“No, really?” Persephone raises an eyebrow. “And here I thought you were planning on attending a cocktail party.”
“Bah.” Mhari stalks back towards the spare room where her kit bag is stashed. She’s still dressed for the office, and after an afternoon of meetings she’s not in the mood for Persephone’s precaper ribbing, even though she knows it’s the other woman’s way of psyching herself up. This evening Mhari would rather be anywhere else than playing live-action Portal against a mad billionaire who might be possessed by an undead god. She changes quickly into an outfit similar to Persephone’s, except for a lack of offensive weapons that she isn’t trained to use anyway. “Walk a mile in the other guy’s boots indeed.” According to Mrs. MacDougal it makes for better human resources asset management, but she can’t help wondering if she’s the butt of an elaborate practical joke as she clips on the last of her supersecret agent outfit, pulls on her shoes, and heads back out to join Persephone.
“I started the count,” Gary volunteers, hovering. “We’re at four minutes. I’ll give you a call at thirty, sixty, and ninety minutes, then at one hundred. If you’re not out by one hundred and ten, I kill the grid and activate the emergency plan.”
“Correct.” Persephone frowns, focusing intently on the telescoping steel bar she’s holding. The chain-link ladder with its lightweight treads loops around the bar, and she makes sure both ends rest across the full diameter of the circle and the treads are stacked in a mound in the middle of it. Above them, Persephone has set up a low metal frame that straddles the circle. Mhari notices that she’s wearing heavy-duty insulated gloves, and shivers: she can feel the hunger of the things trapped in the swirling vortex of power. “Okay, dialed in for a four-fifty drop, the ladder is six meters long, that should work fine. And go.”
Persephone presses a button on the second box and the circle of floor within the grid abruptly vanishes. The chain-link ladder unrolls with a silvery clatter until it dangles, wobbling side to side above a carpet. Everything Mhari can see looks perfectly mundane—except that it shimmers slightly, as if glimpsed through blue-dyed water. “Okay, I’m going first. Headset on.” Persephone taps her headset’s microphone, then grabs the frame above the portal, raises a foot, and places it on the ladder, taking care not to touch the energized circuit as she does so. Then she descends into shimmering turquoise light.
Mhari swallows as she waits. At last Persephone says, “Clear,” in her headset; the chain-link ladder wobbles wildly as she drops free. “Portal is about one-ninety centimeters up, ladder comes to within a meter of the carpet. Come on down, the water’s lovely.”
Mhari climbs down the ladder, copying Persephone’s extreme caution in avoiding the energized portal circuit. This is so childish, she thinks. If we get busted doing this I’m going to die of embarrassment! What am I doing, playing make believe like I’m some kind of secret agent? The Field Ops specialists have always struck her as living in some sort of Boy’s Own fantasy world, a looking-glass universe where they get away from the boredom and the office politics by playing games without frontiers. Even a six-month stint with the Home Office, wearing a glorified police uniform, working with genuine card-carrying superheroes and punching lunatics with a Lycra fetish, hasn’t given her a taste for adventure—quite the opposite, in fact.
As her head passes below the level of the grid her vision blacks out. She’s overtaken by a ghastly and appalling hunger, a pointed reminder of the life-altering infection she’s been living with for the past year, that has forever excluded her from normal life and relationships. For a moment she begins to panic, but then she keeps climbing.
She counts her way down twenty rungs and then her vision abruptly returns. The hunger subsides: spillover from the trapped V-parasites in the portal. She’s hanging from an emergency ladder in an entrance lobby almost identical to the one upstairs, except for the color of the carpet and the darkness hovering above her in midair. She resists the urge to giggle and concentrates on finding the next rung down. Eventually her questing foot can’t find anything. “Uh. ’Seph?”
Persephone’s face appears at the end of the hall. “You’ve bottomed out, lower yourself by hand or jump, it’s not far.” She speaks softly, relying on her headset.
“Right.” Mhari steels herself and lets go. “I’m down.”
“Over here.” Persephone beckons. As Mhari follows her into the living room she glances back. The ladder dangles in midair in blatant violation of the laws of physics, but when seen from anywhere other than directly underneath it, the portal is almost invisible, a hair-thick slice of darkness in the air directly below the ceiling.
“Sitrep?” Gary asks in Mhari’s ear, startling her.
“Sit—oh, I’m down, ’Seph’s down, I think”—Mhari listens hard—“we’re alone here.”
“Confirm,” Persephone echoes. “Raise the ladder until I call for it.”
“Raise the—” Mhari catches her eye.
“Yep. If we have a visitor, you hide, I’ll take care of them. If they open the front door and see the ladder, the game’s up.”
“Right.” Mhari swallows. “Sweep the suite?”
“You go for the bedrooms and bath, I’ll tackle the living room, hall, and closets.”
“On it.”
The layout of Schiller’s suite is identical to the one the Laundry rented two floors up, and intimately familiar from a monthlong stakeout. There are four bedrooms, the largest one with an en suite bathroom and sitting area, all of them equipped with walk-in, mirror-fronted wardrobes along one wall. There are two secondary bathrooms and a robing area with stool and dressing table. There’s a compact kitchen with fridge, microwave, and cupboards. So Mhari pulls on her blue latex gloves and gets down to searching them.