The Annihilation Score (18 page)

The glass is intact and the precious manuscript is undamaged. But, positioned proudly on top of it like a brash intrusion from another era, is another of Freudstein's calling cards. He's thumbing his nose at us now:
Look what I could have taken if I'd wanted it!

This is going to be a very long night . . .

UNAVOIDABLE CONSEQUENCES

The next morning I head for the office early—still yawning: I was up past midnight being checked out by paramedics, then filling out incident reports—then pull my emergency meeting suit out of its carrier and head round to the New Annex. I've been summoned by the Auditors: happy joy. It's not just the SA, in his capacity as chair of the INCORRIGIBLE committee, but the Auditors as a committee, sitting
en banc
. The report on Agent CANDID's encounter with Strip Jack Spratt has collided with a copy of the fatal accident report that is climbing its way up the Independent Police Complaints Commission's in tray and butted heads with yesterday's fracas at the library. We still don't have a complete list of what went stolen or missing in the raid—Freudstein's people made a comprehensive mess out of the main display in the atrium and did a real number on several archives, and were working over the rare music manuscripts when I interrupted them—but the Auditors want to hear from me
in person
even in the absence of a full report. This is quite worrying because it suggests the organization as a whole may be going into damage-control mode.

They've cleared one of the larger offices on the top floor—one of
the Mahogany Row offices—and rolled out the resonant carpet. I wait in the receptionist's office until I'm summoned, trying not to succumb to anticipatory collywobbles. I've been so busy lately that this almost seemed like a trivial irritation at first; certainly, after being carpeted by the COBRA subcommittee and then the Home Secretary, I'm becoming inured to high-level grilling. But you can't ignore the Auditors. They're the front line of our operational oversight system: if you run an organization that gives people like me extraordinary (and lethal) occult powers, you need investigators with similar skills to keep them on the straight and narrow. And their powers to compel and control are themselves extraordinary, and potentially lethal.

“Dr. O'Brien, if you'd please come in?” The secretary to the Audit Committee sticks her head round the door and gives me a sympathetic smile.

I stand up and enter. There are five of them, sitting behind a table with seating for six. The empty chair is telling.
Judith
, I think, with a pang.

“Good morning,” says Dr. Armstrong. His colleagues nod affably.

“Hello,” I say, somewhat nervously.

“If you'd like to take a seat?” asks the man to the SA's right. His accent has a faintly musical lilt: not one I recognize. He's a distinguished looking fellow in late middle-age, possibly with Jamaican ancestry; his beard is bushy and mostly white.

“Um.” There's a wooden chair in the middle of the grid woven into the carpet. “Thanks.” I walk across to it and sit down. My buttocks tense as if I'm taking a seat in Old Sparky.

“Let's keep this simple, shall we?” asks the woman sitting to the left of Judith's empty chair. Middle-aged, mousy and inoffensive, she's probably capable of zapping me into a pile of smoldering cinders if she takes a dislike to me. “Dr. O'Brien”—she looks at me, and as I meet her gaze and fall into her infinitely dark pupils I lose contact with my body—“did you deliberately kill Strip Jack Spratt, also known as Dougal Slaithwaite, in the cells under Belgravia Police Station last Thursday?”

“No.” My tongue is chokingly large and made of dry leather, dusty
as the tomb. I can no more stop it wagging than I can stop my heart beating. “I was unaware of the significance of his medical condition until it was too late.”

My interrogator nods. The SA looks relaxed as he asks the next question: “Do you believe he was working for Professor Freudstein?”

“That seems probable—although I believe Mr. Slaithwaite might not have fully understood what he was doing.”

The auditors glance at each other. “Told you so,” murmurs the man on the SA's right.

More questions follow, as they piece together a detailed time line of the events in Trafalgar Square—then probe my awareness of the unpleasantness at the Bank of England, and finally walk me through my recollection of yesterday's events at the British Library. Then: “Do you have any other suspicions?” asks Dr. Armstrong.

“M-maybe.” My traitor tongue is
hesitant
? In front of the Auditors? I nearly go cross-eyed in disbelief, despite the powerful geas that alienates me from control of my own body.

“What do you mean
maybe
?” The woman sitting at the far right end of the table leans forward intently. She's nearly as striking as Mhari, but entirely human. She has long black hair and is somewhat Middle-Eastern looking, seemingly younger than I am—although you can never be certain among the DSSs of Mahogany Row. “What do you—”

“Wait, Seph,” says the other woman. “Let her—”

I somehow manage to lick my dry lips. “I'm not sure and I don't want to prejudice your investigations. Suspicions not related to the killing. No obvious causal chain. But there's something odd about the staff assignments to the Transhuman Policy Coordination Unit. Something smells funny.”

Dr. Armstrong smiles.
“Good,”
he says. “If you'll excuse me”—he turns to his colleagues—“we have addressed the core concern, have we not? If you don't mind, I would like to discuss Dr. O'Brien's other concerns with her under her own volition rather than under compulsion, in my capacity as operational oversight supervisor for the INCORRIGIBLE committee.”

“Why don't you want us to—” Seph seems to want to grill me further, but the SA won't let her. He turns positively waspish, in fact.

“You know perfectly well that once you start digging for information under compulsion, trying to find evidence to support a hypothesis, you will find it every time! Even if it's the wrong hypothesis in the first place. I would prefer to rely on Dr. O'Brien's freely given cooperation.” His smile vanishes. “Why don't you, Persephone? Don't you trust her?”

She crosses her arms. “Very well, have it your own way.” She's obviously annoyed with him about something but I have no idea what, and it's perilously far above my pay grade to speculate. Chalk it up to hitherto unexplained politics among the Auditors, throw salt over your shoulder, and move on.

