Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

He took his spectacles off. He wiped them on a paper serviette he kept folded in his wallet. He could never get the last smears of facial oil off his lenses these days. Something about London. He put his specs back on. In his hands, he clutched three reports about the night, printed on sticky-feeling, dissolving TemPaper, like all classified communiqués of the Company. The latest report read:

NORTHERN EUROPE-WIDE CLASSIFIED UPDATE 20520501.1 UK / CROWN SOURCES CLAIM SEVERAL NON-DOMESTIC RARE LIVE ANIMALS ON STREETS ACROSS CENTRAL LONDON. POSSIBLE LINKS TO ENGLISH TERRORISTS OR US-BASED DEATH CULT ACTIONS OR (EARL OF) WORCESTER INSURGENCY. ADDITIONAL REPORTS: GORILLA NEAR GROSVENOR COMPLEX. ADVANCED ROYAL WATCH ASSETS DEPLOYED. THREAT BLUE. STRICT LEVEL H PROTOCOLS IN RISK ASSESSMENT / CONTAINMENT. REPORT ENDS, 202061-33.

No report could have prepared him for the surrealism of the facts at hand. Animals in London — everywhere. And there was a dang gorilla on the loose!

He didn’t like the tie-in with the nutjob cults. He didn’t like relying on Crown intelligence sources. And he really didn’t like the gorilla.

Mason wasn’t classic Foreign Service, even within the comparably asperous milieu of the diplomatic police. He was a God-fearing, foulmouthed, bona fide Allegheny grit, a coal-dusted rut-buck hunting hillbilly from Pendleton County, West Virginia, who considered anything smaller than a.30–06 Springfield a squirrel gun. He kept a fourteen-point set of whitetail antlers on his dresser beside an old picture of his mama in a pink housedress, standing in a kitchen in slanted sunlight, holding Mason up proudly as a toddler, kissing his black flyaway hair.

Beyond a seated row of Diplomatic Security Service agents, a bank of screens showed various feeds from low-light and deep-infrared videocameras around Grosvenor Square. On several, a Royal Watch frightcopter was hovering erratically above the square’s lime and plane trees.

“That’s cockeyed,” Mason said to himself.

The pilot seemed unable to keep the aircraft evenly pitched. It looked like a big red, black, and gold Easter egg, rocking and tipping and threatening to take a great fall.

“Watch that chopper,” Mason said aloud. “Something’s. something’s just off there.”

“Yessir!” said several voices.

“And please, will someone please ‘ring the Circus’ *and find out what the fuck is going on?”

Much of Grosvenor Square, particularly the road and square itself, was surveilled from within the Roost. Faces, cars, trucks, and DVLA number plates could be put on-screen, magnified, and analyzed with a suite of recognition and consciousness-probing technologies that could penetrate facial BodyMods and even, it was rumored, insert understated, subtle ideas in targets, although in Britain a Crown Court order was — strictly speaking — necessary for cognitive interventions, and only to British subjects.

The shaky frightcopter lowered itself in one of the corners of the enormous square. An attractive, dark-eyed young woman with long black hair alighted from the copter, and the frightcopter immediately shot back up to the safety of the air.

“What the fuck is this?” asked Mason. The woman’s uniform resembled a minor British police agency’s. She certainly wasn’t Watch.

“I want to know who that woman is,” barked Mason. “I want to know why she’s here. I want to know what brand of organic strawberries she slices into her muesli for breakfast. Jesus fucking shit. Is this the animal catcher?”

Mason was not an arrogant man, but he felt better than this animal silliness. The entire spectacle struck him as too sloppy and absurd to be professional or terror related. The ambassador and her family were on holiday in Greenland — one less headache. But the frightcopter and this woman and the animal reports worried him, if only because of their absolute total fuckedupedness.

“Seriously, get me some data, people!”

Astrid’s face popped onto half a dozen screens. She seemed to be looking for signs of something, but tentatively.

A squinty-eyed, frail-looking cognitive specialist, a so-called Cog on loan to the embassy, sat nearby in one of the “meat chairs”—it used a lab-cultured flesh whose bioware flaps, skin-to-skin, partially garmented the Cogs. He said to Mason, “Sir. I’m getting into her now, a little. I think she’s. a British citizen. Astrid. Sullivan.”

A new group of people, about a dozen, began shuffling in through the steel doors of the Roost. The Cog flinched a little when he saw them.

“Excuse me. Who are you?” Mason asked.

One of the newcomers, a tall man with short cropped hair, rehearsed the pass-phrase: “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch,” he said, sounding oddly amused with himself, “you must first invent a universe.” It was from the old twentieth-century astrophysicist Carl Sagan; Mason had seen it on yesterday’s last brief.

“Well,” said Mason. “OK. But we’re busy here, folks. Are you.?”

“Yes,” the tall man said, grinning at Mason. “Tertiary operations. We’re everywhere.” The man snickered.

Mason said, “Just, please, try to stay out of the way.”

The Cog was waving at Mason. Cogs were highly trained if far more conventional cousins of the controversial, shriveled-legged mutant PreCogs he had heard about. Although trained in NYPD’s PreCrime Agency alongside PreCogs, the Cogs were only faintly empathic — a little empathy went a long way, as Mason saw it — yet far less vulnerable to directed brain attacks than PreCogs. Still, Mason didn’t like them much. All the cognition stuff rubbed him the wrong way. The Cogs could see inside anyone, after all — and mess with things. He’d had enough messes.

“OK, lessee,” said the Cog, petting his meat chair’s pink armrests in a way that unnerved Mason. “An inspector with the Royal Parks Constabulary. She’s upset. Under stress, sir. The Watch. they’re looking for her. I don’t know why. Possibly mixed up with the cults. And there’s something else: I’m feeling. um, lessee. an incursion of some sort? Really vague. Possibly one of the cults, sir. She’s not. uh.”

“What?” asked Mason. “Come on, man. Fuck the ‘vague’ shit.” The Cog looked at Mason, wincing bitterly, and started jiggling his knee.

“She’s not carrying guilt —at least, not normal guilt.”

“What’s that mean? Who cares about that?”

“What I’m trying to say is. she’s. she’s — I don’t know. That’s it. I’m out now.”

“Stay on it,” said Mason. “If she’s cult, I want her kept at a distance. I want her to be thinking of nests of baby bluebirds and nothing else.”

The woman’s flowing black hair swayed as she drifted along the edge of the square, gazing off into the mottled sycamore stands, up toward the sky, then all around the building facades. She appeared both otherworldly and sprung from earthy soil and water, and Mason found himself entranced. A faint nimbus of green — raw, vernal, and fecund — reflected off the budding limbs of the sycamore and lime trees, enveloping her. She hadn’t looked at the chancery with any more interest than the rest of the square, and Mason now felt convinced that this Astrid Sullivan, whoever she was, posed no threat to the embassy.

Astrid now seemed to be looking straight into some of the hidden cameras, in a way that didn’t feel quite human to Mason, and he got a hard, close look. She wasn’t young or lithe, but tall and powerfully built, with the liquid muscles of a swimmer that swelled against her white and dark navy uniform.

In this woman’s face, Mason saw something larger than another entitled aristocrat’s or angry republican’s call to arms. It was deeper and stronger and older and more British than just about anything in England Mason saw. It was more than some ridiculous through blood and law catchphrase.