“Your theorists are wrong, Mr Pargeter,” Rae said.
“Possibly. Yes, quite possibly.” He stopped at the doorway to the stairs and turned to look at her. “I think your angel may have been sent by…” he waved a languid hand at the sky, at the great artefact that had replaced Mars. “If it told you to come to Hyde Park, there must be something important here. And I need to know what it is.”
She barked out an astonished laugh. “You want me to spy for you?”
Pargeter looked abashed. “One hates to revert to type,” he said. “But, you know, it was one’s job. For the past fifteen years we’ve been scrabbling about trying to understand what has happened to the world, and why, Ms Peterson. I think you’re about to be given a chance to find out. We might not get another one.”
Unable to sleep, she went downstairs and sat in the bar. No one else was about, but through the window she could see two of Gottlieb’s men on guard outside the front door. He’d told her that they were there to protect the hotel and its guests from other groups of survivors, who sometimes carried out raids into Household Cavalry territory, but right now they looked to her like armed guards.
She got up and went into Reception, where another soldier was standing behind the desk. She walked right past him without saying a word, and opened the door.
The two guards turned when they heard the noise behind them. One was a corporal named McKie; the other, she didn’t know. “I’m going for a walk,” she said to McKie.
“With respect, miss, I wouldn’t advise it,” the corporal said smoothly and professionally. Everyone here was calm and matter-of-fact and professional, she thought.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m perfectly safe.”
McKie considered for a second or so. “If you’ll just wait a moment, Miss, I’ll call it in and then I’ll be delighted to accompany you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Willem said, seeming to materialise soundlessly at her shoulder. “I’ll be taking the air with Ms Peterson.”
McKie said, “With respect, sir —”
“Enough respect,” Willem said. “I was fighting the Chechen Mafia when you were still being toilet-trained. Have you ever fought the Chechen Mafia?”
“No, sir,” McKie said, in a baffled tone of voice.
“If you had, you’d know there is nothing here I am afraid of,” Willem went on. “And I am armed.” He held up his rifle.
“Me too,” said Rae. She held her hands out and all of a sudden she was holding a futuristic-looking rifle, matt-black, with many strange buttons and modules and a parabolic reflector at the end of its barrel. “Phased plasma rifle,” she said. “Fifty kilowatt range.”
The other soldier took a step back, but McKie stood his ground. “I’ll still have to call it in,” he said finally.
“Fine,” she said. “Call it in. We’re not going far.”
She and Willem left the two soldiers standing there outside the hotel. They walked up towards Shaftesbury Avenue, then turned up the Charing Cross Road, their footsteps echoing in the great silence of London. Not all of the streetlights were working, Rae noticed. Power was certainly coming from somewhere, but the bulbs still burned out. She assumed Gottlieb’s men replaced them, but she also assumed he couldn’t spare the manpower to replace them all.
“Does that thing work?” Willem asked after a while, nodding at the gun she was carrying.
She lifted it up. “This? Of course it works.” She raised it to her shoulder, sighted up the road at the front of a building, and squeezed the trigger. The gun made a modulated beeping sound, LEDs flashed on its sides, and a stream of soap bubbles emerged from a hole in the middle of the parabolic antenna. She looked bashfully at Willem, and they both laughed, but she wondered. She had wanted a toy gun, and a toy gun had been created. What would have happened if she had really wanted a futuristic particle beam weapon? Would she have got one of those?
“Can I ask you a question?” she said a few minutes later, as they wandered through the little streets and squares of Soho.
“Of course.”
“What you told Corporal McKie about the Chechen Mafia. Was that true?”
He nodded. He had never spoken in any great detail about his former life. He’d never hidden the fact that he had been a gangster, a killer, but he had never volunteered any stories about it, and she had respected that, all these years.
“Were they bad? The Chechens?”
He shrugged. “Any man who kills you is bad,” he mused. “The Chechens were ruthless and tough, but they were honourable men, by their own lights. Not everyone was so honourable.”
“I still find it hard to imagine you, living that life.”
“I’m not.” He smiled briefly at her. “That life’s over.”
“Why did you do it, though?”
He thought about that for a while. “I was good at it,” he said finally.
They walked on for a while in silence, until they reached a set of streets blocked by parked cars and lorries — the southern edge of the Household Cavalry’s little nation. They turned north and found themselves at Oxford Circus.
“Pargeter’s experts tell him it hasn’t been fifteen years since La Silence,” she said. “They say it’s been almost two thousand years.”
“And why do they say that?” he asked.
“They have computer programs that can show you the positions of the stars from any time since the Crucifixion to, oh, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of years into the future. They just ran it and compared the results with the positions of the stars.”
Willem thought about it. “I don’t feel two thousand years old,” he said.
“Me neither. I remember those computer programs, though. They’re supposed to be pretty accurate.” She turned and started to walk back eastward along Oxford Street. “Do you remember I told you about Mars?”
“I remember you told me it isn’t there any more. I remember you said there was something in its place. You didn’t know what it was.”
“Pargeter thinks that’s where everyone is,” she said. “He thinks the human race became some kind of group mind, dismantled Mars, and built this thing to live in. He thinks that’s where the electricity’s coming from.”
“You keep saying thinks,” Willem pointed out. “I presume he doesn’t have a pretty accurate computer program to tell him these things.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, he doesn’t. It’s all conjecture.”
“Does it matter?”
Rae looked at him, walking softly and alert beside her. “Of course it does. Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“I used to. Now? No, I don’t think so. Would knowing change anything? Would it bring everyone back? Would I even want everyone back?”
She was surprised. She’d never heard him talk like this. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”