The Annihilation Score (7 page)

“Put me down you motherfucking hippie bitch! Put me down or I will rape you so hard you'll walk bow-legged for a month!”

I tighten my grip on him and he shuts up, unable to draw breath. I see red: heart pounding and head throbbing in time to the beat I'm imagining. Laughing Boy likes to strip the clothes off young women in public as he adds them to the pornographic sculpture he's building on the empty plinth? Laughing Boy thinks rape jokes are funny?
Laughing Boy thinks it's all fun and games until a motherfucking hippie bitch turns his own mojo back on him, does he?
I'll show him, I'll squeeze him until his guts explode—

“Stop that,”
I tell Lecter. Laughing Boy is turning blue in the face, eyes bulging as I dangle him above the heads of the crowd. Almost like the bodies on the giant gallows in Vakilabad—

I let him down gently, in the middle of a knot of riot police, then stop the music dead and lower my instrument. “Oh God oh God oh God,” I mumble. The residual power surge warms the protective ward at the base of my throat. I feel sick. I nearly hanged a man with a noose of air.
But he threatened to
that's disproportionate
rape you
he's just a sad middle-aged man with no life who has suddenly acquired superpowers
and
then decided to have some fun and
sexually abuse random passers-by in public
and I believe we should have a little word with Jo Sullivan, and
stop arguing with yourself
, yes?

I put my instrument away, pick up the case, and begin to walk towards the mobile incident command vehicle.

And that's when I see the other TV uplink van that was parked behind me, and the BBC news crew with the camera tracking me for my reaction shot when I realize they broadcast the entire magical duel live on News 24.

*   *   *

Now, it is a fact universally acknowledged by the modern intelligence agent that whoever said lies could travel halfway around the world while the truth was still getting its running shoes on clearly lived in a YouTube-free bubble.

I am a professional. I do not blog, I do not leak, I am discreet, I do not tweet. I
do
have a Facebook page, because not having one would mark me out as a freak of nature in this disclosure-obsessed age, but it's monitored by Human Resources and I don't talk about work or politics and I don't friend my colleagues.

When a BBC camera crew shoves a microphone under my nose and a vaguely familiar face with an expensive hairdo and a fashionable suit starts asking me pointed questions, I politely redirect their
enquiries towards the nearest uniformed police superintendent, then walk away (mouthing “
get me out of here
” in Jo Sullivan's direction).

Which is how I get my second ride home in a jam sandwich with flashing blues and twos in just under twelve hours, cringing in the back seat every time I notice a random bystander who looks like a journalist or a van that resembles the TV news crew's uplink vehicle. The neighbors are going to think I'm some kind of criminal mastermind at this rate, aren't they?

I'm in the kitchen, brewing up a cafetière of Kenyan on autopilot as Spooky rubs against my ankles in hope of attention, when the landline from HQ rings. It's Vikram. “You made quite a splash.” His tone is surprisingly mild.

“I didn't mean to: the second camera crew arrived while I was already engaged.” I shudder convulsively and bite down on my instinctive urge to start apologizing. It's undignified for one thing, and for another, if I start I don't know if I'll be able to stop. “What happens next?”

“We're meeting at three to discuss damage control policy. The Auditors are calling the shots on this one, I'm afraid. Um, we're using room 4102 in Admiralty House, just off the Spring Gardens entrance; the New Annex is inaccessible today.”

“The New Annex is
what
?”

“Last night's Code Red left quite a mess.” Vik isn't normally quite this taciturn; he must be badly rattled. “We're activating the emergency migration plan while the clean-up proceeds.”

“I see.” Stiff upper lips appear to be the order of the day. Well, my workplace calendar is clear—I was supposed to be stuck in the middle of the North Sea for the rest of the week—so it's not as if I'm expected in the office, apart from this new meeting. But the sense of hollow dread and loss gnawing at my guts won't go away. “How bad is the public exposure?”

“Bad.” He pauses. “Chin up, and see you in a few hours.”

Whoops.

