today we'd be starting up regular Monday morning management meetings, just to keep all department heads in the loop. The Unit—with an effort I remind myself that we're now officially a Force—is big enough that we have to crawl out of the
Precambrian jellyfish swamp of bottom-up organizational structure and grow a management backbone. I don't know everything that's going on anymore, and although I know all the names and faces of the people working under me, there's no way I can stay in touch with what they do. Ergo, delegation, and the bane of management that ensues: endless meetings.

For now the meeting team consists of Ramona, Mhari, Jim, and myself: so we hold it in my office over coffee and it's blessedly short. It's going to change soon enough, though—I can see the writing on the wall.

I get my first surprise of the day when I ask, “Do we have any other business?”

Jim nods: “Yes, I got a memo via the Home Office. It's about the inaccessible tube station—BTP got a resolution, it turns out there's some other agency involved. Aldwych has been shut for years anyway, and apparently TfL agreed to transfer it to this other agency on a five-year lease without telling anyone, including the on-site guards.” His cheek twitches.

“That's—” Mhari shakes her head.

“Crazy?” I ask. “Do you know who the agency in question is?”

Jim's frown deepens. “As it happens, I do.” He glances at Ramona, then Mhari, then back at me. “Promise this won't go any further?”

“Promise—” I stop dead just as Ramona nods slowly.

“I think I see where this is going,” she says tonelessly.

Mhari's eyes narrow. “Spill it,” she tells Jim.

Jim nods, very slightly, then glances at me. “I'll thank you for not spreading this any further,” he tells us, “but you know full well that most police officers have not been briefed about the existence and true purpose of the organization you people really belong to.”

The Laundry's
true
purpose? I shrug. “Yes, but—” I stop. “You're not telling me—” I begin.

“It's the Specialist Crime and Operations Department.” He clears his throat, a worry frown forming at the corners of his lips, his eyes. “Very few of them—almost none of them—are cleared for Laundry-related material. And someone up top, high enough to have tons of
clout but nevertheless not on the briefing list, decided that in view of the rising tide of supervandalism it would be a good idea to have a deep bunker for incident command and containment of dangerous individuals. I mean, you saw how small and under-equipped the cells at Belgravia nick are?”

I nod. “Carry on.”

“It came from the top down a while ago, and I didn't get the memo because I was on secondment: it was while we were on that fisheries jaunt. Aldwych is being rented until the CrossRail TBMs can be redeployed to build us a proper facility—if we get the budget for it, of course. So the first element of the rebuild was to shut off street-level access. Once construction has finished, they'll partly reopen the stairwell, but as an oubliette so that villains can be sent down but can't get back up. They're going to run it like an ICBM silo, with watch crews on duty and underground access only via special trains.” He looks disapproving. “The next Criminal Justice Act will make changes to our ability to detain suspects for questioning without charge just to make this work.”

“Well, that's—” I hesitate to say
nice
.

“How good of them to keep us fully informed!” Ramona chirps pointedly. Jim avoids her gaze.

I roll my eyes. “People, please let's try not to get into the habit of saying what we think
all
the time?” Ramona is actually right: the Met setting up a secure supervillain nick
without telling us
stinks like a month-old fish. It reeks of maneuvering under false colors. Someone in the executive suite is trying to cut us out of the action on our own turf. What else might they be hiding from us? But it's impolitic to say that sort of thing aloud, especially on the record.

“I'm very sorry.” Jim finishes his coffee. “But it's strictly hands-off. There's some kind of pissing match going on in the executive suite at the Yard—at a guess they've got a couple of Deputy Commissioners squabbling for who gets to run the new specialist command. You don't get to that level without being a
political
officer, if you follow my drift. Doubtless they'll end up making a bid for
our
unit in due course.” He sounds disgusted. “Save me from empire builders.” He
pauses. “It's probably worth my skin if word gets out that I told you this.”

“Well, that's just peachy,” I manage. “Don't worry, your secret is safe with us, Officer Friendly. So, um, do we have anything else to talk about this morning?”

It turns out that there is nothing else to discuss, which is probably a good thing. They say if you start each day by swallowing a live toad nothing can possibly make it worse, but after that piece of news I'm not so sure.

And then my day
really
begins to turn to shit.

I'm shutting down my laptop to go and do lunch with the Senior Auditor when I get a voice call from Alison in HR. “Dr. O'Brien?” She sounds worried.

“Hi! You caught me on the way out of the office. Is there anything I can—” I do a double take and nearly facepalm. “Is this about Jim Grey?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

I'm on edge immediately because there's a brief pause between her words that doesn't feel right. “What's the problem?”

