This choice: The family in Kensington would be a good base • Go Back...Chapter #78The Sack of Kensington by: Seuzz   Jacob's already got you on the A12 and is turning into Stratford when you make the decision. You call up Google Maps on your phone and rotate the screen ninety degrees at a time while stroking various spidery cracks in the screen. When you've got the phone right-side up again, a silvery path blazes out on the map and a sequence of alchemical symbols pops up at the bottom. The latter you rapidly tap into an arcane calculator, and frown at the resulting quotient. You feed that number back into the path generator and recalculate. This process you repeat half a dozen times until you've generated a result that you deem you and your driver can both live with.
So when you're finally approaching the North Circular Road, you tell Jacob to turn right instead of left. "Aren't we going back to Cambridge?" he asks.
"Change of plans. Trust your Uncle Hal. Got plenty of petrol? Good lad." The van sputters and burps as Jacob makes a hard dive to the right across traffic.
You send him down to Barking before turning back toward the City, and you skirt the City Airport to dive under the Thames at come out at Woolwich. The A2 takes you into Greenwich, where you circle the observatory three times—"tying the knot on the Prime Meridian"—before crossing under the river again into Limehouse. You cut a zig-zag over to the 501, which you follow north until you hit Regent's Park which, much to Jacob's annoyance, you circumnavigate the long way around only to plunge down the A4201 into Soho. "Do you know where we're going?" he fumes.
"To the thousandth of a second of latitude and longitude. But the journey matters as much as the destination." You allow him a brief glance at the screen of your phone. "Plotted a course that balances speed, gas mileage, and favor."
"Favor?"
"To the cause. There are such things as arriving too early or too late, you know, or arriving having left karma in a corner shop loo with her pants down around her ankles. Watch for Brewer Street on your left. If we can't dodge Piccadilly Circus, I'll have to send us out to Canary Wharf and back through Greenwich again."
A red spot shows in Jacob's cheek. You don't tell him that even after heavily weighting "favor" into your calculations, you've only picked up an additional sixteen percent chance of success in the upcoming venture by adding all these pointless loops about the City.
"What about Joe?" he asks after you've passed Big Ben going east and then passed it again going west after rounding the Imperial War Museum. "He's on his way to Cambridge."
"Factored in." You glare at a police vehicle that, with flashing lights, is creeping past you. "He'll call when he finds we're not there, and I'll have him pick up a few things and bring them back."
"He'll be mad you didn't tell him ahead of time about the change in plans."
"What's a spasm of aggravation when I tell him as against a stew of the same all the way up the M11? Mind you, maybe I should have sent you to my digs and had him take the wheel here. Jacob's seen London before. Joe hasn't." You sniff at the Savoy Hotel as you pass it again on your way toward St. Paul's.
* * * * *
An hour later the van slides into a Kensington neighborhood only three-and-a-quarter miles from where you started. Jacob is glowering but you're humming, as by improvising a few switchbacks in the midst of the drive you've raised your odds of success by a further two percent at a cost of only fourteen more miles of urban driving. "Park here," you say when you're opposite Number 12 on a street of tall, narrow, white-washed houses that stand proudly behind their iron railings.
"Right there?" he protests. "I can't, it's illegal!"
"Exactly," you retort. "Look, I've told you, I've got this calculated to the foot. Right there." You point. "You trust your stars, I trust mine. Do you trust me?"
"No one trusts you, Hal. We just put up with you." But he inches into the spot you've designated.
"Now," you say after you've both hopped out. "You nip roun' the back, see if there's a private way in. I'll take the front."
"You? Dressed like that?" Jacob's eyes boggle behind his black-framed glasses. He glances up uneasily at the limestone house, which only misses a magical nanny to look like something out of an Edwardian fairy tale.
"We each have our role in the collective. This is mine." With a clap to his shoulder you send him down the sidewalk while you advance up the front. Three tall steps take you to a door that's been polished a black ebony. You'd mar the finish with a hard rap of an umbrella handle, but you've only your own knuckles, so you ring the bell.
