“Greetings, Master,” says Jonquil, an apprehensive quaver in her voice for the first time: “We have brought the desired one?”
I can feel a fourth presence, chilly and abstracted. I have a curious sense that I am being inspected-
“Good. The All-Highest will see you now.” The voice is as cold as an unmarked grave.
I hear a door open, and they wheel me forward in silence. Abruptly, someone leans close to me and pulls the canvas bag up and away from my head. It’s dark down here, the deep twilight of a cellar illuminated only by LED torches, but it’s not so dark that I can’t see the All-Highest.
And that’s when I realize I’m in much worse trouble than I ever imagined.
MO LISTENS TO HER PHONE IN DISBELIEF. “THEY WHAT? ” SHE demands.
“They left the paper clip attached to a book in Putney Library,” says Angleton, with icy dignity. “A copy of Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski.”
“Then you’ve lost him.”
“Unless you have any better ideas.”
“Let me get back to you on that.” She snaps her phone closed and glances across the table. An idea is taking hold.
“Who was that?” asks Panin. “If you do not mind…”
“It was Angleton. The memorandum is still missing. The enemy identified his tracer and neutralized it.”
“You have my sympathies.”
“Hmm. Do you have a car? Because if so, I’d appreciate a lift home. If you don’t mind.”
Ten minutes later, the black BMW with diplomatic plates is slowly winding its way between traffic-calming measures. Mo leans back, holding her violin case, and closes her eyes. It’s a big car, but it feels small, with the driver and a bodyguard up front, and Panin sitting beside her in the back.
“Do you have anything in mind?” Panin asks quietly.
“Yes.” She doesn’t open her eyes. “Angleton drew a blank, trying to trace the missing document. But that’s not the only asset the cultists have got their hands on.”
“Your husband.” Panin’s nostrils flare. “Do you have a tracer on him, by any chance?”
“No.” She doesn’t bother to explain that Laundry operatives don’t routinely carry bugs because what one party can track, others may pick up. “However, he has a mobile phone.”
“They’ll have switched it off, or discarded it.”
“The former, I hope. If so, I can trace that.” The shiny, beetle-black car double-parks outside a nondescript row of terrace houses. “Please wait. I’ll only be a minute,” she adds as she climbs out.
Ninety seconds later she’s back, her go-bag weighing slightly more heavily on her shoulder. “Laptop,” she explains.
“Your superiors let you take classified documents home?” Panin raises an eyebrow.
“No. It’s his personal one. He paired it with his phone. Which is also a personal device.” She belts herself in, then opens the laptop screen. “All right, let’s see.” She slides a thumb drive into the machine, rubs her thumb over a window in it: “Now this is a secured memory stick, loaded with execute-in-place utilities. Nothing exotic, mind you, strictly functional stuff. Ah, yes. At the end of the road, turn left…”
The driver doesn’t speak, but he has no trouble understanding her directions in English. The car heads south, slowly winding its way through the evening streets. Mo busies herself with the laptop, a route finder program, and a small charm on the end of a necklace, which she dangles above the screen: a ward, taken from around her neck. “It’s along here, somewhere,” she says as the car cruises yet another twisting residential street, where large houses are set back behind tall hedges. “Whoa, we’ve gone past it. Okay, pull in here.” She pulls out her phone and speed-dials a number.
“Yes?” Angleton is alert.
“I’m in Hazlehurst Road, near Lambeth cemetery, with Nikolai and his driver. Tracking Bob’s personal phone. How soon can you meet me here?”
“Hold on.” Pause. “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Rolling now. Can you wait?”
Mo glances sidelong at Panin, who shakes his head slowly. “I don’t think so,” she says. “Nikolai has urgent business elsewhere.” She pulls the door latch, and it swings open with the sluggish momentum of concealed armor plate. She extends one foot to touch the pavement: “I’ll be discreet.”
“Good-bye, Dr. O’Brien. And good luck.”
Most of the houses on this road are detached, sitting in pricey splendor on plots of their own, a few down-market Siamese-twin semis lowering the millionaire row tone. It’s London, but upmarket enough that the houses have private drives and garages. Mo walks slowly back along the pavement until she comes level with the hedge outside a semi with a built-in garage, probably dating to the mid-1930s. The ward throbs in her hand as she reluctantly fastens the fine silver chain around her neck and tucks it in. This is the place. She’s sure of it.
She pulls out her phone, dials again, says, “Number thirty-four,” then puts it away. Then she opens her go-bag and pulls out a pair of goggles. She pulls them on and flicks a switch. Then she stalks around the side of the house.
There is a bad smell from the drains out back, and the lawn is un-mown. The hedge has not been trimmed: it looms over the over-long grass like the dark and wild beard of the god of neglect. The windows of the house are dark, and not merely because no lights shine within. It’s strangely difficult to see anything inside. Mo stares at the flagstoned patio beneath the French doors through her goggles. They are goggles of good and evil, part of the regular working equipment of the combat epistemologist, and their merciless contrast reveals the stains of an uneasy conscience mixed with the cement that binds the stones: it’s an upmarket Cromwell Street scene, she realizes, her stomach churning. The police forensic teams will be busy here later in the week, as the tabloid reporters buzz round their heads like bluebottles attracted to the rotting cadavers beneath their feet.
Mo moves farther around the house. A sense of foreboding gathers like static beneath the anvil cloud of a thunderstorm. Her heart is beating overly fast and her palms are clammy. She is certain that Bob’s phone is here, and where goes the phone goes the Bob. But this is not a good place. Suddenly she is acutely aware that she is on her own, the nearest backup ten minutes away.
Well, then.
There is a quiet click as she unfastens the latches of her instrument case. Moments later the bow is in her hand, the chinrest clamped between her jaw and shoulder. The case dangles before her chest, two compact speakers exposed. There’s a sticker on the back of the instrument. It reads: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS.
Mo walks towards the glass doors, on the indistinct shadows behind them, and touches her bow to the strings of the pallid instrument. There is a sound like a ghost’s dying wail as the strings begin to vibrate, blurring and glowing as they slice the air to shreds. “Open,” she says quietly, and as she sounds a chord the glass panes shatter simultaneously and the door frame warps towards her. She advances into the suburban dining room, playing raw and dissonant notes of silence to confront the horrors within.
THE BMW IS HALF A MILE AWAY WHEN PANIN LEANS FORWARD and taps his driver on the shoulder.
“Sir?” The driver glances at Panin’s reflection in his mirror.
A blank business card appears between Panin’s fingertips, twin to one Panin passed to an unwitting contact a couple of days ago. “Track this,” he says.
“Yes, sir.” The driver reaches back and takes the card, then places it on the dashboard in front of him. It glows faintly in the darkened interior of the car.
After a moment, they pull over, then the driver performs a U-turn and accelerates. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir…”
“Yes?” Panin looks up from the map book on his lap.
“Do you want me to call for backup?”
“When we know where we’re going, Dmitry. Patience.”
“Sir. Shouldn’t you have told…?”
“The wolf may not bite the hound, but that doesn’t make them friends. I intend to get there first, Dmitry. Wherever ‘there’ is.”