The Annihilation Score (15 page)

I leave my coffee untouched and march, stiff-legged, straight back to the podium. I'm too surprised for fear: I thought they were going to go after the illegal immigrant processing guy first?

I find myself facing an audience which consists of about a tenth of the Cabinet, fronting a phalanx of about fifty Home Office executives any one of whom is senior—on paper, anyway—to the Senior Auditor. They run an organization with sub-agencies whose combined budget is bigger than Google or Microsoft, if you want to put it in multinational terms (as Mhari did), directing a couple of hundred thousand staff and contractors. And they're looking at me as if I have a nonstandard number of heads or a violin case strapped to my back.

“Dr. O'Brien,” the Home Secretary begins, surprisingly tentatively, “I'd like to thank you for giving the most creative proposal we've heard in this room in, hmm, two or three years. Very imaginative, forward-looking.
Daring
, one might even say.” Her tone is light, just this side of mocking. “How did you come to the conclusion that the Home Office needs a
superhero team
?”

Oh you bitch.
I keep my face carefully composed. “I did not come to that conclusion on my own, or rapidly. As the Secretary of State is aware, my organization has been tracking this phenomenon with increasing concern for a number of years, although it is only in the past three months that it has become apparent that the frequency of outbreaks is increasing exponentially. I'd like to stress that this proposal emerged by consensus after extensive monitoring and analysis. We believe that ninety-five percent of the problems we've been having can be addressed by providing a role model for good citizenship: the superpowered are just ordinary people who have, randomly and inexplicably, found themselves
enhanced
. Most normal people are law-abiding citizens and do not represent a problem. Our headache is the outliers: the criminally insane and the plain criminal. We also have a secondary problem with the vigilante role model provided by the popular entertainment media: some of the more excitable law-abiding citizens think they can help us by taking the law into their own hands. We need to
discourage that. So it seems reasonable to co-opt the popular cultural superhero model and use it to keep the good citizens in line, while suppressing the rare outbreaks of superpowered criminality.

“There are a handful of police officers who have acquired miraculous powers”—I am
not
going to mention the enigma wrapped in a mystery that is Officer Friendly at a Home Office briefing—“and my department proposes to use them as a cadre to work with suitably vetted individuals with superpowers, training them as Police Auxiliaries or Special Constables and providing suitable oversight and discipline. They will
not
be vigilantes in capes and tights, they will be entirely under the control of the police services, and their job will be to conduct operations against individuals with superpowers who have been identified as suspects in the course of regular police intelligence operations. And . . .”

I pause to swallow, then realize it's so quiet I could hear a pin drop.

“This
also
feeds into the question of public education. If we have a fully managed government superhero team, we can give TV and media crews access to them—subject to careful control of their public profiles. The message we will put across is that vigilantism is
not
the solution to crime, and we will deal even-handedly with all lawbreakers—including misguided volunteers. People with special abilities who wish to combat criminal activity should volunteer to become SPCs, so that they can operate within a clearly established legal framework. Eccentrics who think a Lycra body stocking and the power of flight entitle them to beat up bank chairmen in the street need to realize that their antics are illegal and counterproductive, and that the official government superhero squad will come down on them as hard as on any bank-vault-robbing mole-man. In this way, we propose to take our current problem and extract from it the seeds of its own solution.”

Applause.
Applause.
I blink. The Home Secretary is leading the applause: not enthusiastically, but just slightly faster than a slow clap. She's actually
smiling
, although I've seen a warmer expression on a rattlesnake at the zoo.

After about thirty seconds the applause dies down. “I'd like to thank Dr. O'Brien for her excellent and creative proposal, which I believe deserves further consideration,” says the Home Secretary. “My right honorable colleagues and I will discuss it and respond within the next week, Dr. O'Brien, thank you very much for your time. Now, moving swiftly on to a much more mundane topic, the question of how to deal with our underperforming immigrant processing centers—seeing it's impossible to issue our contractors with capes and superpowers, perhaps Mr. Jennings would like to return to the podium . . . ?”

I make my retreat, carefully keeping my face impassive. I pass the immigration department gazelle on my way to my seat: he looks just as bad going out as I feel coming back.

*   *   *

My neighbor from ACPO intercepts me before I have a chance to sit back down. “Back of the room,
now
,” he whispers. I shakily grab for my violin case and shuffle towards the back; he follows me as discreetly as a nearly two-meter-tall man of steel in a uniform held together with silver braid and medal ribbons can manage. He cracks the door open and gestures me through it, then follows me out into the atrium.

“That went surprisingly well,” he says. “You knocked 'em cold.” He looks at me, appraising, thoughtful.

“I thought it was terrible,” I admit. “She was all but
laughing
at me at the end.”

“Really? I don't think so.”

“Hmm?” I stare back at him, mildly annoyed that I'm not wearing heels high enough to look him in the eye. I'm quite a bit taller than average, but he's built like Superman: I'd need six-inch platforms to be level with him, and those aren't suitable business dress, at least not in my world. “What makes you say that?”

“You were talking to an audience of senior politicians from the law-and-order side of their party. You don't get to that position unless you're an instinctive authoritarian who likes to put everyone in a neat
little box. The Home Office top brass have only really become aware of the paranormal in the past few months, and they don't like to have to think about it because it upsets their stack of Tupperware. Jessica Greene is at least
trying
to come to terms with the new reality—she may be an authoritarian, but she's also terribly bright, and ambitious enough to believe six impossible things before breakfast if that's what it takes to get to the top. However, I think she still finds it threatening to her model of the natural order of things. Laughter is her way of handling cognitive dissonance; the fact that you got a chuckle out of her is very positive. A negative response would be some sort of belittling dismissal or outright denial or even a very public meltdown and tantrum. I'd say you came out ahead by provoking the mildest reaction. Next time the subject comes up, she'll think of you with amused tolerance rather than denial or fear.”

