Ptolemy's Gate (13 page)

When it came down to it, of course,
all
the Council made him feel uneasy. It had taken all his inner steel to maintain his status in their company. They each radiated ambition, strength, cleverness, and guile; none of them ever acted against their own interests. To survive, he had done the same.

Well, perhaps this was the natural way. Had he ever met anyone who
had
acted otherwise? Unbidden, the face of Kitty Jones came into his mind. Ridiculous! A traitor, violent, tempestuous, untamed He made a doodle in his pad: a face with long dark hair…. Ridiculous! Anyway, the girl was dead. He crossed it out hurriedly.

And further back—long, long ago now—there had been his art tutor too. Ms. Lutyens. Funny, he could no longer clearly recall her face—

“Didn't you hear me, John?” That was Devereaux, speaking almost in his ear. He felt little flakes of sugar doughnut being blown against his cheek. “We are discussing our position in Europe. I was requesting your opinion.”

Mandrake sat up. “Sorry, sir. Um, my agents tell me there is discontent as far afield as Italy. There have been riots in Rome, I understand. But it is not my area.”

Gaunt, severe, stick-thin, the Security Minister, Jessica Whitwell spoke. “But it
is
mine. Italy, France, Spain, the Low Countries. Everywhere it is the same. Our troops are at an all-time low. What is the result? Dissent, riot, rebellion. All Europe is erupting. Every last malcontent under the sun is preparing to strike at us; we will be fighting in a dozen countries before the month is out.”

“This is no time for exaggeration, Jessica.” Mr. Mortensen's eyes were steely.

“Exaggeration?”
A bony hand slammed against the table; Ms. Whitwell stood. “This will be the worst uprising since 1914! And where are our forces? Thousands of miles away! I am telling you, we will lose Europe if we are not careful!”

Now Mortensen was raising his voice too. He half rose from his chair. “Oh, and perhaps
you
have a solution, do you?”

“Certainly I do. We pull out from America and bring our forces home!”

“What?” Mortensen turned to the Prime Minister, face dark with fury. “Do you hear that, Rupert? That is nothing but rank appeasement! It borders on treachery!”

A blue-gray glow erupted around Jessica Whitwell's clenched fist; the air hummed with a surge of unearthly force. Her voice was suddenly quiet. “Would you be so good as to repeat that, Carl?”

The War Minster remained rigid, fingers locked around the armrests of his redwood chair, eyes flicking to and fro. At last he sank back into a position of furious repose. The glow upon Ms. Whitwell's fist flickered and went out. She waited a few seconds more, then sat with victorious care.

According to their allegiance, the other ministers smirked or scowled. Mr. Devereaux studied his cuticles; he looked a little bored.

John Mandrake stood up. Affiliated to neither Mortensen nor Whitwell, he felt a sudden urge to wrest back the initiative, to take a gamble, throw off his inertia. “I'm sure neither of our excellent ministers intended to give offense, nor was so childish as to receive it,” he said. “Clearly both are in the right: Jessica's anxiety is prudent, since the situation in Europe is becoming unfortunate; Carl's refusal to admit defeat is also laudable. We cannot leave America in the hands of criminals. I would like to suggest a solution to the problem.”

“Which is?” Ms. Whitwell was unimpressed.

“Withdrawing troops is not the answer,” Mandrake went on coldly. “That sends out quite the wrong message to our enemies worldwide. But we
must
bring this conflict to an end. Our demons are not enough and nor—saving Mr. Mortensen's pardon—are the common soldiers. We need a decisive weapon that the Americans do not have. Something with which they cannot contend. Simple.We use Gladstone's Staff.”

He had expected the barrage of noise that greeted his proposal; he did not attempt to speak further, but with a thin smile, sat himself down. Jane Farrar met his gaze and raised a quizzical eyebrow; the faces of the others were variously indignant.

“Impossible!”

“A foolish fancy!”

“Quite out of the question!”

