“OCCULUS pinned down at front perimeter, active shooters engaged. Zero is round the back but not responding.”
The corridor has evenly spaced doors, all closed. Cassie pauses between the second and third, then darts forward and shoves the third door open. It’s a pantry, walled-in, open-fronted cabinets displaying fine china. Mo closes the door behind them. “Come on!” Cassie hisses.
“Coming”—she taps her earbud again—“we’re going to try and escape through the woods at the rear.”
“We are?” Cassie squeaks as she stops dead again in a darkened, empty kitchen. “WaitWait—fuck, can’t go there!”
“Why not?” Mo demands edgily.
“We’re cut off! I can’t”—Cassie hyperventilates—“can’t feel my geasa! The Opener of the Way is also the Closer of Doors and owww—”
Mo doesn’t have the senses of a strong ritual practitioner but she’s plugged into her oath of office and the more esoteric binding of the Auditors besides; she senses it as a stillness in the corner of her mind that is normally aware of her duties, and as a bubble of pressure expanding around her mind, like an airliner repressurizing during descent. “MADCAP to CANDID, do you copy? Some kind of ward just went up around the perimeter. Do you copy?”
“CANDID here, I copy.” She licks suddenly dry lips. The stillness in her head is pounding like the absence of giant drums, an alien heartbeat coming closer. “Cassie just lost her mana stream. Are we cut off?”
“Yes. Suggest you find Zero and the car and try to drive out; it’s shielded—”
A brief stutter of gunfire some distance outside the building rattles the window panes. “Ri-ight,” Mo says slowly. Cassie is doubled over as if in pain. Mo hears footsteps beyond the pantry. “Move it!”
She grabs Cassie and tugs her towards the big kitchen doors. These rooms are a trap, even with her natural invisibility. She hears a shout from behind as she throws herself against the door and sprawls through it into one of the side rooms, shoving up against a snowy linen-draped table bearing a half-eaten buffet of finger food. It’s part of a horseshoe surrounding the center of the room, the open side facing gaping French windows and a terrace open to the night and magic. Cassie moans as Mo drags her down under the tablecloth and crawls on hands and knees away from the doorway. “Shut up,” she whispers, and hunkers down, clutching the alf?r woman. For a miracle, Cassie falls silent.
Behind them, the kitchen door opens. Footsteps squeak on the polished parquet floor of the morning room. A man speaks, his tone dull and oddly atonal: “They are not here, Mistress.”
A woman—Overholt, Mo thinks—replies, her voice ringing: “They ran up the stairs, they must have come out on this level! They have not crossed the boundary therefore they’re hiding. Find them! You, you, and you: take the function rooms. You two, search the service areas. Work front to back and flush them out into the pavilion. If you see them, know that our Lord does not require the service of their kind: you may shoot to kill.”
*
Heathrow is a big airport, but luckily the Transport Police are already here; most of them are lying on the ground or kneeling and variously groaning or throwing up, but Johnny knows what he’s looking for and takes the Airwave handset from a supine inspector, then calls up the dispatcher. He explains what we want using yet another bloody code word nobody has seen fit to confide in me—how the fuck was I to know that we have a backdoor liaison with them, and why didn’t the boys on the ground know about it in time to avoid this clusterfuck?—and then we get a fast ride in the back of an SUV driven by one of Captain Partridge’s men, right around the perimeter with blues and twos going.
India 97 is already on approach when we arrive at the chopper terminal. It’s a twin-engine Airbus Helicopters H145 in police markings, a Nightsun and thermal imager slung beneath its nose like a gun turret. “C’mon,” Johnny says, and briskly shoves me out of the SUV.
“The cops—they weren’t told about this target because the SA was afraid they’d been rooted by Schiller’s bunch? But we’re supposed to be their best homies now?” I ask incredulously.
“Shaddup and run, kid, we can chew the cud later.” Johnny is unusually tense and I am increasingly pissed off at being kept in the dark about what seems to me to be an important aspect of an operation I’m supposed to be in charge of, sandbox or no sandbox. But the skids touch down just long enough for us to run across and climb on board—ducking instinctively even though the spinning blades are too far overhead to be a problem—and then we’re off, climbing out and turning towards the center of the capital at low altitude until we clear controlled airspace.
He passes me a headset. “We kept it quiet to avoid tipping our hand prematurely, but now Schiller knows something is up. Chris got through to the dinosaur’s head, but the tail was already knocking on the door.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. Best laid plans ’n’ all that.”
I hate being out of touch, but it’s too loud for a phone conversation in the back of the chopper. I propitiate my inner demons by sending the SA a stream of peevish instant messages, but he’s old school: it’s far from certain he’ll even read them today. I’m taken by surprise when a couple of minutes later he begins to update me on what’s going on. But then he sends me the photograph Mhari took in the bedroom, and I give up on the not-swearing thing—and when he gives me Mo’s latest sitrep on what she and Cassie are doing I learn the real meaning of fear.
*
Anneka Overholt is blazingly furious, and the splinter of the Lord’s soul that pierces her mind like one of the nails that joined Christ to the Cross burns with a painful echo of her rage.