Stiletto (43 page)

“So, was there a specific restaurant you wa — hey!” exclaimed Clements as Odette took off again. She pushed through the crowds, determined to follow the trail as long as she could. The scent wove back and forth across the nave, detoured down into the crypt, then came up again.

“What
are
you doing?” asked Clements behind her, but Odette ignored her. She had her phone ready in her hands, the camera function all cued up so she could get, if nothing else, a shot of the Antagonist. But the scent grew fainter, and the renewed blare of the orchestra and the motion of the crowds made it all worse, and soon Odette could not be sure if she was following something real or just her imagination.

Finally, though, she came to a small side door, tucked away behind a column. It was obviously not for use by the public, but when she bent close to the handle, there was the unmistakable tang of oranges on it.

“Are you trying to lose me?” asked Clements as she caught up. “Even after our little talk yesterday?”

“No,” said Odette distractedly. She started to open the door, and Clements made a noise of objection. Odette was half ready for an alarm to go off, but the door opened silently, and no outraged priests appeared to ask what on earth she thought she was doing.

The door led outside to a square that scores of people were crisscrossing on their way to a thousand different destinations, all of them leaving clouds of scent in their wake. The wind was blowing, completely and indisputably dissipating any chance of tracking the owner of the voice from the Whispering Gallery. Odette stared at the vista in shock. She’d been so intent on the hunt that it seemed impossible it was suddenly over, suddenly unsuccessful.

“See someone you knew?” said Clements behind her.

“What?”

“Someone you wanted to say hello to?” The Pawn’s voice was cold, dangerous.

“No!”

“Indeed,” said the Pawn. The disbelief in her voice was palpable. “Lucky for you, you were never out of my sight.” Odette could almost feel the leash tightening around her neck.

“So... lunch?” said Clements acidly.

Bart Vanderhaegen of the Chimerae stood across from the building that had, before the agonizing deaths of sixteen people, been a charming little Italian restaurant. Now, it was a charming little crime scene that people walked by quickly and talked about in hushed voices. A confusing jumble of warning signs were plastered over the padlocked door. Some were from the police, some from Public Health England, some from the Food Standards Agency. There were skulls and crossbones, and that pointy biological-hazard symbol, and the blue-and-white checkerboard of the Metropolitan Police. All of them combined suggested, very forcefully, that this was not a place you wanted to enter.

Bart turned to his comrade Sander. Where Bart was tall and dark, Sander was slim and pale, with a head that seemed slightly too big for his body. They had both been awoken the evening before when their sleeping sacs split open and poured them onto the floor of a Cardiff flat. It hadn’t been pleasant, especially since it had happened to sixteen other soldiers who had also been sleeping, curled up and peacefully adhered to the same ceiling.

There was the usual confusion that ensues when people are woken up abruptly, exacerbated by the fact that these particular people were all trained fighters with the combat instincts of pumas and they had just been dropped, naked and covered in a milky syrup, onto the ground from a height of several meters. If someone had been standing by with a camera, it would have made for an Internet video that was simultaneously the best choreographed, the most confusing, and the least erotic naked group fight scene in the history of the world. The fight had lasted for about thirty seconds before a voice testily cleared its throat in all their minds.

“Ahem.” They froze, although they did not necessarily let go of any heads that were locked in their armpits or throats that were clenched in their hands. “You are all Chimerae.” Sheepishly, they all released their grips and stood to attention, some of them slipping slightly in the slime on the floor. Now that it had been pointed out and everyone had calmed down, they
did
all recognize one another.

The voice gave the passwords that identified it as belonging to Marie Lemaier, a representative of Graaf Ernst van Suchtlen. She informed them that they had all been asleep for two years and four months. The good news was that they were not being called forth to wage a guerrilla war against the Checquy. (When they were put under, that had been a distinct possibility.) Rather, negotiations for peace with the Checquy were under way.

