“Where better?” Lockhart says ironically as he leads me inside. It’s lunchtime and deafeningly loud inside the landmark restaurant. I’m expecting us to end up queuing, but no: as if by magic Lockhart flags down a waiter, mutters something, and we’re whisked through a Staff Only door, into a cramped lift that squeals and grinds its way up to the third floor, then along a narrow passageway to a private dining room. He pauses before we enter. “The budget will only stretch so far.” But my reading of his mustache is getting better, and right now it spells: caterpillar is hungry for Cantonese.
The room is cramped, illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubes and a tiny window outside which throbs a bank of kitchen extractor fans. But the table is already laid out with chairs for four and a pot of jasmine tea on the lazy Susan. “Remember what I said,” Lockhart warns me, “keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Within reason. Understood?”
I nod, and mime a zipper. I’d normally put up more of a fight, but after reading the BASHFUL INCENDIARY file I find myself curiously uninterested in making a target of myself: she might turn me into a toad or something.
A minute later—I’ve just filled both our cups with steaming hot tea—the door opens again. Lockhart stands, and I follow suit. “Good afternoon, Ms. Hazard.” The caterpillar is delighted. “Ah, and the estimable Mr. McTavish! How are you today?”
Handshakes and smiles all round. I take stock, then succumb to a brisk flashback: a disturbing sense that I’ve met these people before.
McTavish is easy to pigeonhole, hence doubly dangerous: in jeans and a hooded top he looks like a brickie, except I know what the sidelong flat stare and the ridges on the sides of his hands mean. He reminds me of Scary Spice, one of Alan Barnes’s little helpers—specialty: ferreting down rabbitholes full of blood-drenched cultists and undead horrors. The resemblance isn’t perfect, but I’ve met NCOs in special forces before and he’s got that smell. Although there is a slight something else about him as welclass="underline" he punches above the weight.
She, however—
“Charmed to meet you,” she says, and smiles, impish and vampish simultaneously. “I have heard so much about you, Mr. Howard! May I call you Bob?”
“I’m Bob to my friends,” I drone on autopilot as my brain freezes in the headlights. Stunning beauty in a minidress over black leggings, studiously casual yet somehow managing to send a bolt of electricity straight down my spine and drop my IQ by about fifty points on the spot…Yes, I’ve seen her like before. “That’s a nice glamour. Class two?”
Her smile freezes for an instant. “Class three, actually.” Then she lets it slip slightly and the starry soft-focus dissolves, and I’m merely shaking hands with a strikingly pretty dark-haired woman of indeterminate years—anything between twenty-five and forty—with Mediterranean looks and a dance instructor’s build, rather than a sorceress with a brain-burning beauty field set to Hollywood stun. “You have much experience of such things?”
“My wife doesn’t bother.” Is that a palpable hit? “But I’ve met them before, yes.”
Lockhart keeps a stony face throughout, but at this latter bit of banter he begins to show signs of irritation with me. “Bob, if you’d care to sit down, perhaps we could order some food?”
We sit down. I pointedly pay no attention to McTavish pointedly taking no slight at my pointed rejection of his mistress’s pointed—and unsubtle—attempt to beguile me. I’m somewhat disappointed. Do they think we’re amateurs or something?
“That was a very interesting service you sent us to last night,” Hazard tells Lockhart. She’s working on the English understatement thing, but her hands, expressive and mobile, give it away: she’s spinning exclamation marks in semaphore. “Absolutely fascinating.”
“Yes it was, wasn’t it?” Lockhart deadpans. He glances at McTavish. “You took a different angle, I assume?”
McTavish nods. “Penthouse and pavement.” His expression is oddly stony.
“Good—” Lockhart stops as the door opens. It’s one of the Wong Kei’s crack assault waiters, pad in hand. They’re famously rude; it’s all part of the service.
“You ready to order?” he barks.
“Certainly.” Lockhart is clearly a regular here. “I’ll start with the hot and sour soup…”
Two or three minutes later:
“Where was I?” Lockhart asks.
“You were grilling us about last night, as I recall,” says McTavish.
Hazard nods, eyes narrowing.
Lockhart glances at me briefly. It’s barely a flicker, but enough to warn me: The game’s afoot.
“Did you notice anything unusual about the, ah, performers?”
“What? Apart from the way they programmed the event to build the audience’s emotional investment in the key payload, then love-bombed them from fifty thousand feet with the warm floaty joy of Jesus?” Hazard props her chin on the back of her hand and pouts, sulky rather than sultry. “You should send Bob. He doesn’t like glamours. Do you, Bob?”
“Hey, it’s not you—it’s just that the last time someone put one on me I ended up buying an iPhone!” My protest falls on deaf ears.
“It’s not the glamour that interests me,” Lockhart says deliberately, “but the person it’s attached to.”
“You’re asking about Raymond Schiller, of the Golden Promise Ministries,” McTavish says lazily. “More like the Golden Fleece Ministries if you ask me, Duchess.”
“Mm, that tends to go with the territory.” Hazard is noncommittal.
“You didn’t see the average take in the collecting buckets at the back. Lot of people going short on luxuries this month, if you ask me.”
“The O2 Arena doesn’t rent for peanuts.”
“Unless it’s a charity loss-leader and they make up their margin on the food and entertainment franchises.” McTavish is a lot sharper than he looks. “Or someone with a glamour as good as Ray Schiller gets to the management committee.”
“Does he, ah, preach the prosperity gospel?” asks Lockhart.
“After a fashion.” McTavish’s lips are lemon-bitingly narrowed. “There are doctrinal shout-outs, dog-whistles the unchurched aren’t expected to notice. The prosperity gospel is in there, of course—it’s a Midwestern mega-church, after all. That’s what their appeal is all about. But there’s other stuff, too. It put me in mind of the church of my fathers, and not in a good way.”
“You didn’t say that last night.” Hazard sits up. The door opens as a pair of waiters appear, bearing trays laden with soup and starters. She continues after they leave, addressing Lockhart: “It was a very non-specific love-bombing, but it was a very public evening. I thought it was a recruiting drive for foot soldiers rather than a second-level indoctrination aimed at officers. Very skillful, though.”
“I’d use a different word for it,” McTavish says darkly.
“Yes?” Lockhart focusses on him.
“You’ll have read my file.” McTavish winks and picks up a prawn toast. “Let’s not disrespect the food, eh?”
As I dive into my chicken and sweetcorn soup I’m trying to place Hazard’s accent. It’s not remotely American, but not British, either; there’s a hint of something central European, but it’s been thoroughly scrubbed—all but erased—by very expensive speech training.
“Ray is an interesting character,” Lockhart explains over the starters. “We don’t know much about him. US citizen, of course; he came out of Texas, but his background is rather vaguer than we’re happy about. There’s a worrying lack of detail, especially about what he did before he found Jesus in his mid-twenties and joined the Golden Promise Ministries, back when it was a converted shack in the Colorado mountains.”