A squinty-eyed, frail-looking cognitive specialist, a so-called Cog on loan to the embassy, sat nearby in one of the “meat chairs”—it used a lab-cultured flesh whose bioware flaps, skin-to-skin, partially garmented the Cogs. He said to Mason, “Sir. I’m getting into her now, a little. I think she’s . . . a British citizen. Astrid . . . Sullivan.”
A new group of people, about a dozen, began shuffling in through the steel doors of the Roost. The Cog flinched a little when he saw them.
“Excuse me. Who are you?” Mason asked.
One of the newcomers, a tall man with short cropped hair, rehearsed the pass-phrase: “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch,” he said, sounding oddly amused with himself, “you must first invent a universe.” It was from the old twentieth-century astrophysicist Carl Sagan; Mason had seen it on yesterday’s last brief.
“Well,” said Mason. “OK. But we’re busy here, folks. Are you . . . ?”
“Yes,” the tall man said, grinning at Mason. “Tertiary operations. We’re everywhere.” The man snickered.
Mason said, “Just, please, try to stay out of the way.”
The Cog was waving at Mason. Cogs were highly trained if far more conventional cousins of the controversial, shriveled-legged mutant PreCogs he had heard about. Although trained in NYPD’s PreCrime Agency alongside PreCogs, the Cogs were only faintly empathic—a little empathy went a long way, as Mason saw it—yet far less vulnerable to directed brain attacks than PreCogs. Still, Mason didn’t like them much. All the cognition stuff rubbed him the wrong way. The Cogs could see inside anyone, after all—and mess with things. He’d had enough messes.
“OK, lessee,” said the Cog, petting his meat chair’s pink armrests in a way that unnerved Mason. “An inspector with the Royal Parks Constabulary. She’s upset. Under stress, sir. The Watch . . . they’re looking for her. I don’t know why. Possibly mixed up with the cults. And there’s something else: I’m feeling . . . um, lessee . . . an incursion of some sort? Really vague. Possibly one of the cults, sir. She’s not . . . uh.”
“What?” asked Mason. “Come on, man. Fuck the ‘vague’ shit.” The Cog looked at Mason, wincing bitterly, and started jiggling his knee.
“She’s not carrying guilt—at least, not normal guilt.”
“What’s that mean? Who cares about that?”
“What I’m trying to say is . . . she’s . . . she’s—I don’t know. That’s it. I’m out now.”
“Stay on it,” said Mason. “If she’s cult, I want her kept at a distance. I want her to be thinking of nests of baby bluebirds and nothing else.”
The woman’s flowing black hair swayed as she drifted along the edge of the square, gazing off into the mottled sycamore stands, up toward the sky, then all around the building facades. She appeared both otherworldly and sprung from earthy soil and water, and Mason found himself entranced. A faint nimbus of green—raw, vernal, and fecund—reflected off the budding limbs of the sycamore and lime trees, enveloping her. She hadn’t looked at the chancery with any more interest than the rest of the square, and Mason now felt convinced that this Astrid Sullivan, whoever she was, posed no threat to the embassy.
Astrid now seemed to be looking straight into some of the hidden cameras, in a way that didn’t feel quite human to Mason, and he got a hard, close look. She wasn’t young or lithe, but tall and powerfully built, with the liquid muscles of a swimmer that swelled against her white and dark navy uniform.
In this woman’s face, Mason saw something larger than another entitled aristocrat’s or angry republican’s call to arms. It was deeper and stronger and older and more British than just about anything in England Mason saw. It was more than some ridiculous through blood and law catchphrase.
Some of the diplomatic cops in the Roost were astir.
“Shit! Look, shitheads,” one of them was saying. “It’s that goddamned monkey.”
“Not a monkey, dumbass,” said another. “Ape.”
Mason had also seen flashes of the gorilla’s face, and the humped, retreating backside of an elephant, and the giant legs of elephants, and now the gorilla again, with a strange, pained expression, looking right into one lens. There was another animal, too, but it was harder to make out—a tiger? No one had said anything about tigers.
The gorilla’s face came up again on several screens, but Astrid seemed to vanish.
“Britain’s under attack—by its own zoo? But now I don’t see the woman—this Inspector Sullivan,” said Mason. “We’ve got lots of gorilla.” The animal looked sad and frighteningly sentient.
“Nope. Not a face we’re going to find on the databases,” he said, turning to a square-faced black rookie agent from Baltimore who was manning the master CCTV console. Mason really liked this rookie, Navas, an agent who also had strong empathic skills (it was getting to be a trend in FBI and CIA recruitment). But Navas wasn’t exactly trained in using them, and for Mason, that made him far more trustworthy.