“That’s for your tourist snaps?” she asks.
I nod. “It’s a basilisk gun.” Her violent flinch would be gratifying if she didn’t nearly lose control of the car. “Don’t worry, I turned it off. Until we need it…” I thread my wrist through the lanyard. Dammit, why do they make these things right-handed? My upper arm still aches; it’s going to be painful if I have to use it in anger.
“Oka-ay…” She unkinks slightly. “We are about five minutes from the buildings. There is a high street with three smaller roads crossing it. I think we are looking for the church. You may want to keep that for later.”
She takes one hand off the wheel for long enough to point to the miniature Hand of Glory. I sniff, and immediately wish I hadn’t. “Agreed.” I blow on it hard, turning my face away before I inhale. It stops burning, but a hideous smoke trail that stinks of burning fingernails rises from the claws. “Are we—”
We turn a bend, leave the trees behind us, and we’re there.
I’m not sure quite what I was expecting. The Branch Davidian compound at Waco, perhaps? But GPM isn’t poor, isn’t marginal or ascetic, and Ray Schiller is no David Koresh. The layout is more like the residential quarters on a military base: a long, straight boulevard with low buildings set to either side, manicured hedges fronting rows of curtained windows, and a church with a steeple at the far end of the road. It’s half-deserted right now, going by the empty car parks covered in snow outside closed doors. Probably most of the folks who work here commute in from Colorado Springs.
I’m glad there’s virtually nobody about. The fewer people on hand, the less chance I’ll fuck up and kill someone by mistake. Or worse, not kill someone, by mistake.
I blink, trying to cop a brief sense of where everything is in here. There’s a pale green haze in my lap—the complaints department is leaking like crazy on the other side—and what looks like heaps and drifts of green slime all around us: the uncanny residue of its occult origins adhering to the snowfall. The buildings are limned in violet, until I look towards the church at the end which is shining with a harsh emerald light—and the building next to it is on fire, a harsh cuprous glare of raw power that shines through doors and windows, leaching through the concrete. “The building next to the church—”
“I’m on it. That’s Schiller’s residence, I think.”
She drives forward two blocks and parks carelessly, opens the driver’s door, and bails out in front of the church. A gust of freezing air slams into me; I swear, turn my camera on, pick up the pizza box and my phone, and follow her into an ankle-deep chilly white blanket.
Persephone high-steps towards the front door of the big house, holding some sort of gadget in her left hand (a ward, perhaps, or a smartphone with some nonstandard firmware). Her right hand is buried in her coat pocket. I rush after her. My mood is dismaclass="underline" I’ve been trying to keep a lid on it and mostly succeeding, but since we set off on this journey I’ve had a continual sense of foreboding, and it’s getting worse by the second. We should be getting out of this rat trap, not burrowing deeper into the darkness. This is a job for the Black Chamber, along with the Colorado National Guard and maybe the USAF, not a couple of deranged external assets (whatever they are) and a junior manager who’s so far out of his depth—
Persephone is at the front steps when the door opens and a figure bundled up in cold-weather gear leans out. “Can I help—” It begins to say in a woman’s voice, as I raise my camera and try to focus past Persephone, who is standing too damn close for the smart autofocus to get a clean lock on. I can feel it in the back of my head, feel the sleepy hunger in its mind as it recognizes the thing in the pizza box I’m holding in my left hand and begins to turn towards me, reaching for its gun—
Persephone’s right hand lashes out and the figure drops. She’s holding some kind of compact dumbbell; she turns and beckons me forward urgently with it. “Get her inside before she freezes.”
“It’s one of—”
“I know. Keep a tight hold on that pizza box.”
The complaints department is twitching and writhing in the cardboard, kicking up a fuss: it knows where it is. I join Persephone in the octagonal lobby of an expensively furnished house. Reception rooms open off to either side, and there’s an alarm panel behind the door. The one she dropped used to be a fifty-something woman. Now it’s a husk with a silvery carapaced horror for a tongue. I can see it, shining green inside the victim’s mouth and throat. I can hear its panicky mindless scrabbling for escape now that its carrier is unconscious. I bend over the body and before Persephone can stop me I do whatever it is I did to the missionaries in the hotel (it feels like biting) and the host dies. Trying not to think too hard about what I’m doing I push my fingers between the unconscious woman’s lips and tug, tug again until the corpse of the parasite tugs free. (The complaints department kicks up a racket, scritching at the inside of the pizza box lid as if it thinks I’m about to eat it, too. Silly mind parasite!) I wipe my hand vigorously on my coat and catch Persephone staring at me. “What’s the problem?”
“We have a”—she coughs quietly—“job to do.”
“Oh, right.” I look around. “Where—” The answer is obvious. Going by the nacreous glow from below, whatever is waiting for us is downstairs in the basement. Of course, they sent the wrong man; this is the sort of job Agent CANDID handles best, preferably in conjunction with a house clearance team from the Artists’ Rifles. (But would I really want to put her in my shoes right now if I could make a wish and swap places with her? Probably not…) There’s a staircase leading upstairs, and a wooden door in the side of the panel behind it which probably leads down to the cellar. I’m about to go that way when Persephone gets in front of me and starts mumbling and waving her hands around animatedly, as if holding a conversation with a deaf Italian-speaking alien.
There’s a pop and a flash from the door handle. “Clear,” she says quietly, glancing over her shoulder at me. I peer at the door. Yes, there was some kind of ward there; Persephone shorted it out with her semaphore ritual.
I raise my pizza box. “Okay, you,” I say. “Lead me to your taker.”
The complaints department scritches and shuffles round, nudging urgently towards the cellar door. Persephone holds it open and I duck through. There’s a light switch just inside the door and I thoughtlessly flick it, do a double take, and shudder. I lucked out this time—no booby traps—but I am so unprepared for a black bag job that it’s not funny.
A WORD ON THE SUBJECT OF BLACK BAG JOBS:
Don’t.
I’m not a cop and it’s not my job to enforce the law, any more than it is the job of any other citizen to do so. (Yes, I know about Peel’s Principles: nevertheless, there’s a good reason we mostly leave the job to professionals.) I am, however, a civil servant, which means I work for the government, who make the laws. Consequently, lawbreaking is something I’m supposed to avoid unless there’s an overriding justification in the national interest, and it’s not up to me to define what that means.
The situation is murkier when I’m working overseas in other jurisdictions, but I’m normally supposed to obey both sets of laws, HMG’s and the host nation’s. Unless compelled by overriding justification in the national etcetera, of course, or subjected to cruel and unusual circumstances where they contradict each other.
Anyway. Black bag jobs—burglary, bugging, and breaking in—are by definition forbidden, most of the time. Especially since the Spycatcher business. They may be authorized in the interests of national security, but that happens at a level well above my pay grade, all the way upstairs. When I get sent to run a little errand, it has generally been pre-cleared by a committee, or it’s covered by standing orders relating to what we euphemistically call “special circumstances.” In which case there will be an enquiry after the event and the Auditors will be there to ask pointed questions and wield the clue-bat if I’ve exceeded my authority.