Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

He looked past her. “Good afternoon, Captain,” he said.

Rae turned in her seat. Gottlieb was standing in the doorway. “Ms Peterson, Mr van Rijn,” he said. “The gentleman’s arrived. He’ll see you now.”

They drove from Seven Dials to an office building near the Western end of Oxford Street. Sergeant Nutt must have been busy elsewhere, because Gottlieb drove them himself in a Hummer.

He led them into the foyer of the building and took them five floors up in the lift, then led them down a corridor and knocked at a door. Without waiting for a response, he opened the door and stood aside to let them through.

There were two men sitting at the conference table in the room. One was huge and bulky; he was wearing threadbare flying coveralls, his chestnut-coloured hair was awry, and he was clutching a small stuffed panda toy in one huge fist.

The other man was small and neat and wearing chinos and a black polo shirt. He had a chicken under one arm. For a moment Rae thought she had been ushered into the presence of lunatics, that Gottlieb had finally decided to reveal his true colours and murder them all, then the man with the chicken was out of his chair and holding out his free hand, smiling. Rae noticed he was wearing kidskin gloves.

“Ms Peterson,” he said. “Mr van Rijn. I’m delighted to finally meet you; please accept my apologies for not being here in person to greet you.”

Rae found her gaze drifting to the huge man in the coveralls.

“This is Flight Lieutenant Oak,” said the small man. “He probably won’t want to shake hands. But then again, he might. You never know with Flight Lieutenant Oak. I’m Henry Pargeter. Everyone calls me Harry.”

“I’ve heard of you,” said Willem. “Everyone calls you ‘The Last Spy.’”

Pargeter beamed at them as if genuinely delighted that someone had heard of him. “Well,” he said, “I think lost is more accurate than last , and I was never a spy, but yes, I believe I am the only remaining member of His Majesty’s Security Service.”

Rae looked at Willem. “This is the one with the helicopter,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She looked at Lieutenant Oak. “Oh,” she said again.

“The helicopter,” Pargeter said. “Just so, yes.” He rubbed his gloved hands together. “Well, I’m told you want to see Hyde Park, is that right?”

“That was our…plan,” Rae said carefully.

“Then see Hyde Park you shall.” He beamed at them again and indicated the door. “Shall we?”

They went back down the corridor, back down in the lift, back through the foyer, and out into the growing dusk, Rae becoming more and more baffled with every step. Pargeter and Gottlieb didn’t say a word as they walked the short distance to the end of Oxford Street.

As they reached Marble Arch, Rae became aware of a humming in the air, a minor chord, not unpleasant, hanging just above the level of normal hearing. It wasn’t loud, but it was everywhere.

“The Household Cavalry call this the Hum ,” Pargeter said, shifting his hands to get a better grip on the chicken. “It was here when they arrived, but they didn’t know what it was, and there were… casualties.”

“My commanding officer and his driver,” Gottlieb put in. “Brave men.”

Pargeter snorted. “Yes. Brave. Quite so.”

They crossed the road at Marble Arch and Pargeter stopped them in the middle of the southbound carriageways of Park Lane. A few yards away there was a central reservation dividing the northbound and southbound carriageways, and beyond the northbound were the trees and lawns of Hyde Park. Rae looked down at her feet. A few inches from her toes a thick red line had been sprayed on the road. It ran away, none too straight, down towards Hyde Park Corner in one direction, and cut across the complex traffic junction at Marble Arch and off towards Bayswater in the other.

“Captain Gottlieb’s boys call it the Deadline ,” Pargeter said. “They painted it after Major Burton and his driver tried to drive into Hyde Park.” He grabbed the chicken by the feet, drew his arm back, and pitched the squawking bird underarm across the road. Flapping and tumbling helplessly, the bird crossed the red line and exploded like a silent supernova made of smoke, a sudden off-white puff of vapour. Rae and Willem flinched back. Pargeter looked at the cloud of smoke. “Sic transit, Major Burton and…?” He looked at Gottlieb.

“Staff Sergeant Crisp,” Gottlieb said.

“And Staff Sergeant Crisp,” Pargeter agreed. He brushed his hands together. “It goes all the way around the Park. There’s no break and no way through it; anything that tries is, um, explosively disassembled . Captain Gottlieb’s men mapped it before I got here. They didn’t use chickens, they just walked along holding out sticks. The Household Cavalry are pretty good at thinking out of the box; they found a shop that had a stock of those Chinese lanterns — you know, the little paper balloon things you fly up into the sky with a candle inside? They released hundreds of them and let the wind carry them out over the Park, to see how high the barrier goes.” He looked into the Park. “Not the most scientific way of measuring things, but we think it’s a dome.”

“Over the whole Park?” asked Willem.

“Over the whole Park,” Pargeter agreed. He looked at Rae. “We think there’s something inside. And we think it may be waiting for you.”

Rae couldn’t stop thinking of the way the chicken had just burst in a puff of smoke. “Me?”

“You were told to come here, weren’t you?”

Told by an angel, possibly from her subconscious. “I have no idea,” Rae said. “I really don’t know what to do next.”

There was a story that had come to the nunnery with the procession of ill people. It was the story of an Englishman who, in the months immediately following La Silence , had flown a helicopter right around the world. Rae had dismissed it; there were too many wild stories going around to keep track of. And here she was, sitting in a London office with the man in the story.

“I was on an aeroplane,” he said. “I was coming back from a security conference in Jakarta. We landed at Heathrow, we taxied to the terminal, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I was the only person on the aeroplane.” He sat back on his chair. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to get off a transcontinental airliner if nobody’s rolled the jetway up to the door. I had to make a rope out of blankets.”

Rae smiled, picturing the little man climbing down a blanket rope like an escaping prisoner. “What was London like?”

Pargeter thought about that. He thought about it for so long that Rae thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. But he said finally, “Ms Peterson, it was lovely .”

Captain Gottlieb himself had served sandwiches and coffee. Lieutenant Oak had not partaken of the meal; he just sat there at the end of the table, staring at nothing.

“You have no idea how difficult it was to find a car with its keys in the ignition,” Pargeter went on, picking up the plate with the last of the ham sandwiches on it and offering it to Rae and Willem. They both shook their heads, so he put the plate down and took the sandwich for himself. He still hadn’t taken his gloves off. “Eventually I found a bicycle and I cycled into town.” He took a bite of the sandwich, chewed, swallowed. “The whole place was deserted. I went to the office, tried to raise someone, anyone, and there was no answer. So I cycled out to Permanent Joint Headquarters — the big military base at Northwood? I found some people there. Half a dozen of the Fleet Protection Marines detachment, and Lieutenant Oak and his colleagues Lieutenant Birch and Flight Sergeant Holly.”