Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know it. How does it apply?’

‘The circles – the ones with Ajulutsikael’s old names on them – they’re something totally new. A weapon that one demon used to attack another. It’s got applications that go way outside this one situation. That was the first thing she saw – that if you got a handle on this, you could have something that would spike any demon, anywhere. Better than silver, better than holy water. She couldn’t pass it up, Castor. And she couldn’t let you get in the way of it.’

Over two untasted pints of London Pride, he filled me in on how the whole thing had gone down.

As soon as I hung up after trying to call Juliet from Pen’s house, Jenna-Jane put her own plans – freshly minted – into action. Transferring her mobile from her handbag to her pocket, she waited a minute or two and then made it ring by thumbing through the menus until she got to the one where you set the ringtone. She did that blind, from memory, which tells you something about the way her mind works.

Then she took the non-existent call and pretended to get all excited about finally turning up a lead on Martin Moulson. In fact, she’d already run Moulson to ground two days earlier, while I was in Macedonia, and sent Gil down to talk to him. Gil had got nothing worth having because Moulson hadn’t let him through the door, but that explained the old man’s references to ‘you people’ and the receptionist’s story of a journalist trying to get an interview.

The next priority was to get my phone away from me, because my phone had Juliet’s number on it. Jenna-Jane had done that with insolent ease by means of the ‘Will you trade your worn-out mobile for this state-of-the-art radio?’ gag, and then while Gentle – who probably wasn’t in on any of this – stalled me with an instant tutorial, she went outside to give Dicks his instructions.

As soon as she waved me off she called the switchboard at the MOU, both to tell DeJong he was needed for back-up and to start the ball rolling for the real order of business, which was trapping Juliet.

This was the most dangerous part of the exercise, and McClennan said she approached it with a meticulous eye for detail. In the weapons lockers at the unit she had plentiful supplies of the semi-legal neurotoxin OPG and a lot of other anti-demon specifics that could be relied on to take Juliet down if she came on them unawares. But Jenna-Jane was canny enough to realise that any demon who’d been in my circle of acquaintance would know better than to walk into the MOU in the first place.

So she laid her trap somewhere else and moved her people in. Then she called Juliet, and kept on calling until she got an answer. She told her the truth, at least for starters, knowing that the truth would do the job better than any lie: Asmodeus has your girlfriend and God only knows what he means to do with her.

Where? Juliet had demanded. Where is he? Where is the monster now?

The last place anyone would think of looking for him, Jenna-Jane told her. He’s gone to ground in his old cell at the Charles Stanger. The staff have evacuated the place. The police have been called, but what can the police do? Castor said I should tell you, because you’re the only one who might stand a chance . . .

Juliet bought it straight out. If she’d been in her right mind, she would have smelled a whole nest of rats, but she wasn’t. For whatever reason, Asmodeus had maddened and confused her and raised the ghosts of her young, reckless self inside her over a period of days or weeks. By this time she didn’t know which way was up. She was acting like a green kid with only a couple of centuries under her belt.

The Stanger had been cleared, as per Jenna-Jane’s orders. Juliet brought her wasp-yellow Maserati Spyder to a screaming, skidding halt in the car park, leaving twin teardrops of burned rubber on the asphalt, and sprinted for the door. It was wide open.

Nobody in the foyer or at the reception desk. Nobody to challenge or question her as she strode along the broad main corridor and through into the annexe where Rafi’s purpose-built cell had been installed. Probably just as well. She was in no mood to listen to reason, and anyone who’d got in her way long enough to ask her who she was visiting would probably have fallen under her stiletto heels a second later.

The cell door was closed but not locked. She turned the handle and wrenched it open. Doing that set off three canisters of OPG that Jenna-Jane’s suspiciously experienced munitions team had set immediately inside the door, all of them more or less at head height. Juliet got a lungful of the stuff before she even knew what it was.

OPG is a leaner, meaner version of the Tabun nerve gas invented by Gerhard Schrader back in the 1930s – the first of the ever-popular cyanophosphides. There’s a UN resolution specifically outlawing its use, but only in a battlefield context. Used therapeutically, in minuscule doses, it reverses some of the effects of senile dementia. That loophole allows institutions like the Charles Stanger and the MOU to stock it in industrial quantities and call it medicine.

Juliet suddenly found that her arms and legs didn’t want to do what they were told. Spastic tremors tore through her when she tried to move, and the muscles of her throat constricted as suddenly as a door slamming closed.

Demons are built differently from people though, for all that we come from the same stock. Juliet was fighting to bring her limbs back under her conscious control when the cell door immediately behind her also opened, and three men wearing masks and full hazmat suits cut loose at her with specially adapted automatic rifles firing silver-plated hollow-point ammunition.

The white metal ripped through Juliet like fistfuls of oblivion. She was probably already finished at that point, but she leaned into the impacts and managed to fall forward rather than back, her arms thrown out in a blind, flailing sweep. She barely connected, but then again she barely had to. Two of Jenna-Jane’s three sharpshooters died suddenly and messily as Juliet’s razor-sharp fingernails punctured the wire-weave plastic of their decontamination suits and the airborne poison touched their skin.

But the silver had done its work, finishing what the gas had started. Juliet was down, and she wasn’t moving. A second squad – including Gil himself – came up the corridor, no doubt with huge reluctance given what they’d just seen happen to their comrades, but once they ascertained that Juliet was out for the count, they bound her hands and feet with steel and silver bands, lifted her onto a stretcher trolley and wheeled her out. By the time they got her into the unmarked MOU acquisitions vehicle – a Bedford van fitted with soundproofing and top-of-the-rage restraint gear – the air filters were already being turned on inside the Stanger, kick-starting the laborious process of putting the neurotoxic genie back in its bottle.

They took Juliet back to the MOU, and down into the basement. The door had closed in Gil’s face. He’d done his job, and Jenna-Jane was keen to oversee the rest of the operation by herself. This was, after all, where she excelled: at the porous interface between scientific inquiry and legalised torture. It seems to be a happening place these days.

I sat and digested these facts in silence after Gil had finished speaking. Something in his face told me there was still some bad shit to come, but this was bad enough to be going on with. And in the meantime it was probably a good idea to clear the air by asking the obvious question.

‘Why are you doing this, McClennan?’ I demanded. ‘You hate my guts. It doesn’t make sense that you’d come riding to my rescue – or that you’d stab Jenna-Jane in the back, which would put you way out of position for kissing her arse.’