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.