The man who answers is wearing a business suit, but his demeanor shouts "manservant." He is a graying but handsome fifty-something, with the angular good looks of a TV actor. Just the sort these nouveau nobs like to employ to answer their doors, you muse. The face and figure to play the Duke of Doshbury in some period drama where the family is short on brass even though the country estate is the size of Belgium and all the toilets are enameled in pearl. He frowns at you, and his eyes show pain.
"Sign a petition protesting the shortage of council housing off Kensington High Street?" you ask.
His brow furrows. "What?"
"Look around. See any poor people? No? It's a crime, that is, and needs protesting."
"We're not interested." He starts to close the door.
"Who's 'we'? You or your master? Not asking him to sign, comrade, I'm asking you as your own man, proudly upright on your own feet, to show solidarity with the oppressed classes what—"
The door slams in your face. "Lickspittle," you mutter. You hop to the end of the walk and grin at the police cruiser that's just come prowling down the street. It slows as it nears Jacob's van. You lean against the railing and cock an eye back at the house. A curtain twitches in the front.
You take that as your signal and hightail it around the same corner Jacob went down. With a backward glance you glimpse the cruiser stopping by the van, and the manservant charging briskly down the walk toward it. Then you're around the back.
Jacob is hustling back your way, but he stops at your whistle. "Help a mate over?" you ask, and gesture with your hands like you're picking up a table. Jacob blinks, then nods. You feel something like a giant invisible fist clamping around your torso, and it lifts you over the fence and into the yard. "There a back way in? Aces!" You dash back the direction he came.
It's bolted of course, but you slip a blank key into the lock and bang it softly with the handle of the screwdriver Hal always carries in his hip pocket. Once it's unlocked, you and he slip inside.
The door opens into a scullery, and the two of you quickly tiptoe through it and the adjoining kitchen into a long, dark hallway leading to the front. There's no one in the side dining room or the front foyer or parlor. "Meet you on the first floor," you tell Jacob, and send him upstairs. You glance into the room opposite the parlor. It's a library—also empty—and you cluck your tongue at the bookshelves. The tomes are all bound in leather, looking like they were bought by the yard as decor. Probably they're false fronts, for a wet bar if the master has taste, and for a big screen TV if he doesn't.
A glance through the front window shows the manservant hurrying back up, so you scurry into the foyer, where you untie and drop a red bandana onto the polished wood floor. You're at the top of the stairs before the front door opens. "Anyone home?" you hiss at Jacob. He shrugs and points to the steps leading to the next floor up.
Then from below comes a cry and a crash. When you look back over the balustrade, the manservant is sprawled face down on the parquet. He doesn't move. "Check the top floor," you murmur to Jacob. "But man and mistress should be at work, sprogs at play. We got the place to ourselves, it looks like."
But as you're bending by the manservant's foot, retrieving the rag you'd dropped at the door, a female voice calls from high up. "Charles? Did something happen?"
"No, mum," you shout back. "Just dropped this morning's delivery! There's fifty-pound notes all over the floor! I'll fetch a broom!"
Footsteps, and a woman appears at the top of the stairs. Her eyes go wide when she sees you.
Then she shoots up a foot into the air, her arms clapped to her side, and gasps. You run up and shove the bandana into her mouth. "I'll find some cord," you tell Jacob, who has come round a corner. "You find a bedroom we can stash her in."
* * * * *
Ten minutes later you're rubbing your hands over Lenke Crayson and Charles the Willingly Exploited Representative of the Working Class. Both are trussed up tightly, though the latter is still unconscious. You'd call it a fine stroke of luck catching them both, but like most with Catilindrian-inflected essentia, you make your own luck.
Lenke Crayson is one of Fane's in-house solicitors, and Hal Swann has met her sharp end before. Matthew Crayson, the husband, runs the UK branch of Vejoves S.A., a Fane-owned Swiss pharmaceutical concern. They have two girls still living with them: Portia who is twenty and Nerissa who is eighteen.
This is a good place to operate undercover, even if Matthew and Lenke are only corporate tools. Once Joe gets out with the supplies—you've since talked to him and told him what you need from Cambridge—you can start making golems and disguises.
But should you, Hal Swann, go undercover? Or pull the strings from afar?  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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