The Sons of Heaven (32 page)

“That’s
where the damn refrigeration units are,” stated Latif. “Some fortified location in the deep past, what do you want to bet? And probably with a couple of mortal personnel there for maintenance.”

“So … the people in both offices are seeing each other’s halves of the office in cyberspace?” said Kouandete.

“And the tracks on the floor are there to help them navigate,” decided Sarai.

“That’s got to be it,” said Suleyman.

“Damn, that’s clever,” Sarai said, pacing around the table. “Hide the genetic bank in the past, just like Options Research was hidden.”

“No Joseph to send us the temporal coordinates this time, though,” said Latif.

“Easy enough to get them, son,” reflected Suleyman. “The two people in Omega are picking up Alpha’s signal; all we have to do is tap into it and trace its source.”

“You’ll need to get a mortal inside for that.” Kouandete sighed, rising to his feet. His overcoat hadn’t even had time to dry out. “Book me another flight.”

The London chapter house of the Compassionates of Allah was located in Beechcroft Road, in a stately twenty-second-century house of yellow stone in a vaguely Egyptian architectural style, windowless and enigmatic. Within, at the front of the building, was the clinic with its administrative offices and various public rooms for the community it served; to the rear of the building were other, smaller rooms. Most of them housed the black brothers who ministered to the poor. Some were reserved for another purpose, however.

For example, one cell was a listening post where Kouandete waited patiently at a vast communications console.

A light flashed on the console, alerting Kouandete that the office in Gray’s Inn Road was placing an outgoing inquiry. He switched off the London
Times
and leaned close to his console’s screen to see. Echoing back to his office from the corridor outside came the sound of the Fatiha; twelve hundred hours. Someone was using the lunch hour to make a private call, perhaps.

He keyed in a hasty command and got the text of the inquiry. The inquirer was scrolling through listings: catering services? The cursor settled beside one commcode:
BLACKFRIARS MUNCHIES
. After a long moment the commcode was entered.

Suppressing an urge to giggle wildly, Kouandete intercepted the call.

BLACKFRIARS MUNCHIES! HOW MAY WE BE OF SERVICE TODAY
?, he sent.

Hi id like to know if you can cater a party?

CERTAINLY! THAT IS OUR BUSINESS. WHAT MAY WE DO FOR YOU?

Well can you do a special one? Were having a baby shower. Do you know what that is?

CERTAINLY
.

We were thinking maybe some sanwidges and crisps and punch only everything has to be blue. Can you do that?

Kouandete blinked at the screen.
OF COURSE
, he sent in reply, making a mental note to buttonhole the first London-born brother he could find and ask why on earth anyone would want blue food.

And we need a cake too and can you bring cups and plates and things?

CERTAINLY!
Kouandete sent, and was inspired to add
LET US BE THE ONE-STOP SOLUTION TO ALL YOUR CATERING NEEDS!

There was a long pause before the reply came:

Can we come round and see some of your cakes?

Kouandete drummed his fingers a moment in desperation.

NO NEED
, he sent.
ONE OF OUR SALESPERSONS WILL COME TO YOU WITH CAKE BROCHURE IN FULL COLOUR! MANY DESIGNS TO CHOOSE FROM!

Another long pause, and then:

Can you just come to the lobby please?

Kouandete grimaced, but sent in reply:
OF COURSE. WE WILL BE HAPPY TO DO SO. WHAT ADDRESS PLEASE?

First tell us how much for the lot?

Kouandete thought hard.

IT IS OUR POLICY ALWAYS TO UNDERCUT OUR COMPETITION. WHAT OTHER PRICES HAVE BEEN QUOTED TO YOU FOR THIS SERVICE?

Another pause.

Well we have about 80 pounds to play around with.

FOR YOU, CAKE AND ALL, BLACKFRIARS’PRICE IS 70 POUNDS!
Kouandete sent grandly.
WHAT ADDRESS PLEASE?

The address he expected was given. A time was agreed upon. Both parties signed off and for the next three hours Kouandete was very busy looking up online catering brochures, cutting and pasting images of fancily decorated cakes.

He had a very good faked brochure in his briefcase when he stepped into the lobby of the building in Gray’s Inn Road at sixteen hundred hours precisely. He waited, looking around, noting the surveillance cameras high up in the walls. They were obvious and easy to spot. Harder to see were the subtler devices that scanned the threshold, set to raise a silent alarm should an immortal enter the building.

