They all nod their understanding. “We might even get to go home early,” Dr. Penny says.
But McQueen has to rain on her picnic. “No,” he says, “you won’t. In fact, it’s going to take you a fair bit longer than usual because I’m putting all my men on perimeter. You’ll have to do your own pinning and skinning. Phillips, Lutes, hand over the kit.”
The two privates set down the bags that contain the catch-can poles. Dr. Akimwe and Dr. Sealey take delivery, maybe a little too quickly: it seems they have a definite preference as to which end of this messy procedure they want to be on.
McQueen leaves them to it, addressing his own people. “Let’s flatten the risk profile as far as we can. Phillips, Sixsmith, take the two ends of the street and lock them off. Lutes, you stay right here with the whitecoats. Make sure they can pick their flowers in peace. Foss, follow me.”
Everyone jumps to it, absolutely happy that someone else has taken responsibility and told them what to do. Sometimes McQueen despairs of the human race.
He and Foss need to get some elevation to be of maximal use, and ideally they need to do it without going into any of the buildings that line the street. Letting sleeping dogs lie is his default option. He stations Foss on top of a high-sided van about fifty yards away from the scientists, who are already beavering away. What does that leave? A flat roof on top of that café over there, with a drainpipe alongside. Good enough. He scales it in seconds, finds a good nest and settles himself in.
He can’t see everything from here but he can see far enough. It’s virtually impossible for anyone with bad intentions to get close to the science team without tipping their hand to the soldiers first.
The lieutenant is confident that he has this situation in hand. He relaxes a little, and draws some innocent amusement from watching the geeks trying to corral their first specimen. They’re all over the place, scared of their own shadows, almost catching their feet in the running loops as they dance around looking for a good angle.
Something is wrong with this picture, though, and it takes him a moment to realise what it is. There are only four geeks in the parade. One of the science team is missing.
McQueen experiences a momentary twinge of alarm. He does a head count and sees that it’s Greaves who is AWOL, which in most circumstances he would just live with. But if person or persons unknown are wandering around Invercrae with more machetes than inhibitions, this is not a good time for Greaves to be out there doing whatever the unfathomable fuck he does.
The lieutenant unships his walkie-talkie and thumbs it to channel three. Down on the street, Private Lutes picks up and speaks his name.
“You’ve lost one; Bo Peep,” McQueen says. He tries to keep the irritation out of his voice: he gave Lutes the easiest job because Lutes came onto Rosie’s roster from the royal corps of transport, primarily as an engineer. He is the under-achiever of the group. And now he has screwed up his very simple, very explicit brief.
“It’s just the Robot,” Lutes says.
“I know who it is. Go and get him. Out.”
Lutes puts the walkie-talkie back on his belt with a truculence that McQueen can read from fifty metres away. He detaches himself from the group down in the street, takes a forlorn look inside the nearest of the shop frontages, then chooses one at random and wades in.
The scientists don’t even see him leave. They’re doing their own dirty work for once and making heavy weather of it.
It rains on the just and the unjust, McQueen reflects. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up.
17
Greaves was forced to wait for his moment, and it was a long time in coming. But when the soldiers went to their stations and the science team started to look around for the first specimen to work on, the opportunity was suddenly there. He stepped backwards off the street into the window display of a shop whose glass frontage had long ago been shattered.
Faceless mannequins dressed in sun-bleached rags jostled him, but he steadied them with both hands and passed on through. In the space of a second, he had become invisible.
He pauses now to savour that feeling. Privacy and anonymity appeal to him strongly.
The interior of the shop has a rich smell of damp and rot. Sodden cloth, mulched down two or three inches thick, sucks at his feet as he walks. He gropes his way through interior doors, passageways, storerooms, back out onto an alley so narrow that he has to keep his body flat to the wall as he walks. The sound of the river is loud in his ears. It must be close at hand, probably on the other side of the rough-cast wall that faces him.
He comes out onto a side street, finds it deserted. Picking another shop, he dives in through the gaping, dislocated doorway and keeps on going.
Greaves moves quickly, even though he has no idea where he is going. He is painfully aware of how little time he has. On previous excursions when he has struck out from Rosie on his own, he has chosen a time when nobody had any expectations of him or any reason to look for him. This time is different. This time he is on the mission roster and his absence is bound to raise alarms as soon as it gets noticed.
And normally Greaves has a plan, but this time no. He was lured astray by the urgency of his desire. His strongest passion, sometimes his only passion, is for explanations. When he encounters something that runs so contrary to his understanding of the world, he needs to interrogate it until it yields to his intellect.
This time, though, it’s more than just a quirk of his nature. Understanding the children may lead him to a cure for Cordyceps, a medicine for all the world’s ills.
Somewhere in this town, the children are hiding. And the town is so small it seems that he must inevitably run into them, but that feeling is an illusion mostly attributable to his having grown up in Beacon. Beacon began life as a camp. Its structures are mostly single-storey. Thousands of people live in tents, or in temporary shelters that have insidiously become permanent.