Quantum of nightmares, p.22
Quantum of Nightmares, page 22
(In reality, the only supervillains who stood a chance of surviving long enough to earn the coveted title of Advanced Persistent Threat were already State-Level Actors—volcano base-building, missile-wielding, ransomware-writing jerks like the President of Transnistria or the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. The level below them consisted of arcane billionaires and cult leaders with thick blackmail portfolios: they were tolerated as long as they remembered to pay tribute to the PM and thereby ensured it was more cost-effective to ignore them than to take action. There was a level below that for trusted henchpeople who might be ransomed if captured. Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy were freelancers like Mary herself, as long as they were agile enough to dodge the descending flyswatter whenever it loomed overhead.)
“What I need is a dangerous freelancer to blame,” Mary decided, carefully not thinking about the fact that she herself was a dangerous freelancer. She rapidly skimmed the listing of those who weren’t yet gracing the top of Marble Arch. “The kind who might go after Captain Cretaceous and Queen Colorless’s children just for revenge. Or shits and giggles.” Which narrowed the field down a lot. “One who either got away repeatedly, or has powerful sponsors. Maybe the avatar of a powerful faith community.” Not a dark saint, but an actual god-emperor or witch-queen, reviving after centuries of hibernation atop a stash of mana the size of the Empire State Building. They’d be much-diminished, but still the kind of villain who could blow the top off a mountain or teleport.
“Dad could have done it, if he hadn’t succumbed.…” She sniffed, then blinked rapidly. If Dad’s MAD hadn’t come on so early, before his powers had fully matured, she wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Dad had burned nova-bright for a few months two years ago. These days he had to struggle to remember where he’d put his dentures. Her own power was useful for self-defense—she never had to worry about walking down a darkened alley at night—but she simply wasn’t in this weight class. “Maybe blame Moloch, or Baal? Or how about the Child-snatcher General?” Enough children had shivered in fear through Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to empower that particular archetype, after all.
“If I frame it as a game for Emily and Ethan, I can get Lyssa and Robert on board supervising them.” She tapped ash from her burned-down cigarette onto the kitchen table and then shoved the map back in her bag. “We’re going to play hide and seek,” she decided. (Keep the cover story as close to reality as possible.) “I’m running from a bad guy to keep them safe. One who steals children. So, tomorrow…”
Mary MacCandless pulled out a fresh notepad and Biro, and began to plan.
* * *
This was the first time Wendy had ever tried to arrest a murder suspect, and she was badly out of practice at takedowns—so she nearly died.
“Adrian Hewitt”—she began as the zentai-suited body in front of her whirled—“you are under arrest—”
She finished on a squeaky high note, jumped backwards, and blocked a viciously swung socket wrench with a baton which materialized in her right hand just in time to save her from a fractured skull. The clanging impact shuddered up her arm, and her grip was loose enough that her weapon went flying. But it had startled Hewitt, who spun and darted away through the plastic curtains blocking her view of the loading dock. The baton, no longer in contact with her skin, evaporated. Wendy gulped, heart pounding, then stumbled after the fleeing suspect. As she reached the curtain she tried to conjure up another baton, but something felt wrong: her sense of physicality, which she relied on to lend her illusions a semblance of solidity, was slightly off. The baton flickered into focus for a half second, then melted away again. It’s the suit, she realized. Wendy needed skin contact with her creations. If she lost it for more than a couple of seconds the objects faded, and evidently the HiveCo body stocking was thick enough to block it. She yanked at her right hand before she remembered that the glove was built into her sleeve which in turn was part of the suit: she’d need to cut a hole in the palm before she could rearm. And there was no time.
Swearing, she ducked low and darted through the curtain. Thankfully Adrian Hewitt wasn’t lurking in wait on the other side. She found herself in a chilly high-roofed shed, floored in concrete and crammed full of pipework and machinery. One end was blocked off by yellow wire-mesh fencing, which surrounded an overhead conveyor belt and a double-row of industrial robots with—Are those swords? Never mind, right now they were quiescent. Beyond the fenced-off robots she could see daylight, but no sign of a zentai-suited muppet.