I set the timer on my phone to give me a countdown alarm, sit down at the kitchen table, and allow the tears to flow. It's not hard,
and the therapeutic effect of a good cry shouldn't be underestimated: you secrete endorphins in your tears, and there's a good chunk of research showing that it really
does
relieve stress. Trial and error experimentation has taught me that an eight-minute session followed by seven minutes of deep breathing and meditation is the minimum I can get away with to rebalance myself when I'm in danger of losing my shit completely. (It used to be four minutes, back when I started practicing it a couple of years ago. It's been creeping up on me for some time now.) If I follow it with a brief session of calming meditation, it sets me right as rain, for a while.

Fifteen-minute interval over (and feeling a lot better for it) I haul my suitcase upstairs and shower, then wash and blow-dry my hair. Opening the bag, I haul out the black trouser suit I bought for the deep-sea negotiations. Add a cream blouse, heels, and just enough makeup and earrings to soften the look slightly, and it'll be just about right for what's coming up this afternoon, which is inevitably going to be suspension followed by a formal enquiry with the authority to recommend disciplinary sanctions. I hadn't thought things could get any worse after Bob left, but this . . . this is
ridiculous
.

No. Wrong word. Try
disastrous
on for size instead.

*   *   *

I do not over-share on Facebook. Unfortunately, I have an idiot sister who thinks Facebook is the internet, and that the internet is the right way to keep in touch with her friends.

Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook. Many of these photographs are taken at family social gatherings, and the people who upload them tag them with the names of their relatives and friends. Which means that unless you are a paranoid recluse who has been hiding in a cave since the early 1980s, there is almost certainly a photograph of your face tagged with your name and public profile in Facebook's database.

An hour ago I took down an angry white guy with occult powers in the middle of Trafalgar Square. I don't think I had any alternative:
he was holding the Mayor of London hostage—the man most likely to be our next Prime Minister—not to mention a dozen innocent bystanders.

Unfortunately I did so right in front of a TV news crew and about a thousand tourists armed with DSLRs and SD cards that automatically upload everything they see to the internet via wireless.

Back in the prehistoric era of the 1980s, we could stop this shit dead in its tracks. The TV and newspaper crews could be silenced by means of a quaint instrument called a D-Notice, a formal warning that publication would put them in breach of the Official Secrets Act and result in prosecution. The ordinary witnesses carried cameras full of film that could be confiscated, and which in any case couldn't be tagged and matched and searched on the internet.

But today . . . Let's just say Sis is in for a
real
surprise the next time she checks in on Facebook.

I get dressed, put my hair up, apply foundation, eyeliner, and lipstick, then go downstairs. With a growing sense of dread, I fire up the laptop and start poking at dusty news sites. I've got about half an hour before it'll be time to set off—time to see if I need to keep my head down.

It's not looking good:

• I am squarely in the frame of the photograph that accompanies the lead news item on the BBC News website. Recognizably me, even in casual mufti with a rat's nest under my beret.
  
• The same video clip is on YouTube. It has been viewed 223,195 times already. (Make that 223,196.)
  
• There are links to six more videos of the incident, from different angles. One of them was taken by a Korean tourist whose funky high-def camera had some sort of bizarre polarizing filter that is sensitive to thaum fields; bolts of psychedelic lightning zig and zag across the concourse, roughly connecting Lecter to Laughing Boy, who shows up in luminous green.
  
• There's an interview with the Mayor, from his hospital bed, breathlessly expressing his gratitude and admiration to “the redhead with
  the violin” who took down Strip Jack Spratt, as the supervillain manqué apparently calls himself. (Alias Dougal Slaithwaite, age 52, unemployed, of no fixed abode: now facing charges of kidnapping, indecent assault, and threatening behavior.)
  
• There are linked news items—human interest color, I gather—about other superhero outbreaks.
  Who
  ordered
  that?
  Apparently my media habit is sufficiently out of the mainstream that I've been missing out on the summer's big story.
  
• There are more than seventy messages waiting for me in my Facebook inbox. I delete them all. Another one appears almost immediately. (I log out.)
  

