The Hammerstrom Building was the headquarters for all domestic operations of the Checquy, overseen by two executives known as the Rooks. As a result, it was affectionately referred to as the Rookery. It was where government strategists made the arrangements to acquire every child born in the British Isles with unexplainable abilities. It was where the course of those children’s lives, including their rigorous education at the remote and heavily fortified boarding school known as the Estate, was planned. It was where the supernaturally gifted operatives, once grown up — the Pawns — received their assignments to stations across the country. It was the place to which intelligence was funneled from a thousand different sources. It was the place from whence elite soldiers sallied forth to combat the unnatural.
It was also where Felicity had arrived early that morning in an effort to catch up on paperwork. She had been sipping an inferior coffee and waiting for her computer to boot up when a courier trotted over and handed her the envelope containing the summons. The last part of the official message — the caution about the urine — had given Felicity a moment’s pause, but then she’d shrugged. Service in the Checquy called for all sorts of unorthodox duties. Those duties tended to be especially unorthodox when one was a member of an urban assault team.
And if you want to climb higher, she told herself, you don’t ever complain. You just show that you’re ready and eager for any challenge.
The location to which she had been commanded turned out to be a house. It was not a particularly pleasant house, being both abandoned and in disrepair, but as a result it blended in perfectly with the surrounding area. It was in Northam, the least convenient district of the Greater London conurbation, too far from the city’s center or any public transport for even the most optimistic of gentrificators, and too far from the edge of the metropolis for people to delude themselves that they were enjoying country living. Evelyn Waugh had once described it as “the perineum of the Empire.”
Felicity had found the chief of her team, Pawn Millicent Odgers, tucked away in the kitchen at the back of the house sifting through the contents of some hard plastic cases. A plump woman in her midsixties, Odgers spoke with a pure Glaswegian accent. From the shoulders up, with her gray hair in a tight bun and her glasses on a chain around her neck, she looked as if she should be checking out books in a country library. However, the rest of her was swathed in a formidable coverall of dense black material that appeared to be several sizes too large for her. She was shod in boots that looked as though they could kick in a door or a rib cage with equal facility.
“Good morning, Chief.”
“Morning, Clements. Did you bring the biscuits and the milk?”
“Yes, sir,” said Felicity, holding up her shopping bag.
“Good. Buchanan is bringing the thermoses with coffee and tea.”
“So where’s the rest of the team?”
“They’ll be trickling in. The sudden arrival of a horde of healthy people will draw attention in this neighborhood. Hopefully, they’ve all shown the same sense you have and dressed down a bit.” Felicity, having noted the tenor of the area, had taken the precaution of changing out of her suit and into a pair of jeans and a rather grubby fleece. “Meanwhile, are you ready for work?”
“Always, sir.”
“Grand to hear. I’ll brief you after you’ve put on the clothes in that bag over there.”
Felicity cautiously opened the bag and saw that it was filled with garments for which the most charitable description was “vagrant camouflage.” She sighed. It wasn’t the worst ensemble she’d ever been compelled to wear in the name of duty (one mission had called for her to put on a gillie suit composed entirely of well-manured poison ivy), but the clothes were all covered in filth and grease, and there was a pungent odor coming off them.
Gritting her teeth and controlling her gag reflex, she changed into the vestments of the damned. The shirt had several collars sewn in, so it looked like she was wearing multiple layers of old T-shirts and rugby jumpers. The jeans adhered to her legs in various places. She took a seat.
“Are you sitting comfortably?” asked Odgers.
“Are there lice in these clothes? Because — yes.”
“Then I’ll begin.” Odgers took up a file and settled her glasses on her nose. “In the past three weeks, there have been a series of mysterious disappearances throughout London. Now, at first glance, they seem unrelated. All the subjects went missing on different days; they’re of different races, different ages, different socioeconomic backgrounds. However, Checquy statisticians have identified a pattern. All the missing people have B-positive blood type.”
“Any possibility it’s a coincidence?” asked Felicity as she very deliberately did not scratch herself.
“I thought of that too,” said Odgers. “However, in addition to being B-positive, they had all received organ transplants. Something like four people with new hearts, several with new kidneys, a skin graft. Pancreases, corneas, what have you. And all done in London hospitals.”
“How on earth did they figure that out?” asked Felicity, impressed.
“Oh, you know the statisticians,” said Odgers. “They’re always trawling through all the information they can get. I think they identified this trend after the eleventh disappearance.”
“What’s the Checquy bait, though? Do we have any sign that this is something supernatural and not just, I don’t know, an extremely specific and well-informed serial killer?”
“All of the missing people vanished from their homes in the middle of the night,” said Odgers. “In most cases, it looks as if they went to bed and then, after a few hours’ sleep, got up and walked out the front door. There were no signs of forced entry or violence. They just left.”
“Did they all live alone?”
“No,” said Odgers. “There were two teenagers who were living at home, and seven of the victims were married or living with a partner, but none of the parents or partners reported anything strange happening. One woman vaguely recalled her husband getting out of bed, but she assumed he was going to the loo. She just went back to sleep and didn’t realize anything was wrong until she came down in the morning and found the front door open.”
“They didn’t take anything with them?”
“No. They didn’t even change out of their nightclothes,” said Odgers. “Didn’t put on shoes or slippers or a coat. One man apparently left wearing just a T-shirt. It was like they were sleepwalking.”
“And no sign of them afterwards?” said Felicity. “No witnesses?”
“Actually, the police managed to find a couple of witnesses,” said Odgers. “In Green Park at three in the morning, two homeless gentlemen saw one of the victims walking across the grass. They said he was in his pajamas and staring straight ahead. He didn’t respond when they called out to him.”
“So something is summoning them?” Felicity asked. She shuddered a little at the thought.
“We don’t know what’s going on,” said Odgers. “After our analysts identified the trend, they checked for connections between the missing people, but they haven’t found any.
“The most recent disappearance happened last night. A man called the police right away when he found his girlfriend gone. We got a team to the flat immediately, and one of the Pawns managed to track her scent twelve miles to a house near here. He caught traces of the scents of two of the other victims. We’re assuming that all of them are there but that the traces of the others have dissipated or been washed away since they arrived. You’re going to be scouting the house for us.”
“So the reason that I look and smell like the inside of a dumpster is...?”
“You’re going to be homeless,” said Odgers, her eyes intent on the files.
“I see. I take it that a homeless woman is not going to get a lot of attention in this neighborhood?”
“We’re less concerned about the neighbors and more about spooking the kidnapper, or the summoner, or whatever it is. The house you’re scouting is supposed to be abandoned. In fact, all of the houses in the row are. But if there is something or someone malevolent in there, and you’re spotted, you might get attacked. Or it might lure you in. Andrea Cheng will be providing backup, but obviously we’d prefer you to conduct your reconnaissance and withdraw without any incidents.”