Navas smiled and shook his head, then asked in a serious tone, “What about the woman?”
“I think we’re sort of stuck,” said Mason. “I don’t actually see how her presence rises beyond a UK internal security matter. But I’m still thinking we’ve not seen the end of this. I hope she’s OK. I see no threat with her. I just don’t—but, for now, I think we’ve got to leave her to the fucking Watch. Damn shame.” He hesitated for a moment, then turned back toward the squinty-eye Cog.
“Is she or is she not a threat to America?” Mason asked the Cog.
“I don’t . . . think so?”
“OK,” said Mason. “But the Crown doesn’t like her.”
“Good ’ole King Harry,” Navas muttered. “If he’s after her, she must be competent.”
“Damn right,” Mason said, leaning down toward him.
“Heh-heh,” said Navas, smiling awkwardly. Several of the CCTV monitors were swinging wildly in a way that made it impossible to see what they were recording. “My concentration’s shit,” said Navas. “I’m losing focus. I’m feeling like there’s something in the chancery building. Sir?”
Mason took a deep breath. He said, “What do you mean?” He glanced over at the Cog, frowning.
“What do you say, Cog?”
“I don’t know. I notice . . . something, too? Something’s in my thoughts. Something’s in here.”
“What the fuck do you mean, ‘in here’?”
“I don’t know. I think . . . my thinking’s . . . it’s like it’s sort of rippled, sir.”
Mason looked over toward the group of newcomers who had come in with the pass-phrase.
It could be nothing, Mason knew, but a Cog’s distraction usually meant trouble. For all his dislike of Cogs, he recognized that they possessed a talent. They would clamp onto others’ minds like sharks and never let go.
“OK,” said Mason. “Let’s sweep the building.” He nodded to one of the few actual armed U.S. Marines who stood guard in the Roost. “See if there’s anyone in the building who’s not on crew—or authorized.”
“The woman,” said Navas. “We should help her. We have to.”
“Maybe,” said Mason. “It’s complicated. Is there a valid, concrete threat? Where are these . . . animals?”
Navas spun around, back to his console, and worked his cameras. A blur of images from the square—sycamore leaves, black bollards, mullioned windows—flashed across the screens. Finally, two big shots, at separate angles, of an exhausted pachyderm appeared on the main CCM screen, its trunk held rigidly out like a visible bolt of anger.
“OK, sir. Got one. It’s outside,” he said, with a sigh of relief.
“Fuckinay,” said Mason. “This is—goddangit—it’s England, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about. Y’all think? Why does this kind of shit always happen here?” He leaned in to look at the screens more closely. “Anybody read War of the Worlds? Typical Englishness.”
A different, boyish agent turned around, about to speak.
Mason interrupted him, “That was rhetorical.”
It seemed to him now that the newcomers—austere-looking goobers with ultrashort haircuts as tidy as helmets—were crowding around the screens. Where did all these folks come from? Mason wondered. Few wore the dark bland wool suits and ties of his agents. Mason didn’t want to overthink their presence; one of the hassles you learned to tolerate in security around the Company was being monitored and visited by shadowy, parallel organizations within the service. (And the pass-phrases were redundantly protected and knowledge of them sacrosanct.) But Mason felt nervous. He noticed that many of the kooks also wore the same white Nike trainers. They were in one of the most secure rooms in London, six floors below the surface (not the commonly believed three), encased in a full ten-foot-thick socket of lead and steel-buttressed well-being. They could survive a direct hit from most hydrogen bombs—for a few hours, at least. Apart from the mysterious newcomers, they all adored Mason. He was cantankerous and popular, and he inspired loyalty. But something was slipping past him.
“Seriously,” he suddenly announced to all, “the pressure’s sort of off on you all.” Not everyone turned around to listen.
The Met and the horrible king’s special paramilitary units were working this weirdness, he explained to the crowd in the room. American security personnel—diplomatic police, a small, specialized marine detachment, the CIA agents and liaisons, and a few British security “contractors” whom everyone accepted as MI5—would spectate. No one seriously believed that an embassy attacker was going to fill an elephant with ammonium nitrate and attach an Opticall detonator.
“Gorillas are buckchuck cool,” said the boyish agent. Everyone looked at him. He zoomed in with one of the deep-infrared cameras, making a red-orange bloom fill the screen. “That’s its brain. Lot of energy there.”
A soldier standing by the door laughed.