The noise subsided. Mandrake stirred. “I'm sorry,” he said, “but I don't quite understand your objections.”

Carl Mortensen made a dismissive gesture. “The Staff is untried, untested.”

“It is hard to control,” Helen Malbindi said.

“A highly dangerous artefact,” Jessica Whitwell added.

“But that's the
point,”
Mandrake said. “With the Staff, Gladstone conquered Europe. It will do the same to Boston easily enough. Our friends in Paris and Rome will hear about it and duck down behind their parapets again. Problem solved. Once it has crossed the ocean, the whole thing would take no more than a week. Why keep the Staff under lock and key when it's the solution to our difficulties?”

“Because,”
a cold voice said, “
I
do not choose to use it. And my word goes.”

Mandrake turned to face the Prime Minister, who had swiveled in his chair and drawn himself upright. Devereaux's face had become hard and lined, the flabbiness less obvious.The eyes were dull, opaque. “You may perhaps have received a memo this morning, Mandrake,” he said. “The Staff, and other items, have been removed to the Room of Treasures in this very building. They are surrounded by a range of high-level magical safeguards. They will not be used. Do you understand?”

Mandrake hesitated; he thought of standing his ground. Then he remembered the fate of Ms. Harknett.” Of course, sir,” he began. “But I must ask why—”

“Must?
You must do nothing!” The face was suddenly twisted, contorted, the eyes wild and staring. “You will know your place and not seek to destabilize this Council with your inane theories. Now be silent and think before you speak again! And be careful lest I suspect you of having an agenda of your own.” The Prime Minister turned away. “Mortensen—bring out the maps. Give us a firmer update on our position. I understand we have pinned the rebels in an area of marshland….”

“That was a little rash,” Jane Farrar whispered, as she walked with Mandrake in the corridor an hour later. “Whoever has the Staff holds true power. Devereaux's frightened of what that person'll do to
him.
”

Mandrake nodded sullenly. The depression he had briefly shaken off had speedily returned. “I know. But someone's got to make the case openly and clearly The country's falling into chaos. I wouldn't be surprised if half the Council aren't planning something.”

“Concentrate on the plot we
do
know about. Anything yet on Jenkins?”

“Not yet. But it won't be long. My best djinni's on the case.”

9

S
ince the days of old Egypt, when I took the form of a silver hawk and shadowed Kushite raiders far out across the sand hills, I've always been a dab hand at trailing unobserved. Take those raiders, now: they left djinn in the form of jackals and scorpions to guard the desert in their wake. But the hawk flew high against the sun and easily evaded them. I found the raiders' base hidden among the blue-green gum trees of the Kharga oasis and drew the pharaoh's army down upon them. So they perished to a man.

I was employing similar discreet but deadly skills now, although it has to be said that the circumstances were a mite less glamorous. Instead of a ferocious horde of puma-pelted raiders you had a scrawny, ginger secretary; in place of the aching vistas of the Sahara you had a smelly Whitehall backstreet. Apart from that, the parallel was exact. Oh, and I wasn't a hawk this time—a woebegone sparrow was more the job in London.

I was sitting on a sill watching a grubby window opposite. Whoever owned the sill wasn't very keen on birds: he'd laced it with bird lime, metal spikes, and scraps of poisoned bread. A typical English welcome. I kicked the bread into the street, used a small Inferno to incinerate the lime, bent a couple of spikes out of true, and wedged my frail little carcass between them. I was so weak by now that this Herculean effort pretty much finished me off. Head spinning, I settled in to watch my quarry.

It wasn't exactly unmissable viewing. Through the accumulated grime on the windowpane I could see Clive Jenkins sitting at a desk. He was thin, stooped, and rather puny; if it had been a straight fight between him and the sparrow, I'd have put my money on the bird. An expensive suit hung uneasily on his frame, as if reluctant to get too close; his shirt was a disturbing mauve. He was pale-faced and a bit freckly, with small eyes peering myopically from behind thick glasses and reddish hair plastered back in a kind of oily pelt, reminiscent of a fox who'd been caught out in the rain. Small bony hands tapped unenthusiastically at a typewriter.

