And that was about the time when Mason’s own brain, still recovering from a deep sleep, truly awakened.
“Holy shit—the applicants, the fucking visa applicants!”
A collective gasp arose. No one had remembered. Even as early as 4:00 A.M., there was always a queue for the visa services section of the embassy. Men, women, often children—usually Indigents—huddled in blankets, walked in place to keep their feet warm, whispered reverently in a hundred languages. The problem was, they normally gathered so close to the front of the chancery, they were not visible, on-screen, until the embassy officially opened for business at 8:30 A.M., when they would filter into the building’s indoor battery of metal detectors and snaking queues and undergo a terrific, multitiered, marginally legal scrutinizing.
Mason said, “Goddamnit, we need to get the fuck out there.” He could see the Mirror/WikiNous’s headline already: HEARTLESS YANKS LEAVE REFUGEES TO BEASTS.
He looked at the marines in the Roost. “Jesus. Wait a second. You can’t go out there.” What to do, precisely, turned out to be not so simple. The applicants stood on British soil, for now.
U.S. soldiers could not go out onto the pavement with weapons to protect foreign nationals on English territory. Even assigning diplomatic police to the pavement could cause an international row. The “special relationship” between America and the United Kingdom had long gone. If nothing else, Henry IX was majestically, deviously fickle. You just never knew what was coming next. Last year, Henry had actually lobbied to reopen the Treaty of Ghent; there were some twenty million acres of mineral-rich Maine and Upper Michigan that he felt Canada, now a Crown colony (apart from Quebec) again, had a historical claim to, at least in part, and tensions between the two countries were rising. Weeks later, he was calling the struggling America of the twenty-first century “a continuing inspiration for all.”
“You could invite them in,” said the British contractor. “The people, obviously—not the elephants.”
“No, no elephants,” Mason nodded, smirking. “That’s good.” He turned to one of the diplomatic police officers. “Do it.”
The officer started patting his neuralzinger belt.
“Goddamnit,” said Mason. “Do it fast or I’ll cut your cock off with a dull deer antler.”
A few of the men laughed. The Cog was shaking his head in apparent disgust.
“Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!”
The officer ran out of the room.
“Open the main doors!” A voice was shouting up a stairwell. “Let the applicants in.”
Mason turned to Navas.
“What a mess. Get Five and the Circus up to speed. Tell them that we’re getting our logistics in place, that we’ve got a few minor jurisdictional queries out to Legal—wait, no, wait, don’t, don’t do that. God, we’ll never hear the end of it. The ‘rights of Englishmen’ this, EU treaties that. Wait till Harry gets a hold of that! Just request assistance.”
“Sure,” said Navas. “What about the woman—the inspector from the Royal Parks? The one the Watch is hot for?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to talk with her. I think I need to get out there.”
“Are you fucking nuts?” asked Navas.
“Well,” said Mason. He punched in the code on a rectangle of numbers by the door of the lift. The lift, which had just two stops—ground level or six floors below to the Roost—opened with a sibilant woosh.
“I’m good with animals,” said Mason.
The applicants needed help. Mason remembered Ephesians—how it was important to “be ye kind to one another, tenderhearted.” He himself had come up hard from the impoverished hamlet of Mingo Grove, a foggy holler in the shadow of Spruce Knob Mountain. After high school, he joined the air force and excelled. He later worked his way through the state university, managing a BodyFriendly’s ice cream restaurant at night to pay the bills. Despite the stereotypes of insular Appalachia, Mason’s attraction to “furn service,” as his family called it, was admired around his pine-forested, precipitous home. Getting out was the right thing to do, as everyone said once you’d done it. The applicants had it much worse, he knew. There was no comparison.
As for animals, he had grown up around aggressives, both sentient and otherwise, and he loved them. His older sister had bred and sold at half-market price Perro de Presa Canario puppies and kept, of all things, a pet bobcat, called Snaggle, caught as a kitten in the hills. Snaggle had grown up to be dangerous; it had once attacked Mason’s mother and killed a visiting Presa stud as well as another pet in the Gage home—a big raccoon. Still, no one, especially not Mason, thought for a moment that Snaggle didn’t have a place in their household.
As the lift opened to an anteroom of the chancery and Mason loped out into the square to survey the applicants, he felt a keen sense of destiny—and confidence to a fault.
Tenderhearted, he had to repeat to himself. Tender. Hearted.
the brave man from zanzibar