Recently the Facilitator Sarai had gone up to see the legal firm of Cantwell
and Cantwell on the sixth floor, and in doing so she had unknowingly created havoc. Even at his listening post over in Tooting, Kouandete had been astounded by the flashing lights on his console as frantic messages had gone out warning the Company Board of Directors that one of
them
had entered the building!

Had Sarai pressed the lift button for the third floor, a siren would have sounded; the lift would have frozen in place as the building’s security officers appeared en masse, and they’d have escorted her out, explaining courteously that a fire drill was going on. There would have been an actual drill staged then, too, and several other diversionary tactics as needed should she have persisted in her attempts to get to the third floor.

She probably could have got up there, if she’d really wanted to. In twenty years of concealment in plain sight, no other immortal had ever walked into the building in Gray’s Inn Road, and Sarai’s chance appearance had terrified the mortals on the third floor into dithering frenzies. Fortunately for them, Sarai had had no idea the Company had a secret facility in the building, so their emergency measures hadn’t been put to the test.

Of course, it had never occurred to the Board of Directors that they might need to conceal Alpha-Omega from other mortals.

At least, Kouandete hoped it hadn’t.

He smiled now and approached the young lady who had stepped from the elevator and was peering around the lobby. “Are you Brandi Pelham?” he inquired.

“You’re Mr. Jones, yeah?” she responded. “From Blackfriars?”

“The very same. I have the brochure you asked to see—” Kouandete opened his case with a flourish and drew out the text plaquette containing the faked brochure. “As well as a list of menus for a luncheon party for twelve persons, each menu at the fixed price of seventy pounds.”

“With the cake, yeah?” Brandi took the plaquette and scrolled down through the graphics. “Ooo! Nice. This looks nice, the carrot-bran-blueberry surprise. This one, I think. And this is the food and stuff here?” She frowned at it, moving her lips as she read. “But this is fancy, isn’t it? ‘Watercress and tofu pate with minced … er … truffles’? What are truffles?”

“All-organic fat-free mushrooms,” Kouandete assured her.

“Oh! Well, that’s not too fancy then. All the same … it’s for a baby shower and that’s such an old-fashioned thing, you know. I was thinking something maybe more … er … old time sort of—”

“Traditional?” Kouandete suggested.

“Yeah! That,” said Brandi.

Kouandete wondered in exasperation why so few English bothered to become proficient in their own language, but he smiled and said: “May I recommend Vegemite?”

“Oh yeah.” Brandi’s eyes lit up.

“Menu number three, Vegemite on wholemeal with an assortment of fresh carrot and celery sticks and dipping sauce, mushroom caps stuffed with spicy tofu paste—”

“But not too spicy!”

“No, no, of course not. With maize crisps—we’ll make those blue maize crisps, of course, and blueberry punch.” Kouandete tapped in a memo on the plaquette. “I think? And of course all serving materials to be blue as well.”

“Yeah! Super,” said Brandi. “And blue decorations on the cake, yeah?”

“Certainly,” Kouandete told her.

“Brilliant. And, er, I suppose you want a deposit or something—”

“No, no.” Kouandete waved his hand. “Payment on delivery. And that’s to be Monday, 2nd May at eleven
AM
precisely, is that correct? And what suite number?”

“Er—” Brandi looked uneasy. “Well, it was to be the third floor, but—there’s a problem, see, so … well, you just come up to the third floor, and we’ll show you when you’re there, yeah? And you won’t have too many people with you?”

“Myself and two assistants for setup,” Kouandete said, rejoicing silently.

“Right then, that’s not much.” Brandi seemed relieved. “Very nice. So, we’ll see you a week tomorrow then?”

“Without fail,” said Kouandete, bowing slightly.

“Then I’ll just get back upstairs before my break’s over. This’ll be fun,” said Brandi, smiling and waving as she retreated to the elevator. “I can’t wait to see blue carrots!”

Kouandete’s smile froze on his face, but he waved good-bye cordially.

“My lord, this is the third time we’ve tried,” said Brother Youssou. He was nearly in tears, holding out the tray of bread. “The closest I can come is this purple color.”