“That's a very interesting analysis,” I slowly say. (Officer Grey has clearly been studying social psychology.) “But what do
you
want?”

He begins to walk slowly back towards the central Street that connects the three buildings. After a moment I scurry to catch up. “I think there's a cafe around here somewhere. Can I buy you a flat white in return for a few minutes of your time? I've got an idea I'd like to run past you.”

I can tell a setup when I smell one. “Who are you,
really
?”

“Really?” His smile is crooked. “I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you—no, not really. All right, I confess: I attended that briefing because when word that you'd be presenting crossed my boss's desk, she sent me along. I'm only a chief superintendent, far too low down the totem pole to make policy. But then again,
you're
far too low down the totem pole to be making policy, under normal circumstances. So it's a good thing that circumstances aren't normal, isn't it?”

“I couldn't possibly comment.” If I wasn't carrying a violin and a handbag, I'd cross my arms defensively. “So how did the agenda of that particular meeting end up on your desk?”
And are you a scary stalker with a security clearance or an ally?

“Well.” We walk past a shuttered shop front in the side of the Street; just past it, there's an open awning and a Costa's sign. He
swerves towards the entrance. “I'm nominally with the Met, but for the past three years I've been on semi-permanent loan to ACPO. And I've been liaising with your people.”

I stop. “Who do you believe my people are?” I demand.

“Mahogany Row. SOE Q Division.” So he knows about the Laundry. “You take it white, no sugar, yes?” There's that twinkle in his eye again.

“Nope: this time mine's a tall mocha, no cream, one extra shot.”

“Capital. Find a table and I'll be right over.”

I select a table with upright armchairs and pick the one where I can keep my back to the wall and watch the passers-by in the Street. I have a very peculiar feeling about this dashing officer of the law. He's far too good to be true. A year or two older than me, athletic, handsome, self-assured, friendly, shows signs of having a sense of humor and several decades more insight into human psychology than Bob has ever developed while I've known him—Why am I even making that comparison? It's silly and pointless. I feel obscurely guilty as I watch him return from the counter bearing a tray with two large cups. Then I feel suspicious. Just why is a chief superintendent who works for the Association of Chief Police Officers soft-soaping me? What does he want?

“I was tipped off about you by Tim Whitehead, Jo Sullivan's guvnor. Not to mention the rolling coverage you stirred up on News 24. ‘Paranormal Violinist's Virtuoso Performance Swats Human Fly' as the tabloids put it.” He pours a thin stream of brown sugar into his coffee and stirs it thoughtfully. “So I asked Gerry Lockhart, and he suggested talking to you directly.”

I'm all ears, and on edge. “What exactly do you do for ACPO?”

“This and that—most recently, discuss fisheries patrols with our scaly friends. And other things that I don't think you need to know about. ACPO has fingers in a lot of pies, and paranormal issues are just one of them. We handle the stuff that would fall through the cracks if we left it to the regional police forces, but which needs horizontal networking rather than top-down policy directives from the Home Office: inter-force cooperation, professional standards,
intelligence gathering, anything that needs tackling on a national level and isn't so important that the right honorable members will pass enabling legislation and approve a budget for a new national-level special police force.”

“Special police force?”

“Civil Nuclear Constabulary, British Transport Police.” He shrugs. “A problem normally has got to be so big that it's glaringly obvious that the locals can't handle it, and need at least a thousand full-time bodies, before they'll approve a new organization. Supervillains aren't there yet, but they're a highly specialized problem and they cut across force boundaries so we got asked to carry the can.”

“So what is it you want?” I ask. “You think ACPO should run the official government superhero team?”

“God, no!” He looks shocked. “The risk of blowback is enormous. In fact, we're backing out of direct policing support everywhere we can. The scandal over the NPOIU—the National Public Order Intelligence Unit—a few years ago forced a major rethink. We'd gotten ourselves—ACPO—into a wag-the-dog situation: a subsidiary task came far too close for comfort to taking over the entire organization and turning it into a de facto secret police agency, getting up to all sorts of unsavory activities. Sleeping with suspects, framing people, supplying bombs. It was unethical, illegal, and could have compromised our ability to do our core job, which is to coordinate between police forces.”

“Really?” I ask brightly. This is
fascinating
. After the past few days it's wonderful to meet someone whose problems are even bigger than mine.

“But,” he continues, as I take a mouthful of mocha, “as you know, at least one of the newly superpowered is, in fact, a police officer. And there may be others. I believe I can use ACPO channels to find them and point them your way. I also know who to go to within the Met to help you set up a special operations unit as a posting for them. You're going to need to coordinate with us sooner or later. The way I see it working, you—in your guise as, ahem, a department of the Security Service—will be handling the intelligence, policy, liaison,
outreach, public relations, and technical operations side of the team you proposed forming. But if you're serious about them operating lawfully as sworn police officers, you really need to go through a force. The Met is the biggest police force in the UK, and I'm upper middle-management there. Which is the second reason why you want me on board.”

I smile at him pleasantly and put my cup down. Okay, so he's a player and he wants something: probably the obvious, to grab my unit and turn it into a new leaf on their org tree.
Here comes the pitch.
“What's the first reason?” I ask.

He flashes me a quick grin: “I'm Officer Friendly.”

*   *   *

I give him my best vacant stare. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
Jo said something about Officer Friendly, didn't she? And come to think of it, Ramona . . .
“I haven't been following the news much,” I admit.

He chuckles. He doesn't sound offended, which is a relief. “That's all right. Officer Friendly hasn't been out there ‘fighting crime' for very long. Um. This is in confidence, you understand, because you
do
have need to know, but I'd rather my secret identity didn't get noised around needlessly.”