“Yeah, that’s a good angle to start with: Chris will know. And there’s the office complex. It’s not on the airport map: that’s a planning infringement for sure and probably an offense under the air navigation act and maybe the Terrorism Act.”
None of this is giving me the warm fuzzies, but we already knew there were a bunch of tongue eaters in London; this is just joining up the dots for the prosecution, proving the connection to Schiller. It’s a start, but it’s not enough to hang him—especially with the friends he’s made.
There are three levels of offices tucked away in this high-security bonded warehouse. He could be hiding literally anything in there, including a haystack of paperwork—and I’m worried that we might not have time to unearth the poisoned needles before he counterattacks.
*
The rattle of the front door keypad is what Persephone remembers most vividly afterwards. “Get in the master bedroom, go hide right now. Leave this to me—”
Mhari is already gone in a living blur, thudding as she caroms off the wall opposite the kitchen door in a crazed exhibition of indoor parkour. Persephone scans quickly. The under-sink cupboard space is promisingly empty but it’s too small and too low. She makes a snap decision and follows Mhari out the door, trusting that the geometry of the main living room will shield her from the entrance unless the guards enter at a run. The nearest spare bedroom door is closed but unlocked, and she smoothly spins through the doorway before it’s half-open, and has it softly closed behind her just ahead of the shuffle of shoes entering the lobby.
Moving from memory in the darkened room, Persephone hunkers down behind the far side of the bed, underneath the window frame, in the gap between the mattress and the wall. Staying out is a calculated risk, but she doesn’t think the guards are likely to snoop around Anneka Overholt’s bedroom and it gives her two possible exits: through the doorway and past the guards, or through the window. Neither of them are terribly good prospects but she’s been in worse fixes before. While she waits, she loosens her hair from its elaborate knot, removes the ebony hair clip it was held with, and re-ties it in a ponytail. The hair clip is a small, lead-weighted dumbbell, and she hopes she won’t have to use it. Contrary to movie mythology people don’t always recover from head injuries, and it’s not her intention to kill the guards if she can avoid it.
But they’re between her and the escape portal—and she can’t use the front door unless she takes one of their key cards, not with the hounds patrolling outside—and she’ll just have to hope that Mhari has enough common sense to handle them if they stumble across her.
As the minutes tick by, Persephone gradually becomes worried. She recognizes the sound of a body being dragged or carried, and hears the low voices from the master bedroom. There are no sounds of fighting, which is good, but a body complicates things. Schiller told the guards to clock off after running their errand, so she waits patiently. But it gradually becomes apparent to her that they’re waiting for something.
Her phone vibrates. Mhari has sent her a photograph. It’s grainy and somewhat out of focus but it raises the hackles on Persephone’s neck. A few seconds later Gary texts her an update: Mhari is in the master bedroom closet, they’ve passed the one-hour mark, the woman in the bedroom has been roofied and is out for the count, and what do you think we should do about it?
Persephone closes her eyes and tries to relax, then opens her inner eye to the other place. She’s an experienced ritual practitioner, and the ability to see into the soulscape comes easily to her. The guards are obvious—she’s seen the host-ridden initiates of Schiller’s Temple before—as are Mhari (chilly, cold, not entirely human, surrounded by a swarm of buzzing hunger) and the woman on the bed (alive, unconscious, fully human). The hungry nightmares patrol the floors above and below this one, and the corridor outside the residence’s door: there’s no escape in that direction. She can feel Gary’s unease two floors up, just as she senses the private security guards in the lobby, five floors below. Casting her perceptions further she feels the hum and blur of the vast metropolis spreading out around her in the vibrant evening twilight.
She opens her eyes again and considers her options dispassionately. A thought occurs to her and she texts Gary: Did the StingRay grab the guards’ IMSIs before they entered the flat?
All cell phone transmissions within Schiller’s flat get diverted through his tame picocell and the VPN it’s feeding back to his base in Colorado. But the guards, and the call girl they kidnapped, came in through the public spaces, the elevator and the corridor outside.
Stand by, Gary replies. A couple of minutes later: I have three new candidate IMSIs in past 25 minutes.
Persephone is too professional to feel a flash of triumph at this point—wait until it’s in the bag is her motto—but she nods unconsciously. Can you identify the devices from their carrier settings? she asks. The carrier settings are a small chunk of data that cellphone companies send to phones to tell them the best frequencies to use for that network’s base stations, and they vary from phone to phone.
Phone 1 is an iPhone 5s. Phone 2 is a Galaxy S3 Mini. Phone 3 is a Galaxy S3 Mini. Why?
Persephone smiles humorlessly in the twilight. She’s half-surprised that Schiller’s men haven’t been issued with BlackBerries, but perhaps there’s some sort of company-side secure messaging app … the odd phone out is the current Apple flagship phone, a luxury item that low-rent security guards aren’t likely to carry. Please copy and send the next message to both Galaxy S3 Minis via SMS, she instructs Gary: Schiller returning to apartment early, your services no longer needed, you can leave now.
She settles back to see if they’ll rise to the bait.
*
Once upon a time—a very long time ago—there was a wine cellar carved out of the chalky rock below the foundations of Nether Stowe House.
Over the years, as wings were added to the house, collapsed through neglect or fire, and were refurbished and replaced, the wine cellar was also extended and refurbished and replaced. During the middle years of the twentieth century it was converted into a bomb shelter, and then a Home Guard bunker; then the bunker was forgotten about. In the 1970s it was rediscovered and part of it was fitted out as an on-site spa and sauna; but it fell out of use in the 1980s. Then in the late 1990s, during the most recent renovation of the house and grounds, an impish echo of a folk memory of the Hellfire Club and other eighteenth-century distractions of the rich and powerful caught the fancy of the architects. And so to the most recent renovation and reincarnation of the cellars under Nether Stowe House—this time as an underground venue for very exclusive parties.