“My old life, it wasn’t much of a life, to be honest,” he said. “The lifestyle of the organised criminal is over-rated. Always wondering when someone would ambush you and cut your throat and pull your tongue out through the slit. I have another life now.”
“I can’t just let it go like that,” she told him. “I have to know, if I can.”
“Do you think there’s an answer in Hyde Park?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Pargeter thinks so. He wants me to spy for him.”
Willem said, “Pargeter this, Pargeter that,” and made a rude noise. “Suppose there is no answer? Suppose this is just something the universe does, for no conscious reason? Suppose it just… whips away the tablecloth from underneath us every few million years? Suppose it’s just part of the way things are?”
“That’s a scary thought,” Rae said.
“Scarier than Pargeter’s hive mind?”
“Yes,” she said. “Much scarier.”
They cut south again, around Soho Square and back down the Charing Cross Road towards Seven Dials.
As they approached the hotel, Willem stopped and turned to face her. “You came here to cure a little girl, Rae,” he said. “Or to try, anyway. Forget the big questions, for a while at least. Try to concentrate on the things you can understand.”
“But I don’t understand,” and she felt small and helpless and lost. “I don’t understand any of it.”
He nodded. “Neither do I. But Elżbieta needs you; you’re no good to her if your mind’s full of Pargeter’s cosmic madness. Okay?”
Rae rubbed her eyes and nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re tired. Go to bed.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Willem.”
“It’s what I’m here for,” he said. “And I think you can get rid of that gun now.”
Breakfast the next morning was bacon and egg and sausage and fried potatoes and hash browns and baked beans and croissants and fried mushrooms and devilled kidneys and kedgeree and cereal and muesli and coffee and tea and a rainbow of fruit juices, and everyone was very happy. Rae surprised herself by being ravenously hungry, and piled up her plate. She didn’t even mind when people kept drifting across to her table and interrupting her breakfast to ask advice or settle little disputes. My people, she thought. They had come with her for no other reason than that she was coming here, and she felt rather proud of them, and rather ashamed of being so grumpy the previous evening. She wondered what they would all do when this was over. She wondered where Eddy Colorado was.
She was just finishing her second cup of coffee when Mikhail came into the dining room. “It’s here,” he said, and everyone rushed to the windows to look out into the street, where the angel was standing, rather uncomfortably, on its great clawed feet.
Rae put down her cup and dabbed her lips with the linen napkin. “Marta, Beata,” she called. “Bring Elżbieta down and put her in the ambulance, please.” And while the nuns went upstairs to their suite, she went outside.
The angel wasn’t alone. A small group of people had gathered at a respectful distance. Most of them were from the convoy, but she spotted Pargeter and Gottlieb and a handful of soldiers among them. She took a deep breath and walked out into the street.
She stopped a few feet from the angel and said, “Hello.”
“Rae,” said the angel. It was looking shabby; the nano that made up its body was obviously starting to fail. Its wings were threadbare, there were tatty holes in its jeans, big clumps of its hair had fallen out, and patches of dead white had appeared on its skin. It was on its last legs, its mission almost complete. “You got here, then.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Rae saw Beata and Marta carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle out of the hotel. She said to the angel, “Well, I’m rea —” and the window of the hotel dining room shattered and fell into the street. There was a moment of utter silence, and Rae found herself looking in wonderment at the little hole in the middle of the angel’s forehead. The angel itself was trying hard to focus on it, which made it comically cross-eyed. It looked at her for a moment, seemed to sigh, and then exploded into a huge cloud of smoke. And then everyone started screaming.
Rae looked over her shoulder and saw someone moving in a fourth-floor window of one of the buildings just down the street, and she stepped into the room behind the window and found herself in a little office. Eddy Colorado was making for the door, a long-barrelled rifle with a silencer and a sophisticated-looking sniperscope cradled in his arms.
He skidded to a stop when Rae appeared in front of him. “It lied to me, Mrs Rae!” he protested. “Harry gave me the gun!”
“Oh, fuck off,” said Rae, and suddenly Eddy Colorado was a rapidly-expanding cloud of smoke, just like the angel. The rifle thudded to the floor.
Dust to dust, Rae thought, and stepped back into the street, where everyone was screaming and shouting and running about. She took Elżbieta from Beata and Marta’s unresisting hands. Wrapped in her blanket, the girl seemed to weigh nothing at all. Rae pivoted on the balls of her feet and advanced on Pargeter, who was backing away holding his hands up in a placatory gesture. Gottlieb, to his credit, hadn’t moved an inch.
“I wanted to provoke a response!” Pargeter shouted. “That’s all!”
“If you try to follow me, or if any of my friends are harmed in any way, I’ll give you a response, Mr Pargeter!” Rae yelled.
She turned away from the little spy and found Willem standing in front of her. “Didn’t know you could do that,” he said calmly.
“Me neither,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek. “Look after things here. We’ll be back.” And she took a deep breath, gathered herself, and stepped into Hyde Park.
There was a serpent in The Serpentine. It was wearing a Tam O’Shanter and its breathing sounded like bagpipes. Rae stood watching it, Elżbieta in her arms, and after a moment or two it slipped away beneath the surface.
The serpent wasn’t alone. Hyde Park had been transformed into an opium eater’s idea of Fairyland. There were lions and tigers bounding across the grass, and monkeys in the trees, and little things with arms and legs and wings flying through the air, and extravagantly-armoured knights riding along the horse-paths on warhorses the size of armoured cars. There were unicorns and manticores and gryphons and princesses and warty dwarves and minotaurs and hobbits and at least one Darth Vader. Gauzy three-dimensional geometric figures danced in the hot, humid, heavy air, forming and reforming and suddenly darting away across the park. It smelled like the inside of a circus tent. It was a madhouse.
She found a tree and laid Elżbieta down gently beneath it. Then she sat beside the blanket-wrapped bundle.
“I have the kill-codes for everything here,” she told the tropical air quite calmly. “I’m going to count to ten and then I’m going to use them. Your turn. One. Two. Three.”
“My,” said a voice behind her. “Aren’t we the feisty one all of a sudden.”
Rae looked over her shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been afraid it would be Peter; she couldn’t have stood that, she’d have just broken. But it wasn’t Peter. It was a little girl, maybe seven or eight, plump in the face and with her hair in ringlets. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress with petticoats and an apron. Tenniel’s Alice.
“Pargeter killed the angel,” Rae said.