Night of the Animals (38 page)

The winged red doors of the frightcopter flew open.

Astrid felt she had no choice about her next maneuver. She must subdue the frightcopter's pilot before he killed them all. She sprinted toward it. She ducked under one of the copter's hot red and gold-crested nacelles. She pushed her back against the main engine cowl, inching toward the door, weapon drawn. As she crouched and rolled into the open, aiming for the pilot, she saw the reason that she
and the doctor were still alive: it was empty. The Watchman inside the prison was controlling it remotely.

“You will be hunted down,” the Watchman said to them. He took off his helm, and he clearly considered himself safely ensconced. He was a sallow, weak-chinned, balding man with tiny blue eyes and an incongruously noble roman nose. “But I'm going to kill you first.”

Dr. Bajwa stood up behind Astrid. “Distract him,” he whispered. “I've got nothing to lose, have I?”

“What?”

“Distract the idiot in the box.”

So Astrid said to the Watchman, “You can't, er, see it . . . from your angle, but above you, chap, I see . . .
I
see the king's own frightcopter. It's all pretty-ditty Windsor golds and scarlets, and I don't think His Majesty's going to be pleased with your performance. You've murdered your colleagues. He's landing down, my friend.”

“Oh, piss off,” the Watchman said, smiling greasily. “You're lying. King Harry! And now you better hope your affairs are all in order.” He began tapping the aerosol touchscreen on back of his armored hand, and frowned. “What the bloody hell?”

Dr. Bajwa popped his head out of the frightcopter's cockpit. “I've disabled the remote,” he said. “I've got an NSeven solarcopter certification. Almost. It's ours now.”

“It's a bloody frightcopter,” the Watchman hissed, his face grown incandescent red. “It ain't some weekend whirlybird.”

“Well, we'll see, friend. I've been to Philip K's Solarcopter Flight School. In Kent, mate, in case you're wondering.” He nodded and grinned. “And if you don't mind my saying, you look like you've gone for a burton, old chapper.”

“You'll all die,” the Watchman spat back.

“I won't argue that,” said Bajwa.

Astrid and the doctor looked toward the lions. “Cuthbert!” they shouted, nearly in unison.

They ran over to the enclosure and looked over its edge. There he was—St. Cuthbert, slid halfway down the inside wall, up to his thighs in moat water. He was using his bolt cutters like a climber's pick, keeping himself above the moat. A full inch of bright emerald algae covered the water, so much it hardly rippled. Only four or so feet deep, it posed little danger to adults, but it was cold, and Cuthbert was old, sick, and he'd had a few knocks. The lions gazed at the spectacle of him with interest, but not any sort of bloodlust.

“Cuddy,” said Bajwa. “We'll get you out of here. Can you stay there?”

“Oi'm St. Cuthbert, my old friend. Oi'm going nowhere. Yow must—yow
must
get down to Grosvenor Square—with Drystan. Ar, it's
past
time. I shall begin my . . . my last prayers.”

“But we can't leave you,” said Astrid. “You'll die.”

“Yes, yes,” said the doctor, nodding.

“Drystan,” said St. Cuthbert. “I will call you ‘Astrid.' It's only two letters off ‘Drystan,' and one of them is ‘
I
'—and I'm here, ain't I? Ha-ha. But the animals. If I can hear them, so must you because of who you are.
Listen
for them. They will not hurt me any more than people have already. Go. Go to Grosvenor—now, please. And then come back.”

“But you won't be safe,” said Astrid.

“If you don't go, there's no future.”

“No.” Astrid turned to Baj. “We can't do this. We shan't leave him.”

St. Cuthbert, his words smearing together, said, “Please
please
-gonow. Oi'm just a voice in tha wilderness of the streets. Yow're the glory. So go. Gogaga-gogo. Go.”

Smiling down at his patient, battling back tears, Dr. Bajwa said, “Well, Cuddy, I guess this is, officially, going for a burton.”

“Yes,” said the saint.

It was with heavy steps, and crushed hearts, that Astrid and Dr. Bajwa climbed into the frightcopter.

“I can't believe we're doing this,” said Astrid. “It's utter madness.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Bajwa, pulling up the hovering touch-controls. “Isn't it wonderful?”

And they whirred into the busy London night sky.

MASON GAGE WAS A LONG WAY FROM HIS HOME IN
Mingo Grove, West Virginia.

The chief security officer at the American Embassy, still a little grumpy at getting awakened at 4:00
A.M
., couldn't believe his eyes. He was standing in what was officially called the Central Confidence Module, or CCM, but most everyone called it the Roost. Apart from the sound of air whooshing through a ventilation register, the dim room was cool and silent, despite the twenty or so people packed in.

He took his spectacles off. He wiped them on a paper serviette he kept folded in his wallet. He could never get the last smears of facial oil off his lenses these days. Something about London. He put his specs back on. In his hands, he clutched three reports about the night, printed on sticky-feeling, dissolving TemPaper, like all classified communiqués of the Company. The latest report read:

NORTHERN EUROPE-WIDE CLASSIFIED UPDATE 20520501.1 UK / CROWN SOURCES CLAIM SEVERAL NON-DOMESTIC
RARE LIVE ANIMALS ON STREETS ACROSS CENTRAL LONDON. POSSIBLE LINKS TO ENGLISH TERRORISTS OR US-BASED DEATH CULT ACTIONS OR (EARL OF) WORCESTER INSURGENCY. ADDITIONAL REPORTS: GORILLA NEAR GROSVENOR COMPLEX. ADVANCED ROYAL WATCH ASSETS DEPLOYED. THREAT BLUE. STRICT LEVEL H PROTOCOLS IN RISK ASSESSMENT / CONTAINMENT. REPORT ENDS, 202061-33
.

No report could have prepared him for the surrealism of the facts at hand. Animals in London—everywhere. And there was a dang gorilla on the loose!

He didn't like the tie-in with the nutjob cults. He didn't like relying on Crown intelligence sources. And he really didn't like the gorilla.

Mason wasn't classic Foreign Service, even within the comparably asperous milieu of the diplomatic police. He was a God-fearing, foulmouthed, bona fide Allegheny grit, a coal-dusted rut-buck hunting hillbilly from Pendleton County, West Virginia, who considered anything smaller than a .30-06 Springfield a squirrel gun. He kept a fourteen-point set of whitetail antlers on his dresser beside an old picture of his mama in a pink housedress, standing in a kitchen in slanted sunlight, holding Mason up proudly as a toddler, kissing his black flyaway hair.

Beyond a seated row of Diplomatic Security Service agents, a bank of screens showed various feeds from low-light and deep-infrared videocameras around Grosvenor Square. On several, a Royal Watch frightcopter was hovering erratically above the square's lime and plane trees.

“That's cockeyed,” Mason said to himself.

The pilot seemed unable to keep the aircraft evenly pitched. It looked like a big red, black, and gold Easter egg, rocking and tipping and threatening to take a great fall.

“Watch that chopper,” Mason said aloud. “Something's . . . something's just
off
there.”

“Yessir!” said several voices.

“And please, will someone please ‘ring the Circus'
^*
and find out what the
fuck
is going on?”

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 arm
rests 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.