“End testimony,” incants the mousy-looking woman. Directly, to me: “You may leave the grid now, Dr. O'Brien.”

I feel as if invisible fetters have just evaporated from my hands and feet. I take a deep breath, as I stand up: “Thank you.”

“Don't thank us.” She nods affably. “Your oath of office simply verified that you cleared yourself.”

The SA stands up and walks across the room: he holds the door open for me. I emerge blinking into the daylight, feeling shaky and a little numb. More formerly solid pieces of my life are crumbling into fragments. Everything is spinning out of control. It is not a sensation I am remotely at ease with.

*   *   *

After my session with the Audit Committee I take a long lunch break while I pull myself together, then head over to a police station to give a statement about last night's excitement, then back to the office to chip away at the paperwork mountain. And I'm still there at seven o'clock in the evening when my desk phone rings.

“You've got to come home,” says Bob: “Spooky needs you.”

“But I don't need Spooky.”

It's seven o'clock and everyone but me and Mhari have gone home. I told them all not to bother coming in before noon tomorrow unless
they feel like it. They're still catching their breath from the weekend madness, and I'm playing catch-up from the weekend, the Home Office grilling,
and
an exciting visit to the library. It feels as if I'm drowning in work, but it can't wait. Right now I'm paging through a list of rare music manuscripts that are missing from a certain archive, trying to figure out if there's anything here that might give us a handle on Freudstein's goals or interests—

Bob sounds distressed: “They're sending me away tomorrow!”

“What?”
Does not compute.
Suddenly I find myself paying complete attention to the phone call. “What do you mean?”

“I have to go up to Dunwich. Angleton ran a lab there for dangerous experiments of some kind and they need me to defuse the defensive wards. It might be an overnight trip, but having seen what he did to his office, it could easily take me the rest of the week.”

Work
can
wait. “Where are you now?” I ask.

“In the kitchen.”

Oh damn.
“This long-distance telephone tag is no good,” I tell him. I hit “save” on the laptop, leaving the list of stolen manuscripts for later. (Judging by what his minions took, Freudstein must
really
like obscure nineteenth-century violin pieces.) “How about I come round? Do you want to call for a carry-out?” Hope begins to rise. “I know you're scared of L—the violin, but I figured out a way to secure it overnight.”

“Let's do that,” he says after a pause. “Make a formal date of it?”

A date? In my own home, with my own husband? How strange: something about his offer makes me shiver, but in a nice way. “Yes, let's do that.”

“Love you,” he says, as if he needs reassurance.

“Love you, too, dear. I'll be about an hour.”

*   *   *

It takes me ten minutes to prepare my suitcase, grab my violin, and lock up the office. Mhari looks up as I pass her open door. “What's up?” she asks.

I show her some teeth: “I've got a home to go to. See you tomorrow.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Don't you want to see the list of what Freudstein grabbed?” She looks affronted. “I pulled in favors to get this report, Mo—”

“Oh.”
Wait.
“Is that the same list I got three hours ago? Because if—”

“Nope.” She turns her laptop so that the screen points my way. “This is what Officer Friendly sent round fifteen minutes ago. They eliminated duplicates and struck off a lot of items that got thrown on the floor when Freudstein went through, and we're down to about fifty possible primary targets and maybe two hundred other items.
But.
” She flashes me a feral grin: “I asked the archivists at Dansey House to cross-reference them against our classification index.”

Oh.
“Good thinking,” I admit. I lean Lecter's case in the doorway and cross over to her desk. She can probably hear my heart thumping involuntarily but she gives no sign of it as she pointedly turns back to her computer. “Did they find anything?”

“Not much,” she admits. “But there's a lot of weird-ass shit—that's their term, by the way, not mine—in the BL stacks, and some of it is possibly interesting. Did you know they had the score to a rock opera composed by Charles Manson on file?” Her brow wrinkles: “It's a bit shit,” she admits. “But that's not all. A whole bunch of esotericists dabbled in musicology over the past couple of centuries. Freudstein stole an organ piece by Aleister Crowley, to be performed in Coventry Cathedral—the old one, before it got bombed during the war—during a thunderstorm to summon the Great Salamander of Galvanism, whatever that means. Bloody show-off. Then there's Delia Derbyshire's symphony for fixed-disk storage systems that requires about two million pounds' worth of 1970-vintage IBM 370-series mainframe: apparently if you move the disk drive read/write heads fast enough they make screeching sounds at set frequencies. And there was an operetta of
The King in Yellow
, scored as a violin concerto. It's all rare stuff, but it's hard to put a cash value on it—it's not like the Bank
of England heist. Maybe Freudstein's trying to steal the sound track to a low-budget horror movie?”

I sigh. What kind of sense do any of Freudstein's activities make? We've got a no-shit Mad Scientist on our hands and no idea what on Earth he's trying to achieve; in terms of profiling him (or her) we're a complete bust right now. “You done good,” I assure her. “But I really have to be going: domestic emergency.”
Bob wants the cat tray cleaned.
“Can you email it to me for tomorrow? I mean, unless there's something so time-critical that it really can't wait for morning . . .”

“Sure.” She sounds slightly disappointed. “No, nothing that can't wait. Probably.” She pushes her own chair back. “I could be going, too,” she says quietly, as if trying to convince herself.

Knowing we've at least got a handle on the extent of the robbery salves the pain very slightly. Which I need because the long hours have finally gotten to me. The adrenaline surge from my grilling by the Auditors has long since worn off and I feel, not to put it too crudely, like a used dish-rag.

I catch a bus most of the way home, then walk the last half kilometer. The suitcase seems to gain an extra kilo with every step: by the time I get to the front door I'm almost staggering, so I lean close enough to push the doorbell with my nose, and wait.