Sidling around the wire cage, Wendy spotted another plastic curtain covering an archway leading into another loading area. She slipped through it quietly and looked around. This was a more conventional receiving bay, with concrete piers and a waste compactor and removal skip parked at one side. High carts filled with broken-down cardboard packaging waited for pickup on one pier. It was deserted and the steel shutters were lowered, indicating that no deliveries were expected. The swing doors at the end had a transparent window, but it was scratched up and fogged into opacity. Nerving herself, Wendy approached the doors and pushed through.
She found herself in a darkened stockroom walled with industrial shelving from floor to ceiling. It felt cramped and dingy compared to the shop floor, even though the aisles and stocktaking stations could take a forklift truck. The retail spaces lay beyond another set of doors. Wendy tiptoed along the back wall of the room, glancing down each aisle for signs of her fugitive. But Hewitt had shown her a clean pair of heels, and besides, this was his home turf.
Giving up the hot pursuit, Wendy went back to her self-directed orientation. She passed a row of heavy refrigerator doors—obviously the warehouse space for frozen goods—then spotted a couple of normal doors at the far end. One led to a toilet block that would have been condemned as unfit for habitation by HM Inspectorate of Prisons. The other opened into darkness and a fetid odor like backed-up sewers. “Gack.” She swallowed bile as she fumbled for the light switch. Flickering overhead tubes illuminated three tiers of bunks hammered together from unfinished shipping pallets. The bunks themselves were in shadow, but she saw a body in a white zentai suit lying in one of the bottom racks. “Oops, sorry,” she said, then hastily switched off the light, her gorge rising at the sick-sweet smell of decay. How anyone could sleep with such a stink was beyond her. The prone form didn’t move as she closed the door.
Back in the stockroom, Wendy leaned against the wall for a moment. She briefly closed her eyes. The adrenaline crash had caught up with her. Hot pursuit. She ran through her facts rapidly, trying to make sense of what had just happened. She’d gone out on the floor in muppet drag, assisted a repair muppet with the meat printer, acted on a hunch, and nearly gotten brained. But now she knew that Adrian Hewitt, prime suspect, was haunting the crime scene disguised as an anonymous workfare jobsworth. And he was wearing a headset and Company Face, so the computer would be tracking his whereabouts.
Behind her mask Wendy smiled grimly, then straightened up and retraced her path to the offices. Things were looking up. It was time to ask Amy some pointed questions.
* * *
Eve had made a few changes at head office since Rupert’s disappearance. While she hadn’t cared to take over the master suite in the Knightsbridge town house that served as the Bigge Organization’s London headquarters—not until she’d had the bedroom gutted and refurnished from the plaster and floorboards up—she’d moved her own possessions into the main guest suite, vacating the housekeeper’s attic room she’d previously lived in. She did this not because she needed the upgrade (Eve slept barely five hours a night) but to send a message to the staff, I’m in charge here. (Which was the external projection of her internal scream of defiance at Rupert’s ghost, I’m not under your thumb any more.) Either way, it meant the housekeeper’s dormer was available for Sybil Cunningham’s use. As it was on the third floor, with locked bulletproof windows and no exit that did not pass the ground-floor security checkpoint, it was suitably escape-proof without actually screaming you’re in the dungeon now.
True, there were cells in the basement—above the tunnel with the trenches filled with quick-setting cement—but it occurred to Eve that Sybil hadn’t actually done anything to deserve such treatment. And besides, Eve could foresee a use for Sybil in her near future, running Castle Skaro. Best to keep the housekeeper comfortable and give her breathing space while she recovered from her overbearing husband, then wait for her to come to Eve on her own terms.
While she’d been busy catching up with things—matters arising from the FlavrsMart buy-in process, putting the frighteners on a couple of Rupe’s minions who’d been acting up, farming out the occult mine-detector job to Imp and his crew—Sybil had been allowed to shop for necessities (with a discreet escort). So when Sybil finally asked to see Eve, two days after her return to London, she was barely recognizable as the haggard ghost who’d pleaded for rescue on a dark and stormy night.
