Night of the Animals(129)

“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.

Some of the diplomatic cops in the Roost were astir.

“Shit! Look, shitheads,” one of them was saying. “It’s that goddamned monkey.”

“Not a monkey, dumbass,” said another. “Ape.”

Mason had also seen flashes of the gorilla’s face, and the humped, retreating backside of an elephant, and the giant legs of elephants, and now the gorilla again, with a strange, pained expression, looking right into one lens. There was another animal, too, but it was harder to make out—a tiger? No one had said anything about tigers.

The gorilla’s face came up again on several screens, but Astrid seemed to vanish.

“Britain’s under attack—by its own zoo? But now I don’t see the woman—this Inspector Sullivan,” said Mason. “We’ve got lots of gorilla.” The animal looked sad and frighteningly sentient.

“Nope. Not a face we’re going to find on the databases,” he said, turning to a square-faced black rookie agent from Baltimore who was manning the master CCTV console. Mason really liked this rookie, Navas, an agent who also had strong empathic skills (it was getting to be a trend in FBI and CIA recruitment). But Navas wasn’t exactly trained in using them, and for Mason, that made him far more trustworthy.

Navas smiled and shook his head, then asked in a serious tone, “What about the woman?”

“I think we’re sort of stuck,” said Mason. “I don’t actually see how her presence rises beyond a UK internal security matter. But I’m still thinking we’ve not seen the end of this. I hope she’s OK. I see no threat with her. I just don’t—but, for now, I think we’ve got to leave her to the f*cking Watch. Damn shame.” He hesitated for a moment, then turned back toward the squinty-eye Cog.

“Is she or is she not a threat to America?” Mason asked the Cog.

“I don’t . . . think so?”

“OK,” said Mason. “But the Crown doesn’t like her.”

“Good ’ole King Harry,” Navas muttered. “If he’s after her, she must be competent.”

“Damn right,” Mason said, leaning down toward him.

“Heh-heh,” said Navas, smiling awkwardly. Several of the CCTV monitors were swinging wildly in a way that made it impossible to see what they were recording. “My concentration’s shit,” said Navas. “I’m losing focus. I’m feeling like there’s something in the chancery building. Sir?”

Mason took a deep breath. He said, “What do you mean?” He glanced over at the Cog, frowning.

“What do you say, Cog?”

“I don’t know. I notice . . . something, too? Something’s in my thoughts. Something’s in here.”

“What the f*ck do you mean, ‘in here’?”

“I don’t know. I think . . . my thinking’s . . . it’s like it’s sort of rippled, sir.”

Mason looked over toward the group of newcomers who had come in with the pass-phrase.

It could be nothing, Mason knew, but a Cog’s distraction usually meant trouble. For all his dislike of Cogs, he recognized that they possessed a talent. They would clamp onto others’ minds like sharks and never let go.