“I don’t know what it means, but I guess it means you are in danger,” he said. “I can help get you warm. I can . . .”
“You know,” said Astrid. “If you only did what other primates do for each other, that would be great,” she said. She kissed his cheek. “But thank you, kind sir.”
Suleiman had managed to pull an old Detroit Tigers hoodie from his Ghana Must Go bag, and he and Mason swaddled Astrid in the hoodie, and she accepted this.
“What happened to you?” Mason asked her. “What’s going on?”
She said, “I’m afraid I don’t know. But I . . . I felt like I—I feel like I am here for a reasons that goes way beyond myself. I’ll say this, too—I’ve had king’s bulletin Opticalls and black-freqs going off in my eyes like nuts in the last ten minutes. We’re . . . in trouble. In Britain. Something’s going on . . . a kind of attack.”
Mason motioned toward one of the nearby rank-and-file diplomatic police officers, while nodding toward Suleiman. He said to the officer, “Make sure this gentleman gets his visa—whatever he wants. He saved my life. He’s one of the good guys. Make sure.”
Mason glanced inside; the sight of the table of Flōt and champagne and hors d’oeuvres startled and disturbed him. “What the shit?” It snapped him out of the reverie he felt toward Astrid, which was making her uncomfortable.
“Who’s having a fucking party in the middle of the night?”
Something newly bewildering was unfolding. The officer Mason had ordered, a tall man with red hair, was being led away by one of the people in white coveralls—a Neuter. The red-haired officer was distraught, and so was Mason. Astrid was holding on to Mason’s arm, more from a desire for warmth than fear.
“Hey,” Mason said to the Neuter. “What the hell’s this?”
One of the Neuters, smiling broadly, bashed Mason’s collarbone with a neural-coshstick, flattening him, taking his breath away.
“Are you ready to go to the comet ship?” the Neuter asked Mason, in an absurdly courteous voice, still grinning numbly.
“Wait!” said the officer, trying to pull away. Mason tried to rise back to his feet, and the Neuter hit him again in the middle of his back, knocking him back down.
“Ah!” he screamed. “You sumbitch.”
Another white-suited Neuter appeared and took the red-haired officer’s free arm.
“What did Chief Gage say?” said the officer. “Asshole, stop! Get your fucking hands off me. Who the fuck are you people?”
Before anyone could say another word, the Neuter’s jaw was hit so hard, it seemed to move sideways off its hinges. In a single swing of her stave, Astrid dispatched two others and gave the Americans a brief haven.
As Mason got back to his feet, he realized how desperately he had failed in his own sacred duty to protect the embassy. The Neuters had somehow infiltrated the chancery, emerging from within. Some of them, it seemed clear, had to have been in the diplomatic security detail.
Now the Neuters, who had come to England to obliterate all animals and to force mass human suicide, who seemed to be replicating themselves by the second, were acting with cruel force, using shoulder-dislocating jerks to haul everyone in the embassy out into the square. They had fanned out across the square and started to invade the rest of central London, surrounding every animal they encountered. There were also new Red Watch frightcopters and a few autonews drones in the sky, too, but the Neuters were shooting them down with a kind of sticky-roped plasmatic harpoon.
Indeed, by this time, all across central London, men, women, and children—aristocrats first—were being dragged out of bed by the Neuters and compelled to return to Grosvenor Square. A nightmaric invasion had begun in earnest, just as the sand cat and the lions had warned St. Cuthbert. With its hundreds of living and frozen gene banks, the last zoo on earth—more Noah’s ark than Noah’s—would be the supreme, but far from the only, target.
Suleiman was in a daze, but he was incongruously free of fear. He did not understand what was happening. He actually believed the appearance of the Neuters was all part of some eccentric embassy procedure. The naked woman—well, he didn’t know what to think there. But he felt in her a sign or symbol of good luck or power that he didn’t need to grasp. He had always stood little chance of getting the visa, but now that was secure, as this Chief Gage man had said. And Suleiman could not stop grinning. He had barely noticed the attackers; he was still half-focused on the tembo. It was still there. Someone needed to trap it now, he thought, smiling. It looked settled and compliant, but exhausted, its trunk hanging limp making tweedling squeaks and low, muculent rumbles. Perhaps someone could give it some of those crackers he had seen on that intoxicating American table of plenty?