The Atrocity Archives (38 page)

Five minutes later we're sitting down with a
notepad, a telephone, and an antique tape recorder that Smiley probably
used to debrief Karla, back when men were real men and lesbian sheep
were afraid. "This had better be important," Josephine complains,
clicking a frighteningly high-tech sweetener dispenser repeatedly over
her black Nescafé. "I've got a persistent burglar, two
rapes, a string
of car thefts, and a phantom pisser who keeps breaking into department
stores to deal with, then a bunch of cloggies from West Yorkshire
who're running some kind of computer audit—your fault, I believe. I
need to get bogged down in
X-Files
rubbish right now like I
need a hole in my head."

"Oh, it's important all right. And I hope to get
it off your desk as soon as possible. I'd just like to get a few things
straight first."

"Hmm. So what do you need to know? We've only
had two flying saucer sightings and six alien abductions this year so
far." She raises one eyebrow, arms crossed and shoulders
set a trifle defensively. Who'd have thought it? Being interviewed by
higher authorities makes the alpha female detective defensive. "It's
not like I've got all day: I'm due in a case committee briefing at noon
and I've got to pick up my son from school at four."

On second thought, maybe she really
is
busy. "To start with, did you get any witness reports or CCTV records
from the scene? And have you identified the cow, and worked out how it
got there?"

"No eyewitnesses, not until three o'clock, when
Vernon Thwaite was out walking his girlfriend's toy poodle which had
diarrhoea." She pulls a face, which makes the scar on her forehead
wrinkle into visibility. "If you want we can go over the team reports
together. I take it that's what pulled you in?"

"You could say that." I dip a cheap IKEA spoon
in my coffee and check cautiously after a few seconds to see if the
metal's begun to corrode. "Helicopters make me airsick. Especially
after a night out when I was expecting a morning lie-in." She almost
smiles before she remembers she's officially grumpy with me. "Okay, so
no earlier reports. What else?"

"No tape," she says, flattening her hands on the
tabletop to either side of her cup and examining her nail cuticles.
"Nothing. One second it's zero zero twenty-six, the next it's zero
seven fourteen. Numbers to engrave in your heart. Dennis, our
departmental geek, was most upset with MKSG—they're the public-private
partners in the regional surveillance outsourcing sector."

"Zero zero twenty-six to zero seven fourteen," I
echo as I jot them down on my palmtop. "MKSG. Right, that's helpful."

"It is?" She tilts her head sideways and stares
at me like I'm a fly that's landed in her coffee.

"Yup." I nod, then tell myself that it'd be
really stupid to wind her up without good reason. "Sorry. What I can
tell you is, I'm as interested in anything that happened to the cameras
as the cow. If you hear anything about them—especially about them
being
tampered with—I'd love to know. But in the
meantime—Daisy. Do you know where she came from?"

"Yes." She doesn't crack a smile but her
shoulders unwind slightly. "Actually, she's number two six three from
Emmett-Moore Ltd, a dairy factory out near Dunstable. Or rather, she
was two six three until three days ago. She was getting along a bit, so
they sold her to a local slaughterhouse along with a job lot of seven
other cows. I followed-up on the other seven and they'll be showing up
in your McHappy McMeal some time next month. But not Daisy. Seems a
passing farmer in a Range Rover with a wagon behind it dropped by and
asked if he could buy her and cart her away for his local family
butcher to deal with."

"Aha!"

"And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to
sell you." She takes a sip of her coffee, winces, and strafes it with
sweeteners again. Responding on autopilot I try a mouthful of my own
and burn my tongue. "Turns out that there's no such farmer Giles of
Ham
Farm, Bag End, The Shire, on record. Mind you, they had a camera on
their stockyard and we nailed the Range Rover. It turned up abandoned
the next day on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard and it's flagged as
stolen on HOLMES2. Right now it's sitting in the pound down the road;
they smoked it for prints but it came up clean and we don't have enough
money to send a SOCO and a forensics team to do a full workup on every
stolen car we run across.
However
, if you twist my arm and
promise me a budget
and
to go to the mat with my boss I'll see
what I can lay on."