Mandrake had not been wrong in his assessment of Jenkins's powers. As soon as I took up my perch, I checked the seven planes for sensor webs, watch prisms, gimlet eyes, shadow-stalkers, orbs, matrices, heat traps, trigger-plumes, sprites, weirds, and other means the magician might have employed for magical protection. Not a sausage. He had a cup of tea on his desk and that was about it. I watched closely for any sign of supernatural communication with Hopkins or another, but the secretary spoke no words and made no untoward signs. Pitter-patter, pitter-patter went his fingers on the keys; occasionally they rubbed his nose, adjusted his glasses or scratched an itchy spot on the end of his chin. So the afternoon passed. It was simply riveting.

Although I did my best to keep focused on the job in hand, I did find my mind wandering at intervals, (a) because it was so damn dull, and (b) because the ache in my essence made me clothy-headed and distracted. It was like suffering chronic lack of sleep: I kept drifting off and thinking of unrelated topics—the girl, Kitty Jones; my old enemy Faquarl sharpening his cleaver; far off in the distance, Ptolemy—before he changed.

Each time I had to force myself back into the present with a start; but Jenkins was always as before, so no harm done.

Five-thirty came, and with it an almost imperceptible change in Jenkins. A new and stealthy life seemed to flicker in his veins; his lethargy receded. With quick movements, he drew a cover over the typewriter, tidied his desk, gathered up a few bundles of paper, and slung a coat over his arm. He departed his office out of view.

The sparrow stretched a painful wing, shook its head to relieve the numbing ache behind its eyes, and took off. I drifted down the side road and out above the bustle of Whitehall, where buses nudged slowly through the heavy traffic and armored vans disgorged Night Police at intervals among the crowds. The war had brought disturbance to the streets, and the authorities were taking no chances in the center of the capital. Imps and foliots watched from recesses in the eaves of nearby buildings.

I alighted in a walnut tree in the little courtyard that separated the Internal Affairs building from the road, and waited. A policeman stood below me at the gate. Presently the door opened and Jenkins emerged; he wore a long leather coat and carried a crumpled hat in one hand. At the gate he nodded to the guard, showed a pass, and exited. He turned north into Whitehall, set his hat on his head at a jaunty angle, and with suddenly eager steps plunged into the crowd.

It's not easy following an individual amid a milling throng, but when you're an expert tracker like me, you take it in your stride. The secret is not to get distracted. I kept my eyes fixed upon the crown of Jenkins's hat and fluttered high above, keeping a little behind him, just in case he looked around. There wasn't much chance that he would guess he was being followed, but you know me, I do things properly You have to get up pretty early to catch
me
out in the art of trailing.
¹

Beyond the roofs the autumn sun was dropping down behind the trees of Hyde Park; a pretty red haze hung in the sky. The sparrow watched it approvingly. It reminded me of evening at the pyramids, when the djinn flitted like swallows above the tombs of the kings, and—

A bus horn honked; the sparrow snapped back to the present.
Careful
—almost caught daydreaming there…. Now then: Jenkins … Ah.

I scanned frantically to and fro. Where was the distinctive hat? Nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he'd taken it off… Nope: no fox's coiffure in the vicinity. Men, women, children, yes. All the flotsam and jetsam of humanity. But no Jenkins.

The sparrow snapped its beak together in irritation. This was
Mandrake's
fault. If he'd given me a few months' rest, my head would be clearer. I wouldn't keep getting distracted. It was like the time when—

Concentrate.
Perhaps Jenkins was on a bus. I did a quick flypast the nearest few, but the secretary was not aboard. Which meant he'd either dematerialized or gone inside a building…. I noticed a pub now, the Cheddar Cheese, squeezed between two government offices, roughly at the point where Jenkins had vanished. Since voluntary dematerializing in humans is rare,
²
I figured the pub was the likely option.