“Ah, Mrs.—Sybil,” Eve corrected herself, “please come in.” She smiled her business smile and gestured at one of the chairs.
Sybil had ditched the old-school servant’s dress for a twinset and pearls (Jaeger, if Eve was any judge of brands: not couture but not cheap, either). She’d clearly taken pains over her hair and makeup. Other than being about thirty years behind the times she looked like a smart upper-class grandmother, one with grandchildren at Oxford and a country estate to drive her Subaru Outback around. She took a seat. “Mrs. de Montfort Bigge—” she began, haltingly.
“—Please call me Eve, I wouldn’t want to cause Rupert’s mother any confusion if she visits.”
Sybil nodded. She gave no sign of acknowledging that Rupert’s mother had killed herself some years ago. “Certainly, ma’am.”
“How have you been?” Eve asked, with a slightly more genuine smile this time. “Have you any problems I can help with?”
“Everything is absolutely fine, ma’am!” Sybil delivered a stuttering account of her new life at Bigge HQ. Her hands, folded neatly in her lap, clenched unconsciously as she continued: “I don’t like to presume, but it’s been two days, and I was wondering—”
“Yes?” Eve prompted.
“—Would it be all right for me to go to church?” Sybil asked nervously.
Eve bit her tongue to hold back her instinctive reply of over my dead body. “Why?” she finally asked, deceptively mildly.
The answer trailed on for a good ten minutes. There was an element of because I haven’t missed a service in thirty years except when I had the flu, somewhere in Mrs. Cunningham’s apologetics; and I want to know what it’s like when my husband isn’t officiating, along with a large dollop of I’m scared of getting on the wrong side of God (and by God I mean the Mute Poet). She even tried to cozen Eve with I’m alone in a strange city where I don’t know anyone, and church is familiar. None of which swayed Eve.
What did work, however, was Eve’s dawning realization that if the Church of the Mute Poet held services in London, Eve needed intelligence on their activities: and she needed to send an observer who would know what they were looking at.
This latter realization was what finally prompted her to reply, “Yes.”
Eve detested mystery cults in general and those dedicated to sanguinary gods in particular. A particularly evil cult sheltering within the husk of an evangelical church called the Golden Promise Ministries had taken her mother from her. Before Mum had descended into her own private abyss she’d tried to drag Evie along to a couple of services, and they’d given her a tooth-grating, fingernails-on-blackboard sense of wrongness. Rupert had been very high up in the Cult of the Mute Poet, if not right at the top. Eve would have to deal with his followers when she returned to Skaro, and as Sun Tzu observed, it is impossible to defeat an enemy you don’t understand.
So she smiled diffidently and nodded, then added, “I take it you mean the Church of Our Mute Lord, of course?” Sybil nodded. “I’ll definitely look into it.” She rubbed the suddenly moist palm of one hand on her knee.
“Do you know where—” Suddenly shy, Sybil dropped her gaze—“in London?”
“No, but I can find out.” Imp would know, if he’d finished the read-through of Rupert’s papers. “Would you like to go this evening, if there’s a church nearby? Otherwise, let’s say the next available service? You can tell me all about it afterwards.”
“Yes, Mrs.—I’m sorry, ma’am. Yes!” Sybil stood and blundered out of Eve’s office, trailing an almost palpable happiness behind her, and for a moment Eve wondered if she should have checked her mouth for alien parasites: but no, it was the Sleeper in the Pyramid whose followers used those. The Mute Poet didn’t strip his followers of the powers of speech, song, and rhyme. (His demands were dark but at least they required his congregation to have tongues.)
“Well now,” Eve said to herself, then tapped her headset. No need to tell Sybil that Eve herself wasn’t going to risk being recognized by her former boss’s coreligionists: “Get my brother on the line.”
