The Annihilation Score (41 page)

Ooh, sounds like fun.
I smile to myself and send back: “Yes, and yes.” I pause. “What's the party dress code?”

“Black tie,” he replies. “Our host is a sheikh. The hospitality will be something special.”

“Ok,” I send. And just like that, I have a date.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

So, Saturday.

I wake up early, stung by the realization that I said
yes
when Jim escalated to formal, but the only suitable outfit I've got that's not five years out of date is a bit risqué. So I brave the autumnal clouds and the weekend shoppers, and head for Peter James and competitors. In the end, I do not buy a new dress, because everything that looks good doesn't fit, and vice versa. On the other hand, once I've spent hours fruitlessly wandering department store floors, my existing gown doesn't look so extreme. So I end up buying something much more useful: a calf-length black coat with silver detailing. It's cheaper than a posh frock, and I can get a lot more mileage out of it. I then blow what's left of my budget on a frivolous sequined clutch, opera gloves, and a new pair of court shoes with heels just tall enough to help me look Jim in the eyes without crippling me.

I get home at two in the afternoon: hungry, tired, and suffering from just a little ennui at the frivolity of it all. I'm old enough to know better than to play dress-up party doll for a man, especially one I'm not married to and need to be able to look in the eye next week at work. Or to blow a ton of cash on shoes and a handbag and a ticket
to the opera, when I could just as easily rent it on DVD. Never mind the whole dating in the workplace thing—
that
can go horribly wrong in so many ways that it's not even funny. On the other hand, there hasn't been a lot of frivolity in my life these past few years, has there? Let alone fun. And Jim and I are both grown-ups, I tell myself. I can handle this, as long as it doesn't go too far. So I chow down on a very austere edamame salad I bought on my way home, then go upstairs to shower and begin preparing myself for the ritual of a formal night out—a kind of formal that Bob and I haven't done in longer than I care to remember.

Around four, my phone buzzes. I pull it out of the evening clutch; it's a message from Jim:
Want me to pick you up at 5:30?

Yes,
I send back. Then I go into panic mode. I've showered and done my hair and I'm half-dressed, but I'm not ready. The next hour passes in a blur. Finally, I look in a mirror. A stranger looks back at me: sleepily sophisticated, all lip gloss and crimson nails. She doesn't look like me
at all
. Her red hair (the gray stragglers dyed into compliance) hangs loose in a waterfall over the shoulders of her lace-topped black gown: she's a striking stranger, my princess-world twin sister. There is jewelry: a silver chain supporting a discreet silver bangle, earrings, bracelets that contain heavy-duty wards. It's as if I'm looking into a magic mirror that shows me who I might have grown up to be if I'd settled on “trophy wife” as my life's ambition in secondary school. (All
look at me
rather than
look at what I do
.) I wouldn't want to be her every day, but it's an interesting role to try on for an evening. I pull my new shoes on, wiggle my toes to make sure they still fit as well as they did in the shop, go downstairs (proving I can walk in them without breaking my neck), and pull on my coat. Just in time for my phone to ring.

“Hello?”

“It's me. We're parked outside. Want to come out and meet me?”

“Sure,” I say. I check that Lecter's asleep in the safe, energize the wards, arm the burglar alarm, and let myself out.

There is a stretch limo sitting in front of the house. It's not huge—
you'd never fit a full-length one through London's twisty suburban streets—but for our purposes it counts. Jim stands beside the door, holding it open for me. He wears a tux well: I suddenly no longer feel overdressed. He takes my hand with a smile. “I hope this meets with your approval, ma'am?” he asks as I climb in. There are wide leather seats and a minibar in front of us with a bottle of sparkling wine sitting in a silver tub. Jim climbs in next to me, fastens his seat belt, and leans forward: “We're ready,” he tells the driver.

The opaque divider in front of us whirrs up, then the car begins to move. The suspension is very soft, and a good thing, too: Jim fills two champagne flutes and hands one to me. “You look marvelous,” he says quietly. “I almost didn't recognize you.”

