“Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute.”
She vanishes for a while, then reappears with another evidence baggie. Then she leads me to the vault door and thence to the elevator. The ride up to the concrete-walled yard up top seems to take forever. I stare at the scuffed metal walls despondently. If this is a mistake I can just go back, I rationalize. I don’t have to fuck over a not-a-friend-exactly in a career-ending way. But that sense of something missing won’t go away, and I know in my guts that I’m about to be a very bad boy.
“Here.” She opens the baggie and passes me my phone. “You’ve got three minutes, then I’m going to have to take you back down to the cells again and I can’t promise I’ll let you out any time before your hearing.”
“Jesus, Jo.” I take the iPhone and I touch the home button, and it doesn’t unlock. “Hang on.” I try a different finger. Enter PIN. “Hang on.” I use a long number, not just four digits, and it takes me a moment to get it right, then the phone unlocks. I fire up the OFCUT app and select Secure Voice Call, and my phone reboots to a pale glowing Apple logo. “What the fuck?”
A progress bar begins to crawl across the screen. “Problem?” asks Jo.
I shrug. “Phone’s on the fritz. Got to wait while it reboots.” She nods. Rebooting seems to take forever, but finally it’s done and with a sigh of relief I touch the home button, only to see a very unwelcome WELCOME logo. “Fuck. It just did a full factory reset on me!”
“Then it’s not much use standing here, is it?” Jo points out. “I’ll call the SA and keep bugging him until he sends someone, but you can’t wait here—”
“Sorry,” I say as I close my imagined mental fist on her mind, and the flicker of horror in her eyes before they roll up makes my stomach churn.
I manage to catch her as she collapses so that she doesn’t crack her head, and I lay her out on the ground. She’s still breathing, and something inside my head is screaming and raging at me for baiting it to wakefulness, then not letting it eat its fill, but I don’t listen to my inner feeder. I think she’ll be okay. I hope she’ll be okay. If she isn’t okay … I don’t want to think about that. If I’d known I was going to be in this bind I’d have prepped a binding macro and a no-see-um or two, but that’s not the sort of thing you can do safely on the back of an envelope in a lock-up and you have to work with what you’ve got.
We are not alone in the yard. There are steps up to a back door into the main station where a constable smoking a cigarette begins to turn towards us as she slumps. I wave to him urgently. “Inspector’s collapsed!” I yell. “Call a paramedic, I’ve got this!” I kneel beside Jo for a moment as he throws away his butt and scrambles inside, then I unhook her ID badge and lanyard and close my eyes. I can feel him dashing into the station, so after a count of three I follow him, but I zig where he zagged and the instant I turn the corner on the windowless corridor I drop back to a slow walk with my hands behind my back. I surreptitiously tug my sleeves down in case any cuff abrasions are visible, and I let my awareness spread out, feeling for thinkers to either side.
If you ever have occasion to move unchallenged through a big construction site, your disguise needs to include certain totemic elements of the trade: a hard hat, hi-vis jacket, and a clipboard, for example. Anyone looking at you will assume you’re a surveyor or architect’s assistant—someone else with reason to be there but who marches to a different drumbeat.
And if you ever need to escape from a police station, your best disguise is to look like a cop. Or, to be more specific, a detective: soberly suited, ID badge visible (but photo concealed by your tie), and walking the policeman’s walk, watching everything, giving nothing away. It helps that I can feel the minds around me. I can’t read them, but I know which rooms are empty and which hold meetings; I know when someone’s going to come around the corner ahead of me or when the lift is going to open.
It takes me about two minutes to work my way through the warren of offices to the front of the building, then out past the front desk unchallenged. The main road outside is busy as usual and there’s no sign of any alarm. By now they’ve probably found Jo and realized I’m nowhere to be found, and possibly they’ve worked out that there’s somebody missing from the enhanced security lock-up, in which case all hell is about to break loose … but I’m already on the pavement. I see a black cab with its hire sign illuminated and I stick my arm out instantly, and the driver pulls over to let me in.
“Where to?” he asks.
“Sloane Square.” I sit back and tighten my seat belt as he pulls back out into traffic and sets course, feeling another stab of guilt: I have no money and no intention of paying, or of leaving my driver in any immediate condition to tell the police what happened. But Sloane Square is within walking distance of Persephone’s house, and I really need to touch base with someone who can tell me what the fuck is going on today. If ’Seph tells me I’m off base, I suppose I’ll have to go back to Belgravia and hand myself in and face the music. (And in addition to whatever stupid charge got me huckled in the first place we can now add: assaulting a police officer, absconding from custody, theft, and another assault charge.)
But I really don’t expect that to happen. Something has gone wrong with the oath of office, and having read the DELIRIUM brief, I’ve got a horrible feeling I know what it is.
*
The New Annex is in an uproar when Mo gets there.
She takes the stairs to the fourth floor, to Mahogany Row, through knots and clusters of staff gathered in corridors and talking in hushed, vehement tones. Ordinary work has been cancelled; computer screens in the admin areas are dark. Security are everywhere, escorting weepy, angry, and variously emotional employees carrying cardboard boxes. She passes doors that are sealed shut with police evidence tape, others that glow with the inscribed radiance of activated security wards. She feels numb as she turns the corner, onto the carpet, then sees the SA’s office door standing open.
“Doctor—” She gets as far as the threshold before she stops. It’s Dr. Armstrong’s office door, but it doesn’t open onto Dr. Armstrong’s office. There’s an empty room here, grimy curtainless windows staring like a dead man’s eyes at the building on the opposite side of the main road. The floor is worn lino, scuffed and battered and unsullied by furniture. The man himself is nowhere to be seen.