“Close enough,” decided Latif, and took the tray. He carried it out to the long table in the refectory, where assembled brothers were busily slicing up
vegetables and trying not to look at Sarai, who was wearing a very low-cut sweater, or listen to her either for that matter, as she was attempting to sculpt cake decorations out of almond paste and indulging in blistering profanity because the work wasn’t going well.

Kouandete, with his sleeves rolled up, waited with a spatula and a gallon bucket of Vegemite. He eyed the bread doubtfully. “But that’s purple,” he said, and withheld any other objections after seeing the look on Latif’s face.

“We’re going with purple, okay?” said Latif. “It’s almost blue. Marinate the damn carrots in grape juice.” He thumped the tray down and they got to work slapping together enough Vegemite sandwiches for a party of twelve.

“Idiot Brits used to paint even their arses blue,” growled Sarai. “Now they’re too delicate for a little artificial food coloring. Oh nooo, we won’t have that in our country! Bloody shracking
hell.”
She threw her spatula and a misshapen marzipan baby bootie across the room with such velocity that the marzipan stuck to the wall.

“I must say,” observed Brother Kicham, gloomily spooning tofu into a mushroom cap, “that this was not what I anticipated when deciding to devote my life to serene contemplation of God and service to His paupers.”

“Life is full of surprises,” snapped Latif, cutting off crusts. “As long as we get a man inside, this will have been worth it.”

“You’re quite sure that simply opening the box will be enough?” Kouandete inquired, handing him another sandwich. Latif nodded.

“It’s brute force, like the camera shutter. You open it—the crystal gets exposed to the incoming signal—you close it and get out of there. There’s no mechanism for their surveillance to detect.”

“But how will I know where to open the box?” asked Kouandete. “Where will the incoming signal manifest?”

“That’s for you to find out, isn’t it?” Latif replied, carefully arranging little triangles of sandwich in a pyramid. “That’s why you get paid the big salary.”

“Look what we found at Harrods,” sang Brother Ibou, bursting in with Brother Mahjoub. “Baby blue serviettes!”

Latif sat at the console, monitoring communications from Gray’s Inn Road, scowling at the screen in fixed concentration. He was muttering something under his breath, too rapidly for any mortal to make out. He might have been praying, but wasn’t. He was reciting the words of a lullabye his mortal mother
had used to sing to him. Even with all the terror and misery attached to his last memories of mortal life, down in the foul darkness of the slave ship’s hold, he still found the lullabye obscurely comforting.

No lights on the console. There would be no lights. Everything would go smoothly. It was a simple job.

A light flashed on the console. On the bed behind him, Sarai tensed and sat up, but said nothing. Latif struck the button that allowed him to intercept the call. Where had it been directed? The switchboard.

This is Brandi, can you take any incoming please? We’re closing down for the party now
.

Latif exhaled and forwarded the message to the switchboard. There had been no more than a second’s delay.

At precisely that moment, Kouandete was stepping into the elevator of the building in Gray’s Inn Road, accompanied by Brother Ibou and Brother Mahjoub. They were loaded down with catering containers; he himself carried an immense cooler of punch. The others crowded in after him as he studied the buttons. There, beside the button for the third floor, was a small sign: PERPETUAL
ASSURANCE LTD
. He pressed the button.

They rode smoothly upward and the doors opened to reveal an ordinary-looking office: rows of consoles, supply cabinets, cheap framed prints on the walls and a dismal view of metropolitan London out the windows. There was nobody in sight but Brandi, who was waiting for them in obvious impatience. However, she smiled as she saw the abundance they carried. “Oh, yeah, that’s a lot for the money. Good.”

“Are we setting up in here?” Kouandete inquired offhandedly. Brandi made a slight face.

“Er—no. It’s sort of special. We’re having it upstairs. Come on, I’ll take you.” She led them to a small door, unmarked, lined up unobtrusively next to the lavatory doors and well out of sight of the windows. Anyone might have taken it for a broom closet, but Brandi swung the door open to reveal a half-sized lift booth. “You’ll have to go up one at a time,” she apologized, and Kouandete shrugged affably and stepped in.

“No aggro,” he said. “Wait here, chaps.” Brandi crowded in beside him and pressed an unmarked button.