"That may not be necessary: we have ways and
means. But can you get someone to drive me down there? I'll take some
readings and get out of your face—except for the business with Daisy.
How are you covering that?"

"Oh, we'll find something. Right now it's filed
under 'F' for Fucking Fortean Freakery, but I was thinking of
announcing it's just an old animal that had been
dumped illegally by a farmer who didn't want to pay to have it
slaughtered."

"That sounds about right." I nod slowly. "Now,
I'd like to play a random word-association game with you. Okay? Ten
seconds. When I say the words tell me what you think of. Right?"

She looks puzzled. "Is this—"

"Listen.
Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. By the
authority vested in me by the emissaries of Y'ghonzzh N'hai I have the
power to bind and to release, and your tongue be tied of these matters
of which we have spoken until you hear these words again:
Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. Got that?"

She looks at me cross-eyed and mouths something,
then looks increasingly angry until finally she gets it together to
burst out with: "Hey, what
is
this shit?"

"Purely a precaution," I say, and she glares at
me, gobbling for a moment while I finish my coffee until she figures
out that she simply can't say a word about the subject. "Right," I
say. "Now. You've got my permission to announce that the cow was
dumped. You
have my permission to talk freely to me, but to nobody else. Anyone
asks any questions, refer them to me if they won't take no for an
answer. This goes for your boss, too. Feel free to tell them that you
can't tell them, nothing more."

"Wanker," she hisses, and if looks could kill
I'd be a small pile of smouldering ashes on the interview room floor.

"Hey,
I'm
under a geas, too. If I don't
spread it around my head will explode."

I don't know whether she believes me or not but
she stops fighting it and nods tiredly. "Tell me what you want then
get
the hell out of my patch."

"I want a lift to the car pound. A chance to sit
behind the wheel of that Range Rover. A book of poetry, a jug of wine,
a date tree, and—sorry, wrong question. Can you manage it?"

She stands up. "I'll take you there myself," she
says tersely. We go.

I get to endure twenty-five
minutes of venomous silence in the back seat of an unmarked
patrol car driven by one Constable Routledge, with DI Sullivan in the
front passenger seat treating me with the warmth due a serial killer,
before we arrive at the pound. I'm beyond introspective self-loathing
by now—you lose it fast in this line of work. Angleton will have my
head for a key-ring fob if I don't take care to silence any possible
leaks, and a tongue-twisting geas is more merciful than most of the
other tools at my disposal—but I still feel like a shit. So it comes
as
a great relief to get out of the car and stretch my legs on the muddy
gravel parking lot in the pouring rain.

"So where's the car?" I ask, innocently.

Josephine ignores me. "Bill, you want to head
over to Bletchley Way and pick up Dougal's evidence bag for the Hayes
case. Then come back to pick us up," she tells the driver. To the
civilian security guard: "You, we're looking for BY 476 ERB. Came in
yesterday, Range Rover. Where is it?"

The bored security goon leads us through the mud
and a maze of cars with
POLICE AWARE
stickers glued to their windshields then gestures at a half-empty row.
"That's it?" Josephine asks, and he passes her a set of keys. "Okay,
you can piss off now." He takes one look at her face and beats a hasty
retreat. I half-wish I could join him—whether she's a detective
inspector or not, and therefore meant to be behaving with the gravitas
of a senior officer in public, DI Sullivan looks to be in a mood to
bite the heads off chickens. Or Laundry field agents, given half an
excuse.

"Right, that's it," she says, holding out the
keys and shaking them at me impatiently. "You're done, I take it, so
I'll be pushing off. Case meeting to run, mystery shopping centre
pisser to track down, and so on."

"Not so fast." I glance round. The pound is
surrounded by a high wire fence and there's a decrepit Portakabin
office out front by the gate: a camera sits on a motorised mount on a
pole sticking up from the roof. "Who's on the other end of that
thing?"

"The gate guard, probably," she says, following
my finger. The camera is staring at the entrance, unmoving.

