"Possession of forged documents, violations of the Immigration and Naturalization laws, and weapons violations. Those are enough for the hearing."
Brian relaxed a touch. They were all bail offenses. No murder charges or planted drugs. Spend a night or two in jail, hand them some fairy gold -- or more accurately, a fairy check that would evaporate in mid-transfer -- and walk away. He'd eaten prison food before. No worse than field rations and a hell of a lot better than gnawing on cold mutton in a Falkland Islands trench. The place was even warm and dry.
The corporal guided him through a maze of corridors and rooms, booking and mug shot and fingerprints, change into an orange jump-suit and inventory of prisoner's possessions with signed receipt. Doors clicked and banged and echoed. He wrinkled his nose as they passed a trusty hosing down the holding cell and the drunk inside it, sour with puke, battered from a fight or the arrest, still screaming abuse at some distant bint named Carla. He mapped it all and rated it, compared with other prisons he'd seen in Burma and Turkey and Mexico and England. About a seven, he thought, on a scale of ten. I've stayed in worse hotels.
And he didn't kill anybody. After all, he was here to take pressure off Jo and David, not add to it. The cops had demanded to see first Maureen and then him, proof that they were still alive and kicking. Otherwise, they would just keep on sitting in their cruisers outside of Jo's apartment and idling, calling them in for questioning every day or so, tapping phones and presenting search warrants at odd hours, tracking bank transactions. Cops had a million ways to make themselves obnoxious, all within the law.
A final buzz-click and hollow clang behind him, and he stood inside a dormitory cell. A thick stale mix of male bodies and disinfectant washed over him. Six metal bunks, two of them didn't match the other four. Over the design capacity, your tax dollars at work. A metal table, bolted down to floor and wall, with some sort of card game going on, five pairs of cold cynical eyes measuring him and then looking away as they decided they were not going to shake down the fresh meat. Wise choice.
He ignored them, didn't try to reset or even read the cell's pecking order, and sat down on the single unused bunk. He let his aura expand, testing the walls, and decided they didn't have enough iron reinforcing in them to be any problem at all. Cold iron. Only prison that had ever slowed him down was that cockroach cesspit in eastern Turkey, an iron cage. That one, he'd had to control one of the guards to escape. Amazing, the places that Queen and Country sent a man. Or the Pendragons, for that matter.
Meanwhile, he had some thinking left to do. Jails were good for that, nearly as good as a monastery or a hermit's cave. The charges stank. "Forged papers?" "Immigration laws?" Those meant some serious balls-up in the works. He'd handed the cops a good passport, true government issue with his own name and photo and real seals. Only way that could have broken down was with a three- or four-layer search, not just consul records but back to the Home Office and even field checks at the Cornwall address he'd claimed. That meant trouble for the Pendragon's inside man. Or trouble with the inside man, one or the other. Either meant a can of Grade A worms. He needed to get a report back to Duncan, soonest.
The weapons charge might be even worse. The Bobbies weren't talking about Maureen's toy .38 -- she had a license for that, concealed-carry and all. But he'd had his selector-fire FAL and a couple of suppressed machine pistols hidden in the flat, without the paper to cover them.
Thing was, the way he'd hidden them, the cops could have taken the bloody building apart down to the sub-cellar and never found the bleeding abditory. He'd wrapped it in some damned strong spells, and the weapons sat at about ninety degrees to human "reality."
That meant somebody with the Old Blood was involved. Fiona would be the logical suspect there. It smelled just like her kind of trick. And she might have been mucking about at the embassy as well. It should have been impossible to link up all his military records. Sometimes his sister could be a right royal pain.
The weapons and papers really didn't mean much, all things considered. It wouldn't be the first time that he'd made things vanish from an evidence locker. The Bobbies tended to get very quiet when things like that happened.
The door buzzed and clanged again, noise echoing off the bare concrete walls, and another deputy stuck his head through the opening. "Hey, Albion! Don't bother getting comfy -- you've got bail." The jailer glanced across at the card players, and a nasty grin spread across his face. "Eat your hearts out, jailbirds. None of you losers has a broad that's willing to pay hard cash to get her hands on your smelly bod." Then he waggled his tongue salaciously while his hands sketched big bumps in front of his own chest.
That was fast. Brian shrugged at the other prisoners, flipped one hand in a "Nice to meet you" gesture, and turned toward the door. Should he tell Maureen about that little by-play? He never could tell about her and sex -- she might find it amusing. Or bite his head off. But her own description for her figure was "skinny and flat-chested," not the voluptuous curves that deputy had mimed. Brian found her beautiful, but she wasn't top-heavy by any measure.
Brian continued chewing on his puzzles while the deputy marched him back out through the process. Change clothes. Check inventory and sign again. Log the prisoner out. Buzz-click-clang of another door, a different one next to the command