“There is a problem, however,” said Marie’s voice. She went on to explain the situation and ordered the gathered Chimerae to come to London (once they’d cleaned themselves off and put on some clothes) and bend all their efforts to tracking down and obliterating these Antagonists. She made it especially clear that, above all, the Chimerae must avoid the notice of the Checquy. Other instructions were given, and the soldiers snapped into action.

A rota was worked out so that the flat’s single shower could be used as efficiently as possible. The first Chimera to emerge from the shower, an enormous man named Jan Kamphuis, was assigned the task of preparing breakfast for the others. He broke open trunks filled with a shiny agar and peeled away the gelatin to reveal perfectly preserved ingredients. Shortly, he was serving up bacon, eggs, waffles, and (him being Dutch) toast with chocolate sprinkles.

Over the course of the night, all eighteen men and women were showered, clothed, fed, and watered. They decrypted and reviewed the files that were e-mailed to their brains and stretched out the kinks that came from being in the fetal position for months. They were issued travel and identification documents, corporate credit cards, and, thanks to a little neurolinguistic alteration, new English accents from all around the country. Four of them were provided with firearms, and everyone had two mobile telephones.

At six in the morning, having established that there was no one watching, the Chimerae filed out of the flat in one continuous stream. They split up into smaller groups, made their way to either Cardiff Central Station or one of various car-rental offices, and then proceeded to London. From there, they spread out into the city seeking traces of their quarry. At St. Pancras Station, Bart, Sander, and Laurita, who had been tasked with a specific mission, waited in a café and were joined by a Grafter who had come over on the Eurostar. She was extremely nervous and kept looking over her shoulder, but she handed them a case and a piece of paper with the address of the Italian restaurant before scuttling off to catch the train home.

Throughout the day, four different cabs drove the three of them by the ill-fated restaurant and they examined it cautiously. Each of them had eyes for a different element, but they all agreed that it looked completely deserted. They adjourned to another café and spent several hours poring over street maps, working out their plans, their fallback plans, and the fallbacks to their fallbacks. A late dinner at a pub in Soho, a leisurely stroll down Oxford Street, and now, at two in the morning, Bart and Sander were loitering on the opposite corner while Laurita, who was by far the stealthiest of them, scaled the back wall and investigated the roof.

“Do you think there’s a Checquy in there?” asked Sander under his breath. The Chimerae’s hearing was amplified so they could hear each other’s barest whispers. Bart shrugged slightly. “Would they have left a guard in there after — how many days was it?” Bart shrugged again. “But they say that sometimes murderers and arsonists return to the scene of the crime. Maybe the Checquy would think it was worth a try.”

They had already discussed at length the possibility that Laurita would meet a threat in there, but Sander always felt the need to say something. It was just his way. Bart’s way was to say nothing, shrug, and manfully resist the urge to strangle him.

A long pause ensued.

“I like these new phones,” remarked Sander finally. “They’ve gotten very thin in the past three years, haven’t they?”

“Gentlemen,” said Laurita at a deafeningly normal volume from right behind them. Neither of them jumped, because they were professionals. “Well, it’s clear of people,” she said. “But they’ve left behind a couple of cameras.”

“Can we disconnect them?” asked Bart.

She shook her head. “Live feed to somewhere,” she said. “If we stopped them, the Checquy would know something had happened.”

“So we’ll have to go in clean,” said Bart. The three of them had fibers woven throughout their skin that would render them invisible to cameras. The only flaw was that their clothing and hair enjoyed no such features. “Laurita, you’ll stand watch outside.”

They made their way around to the back of the restaurant and scaled the walls to the sloping roof. Laurita remained impassive as the two men removed their clothing and retracted every hair on their bodies back into their skin. She had already opened a skylight, and they dropped soundlessly into the room where sixteen people had died. It was dark except for the dim glow that oozed in from the skylight.

