“CANDID, will comply. Over. Fuck,” she adds. “Good news and bad news,” she tells Cassie; “the seventh cavalry is riding to the rescue, but they won’t get here for thirty to sixty minutes. We need to find somewhere to hide out.”
Cassie shakes off her hand and crawls out from under the table. After a few seconds Mo follows her, wincing slightly; her knees aren’t happy about crawling over hardwood these days. Cassie is standing up, holding a tray of champagne flutes and Mo does a double take as she realizes the girl’s got her waitress glamour back in place. “One of us needs to find somewhere to hide out, YesYes?” Cassie winks at her.
Mo thinks fast. If Schiller’s people decide things have gone irretrievably wrong they won’t leave any witnesses behind, but it’ll take the Sleeper cultists time to organize a large-scale conversion—or a massacre—without triggering a messy panic. If she and Cassie can blend in with the guests—“This will buy you ten or fifteen minutes, but it’s worth a try.” She takes stock of herself. Her hair’s a mess and she’s lost her shoes; she smooths down her dress and tucks a straying lock of hair back as she prepares to rejoin the party. “Let’s split. You go left, I’ll go right, they’re looking for two fugitives, not a waitress and a guest. Aim to meet me at the Bentley parked behind the stable block.”
“YesYes, on my way.” Cassie taps her ear—Mo blinks as the tip twitches, then disappears from her vision again—and walks away in the direction of the French windows onto the terrace out back, tray held high. Mo wastes no time but heads for the side door opening into the ballroom.
The instant she slips inside she realizes that something is very wrong. The band plays on in the pavilion on the lawn, but the guests aren’t dancing—they’re clumping in corners, agitated and upset. The doors to the Grand Hall are half-closed and an armed policeman stands in the open half, blocking the exit and shooing away anyone who approaches. More and more of the guests are drifting towards the terrace and the gardens beyond.
Mo approaches a small cluster of silverback banking executives and their younger, prettier partners. “Do you know what’s going on?” she asks, deliberately cutting into a mansplaining monologue.
“There’s some sort of incident out front”—the sixty-something with the five-hundred-pound haircut leers down her cleavage unconsciously—“police are handling it, nothing to worry about, I’m sure.”
Mo stares at him. “I heard shots.”
“I should think that was the police—”
Silverback’s partner is tugging at his arm and giving Mo a very obvious side-eye, one second away from escalating, so she nods and turns away, dismissing the guy even as he carries on monologuing at her back. She heads across the room towards a side table and picks up a glass of bubbly for social camouflage. As a single woman in this crowd she’s going to stand out, but Silverback and his company were just too sleazy to put up with. She casts around and sees two men and women of roughly comparable age near the French doors, glancing nervously at the guarded entrance. Arts people, she guesses, not pretty enough to be rock stars or actors, slightly unconventional and thus unlikely to be politicians or business magnates. She plasters a smile on her face and minces over.
“Hi. I’m terribly sorry about this, but do you mind if I stand with you people and pretend to be making conversation?” She tilts her head, briefly indicating Silverback and his friends. “I just ran into my ex and he’s a lot less likely to be a nuisance—make a scene—around other people.”
“Oh, honey.” One of the women smiles sympathetically—thirty-something, fifties-vintage butterfly glasses, and cherry red hair—“been there, done that, join the club.”
“Thank you.” Mo glances at her companions. Tall, thin, academic-looking guy in a bow tie and tweed jacket rather than a dinner jacket; bald bloke with a beard and a ruddy wine-drinker’s nose in a dinner jacket that is at least a decade out of date; and an older woman with distinguished silver hair and a purple velvet frock. “Sorry to be a nuisance. I’ll just stand here and smile and nod if you don’t mind?”
Red-Nose speaks: “If he’s trouble, do you want me to talk to the cops—”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” Mo thinks fast. “He has lawyers. I just wasn’t expecting him here.” Across the room, out of the side of her eye, she spots a blonde woman in a white shift stalking past. She’s got something in her right hand down by her side and for some reason trying to focus on it makes Mo’s eyes hurt and a prickly sweat stand out on her forehead. Right. “He tried to screw me over the settlement,” she extemporizes. At the other side of the room, a jacketless man, his tie draped around his open collar, dark stains on his trousers (which are tight around the crotch). She looks away hastily. “He’s the overcontrolling type.” She has no idea whether she’s libeling the silverback executive or not but she’s desperate to keep talking because now her conversational gatecrashing gambit has paid off and her four companions are nodding and looking sympathetic, as if she’s been here all along. She smiles at Red-Nose. “What brings you here?”
“I think I’m part of the comic relief,” he says self-deprecatingly, before launching into a purportedly amusing anecdote about internal politics between dueling BBC directors who can’t decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series—Mo tunes it out, nodding and making encouraging noises at appropriate intervals as she scans the room for threats.
Two more handmaids slip into the ballroom behind the back of the policeman, who pays them no attention. Mo pulls out her phone. “Excuse me, I think someone just texted,” she says, smiling as she glances down at it and fires up a scanner app. She turns away from her companions and raises it to eye level, seeing the telltale flares of light limning the heads and crotches of the possessed. “Sorry, my son wants to see what it’s like,” she says, turning back.
Woman in Purple raises an eyebrow. “Really? I thought you were playing Ingress.” Mo suppresses the urge to scream; Purple must have glimpsed the scanner display.
She makes a snap decision: she can’t rescue everybody but she’ll save as many as she can. “I don’t expect you to believe anything I say, but it would be a really good idea if we all stepped outside onto the patio before the people who have just come in start to herd everyone into the basement.”
Purple’s eyes narrow. “That’s not your husband—”
The jacketless man is approaching. “Sorry to interrupt, but we have a security situation. There are intruders in the grounds. Please go into the main hall, then take shelter in the basement.” He doesn’t make eye contact or wait for any acknowledgment but proceeds to the next knot of conversation, evidently unaware of the effect of his writhing priapism. The eye-warping blur at his right hand stings Mo’s eyes for a moment, then resolves into a squat-looking machine pistol.