Slightly star-struck, I take the glass: “And you've outdone yourself, you smooth mover!”

“I thought we should start as we mean to go on.” He looks quietly smug. “Might as well celebrate our success.”

“To success,” I say. Chink of glassware. I take a sip: bubbles in my nose. “Past
and
future.”

It takes half an hour for the limo to rock and sway across the bridge and into the heart of the theater district, by which time our glasses are running dry—but rather than offering a refill, Jim raises a finger. “Nearly there,” he says.

“Nearly where?” I ask.

“Surprise.”

The car pulls in beside a slightly grubby red carpet that runs out to the curb. Then I see the restaurant awning: “Oh my.” I'm not used to dining in restaurants owned by chefs with their own TV show.

“Don't worry, the pre-theater option is very reasonably priced. We have”—he pushes back his cuff to reveal an antique Rolex Oyster—“seventy-five minutes. And we have a reservation. They'll be ready for us.”

He hands me out of the car, and we walk together to the door, which a uniformed doorman opens before us. I feel very self-conscious, but not in my usual bad, vulnerable,
cross-hairs-on-the-small-of-my-back way. Once inside, an attendant takes my coat; Jim's pupils dilate as he sees my dress properly for the first time. “Good golly, Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful!” he misquotes.

“Science!”
I whisper, with emphasis, and grin at him. His answering smile is qualitatively different from anything I've seen on his face before, and for a moment the part of me responsible for self-restraint hopes that I haven't gone too far.

Dinner is a blur. Small portions, designed not to inconvenience the stomach of the theatergoer: it's beautifully laid out but not terribly filling. Jim's conversation is witty and entertaining and we skirt around work delicately. “If only we could organize the whole planet as well as you've organized your department,” Jim says wistfully. “You could bring about world peace and abolish poverty and crime! Except we'd have to elect you planetary overlord first.”

“Nah, I'm really not up to that job,” I tell him. “Anyone who could do it well is sane enough not to want it. Anyone who wants it is by definition unsuitable. Anyway, it's a committee job—even being head of state for one country is too big a job for a single person to do without a whole team working behind the scenes. What do you say?”

“At ACPO team-building sessions we have this discussion on days with a Y in their name.” He pauses to eat a mouthful. “It's called the setting-the-world-to-rights session. You can probably imagine the direction it takes when you get a room full of twenty mildly inebriated senior police officers with PhDs in sociology or criminology.”

“It's probably a good thing they don't have their hands on the levers of power, then. When your tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. They run the Police: QED.”

“They're not quite as simple-minded as that,” he says, mildly.

“No, of course not.” I reach across the table and touch his hand reassuringly. “But. ‘Rules are rules,' and their career path has conditioned them for decades to believe that laws should always be enforced even-handedly. Rule of law and all that. It's not their job to ask how the laws are made, and who benefits from them. Rules are fine
for machines, but human beings aren't perfect spheres of uniform density and negligible frictional coefficient.”

“Ah, the spooks viewpoint.” His lips purse in good-natured amusement. “Any number of shades of gray.”

We finish up in the restaurant. I go to powder my nose and while I'm gone, Jim summons the limo: as we reach the front door, it's at the end of the red carpet, waiting for us.
He booked it for the whole evening,
I realize with a frisson of doubt and secret excitement. I'm conflicted: unsure how to react. Bob moved out a couple of months ago, but I'm not ready to put a dot at the end of that sentence and move on: it's all a bit fast. On the other hand, it's fun and magical and an excuse for escapism: romance, even. Bob is many things, but there is not a single romantic bone in his body. Whereas Jim, who one might expect to be a stolid, plodding policeman, has a barely submerged romantic streak as wide as a motorway. Setting the world to rights indeed!