“Well, you asked me to look into his medical background and the details of his armor, and, um, it puts me in a sticky position. I'm afraid I can't help you. I mean, I
can't
. Medical files are legally privileged information. But you mentioned his armor? I can confirm that it's definitely unpowered. If you've seen him walking through walls in it, that's entirely due to his own powers. It's also tailored closely to fit. I
am
allowed to say that he first manifested superhuman abilities nearly fourteen months ago. Um. Doctor? I know this isn't my field, but if he
isn't
being screened for K syndrome on an ongoing basis, he could be heading for big medical trouble.”

I put the phone down with an
oh-shit
sensation in the pit of my stomach: not just the usual headache of sending one of my staff for a bunch of tiresome medical tests and juggling rotas to cover for him, but a nauseous sense of dread. Good news: Jim's armor isn't haunted. If I see Officer Friendly flying around, then he's Jim, which means he
isn't holding out on me—isn't a sock puppet for Freudstein. Bad news, though: Jim's vulnerable, just like any other occult practitioner. And something in me balks at the idea of exposing him to threats that force him to use his powers in ways that make his gray matter a tempting tidbit for the feeders. But that's the sort of threat I'm supposed to expose him to, daily, as part of our job! It hasn't been a problem with Bob, for ages—his entanglement with the Eater of Souls protects him, just as Lecter insulates me from their attentions. But Jim is vulnerable, and I can't be detached about it anymore: I've fallen into a conflict of interest.

So I'm feeling particularly fragile as I catch the tube across London, feeling naked again in the absence of my instrument. Being out and about on business without a violin case slung over my shoulder simply feels
wrong
. Try to imagine James Bond without a gun or a Martini in sight: It's incongruous, isn't it? But I have to leave Lecter behind in a secure storage lock-up because I'm on my way to have lunch with Dr. Armstrong to talk about the white violin. I'm not sure Lecter can hear, exactly, but he can tap into my senses eerily well at times, and I have a feeling that having him listening to the conversation I intend to have would be a really bad idea.

And so, to the office with the disturbing dimensions and the secret stash of really rather good single malt—not that I plan on consuming any: I need my wits about me.

“Ah, Mo! Come in, come in.” Most people do office casual only on Friday, if at all, so I'm slightly taken aback to be confronted by the SA in a knitted wool cardigan and tartan bedroom slippers. I enter anyway. “Is something the matter?” he asks, focusing over my shoulder.

“Yes, I think so.” I let the door shut, then sit down in his visitor's chair without waiting to be invited. “It's about Lec—I'm sorry, it's about the white violin. And it's about Officer Friendly as well, but mostly the violin.”

“Ah. So it's time for
that
conversation,” he mutters as he sits behind his desk, takes his spectacles off, and polishes them with a microfiber cloth. He glances at me, his gaze startlingly intimate without
the intervening crystal barrier that normally screens him. “How far has he pushed: speaking to you in your dreams, sending you entirely new dreams, or actual possession?”

“All of the above,” I admit. “Although the only incident of possession so far was when”—bleeding on the fretboard as the bow drags my fingers across blue-glowing strings, a terrified pale figure crouching before me in the living room—“in a moment of extreme emotional stress and exhaustion I was confronted by what I perceived to be a threat.”

“And?” he prompts gently.

I shudder. “Bob was there: he managed to talk me down before anything too bad happened.”

“Well.” He picks up his half-moon reading glasses and puts them on, then carefully adjusts them before he looks at me. His delay doesn't inspire confidence. “How long ago did that happen?”

“The morning after the Code Red.”

The SA nods thoughtfully. Is it just my overactive imagination, or is he really disturbed? “It would have been good to have known the full scope of your reasons for misgivings earlier,” he says, slowly, choosing his words with the care of a man walking across an uneven icy pavement. “I think I may have underestimated the urgency of your earlier concerns, Doctor. Are you sure you can continue to control the white violin? What do you call him?”

“Lecter.” It slips out before my internal censor can block it, and he winces visibly. I carry on, feeling distinctly reckless: “And no, I'm not sure I can hold him in check at all times. When I took down Strip Jack Spratt, Lecter nearly weaseled me into strangling him. I had a big fight with him a couple of weeks ago and threatened to chuck him in the English Channel if he didn't stay out of my dreams—he backed off, then—but it's only a matter of time before an incident crops up where . . . well. As long as he gets his blood, I think he'll do what I want; the problem is what happens if I have to stand down before he's fed.”

I stare at the backs of my hands. I feel as if I just confessed to
personal inadequacy.
Get it off your chest,
they say: but nothing about the hollow dread, the unanswered question,
what happens next
, that fills your mind after confession. Somehow while I've been carrying the bone violin, the veins and tendons have risen to the surface: flesh falling away from the metacarpals, skin loosening and losing its elasticity, thinning, becoming almost transparent: it's been years, and I'm growing older, and I'm just too tired to arm-wrestle with dream-demons whenever I need to do my job. I look up at the SA. “I can keep him under lockdown and only bring him along on major incidents; I can probably continue to do the job on that basis for a while longer . . . but I'm losing fine control, and sooner or later there'll be an accident.”