I’ll say, thought Felicity.
“Course, it’s a problem for some,” mused the attendant. “Pawn Sutton keeps punching them out on instinct. She’s gone through four headboards so far. But it wakes her up sharpish. Anyway, you get yourself back into bed,” she said. “You won’t get woken up again until it’s time to wake up.”
*
Four and a half hours later the Barghests charged back into the barracks, loudly singing some sort of victory song in Latin. Apparently, the computer had been successfully killed or turned off or negotiated with. Felicity buried her head under her pillow.
15
A chauffeur-driven car, clean and discreet, ferried Felicity through the London traffic to her home. She was dressed in the suit that had been retrieved from her locker and had a stack of files on her lap. Grenadier, her Pomeranian, was seated next to her, gnawing contentedly on a new toy. He was black, with the wide-eyed stare of a lemur or a celebrity caught wearing old holey sweatpants by the paparazzi. She’d had to swing by the home of a Checquy operative to retrieve him.
As soon as Felicity was declared dead, a representative of the Checquy had gone by her town house. He had emptied the fridge of all dairy products, picked up her dog, and re-housed him with a loving family that had happy, laughing children. Said children had been in tears at the loss of their new pet. Grenadier, however, had trotted away from them without a backward glance.
The driver turned the car into Felicity’s lane, a few streets away from Kensington Gardens. It was paved in bricks and, a hundred or more years ago, had been the back alley that served the carriage houses of the big expensive terraced houses on either side. Now all the carriage houses had been converted into little town houses that cost the earth. The driver held her files and stood on Grenadier’s leash as Felicity fumbled with her keys. She thanked him, and then she and her dog went inside.
The floor of the onetime carriage house had been dug out so that the living room sat half a story below street level, and the kitchen a story below that. A tight spiral staircase led up to a landing and a bedroom with no windows. Because it was the largest bedroom and had its own bathroom, it generally went to whichever of the three housemates currently had a boyfriend. At the moment, it was Felicity’s, not because she had a boyfriend (she didn’t), but because she was the only one in a position to use it. From the landing, more stairs led up to two tiny bedrooms and the world’s smallest bathroom.
Grenadier trotted across the living room and vaulted onto the couch. He nestled himself into his accustomed corner and closed his eyes. Felicity placed her files on the coffee table and went downstairs to make herself a cup of milkless tea.
The house was quiet. One of her housemates, Priscilla, was out of the country, posted to Okinawa, where she was meeting with one of the four other supernatural organizations the Checquy had diplomatic ties with. Kasturi, the second housemate, was hibernating on a plinth in her bedroom. I must remember to go in and dust her, Felicity told herself. Then, with her cup of tea, she settled herself on the couch and closed her eyes for a moment.
It had been a busy morning. Early, well before the sun came up, she’d been woken by the attendant with a summons to Rook Thomas’s office. All the Barghests were still asleep, and Felicity had tiptoed out reverently. Her suit had been waiting for her, and she’d dressed quickly before scurrying up to the executive floor. Mrs. Woodhouse had waved her in, and Felicity had found the Rook wearing pajamas and a dressing gown and participating in a conference call about snipers. It was evident that she had been roused from her private apartment upstairs to talk with some far-flung outpost of the Checquy. Thomas had excused herself from the call, muted the phone, and handed her the Odette Leliefeld files.
“Where did we get all this material?” Felicity asked.
“Most of it was supplied to us by the Grafters themselves,” said Rook Thomas. “They sent us an insane amount of information. We can’t decide if it’s a strategic attempt to bury us in paperwork or if they’re just really, really anal.”
Flipping quickly through the files, Felicity was inclined to believe the second option.
The Rook told Felicity that she was to report to her division head, attend a therapy session, and then go home and prep for her placement with the Grafter girl. She gave Felicity the direct number for her mobile phone, wished her luck, and was back on the conference call before Felicity had gotten a chance to sit down.
The head of her division was waiting for her when she arrived. Her special placement on the orders of the Rook had raised a couple of eyebrows, but it had a certain logic to it, and because it was an order from Rook Thomas, it was accepted. Felicity did as Rook Thomas had ordered and recounted every detail of the events in the row house without mentioning any speculation about the Grafters. The division head had nodded thoughtfully and was sad at the loss of his people, but there was no indication that he linked the events to anything more significant. As far as he was concerned, it was just another inexplicable supernatural atrocity that had flared in the heart of the city. Tragic, but unremarkable.
Then came the session with the therapist. Felicity had been braced for a horrible surge of emotions, but in fact the time had passed quite quickly and easily. It was partly because she had vented so much grief during the car ride to the Rookery, and partly because she was now focused on her new mission. There was still sorrow in her heart, of course, but there was so much to do and think about and plan for that she could not spare the time to be traumatized.
It happened, she thought. It all happened, and now this is happening. She sat quietly for a moment, then took a sip of tea and opened the first file.
A picture of the Leliefeld girl stared back at her. It was not the typical ghastly ID photo, nor a surveillance photo with a fuzzy image of the subject as she walked down the street. Rather, it featured Leliefeld groomed and polished and smiling right into the camera. It was the sort of photograph that you would send to your grandmother or feature on a Christmas card.
And then there were pages and pages and pages.
Everything had been meticulously folioed and indexed. It’s as if they included every piece of paper they could find. Photocopies of driver’s licenses and student-ID cards. A birth certificate. Math tests. Felicity winced at notes from surgeries — some that Leliefeld had performed and some that she’d undergone. Much of it was in Dutch, a little was in French, and what English there was had been written in the laboriously stilted language of someone not completely fluent. There was a list of the medications Leliefeld was taking now and lists of the medications she’d taken at other times in her life. Diets she’d been put on. Fingerprints, toeprints, tongueprint, x-rays, and an image with streaky lines that Felicity vaguely recognized as a DNA report.
She skimmed over a checklist of all the samples the Grafters had submitted to the Checquy. Samples of Leliefeld’s blood, saliva, bile, urine, tears, mucus, stool, skin, venoms, hair (scalp, underarm, forearm, nostril, leg, pubic), toenail clippings, fingernail clippings, breath, flatus, vitreous humor, bone marrow. I’m glad Rook Thomas didn’t give me the reports of those as well, she thought.
Still, despite the chaos of the documents, Felicity found that she was building up a mental profile of the subject.