The opera itself is almost an anticlimax. Verdi, doomed lovers, romantic tragedy: What more is there to say? It is, needless to say, a solid, reliable performance with one or two call-outs. Jim has found us seats at the front of a large box, but it's also home for the evening to other groups—corporate executives and their WAGs (and in some cases, HABs). They're all dressed to the nines so we don't stand out. It makes for an odd combination of intimacy and anonymity, and so we sit knee to knee for two and a half hours.

The final curtain call is over; the lights come up. Conversation rises around us. “The evening is still young,” Jim murmurs, “and the magic carriage won't turn into a pumpkin until one o'clock. What do you say?”

“I say, hello evening . . .” He offers me his arm: I take it, and we return to the limo (one of several queuing patiently outside the crush in front of the Royal Opera House). I slide into it gratefully. “Where to next?” I ask.

“I have something in mind.” His eyes twinkle wickedly. He knocks on the partition: “Destination four, please.”

“Wait, where—” The car begins to move.

“It's a surprise,” he says. Quietly: “Do you trust me?”

“I—” I look him in the eye. “This is all a bit fast.”

“I'm sorry. If you want, I'll give you a lift home immediately—”

“No, that won't be necessary.” I relax. He's fast, but smooth—and he knows when to back off. He's a grown-up: more grown-up than Bob will ever be. Is that what I've been missing? A real grown-up man in my life? I'm not sure. I'm not sure I'll ever
be
sure, frankly. His attention is flattering,
very
flattering. I'm absolutely dead certain he's been working up to this for some time. But he's given no hint of it before now. “Surprise me,” I tell him, stretching luxuriously.

“Happily. It'll take about twenty minutes to get there. Would you care for a top-up?”

And so we get through our second champagne flute of the evening.

*   *   *

Some time later we pull up alongside another red carpet. “You can leave your coat in the car,” Jim tells me, “he'll pick us up when we're ready to go.” So I shed my heavy outer shell and Jim helps me out of the limo, and we walk along the runner. There are
reporters
here, paparazzi: one or two flashes go off and I almost flinch before I realize that they're not aimed at me.

“What
is
this?” I hiss in his ear, a rictus smile baring my teeth at the world as I lean on his arm.

“Look up.”

I look up. “Wow, it's Minas Tirith!” Yes: the red carpet leads to a glass entrance and an atrium with a ceiling high enough that our office building could fit comfortably under it. We're at the foot of the London Shard, the tallest building in the European Union. It's pretty small beer by Chinese or American standards—it doesn't even make the top fifty skyscrapers worldwide—but it's the tallest
here
. And Jim is leading me across the lobby red carpet towards a bank of express elevators.

“I scored two tickets to a very exclusive party,” Jim confides in
me. “I'm afraid this qualifies as work, not pleasure: hope you don't mind.”

I tighten my grip on his arm.
Dammit.
“Why?”

“I thought you ought to be here to see it.”

“To see what?”

“I got wind of it yesterday afternoon from a source at the Yard, via the Integrated Intelligence System. It's a meet-and-greet for persons of interest to our host, his eminence, Sheikh Ammar Al Nuaimi. I very much doubt he'll be seen in public here tonight, but there may be some discreet invitations to his apartments downstairs from the observatory level. Most of the guest list are investment bankers and political lobbyists, but word is that he is extremely interested in meeting three-sigma powers: I barely had to express interest . . . ah, here we are.”

The spacious glass-walled lift to the observation deck is stunningly fast and smooth, and my ears pop on the way up. We don't have it to ourselves, mind you: the other passengers are a mix of middle-aged couples and younger and more glamorous hangers-on, all in evening dress. Nobody I recognize. At the top, the doors open and white-gloved attendants direct us out onto a floor which serves as an open-air viewing platform. It's surrounded on four sides by giant triangular glass walls and support trusses that extend several stories above us. We're sheltered from the wind, but it feels light and airy and a little bit chilly: a harbinger of early autumn. Waiters with drinks trays and bottles circulate discreetly. Jim and I both accept glasses of white wine. “Do you recognize anyone here?” I ask.