There’s a notification. A call. I blink, bleary-eyed. Six forty-two last night, from oh fuck it’s Lockhart. There is voicemail. I listen to it. “See me first thing tomorrow morning. Bring your bag. Be prepared to travel.” Click. He doesn’t sound happy: probably expected the good little minion to be in the office until whenever he felt like going home. I yawn, then get the coffee started.
Half an hour later Mo and I are sitting opposite each other across the table. Toast, marmalade, a cafetière full of French roast. Mo is showing signs of sleeplessness, yawning. “I had a bad dream,” she remarks over the coffee.
“Bad enough to remember?”
“Very.” She shivers. “I was alone in the house. Upstairs, in the attic.” The roof space is big enough that we’ve been planning to add a dormer window and turn it into a spare room one of these years. “There was—this is going to sound cheesy, but it was just a dream—a window. Under the window, there was a cradle, and a woman in a chair sitting next to it with her back to me. I couldn’t see very clearly, and her face was in shadow, or she was wearing a veil, or there was something between us. She had a bow, and she was playing—lullabies. Except I couldn’t hear them. To the crib. Although I couldn’t see anything in it.”
“Um.” There’s no way to say this tactfully, so I don’t. “Are you sure it was empty? Because if so, that’s classic projection—”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I know what you’re thinking.” She looks troubled. “The thing is, in my dream I knew the melody. It was familiar from somewhere. Only I don’t. It’s not a tune I’ve ever heard. And I’m not sure the crib was empty. But it was definitely my instrument.”
And now it’s my turn to look troubled, because nobody in their right mind would play lullabies to a baby on Mo’s violin. It’s an Erich Zahn original, with a body as white as the bone it’s carved from, refitted with electric pick-ups and retuned to make ears and eyeballs bleed. It has other properties, too.
“Have a bagel,” I suggest, buying myself some time to chew on the problem. “It sounds like projection, but if you think it’s something else…well.” A thought strikes me. “The violin?”
“Huh.” Mo glances at the corner of the room. She brought the violin downstairs. It’s still in its case. Come to think of it, the only time she leaves it in another room is when she’s having a bath or a shower. “Think it’s jealous?”
She shivers. “Don’t say that.”
“My new boss phoned,” I say to change the subject. “Told me to bring my go-bag. I might be late for dinner.”
“Oh.” She stands up and walks around the table. “So soon?”
“Can’t be sure. Hope not.” I stand up and we embrace, awkwardly because of the coffee mug glued to the palm of my right hand (it’s a shape-shifting leech that feeds on fatigue poisons in my blood; it’ll fall off when I’m fully awake).
“Take care. Remember to write. Or call, if you can keep track of the time zones.”
“I shall.” I remember something. “Pinky had a little toy waiting for me. Not the kind of toy that’s supposed to go walkabout, I think. Your doing?”
“What toy—oh, that. I don’t think so. But last week Angleton made a point of asking me the kind of hypothetical question that’s not so hypotheticaclass="underline" I reminded him about that time in Amsterdam.” The hole in a hotel corridor’s wall, blowing air into vacuum in a dead-cold world beneath the blue-shifted pinprick stars of a dying cosmos. Pinky’s little toy is the direct lineal descendant of the machine they issued me for self-defense back then. “Promise me you’re going to make sure you don’t get into a situation where you need it. Please, Bob?”
I shudder. “I promise. You know what I think of violence.”
“And you’ll draw a new ward. And a HOG. Two HOGs. And you’ll brush your teeth every night. Okay?”
I kiss her. “Sure.”
And, oddly, when I go in to work later that morning my first stop is the armory, just to draw a new and unused protective ward and a pair of mummified pigeons’ feet in leather bags. I draw the line at toothpaste, though.
“AH, MR. HOWARD. COME IN. YOU’RE LATE.” LOCKHART IS CHARACTERISTICALLY curt, but despite the routine chewing-out—I am getting a feeling that this is his usual way of relating to his staff, in which case it’s bloody juvenile and I wish he’d get over it—he seems somewhat pleased with himself.
I shut the door. “Has something come up?”
“You could say that.” The smugness is threatening to burst out. “Yesterday BASHFUL INCENDIARY’s invitation to attend a session of the Omega Course came through. It’s a weekend residential session held at the Golden Promise Ministries headquarters, just north of Colorado Springs, and it starts this Friday. We’ve been trying to get someone inside there for weeks. She’s already on her way there by way of New York, along with Mr. McTavish. So you’d better get moving, eh?”
“Wait a minute. The tattoos—”
“You’ll just have to play catch-up with her in Colorado, Mr. Howard.”
“Okay. What then? What’s the plan? What’s she doing, do we know?”
“I couldn’t possibly say.” Lockhart’s eyes narrow. “BASHFUL INCENDIARY is not one of your, or my, or our department’s employees, so in principle she could be doing anything. As it is, she’s clearly engaged in surveillance activities directed against a protégé of the PM. We are therefore sending you to Denver to keep an eye on her and find out what’s going on. We devoutly hope that she will find it amusing to confide in you from time to time, Mr. Howard. That is all you or I know, to be sure. Do I make myself understood?”
“I think so.” I pause. “Isn’t this a little bit open-ended…?”
“Clever boy. Yes, it is.” He nods sharply. Then he picks up a black nylon travel document wallet from his desk and hands it over, along with a form. “Sign this.”
“Sign what—” It’s a receipt. “Just a sec, you know I need to check the contents.”
“Take your time.”
I open the wallet. It contains a passport and a bunch of boarding passes. Return from London to Denver, business class, fully flexible—my eyebrows are clawing at the ceiling even before I see the next item.
“You’ll need to sign that, too,” Lockhart adds.
“But, bu-but—” I don’t usually stutter, honest, but it’s the first time I’ve seen one of these things in the wild: Aren’t they supposed to come on a velvet cushion escorted by a couple of snooty liveried footmen and an armed guard? “This is a gold Visa card. A Coutts gold Visa card.”
“For expenses.” Lockhart sounds perfectly matter-of-fact.
“But, but…” Coutts is a small, obscure, remarkably stuffy financial institution in London. It used to be private but these days it’s the posh subsidiary of one of the mega-banks. Owner of banking license 002—001 belongs to the Bank of England—they won’t even give you a cheque account unless you maintain a minimum balance of a quarter of a million. The Queen banks with Coutts. (Although apparently they had second thoughts about her son: maybe he lowers the tone, or something.) They’ve become a little more accessible since the RBS takeover—I gather they’ll give accounts to rock stars and presidents these days—but even so. “What will the Auditors say?” I finish weakly.