*
It’s early evening on the Saturday of Schiller’s big party, and the Target One team are taking up their positions. Cassie is aboard the minibus ferrying agency waiters from the West London hinterlands to the big house, incommunicado for now (the agency insisted on everyone turning in their mobile phones for the shift, ostensibly to prevent unauthorized photography as well as to reduce goofing off). The bus has already dropped off two loads of shift workers; Cassie is part of the late evening shift, on duty until the early hours. But she won’t be alone once she arrives on-site. A mobile support truck and two cars are parked half a mile down the road at Nether Stowe itself. Alex shelters from the remaining sky-glow in the back of the truck, along with the special backup people Dr. O’Brien introduced him to earlier that afternoon. Brains, who has come from nursing his injured partner, Pinky, in Leeds just to help with this caper, swears at the array of receivers and data loggers in the rack beside him while Alex fidgets edgily. “Cheap cables, kid.” He wiggles an ethernet patch experimentally as one of the speakers crackles. “Bane of my life.”
Meanwhile, Mo is differently nervous. She sits in the back seat of a Bentley, checking her foundation in a makeup compact for the third time. She wears her one black evening gown, with borrowed jewelry glittering at throat and wrists. In her clutch she carries a gilt-edged card acquired—at some personal risk—from a certain high-flying Metropolitan Police officer with a guilty conscience. Cassie’s way in is below stairs, but hers is strictly ballroom. “If you can score me an invitation I can go in separately and rendezvous with Cassie once we’re both on-site,” she pointed out in one of the planning sessions. “It has the advantage that it gets Zero in too.” (The uniformed chauffeur behind the Bentley’s wheel, taking a catnap while they wait for the go signal, has been Persephone’s Oddjob for as long as I’ve known them both. I’ve never seen him wearing a steel-brimmed bowler hat but there’s always a first time, and it’s the sort of thing that would appeal to his sense of humor.) “Nobody will think twice about us stashing our driver round the back, so we’ll have muscle and a rapid evacuation route if it all goes to shit before the cavalry can reach us,” she added, sealing the deal.
But despite all the planning, despite the backroom crew and the extraction team, when she finds herself dressed to the nines and waiting in the car for London Central to fire the starting pistol, she’s jittery. Stage nerves. “I’m getting too old for this Mission: Impossible crap,” she tells the microphone concealed in her corsage.
“Could be worse,” Zero chirps; “you could be prepped for Mission: Impossible and find yourself in a teen slasher movie instead.”
She shudders and pulls her silk wrap closer around her shoulders. “Don’t even think that.”
“Mind you, the way things work around here The Prisoner is more likely than either…”
Mo screens him out—Zero is an aficionado of spy thrillers—and glances at her phone again.
“Alex. Talk to me?”
“Dr. O’Brien.” He sighs noisily. “What can I do for you?”
“How are you feeling?” Mo isn’t nervous on her own account—she’s done this sort of thing plenty of times before, although not as frequently since her CANDID cover was wrecked on national TV—but she gets edgy whenever she knows that I’m in play, and she’s very aware that Alex has gotten into deeper waters far faster than she or I ever did. It’s not some sort of mother hen instinct; she’s just concerned that the least experienced member of her team might be out of his depth.
“Mostly worried about Cassie.” Alex pauses. “Huh. Tracker on the Transit says the minibus is about three kilometers out. As long as it doesn’t go off the road, or—”
“That’s not going to happen. She knows what she’s doing, Alex. How about you?”
“What about—? Sorry. I’m easily distracted.”
“Don’t be.” Mo pauses to collect her thoughts. “Worrying about your girlfriend won’t help. You’ve got a job to do—focus on that, and you’ll make everyone safer, her included.”
“Yeah … I guess so. How long until it’s time to go in?”
Mo glances at the dashboard clock. “Zero and I will probably be on the move in about another ten minutes. You don’t move until you get the signal, but it won’t be long, I promise.” Not unless there’s an abort on Target Two or Three, and that doesn’t bear thinking about, but she decides against reminding him of this. Nervous PHANGs make everyone else extra twitchy, and it’s a vicious circle. “Hang tight, try to chill, and call me if anything comes up. Bye for now.”
Mo leans back, closes her eyes, and sighs. The SA has taken her into his confidence and explained just how high the stakes are. If he is right about the real agenda behind Schiller’s parties and backroom meetings, then the cost of failure is too nightmarish to contemplate. So, with the heavy-hearted assent of the Board, he has made a deal with the devil; and the hell of it is that she can’t see what else he could have done. It’s up to her to keep the Laundry’s side of the bargain tonight, and to that end he’s given her a blank check to do whatever she thinks necessary. Time to face the music and dance, she thinks mordantly, feeling a reflexive stab of nostalgia for the eldritch strings of an instrument she’s lost forever, then she begins once more to go through the trigger words for the summonings and wards that her smartphone is keyed to activate on command—
“Why’s the kid nervous?” asks Zero.
“Someone back at HQ thought giving him a cup of coffee to make him extra alert this afternoon—he usually works nights—was a good idea. He thought it was decaf. Caffeine and PHANGs—most of them—go together like bankers and cocaine. He’s still coming down and twitchy.”
Zero does a double take in the mirror as Mo opens her eyes again. “And his girlfriend is point on this? Is that entirely wise?”
Mo swears softly. “No it isn’t, but it’s our least-bad option right now. We’re shorthanded, and he’s one of the few halfway-trained combat thaumaturges we’ve got, even if he is wet behind the ears. Anyway, he’s not the only field support we’ve got in play tonight.” Her phone vibrates and a message bubbles up on the screen. “Okay, that’s our go signal. Showtime.”
Zero pushes the go button and the big V8 purrs to life. “Death or glory. Break a leg. Your next mission—”
“Stick a cork in it and drive.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He peels out of the parking slot and turns the limousine towards the tree-shaded lane that leads towards the mansion as Mo takes a deep breath, and wonders how many unpleasant acquaintances she’s going to have to smile at before the night is over.