“I think so”—I wipe my face down—“can you glam us up now?”
“Done.” Cassie clicks her heels and suddenly she’s a straight-haired blonde in a black skirt-suit and Alex looks like a Mormon missionary. I take another deep breath and pull my rubber mask on, then look at Johnny. There’s something not quite right about his uniform, but my eyes skitter away whenever I try to see the bloodstains. Wow, she’s good. “Is right, YesYes?”
“Is very right,” I agree. “Johnny, you’re driving the Peugeot with Alex, I’m taking the bad guys’ Mercedes with Cassie. You lead. Once we get off-site to the first services we dump the bad guys’ wheels and carpool to the RDV. Right?”
“Sure.” Johnny grins cynically. “Piece of cake. What could possibly go wrong?”
*
Nothing actually goes wrong until we’re almost out the gates of Camp Tolkien, largely because Schiller’s missionaries (or their hideous controlling parasites) have cleared the way for us. Captain Marks is lying dead in his office and we pass three other dead soldiers on the way out, two of them armed guards who didn’t have time to go for their sidearms before something hit them. (My guess is the missionaries had their own occult mojo to throw around—skin contact, probably. Everyone assigned to the camp wears a ward, but wards will only protect you against minor threats, much like body armor won’t protect you from a high-velocity rifle bullet to the face. How they got the pistol through security is a worrying question to raise later, but the way the adversary has gotten inside our decision loop doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. What we need to focus on is getting out of here right now so we can make our report.)
So here we are: a military lawyer and his female civilian opposite chatting cordially, while behind them follow a redcap sergeant and a legal aid with a double armful of papers. We proceed through to the first checkpoint, are signed out, and acquire an escort who leads us to the outer checkpoint and the guardhouse where we are signed out again. There are no searches on the way out, because legal privilege is a powerful magic, and we’re actually out in the open-air car park just inside the fence, and I’m trying to spot the Mercedes without looking obvious about it, when our escape plan goes to hell.
I’ve just spotted the giveaway flash of side lights on a huge black car a few cars away and Johnny is unlocking the Peugeot when a siren begins to wail somewhere behind us. I catch his eye and nod, then tap Cassie on the shoulder. “Johnny, Alex? Come with me,” I tell them, and begin to quick-march towards the Mercedes.
Cassie catches on and trots after me. “WhatWhat?” she asks, an all-purpose interrogative.
“Don’t know, let’s get out of here.” I open the driver’s door, which is ridiculously heavy and solid feeling, drop into the seat, hit the engine start button, and am sliding the chair forward so I can reach the pedals when Cassie climbs into the passenger seat. Behind me I hear muffled swearing as Alex and Johnny get in the back.
“Ooh, it’s so shiny!” she says. “I’ve never been in one of these.” I think she means a Mercedes but after a second I realize she’s talking about cars in general.
“Fasten your seat belt”—I demonstrate—“and shut the door.” There’s a thunk as the door closes like a bank vault and I realize it’s dark in here, as if we’re underwater; the window glass has got to be two centimeters thick and the view out the rear window is like looking through a tiny porthole. It’s a limo, just not a stretched one; there’s a logo on the dash saying S600 GUARD, whatever that means. I shove the car into gear and move off towards the airlock-style double-gated entryway because I’ve got a very bad feeling about this. The barrier is down and a soldier is coming out of the guardhouse and bending towards my window and then his rifle is coming up—
I don’t have time for subtlety: I crunch down on his ward and it shatters and I can feel his mind naked and vulnerable before me for a moment, and I push instead of chewing, and he drops like a stone. I think he’s still breathing. I hit the gas. There’s a thunderous gurgle of fuel draining into an engine the size of a destroyer’s, followed by a surge of acceleration, and then we crash into the barrier and it goes flying, chunks bouncing off the windscreen. I hear distant shouts from outside and take my eyes off the road as I stretch my mouth wide and blow, and the little mayfly minds around us tumble and dim, and then we hit the front gates and crash right through them. This isn’t a regular car: I seem to have stolen an armored limo, a heavily reinforced VIP transporter. Suddenly the picture comes into focus: the attempted snatch in London, another team coming here with a vehicle with a sealed, soundproofed rear compartment, this is Schiller’s style now—
There’s a screech and tearing of metal and I’m thrown forward for a second, but then the tall gate topples forward into the road, ripped right off its hinges by several tons of armor. It’s not a very substantial gate because the real security around Camp Tolkien totes SA90 rifles, but I’m on that and feeling icily detached as I realize there’s another Power riding shotgun in the seat beside me, mouth and eyes wide open as she sees how I’m clearing the exit of anyone who might be able to interfere with us. I drive forward across the gate, the Mercedes bouncing heavily on its shocks, and then we’re back on the road again and I hammer the throttle wide open just as Johnny figures out how to wind down the screen behind us and shouts, “What the fucking fuck, Bob?” in my left ear.
“Can’t stop, clowns will catch us!” Or if not clowns, anyone who’s monitoring the CCTV cameras overlooking the exit.
“Challenger’s covering the exit road about two kilometers down, you can’t outrun it,” he points out, inhumanly calmly. “This is good for rifle bullets but not for a GPMG let alone the main gun and we’ll be under their sights for at least fifteen hundred meters.”
The engine is bellowing and the smooth surge of power is still coming—we’re up to 120 kilometers per hour already and I’m finding that tracking the two-lane blacktop ahead is a challenge. Looks like we’ll be into the killing zone in another thirty seconds and it’ll take us about two minutes to clear it. Maybe less if I can hold this thing on the road. If I wasn’t driving and could get line of sight on the dug-in defenses I could take their crews’ minds off the job, but trying to delicately nibble on souls at extreme range while practicing high-speed evasive driving is way above my pay grade. And I don’t want to kill them: they’re only doing their job, and it’s a necessary one for the most part. “Cassie, can your glamour stretch to an invisibility spell?” I ask.
“Nope!” she chirps. “But I can throw our shadow around?”
“You can what our what?”
“Just drive,” Johnny tells me.