I don't bother checking the newspapers. Instead, I repack my suitcase, adding my second-best suit in place of the one I'm wearing. It may be some time before I can come home without running a gauntlet of journalists. The first of them may already be on their way, depending on how good they are at image manipulation and social engineering. As I said, Sis is in for a real surprise next time she checks in . . .

But for me, it's time to face the music.

*   *   *

I phone for a cab, and they pick me up at my front door. My skin's crawling as I do the perp walk out to the curb, but there are no tabloid reporters or paparazzi waiting in the bushes yet: it's a lucky escape that I can't count on repeating. I feel nauseous as I contemplate what's coming up next. An auto-da-fé if I'm lucky; utter shame otherwise.

Of course the cabbie turns out to be the talkative kind. “Did you 'ear about the mess in Trafalgar Square?” he asks. “I'm going to 'ave to loop around to drop you on Pall Mall, that end's all blocked off. One of those supervillains went off 'is trolley and kidnapped the Mayor! Then some girl with a magic guitar took 'im down, right in front of Nelson's Column! The news is saying she works for a
secret government agency
,” he confides with a knowing look.

“I'm sure she does.” I cross my arms and peer out of the window, feigning boredom. I'm certain he can hear my pulse pounding over the noise of the lorry we're nose-to-tail with.

“Stands to reason, the government must have some kind of plan for dealing with them, right?” He sounds worried.

“Them?”

“Yeah, the crazies with superpowers.”

“Crazies with—” I catch his eye in the mirror, looking at me as if he's wondering what planet I'm from.

“Yeah, crazies. Like the bloke wot tore up that community center in Tooting last week, with 'is bare 'ands. It's anarchy, that's wot it is, even with all these crime-fighters in pervert suits coming out of the woodwork.”

“Pervert suits?” I ask, caught by his phrasing.

“Yeah, it's like there's some kind of law or something: ordinary bloke acquires the power to turn his 'ead into a teapot, he has to start poncing around in Lycra and fishnets. Like something from the
Rocky Horror
, innit? You know what? That sort of thing turns my stomach. There ought to be a law against it.”

“What, turning your head into a teapot?”

“No, the pervy suits. I mean, no offense, if a fit bird with superpowers wants to wear a skimpy dress and thigh-high boots I've got no problem, knowworramean? But some of these blokes, they're a bit past their sell-by. There oughta be a law about it, right? They should make all the fat supervillains wear burkas. But they ain't doing anything about
any
of it right now, looks like. It's a crime! The police should do something.”

And so on and on and on, for approximately twenty-five minutes. By the time we arrive at the Admiralty my cheek is twitching and, if I had my choice of superpowers, I would cheerfully sell my soul for the ability to turn my driver's head into a cafetière.

I'm so tense by the time we arrive that I forget to ask for a receipt when I pay. But swearing won't help and I don't feel like running after the taxi, so I make my way stiffly to the front desk, where a splendidly uniformed doorman waits behind a desk carved from the timbers of
an eighteenth-century man-o-war. I present my warrant card: “Dr. O'Brien. I'm here for a meeting in room 4102.”

It sounds so much better than
disciplinary hearing
.

“If you'd care to sign here, ma'am . . . now stare into the camera, just for a second.” It's one of the ubiquitous eyeball-on-a-stalk webcams, disquietingly like something I once met in a hotel hallway in Amsterdam. I try to will the lens to crack, but I'm not quite ugly enough. “Jolly good, now I'm just going to print you out a badge. Remember to wear it at all times and return it when you leave. I'm afraid you'll have to leave those bags here. You can check them into the cloak room, but I'm afraid we'll have to scan them—”

“You can take the suitcase, but the violin has to stay with me.” I put it on the desk. “You're welcome to inspect it right here, but I can't let it out of my possession. It's rather valuable.” I tense up, anticipating a fight.

“Really?” He smiles over gilt-framed half-moon glasses. “Well, if you insist, I can hand search it.” Bless the Corps of Commissionaires: they're ex-military enough to know when to bend the rules.