“Begin when you’re ready,” whispered Bart, too quietly for a camera’s microphone to catch. Sander nodded. He took up a crouching stance and Bart watched as a ripple went through his comrade’s muscles, locking his legs and back into place. The fair man’s jaw opened, wider and wider, finally unhinging itself like a snake’s. His nostrils flared, and his nose swung up and back into his face. He began to take deep breaths, so long and deep that his rib cage expanded much more than was a normal rib cage’s wont. His tongue grew longer and broader and wagged about in the air. It was hardly dignified, but Sander had the smelling ability of a bloodhound and the tasting ability of a Manhattan food critic.

For long minutes, he stood there, drawing in those deep breaths. When he breathed out, however, the air was not released through his mouth. Instead, rows of bladders inflated along his back like balloons. Bart knew that this was so that the particles and traces that Sander had just sampled would not be redistributed to complicate his ongoing search.

The Checquy had scoured the restaurant for any clue of what might have caused the deaths of those people, but they had faced an almost impossible task. Hundreds upon hundreds of people had passed through those rooms, all leaving microscopic vestiges of themselves. With so much to sift through, the Checquy could not find the trail — especially since they had no idea what they were looking for. But the Chimerae knew exactly what they were looking for. The case that the Grafter woman had given them contained ampules of samples that the Broederschap had gathered from the Antagonists. Winnowing out the minute traces of their quarry was still a Herculean task, but then —

“I have it!”
exclaimed Sander. He stood up, eyes blazing with triumph. “I’ve got their trail!”

“How do I look?” asked Odette.

“Don’t talk to me,” said Alessio.

Odette turned to where he sat on the couch. His arms were folded, and he glared at her from under his miniature top hat. He was wearing black morning dress, and with his tails and waistcoat, he looked like he’d stepped out of a period drama and was about to be sent off to Harrow with a young Winston Churchill to learn his Latin verbs, get up to some merry japes, and maybe get flogged before graduating and going off to supervise the empire. Odette thought he looked adorable but resisted the urge to say so. He appeared to be suffering enough.

“I don’t have to be dressed like this, you know,” said Alessio sullenly. “I looked it up on the web, and it said that since I’m under seventeen, I’m allowed to wear a lounge suit. Then I looked up
lounge suit,
and it turns out it’s just a suit, which I already have. But instead, I’m dressed like... like...” Words failed him.

“You’re lucky,” said Odette. “You have a uniform; you know exactly what you’re supposed to wear. I’m supposed to wear a ‘formal day dress of modest length.’”

“What’s ‘modest length’?”

“Just above the knee or longer.”

“Well, that’s what you’re wearing,” said Alessio.

“Yes, but is it
right?
” She sighed and looked at herself in the mirror. “Is it appropriate?” Her dress, a princess cut in cream and the palest of greens, had cost an astounding amount of money, but she was still agonizing over it. She’d bought it in Brussels and was now worrying that it was not British enough.

It came to just below the knee and had long sleeves and a round collar. It was elegant — at least she was pretty sure it was elegant — and cut in such a way that it bullied her into having excellent posture. She felt like the kind of woman who could reject James Bond at a garden party, a woman who would raise a single wry eyebrow at everything anyone said. But was that the appropriate feeling for Royal Ascot? The problem of what to wear to this occasion had worried her slightly less than the prospect of meeting with the inhuman monsters who had tried to destroy her people, but only slightly.

“The dress covers you,” Alessio said with a shrug, “and
you
don’t look like Mr. Bumble sold you to an undertaker, so I don’t know what you have to worry about.”

“Royal Ascot is a major event in the British social calendar,” said Odette.

“Horse races.” Alessio snorted dismissively.

“Thousands of people attend every year,” said Odette tightly. She anxiously did that thing where you adjust your garments and then panic that you have ruined them. “There is vast press coverage, as much for the fashion as for the races. The Royal Family attends. And we’re going to be in the Royal Enclosure as personal guests of the Court of the Checquy.”

“What’s the Royal Enclosure? A paddock where they keep the King and Queen?”

“It’s an exclusive area open only to members,” Odette informed him.

“Oh.” He paused. “It sounds pretty special.”

“It is.”

“And
that’s
what you’re wearing?”

She looked at him with genuine hatred for a moment.