Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

“Trouble?” I said innocently. “Us?”

“If you should be arrested, the department has never heard of you,” said Diment. “We’ll deny all knowledge of you, and swear blind the passes are forged. Would you like to sign for your passes?”

“What do you think?” said Molly.

“Oh, here,” said Diment. “Take the bloody things, so I can go home.”

He thrust two small laminated passes into my hand. Very official-looking, but carefully bland. No photo ID, because MI-13 agents don’t like to be remembered, and the official signatures were just scrawls. Perfect.

“Right. That’s it. I’m off,” said Diment. “I am going home to a warm bed and a hot wife, and if you should need any further assistance, feel free to phone anyone except me. Phone MacAlpine. He never liked me. Good-bye.”

And he strode off into the night, still muttering to himself. Molly looked at me.

“If I’d known it was this easy to break into Parliament, I’d have done it years ago. You know, I could get you a really good deal on several gallons of napalm. . . .”

“Another time,” I said.

Getting into the House of Commons was easy: Flash the passes around and look confident. The police on duty nodded to us. The security guards inside insisted on a close look at the passes, but bowed down to the implied might of MI-13. The outer lobby was exactly like it looks on television: very old, steeped in history and tradition. Full of people with vaguely familiar faces coming and going with an important air about them, even at this early hour of the morning. The business of government never sleeps, which is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not. Occasionally someone very dignified and important would come striding through the outer lobby, on very important business, smiling graciously at the television crews waiting about, because you never knew when a camera might be rolling. The television reporters showed no interest in Molly or me. They didn’t recognise us, so we couldn’t be important.

A uniformed security guard with a large sniffer dog felt quite the opposite, and came forward to check us out. So I immediately knelt down and made a big fuss over the dog, rubbing his head and scratching behind his ears, and he wagged his tail happily as I spoke cheerful nonsense to him. The guard looked pained.

“Please don’t do that, sir; he’s working.”

“Oh . . . is he working, then? Is he?” I said to the dog. “Is he working then!”

“Soppy,” said Molly.

I showed the guard our passes, and he reluctantly dragged his dog away, only to be replaced almost immediately by a plain-clothed security man who seemed to take it as a personal insult that he hadn’t been briefed about an MI-I3 presence in advance. He looked down his nose at me, and then at Molly, and studied our passes very thoroughly, obviously just itching to find something he could say was wrong with them.

“MI-13,” he said sniffily. “I am Peregrine Le Behan.” And he looked down his nose again, clearly expecting the name to mean something to us. I think we were both supposed to bow down and offer him our firstborn, to appease his wrath. When we looked back at him blankly, he glared at both of us. “No one from your department cleared this with me! Or anyone from Drood Hall. Oh, yes, Eddie Drood and Molly Metcalf . . . I’ve read your files. You’re trouble, both of you, and I want to know what you’re doing here with MI-13 passes!”

“At least I’m not one other anymore,” said Molly.

“The fact that we’re using the passes should tell you that we’re not here as ourselves,” I said. “As far as you’re concerned, as far as anyone’s concerned, there’s no need to make a big deal of this. We’re just two MI-13 people having a quiet look round. No need to panic anyone, is there?”

Le Behan sniffed loudly. “These passes have no validity, since they weren’t cleared with me. So I’m confiscating them. And you will both have to come with me while I make further enquiries. I’m sure we can find somewhere suitably depressing to hold you while I find out what’s really going on. You should never have been allowed in here in the first place.”

“Allowed?” I said, and something in my voice made him fall back a step. I smiled coldly. “No one allows Droods to do anything. We do what needs doing, and minor functionaries like you get the hell out of the way, if they don’t want to be trampled underfoot.”

Le Behan started to splutter something officious and suitably outraged, so I armoured up my right fist and held it up in front of his face. He stopped talking immediately, his wide eyes fixed on the golden spikes rising up from my knuckles. He actually whimpered a little. He jerked his gaze away and looked at Molly. She smiled unpleasantly, snapped her fingers and turned his expensive shoes into a pair of dead fish. Le Behan looked like he was going to burst into tears.

“Now be a good little functionary, Peregrine, and piss off,” I said. “Or we’ll get cranky.”

“Seriously cranky,” said Molly.

“And give me back the bloody passes,” I said. He thrust them into my hand, and I gave him a hard look. “Remember: We were never here. Or we’ll fix it so you were never here.”

“Ever,” said Molly.

Le Behan squelched mournfully away in his dead fish, and I made my armoured fist disappear. No one noticed. No alarms. No one was paying us any attention at all. The television people were still waiting for someone important to show up. Security in the outer lobby was seriously rubbish. I’d have to have a word with someone about that later.

Molly and I wandered around the outer lobby, looking the place over. The old walls looked solid enough, but my torc-backed Sight led me immediately to one particular section tucked away in a corner. As we approached, several quite powerful move along; nothing to see here avoidance spells kicked in, more than enough to divert normal attention. Molly brushed them aside with a sweep of her hand, like clinging cobwebs. As we drew closer, my Sight showed me a massive door set into the wall, made of solid gold. Molly made admiring noises.

“Is that really solid gold . . . ? It is, it is! Tons of it! Well, one up on the Wulfshead’s silver door . . .”

“Don’t get any ideas,” I said. “The door is fused to the wall; you couldn’t pry that loose with an enchanted crowbar.” I ran my fingertips across the gleaming gold. It was unnaturally warm to the touch, and subtly unpleasant. As though there were something really nasty on the other side. “This isn’t just gold, Molly. It feels . . . inhabited.”

“Could this be the same material as your armour?” said Molly.

“Good question,” I said. “Obviously not the strange matter of my current armour, but . . . the Heart got up to a lot of stuff that most of the family never got to hear about. No . . . No. I don’t think so. London Undertowen had already been in existence for centuries before the Heart crashed into our reality. This is probably a coincidence.”

But I couldn’t seem to make myself feel comfortable about that, even as I said it.

“How do we get in?” Molly said briskly. “Without our having to do something urgent, violent and attention-gathering?”

“We use the passWord,” I said; and I said it. The golden door swung smoothly and silently open before us.

“How did you know that?” said Molly.

“Because Droods know everything,” I said.

“Not always,” she said sweetly. “Or we wouldn’t need to be here, would we?”

“True,” I said.

Inside the door, a narrow stairway of very old, very smooth and worn-down stone steps led away into darkness. They looked old enough to have actually been Roman. I looked back, but no one was paying us any attention. The door’s avoidance spells were protecting us. I led the way down the steps, Molly following close behind. She wanted to go first, but I wouldn’t let her, and then she wanted to walk beside me, but the steps weren’t wide enough; so she settled for walking close behind and sulking. There was no handrail, so we had to press our shoulders hard against the rough stone of the adjoining wall to be sure we didn’t accidentally get too close to the edge of the steps, and the apparently bottomless drop beyond.