"Okay, why don't you open up the car." She blips
the remote to unlock the door and I keep my eyes on the camera as she
takes the handle and tugs.
Could I be wrong?
I wonder as the
rain trickles down my neck. I shake myself when I notice her staring,
then I pull out my palmtop, clamber up into the driver's seat, and
balance the pocket computer on the steering wheel as I tap out a series
of commands. What I see makes me shake my head. Whoever stole the car
may have wiped for fingerprints but they didn't know much about
paranormal concealment—they didn't use the shroud from a suicide, or
get a paranoid schizophrenic to drive. The scanner is sensitive to
heavy emotional echoes, and the hands I'm looking for are the most
recent ones to have chilled from fright and fear of exposure. I log
everything and put it away, and I'm about to open the glove locker when
something makes me glance at the main road beyond the chainlink fence
and—

"Watch out! Get down!"
I jump out and
go for the ground. Josephine is looking around so I reach out and yank
her ankles out from under her. She yells, goes down hard on her
backside, and tries to kick me, then there's a loud
whump
from
behind me and a wave of heat like an open oven door. "Shit, fuck,
shit—" I take a moment to realise the person cursing is me as I
fumble
at my throat for the bag and rip it open, desperately trying to grab
the tiny claw and the disposable cigarette lighter at the same time. I
flick the lighter wheel and right then something like a sledgehammer
whacks into the inside of my right thigh.

"Bastard … !"

"Stop it—" I gasp, just as the raw smell of
petrol vapour reaches me and I hear a crackling
roar. I get the pigeon claw lit in a stink of burning keratin and an
eerie glow, nearly shitting myself with terror, lying in a cold damp
puddle, and roll over:
"Don't move!"

"Bastard! What—hey, what's burning?"

"Don't move," I gasp again, holding the
subminiature Hand of Glory up. The traffic camera in the road outside
the fence is casting about as if it's dropped its contact lens, but the
one on the pole above the office is locked right onto the burning tires
of the Range Rover. "If you let go of my hand they'll see you
and kill
you
oh shit—
"

"Kill—
what
?" She stares at me,
white-faced.

"You! Get under cover!" I yell across the pound,
but the guy in the blue suit—the attendant—doesn't hear me. One
second
he's running across the car park as fast as his portly behind can
manage; the next moment he's tumbling forward, blackening, puffs of
flame erupting from his eyes and mouth and ears, then the stumps as his
arms come pinwheeling off, and the carbonized trunk slides across the
ground like a grisly toboggan.

"Oh shit, oh shit!" Her expression changes from
one second to the next, from disbelief to dawning horror. "We've got to
help—"

"Listen,
no
! Stay down!"

She freezes in place for a full heartbeat, then
another. When she opens her mouth again she's unnaturally cool. "What's
going on?"

"The cameras," I pant. "Listen, this is a
Hand
of Glory, an invisibility shield. Right now it's all that's keeping us
alive—those cameras are running SCORPION STARE. If they see us we're
dead."

"Are you—the car? What happened to it?"

"Tires. They're made of carbon, rubber. SCORPION
STARE works on anything with a shitload of long-chain carbon molecules
in it—like tires, or cows. Makes them burn."

"Oh my sainted aunt and holy
father … "

"Hold my hand. Make skin to skin contact—not
that hard. We've got maybe three, four minutes before this HOG burns
down. Bastards,
bastards.
Got to get to the control
shack—"

The next minute is a nightmare of
stumbling—shooting pains in my knees from where I went down hard and
in
my thigh where Josephine tried to kick the shit out of me—soaking cold
damp jeans, and roasting hot skin on my neck from the pyre that I was
sitting inside only seconds ago. She holds onto my left hand like it's
a lifesaver—yes, it is, for as long as the HOG keeps burning—and we
lurch and shamble toward the modular site office near the entrance as
fast as we can go. "Inside," she gasps, "it
can't see inside."

"Yeah?" She half-drags me to the entrance and we
find the door's open, not locked. "Can we get away round the
other
side?"

"Don't think so." She points through the
building. "There's a school."

"Oh shit." We're on the other side of the pound
from the traffic camera in the road, but there's another camera under
the eaves of the school on the other side of the road from the steel
gates out front, and it's a good thing the kids are all in lessons
because what's going on here is every teacher's nightmare. And we've
got to nail it down as fast as possible, because if they ring the bell
for lunch—"We've got to kill the power to the roofcam
first," I say. "Then we've got to figure a way out."