Today was Thursday. As it happened, Imp had identified three different church meetings in the Greater London area from Rupert’s cult directory. Phone calls and other enquiries ensued. “This Saturday evening,” she told him, “you’re taking Sybil to church.”
Her brother was unamused. “What? Why Saturday night, why not Sunday?”
“Because they hold their services the evening before the Sabbath, and on Sunday you’ll be hungover,” she pointed out. “I’m picking you up and briefing you at six o’clock sharp: be prepared. Bring your crew.”
“But what if I don’t—”
Eve smiled at the wreckage of the cuckoo clock hanging from the wall opposite her desk. Since triggering the trap she’d taken to using it for target practice with her marbles, and it was considerably the worse for wear. “Stop arguing: you’re going one way or the other. Here’s a tip: one way is voluntary, the other involves a BMW with blacked-out windows and a couple of ex-paras with no sense here of humor. But if you take notes for me I’ll buy you dinner afterwards. What does your stomach say to that?”
“It says—” Imp sighed loudly. “I hope you know what you’re doing, sis.”
* * *
Two days of mind-numbing, foot-blistering legwork around FlavrsMart Branch 322 had put Wendy in a shitty mood right before a date—or perhaps in a better state of mind to appreciate company that didn’t have anything to do with endlessly tracing through CCTV footage, interrogating zentai-suited shopworkers, and groveling over diagrams of robot butcher lines.
“I swear this job is going to turn me vegan,” she complained.
“Beer, girl.” Del—Becca—shoved a chilled glass at her. “Sit down, tell me about it.” She had to raise her voice over the background roar of the busy pub. “How bad can it be?”
Wendy had clocked off and gone home for long enough to ditch her suit—Becca didn’t approve of them, she said it made Wendy look like a cop—then met up with her girlfriend in a grungy Fuller’s pub in Clapham. Only to find that Becca had come straight from an orientation and training day at HiveCo Security and was wearing a shiny new (and extremely cheap) company uniform: black trousers, navy polo shirt, and her usual DMs. “Bad enough,” said Wendy, then took a mouthful of London Pride. “I”—a mouthful of beer covered her hesitation—“I jumped the gun and spooked my suspect. He ran. And it’s impossible to tell him apart from the other muppets.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “They all look the same, and for once that’s not a racist cliché.”
Becca gave her a side-eye. “Really?”
“It’s … FlavrsMart.” She made it a curse. “They make their bottom-tier employees wear body stockings and face masks with digital displays. You can’t even hear their voices, the branch computers handle all customer interaction. And there’s about a dozen of these, uh, muppets, on the floor at any time. So the suspect is—or was—playing a shell game. I played my hand too soon and spooked him so he got away. And it turns out that although the branch computers track absolutely everything, data protection rules apply and muppets are anonymized even from other personnel to prevent them unionizing—”
“The fuck?” Becca looked appalled as she chugged her cider and black.
“—Yeah. So I asked HR to track the muppet I was after on CCTV and got given the computer says no runaround. Even though they called us in the first place to figure out what’s going on. I don’t have any evidence against him that’d stand up in court—that’s why I wanted to talk to him—but without evidence they won’t hand him to me.”
“That is some kind of fucked up,” Becca said admiringly. “That is some Catch-22 grade fucked up right there.”
“Absolutely.” Wendy stared at her beer as if it was sitting on the opposite side of an interview suite table. “It’s almost like they’re setting me up to fail.” The beer was evil and needed to be punished. “But why?”
“Dunno. Internal politics?”
“Unlikely.” Wendy brooded. “There were two of them in HR: Amy, who got me set up, and her boss Jennifer. Come to think of it, I saw Jennifer when I went back for the camera and movement logs. Maybe she just hates her assistant?”
“What are they like?”
“Amy is—” Wendy thought for a bit—“going through the motions? I mean, vegan, probably insists on eating only organic, dyes her hair green, I spotted her sketching on a pad when she didn’t think anyone could see—but her boss Jennifer is eww. I mean, she could be Eve’s Mini-Me. Whenever she swallows you can see the venom sacs in her throat twitching.”
