Ellison commits Kristall Weber’s face to memory. Then she switches off the iPad and slides it beneath the car seat. She ruffles the brunette wig she’s wearing with her fingers, sending up a spray of rain droplets that spatter both the Signalman and the windshield.
“Goddamn rain,” she says, drawing the 9mm from somewhere inside her coat, giving it a quick once-over, popping out the clip, jamming it right back in. “Three businessmen from Turkey are going to be very fucking unhappy if I’m late. I just need you to understand the consequences of that, okay? These aren’t men who are accustomed to being left at the altar.”
She pulls back on the slide, putting one in the chamber.
“Mags in the glove box, hardware in the trunk,” the Signalman tells her. “Listen, I didn’t even want to put you in play for this. But we don’t have a lot of deniable resources in striking distance. Weber has business in retro-engineered Zeta-Reticulan tech and backside exo-trafficking, so we’re going to spin the hit as a preemptive decap strike. The competition getting aggressive, throwing its weight around.” The Signalman looks at her as they race down an entrance ramp onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. ”Can you do this, kiddo?”
Ellison opens the glove compartment, takes out the spare clips and puts them into the pockets of her raincoat, then slams it shut again. “Yeah,” she says, “I can do this. But first, I need you to be absolutely clear about the . . .”
—the siren has told you to walk, and so you’re walking, putting one foot in front of the other, following the endlessly shifting warp and weft of the maze painted on the floor, careful to avoid dead ends and switchbacks. Your aching skull, so filled with her fingertips, feels as if it’s about to burst open at the seams, but you know that’s not going to happen. There’s no easy way out, not now, not here. And don’t look at your feet, the siren sneers. Look at the mirror. Keep your eyes on the mirror, little killer. That’s where all the action is. Or soon enough will be. And, because there’s no fight left in you, you do as she says and look up. The mirror’s still right there, but now, instead of your reflection, it’s become a window into what appears to be a dilapidated building of some sort, bare concrete floors, cement columns, exposed ductwork and tattered fiberglass insulation and everything lit by stark fluorescent tubes hanging on chains from the ceiling. There’s something else hung there, too, and at first—even after all you’ve seen, after all she has shown you—you think your eyes are playing tricks on you. No, dear, not this time. No sleight of hand. No subterfuge. What you see is what you get. And what you see through the looking-glass window is an enormous shark, gutted and hanging snout down from the rafters of that deserted, derelict place. Soon, whispers the siren, and she’s put something in your right hand, something small and hard that you don’t dare take your eyes off the mirror to see. Soon enough we’ll be done here. Your carriage awaits. And, at that, the thing in your belly rolls over and over and over, slouching towards whatever Bethlehem is its birthright. The siren sighs, the tempest’s sigh, the bone’s wrangle, and a talon digs deeper into soft grey matter—
“Which is easier to believe?” Ellison asks the Signalman. “That this Nell Snow woman is a face-stealing ghoul-human hybrid, or that she’s only a sleeper agent constructed for . . . well, whatever it is Barbican Estate might find useful?”
The Signalman waits until the thoroughly confused waitress is well out of earshot before answering. He unfolds two paper napkins and covers his lap. They’re new slacks, after all. “In more normal circumstances,” he says, “I could see how maybe that question would have a pretty obvious answer. But, unfortunately, as the fucking fates would have it, our particular theater of operations doesn’t usually afford obvious answers or clear-cut delineations between that which is impossible and that which is merely improbable. Which is to say, I don’t really I have an answer, only probabilities.” The Signalman sprinkles salt and pepper on his scrambled eggs, a dash of Tabasco, and then he spreads margarine over his blueberry pancakes. “Sure, a sleeper agent would be reasonable in a more conventional counterintelligence, deep-cover scenario, someone as invisible as invisible ever gets. A goddamn null set of a human being.” He pauses and looks at Ellison across his breakfast. “To paraphrase a wonderful Walter Matthau movie, double agents have to be drab and unremarkable people.”
Ellison frowns and stares down at her own breakfast. The eggs are overcooked.
“And Immacolata Sexton—and that Ptolema character,” she says. “We’re actually meant to believe they’re—”
“Eat up, kiddo,” says the Signalman. “I’m tired of talking about Barbican’s freakshow. Your food’s getting cold. More to the point, my food’s getting cold.”
—and just before you turn that Alice trick and step through the looking glass, you finally hear the hound snuffling about somewhere beyond the confines of the shimmering sphere, angry and cheated and trying to find a way through. So you haven’t been abandoned. You’ve only been locked up somewhere the troublesome laws of spacetime and quantum physics make it impossible for the beast to reach you. The sphere is the siren’s medicine for Tindalos, her prophylaxis against her doom. And now the hound does what it does that isn’t howling, a cry like entire planets grinding one against the other, and for just an instant, your head is clear again. For the first time since the siren took the shiny lure and showed up at the High Museum, joining you in front of the glass case and the hideous little artifact on display inside the case—just like the Signalman had said she would, just like all the DIRD data crunchers beneath
