Chapter 2: London Calling
My major problem with my intelligence division assignment was that I wasn’t allowed to carry a gun. The only place in Europe I was even allowed to carry a handgun would be Switzerland. In London, it would be worse—no one was even allowed to carry a pocket knife. In fact, I heard people were being encouraged to turn in their kitchen knives.
I spent the plane ride in a state of prayer. I thought about my family. I thought about my partner, Alex, who had bid me a fond farewell barely 72 hours ago. I prayed for everything and everyone I had left behind since I had no idea when I would see them again. I wasn’t particularly worried about not surviving. Death happened. If it happened to me, I didn’t have anything left to worry about except where I was going. But this was going to be the longest I had been away from my family in years. Since I had been married, I hadn’t been away from Mariel for longer than the length of a law enforcement conference. To my surprise, even masses at the Vatican did only so much to mitigate the anxiety I felt about being away from home.
The moment I was in UK airspace, I was jerked out of my state of prayerful meditation. The plane was still at 20,000 feet (and descending), but I was hit with the awful smell that was worse than a field of rotting corpses. I had scented it around MS-13 gangbangers, who had made evil their motto (I submit that “Rape, control, kill” is not something good). I had smelled it off of a warlock and in an abortion clinic run by a death cult. The worst had come off a demon.
It was the smell of evil.
It took me by surprise. I felt fortunate I didn’t vomit right there. I gagged but fought it down with a combination of willpower and a collection of fast Hail Marys. I didn’t mind the discomfort, but I did mind puking on my fellow passengers.
Once my reaction was under control, I did some quick calculations. The most important question was if the source of the stench was on the plane with me. It couldn’t have been. I was in the rear of the plane. I would have caught it as I walked the entire length of the cabin. While I wasn’t certain of my range, I knew the evil had to be in the general vicinity.
But that means that if it’s not on the plane, it’s in the city. The entire city.
I shook that thought off. It can’t be the entire city. If something were that evil, it would have probably collapsed under its own weight by now...
Dear God, this is going to fall under the heading of cheating, but I’m going to have to ask that, if this smell is permeating the entire city, smelling evil is one gift I’m going to have to put aside. I could barely stand a half-hour in the Women’s Health Corps main building. If I’m to be any use at all to You in London for any length of time, this smell will either have to turn down or turn off completely. If it is truly as bad as I suspect, then I humbly request—
On my next breath, all I could smell was the stale, recycled air of the plane’s cabin.
Thank You, God. Thank You, thank You, thank You.
It didn’t occur to me until after a minute of thanking God that it confirmed that evil had soaked into London, perhaps the fabric of the city itself.
The plane rattled and shook as we came in for a landing. We touched down without incident. It took the usual length of two and a half decades of a rosary for us to start to disembark the plane, and it took another decade for me to actually get off the plane. Welcome to the unfriendly skies.
I followed the herd of my fellow passengers to the luggage carousel. It may be considered hubris, but I counted it as a miracle that my bag was the first one off.
There was only one priest at Arrivals. He was of medium height, with a sturdy build. He wore typical black on black on black for his pants, shirt, and jacket. He was bald, mid-forties, with a closely-cropped brown beard. His eyes were brown and warm and friendly, hidden behind glasses with black frames so thick they looked like they had been borrowed from Clark Kent.
He held up a sign that read “Nolan.”
I strode up to him and nodded. “Pearson?”
He grinned. “Detective Nolan!” he said cheerfully. “Yes. I am Father Michael Pearson. I am so pleased to meet you. I’m sorry about the mix-up. I thought you were in first class,” Pearson told me.
I smiled at him calmly. He was at least friendly. “I was. There was a woman with back problems they were threatening to jam into the rear of the plane. We swapped seats so she could have the bigger chair.”
Pearson arched a brow and looked me up and down. I wasn’t small. “That was very generous of you.”
I shrugged. “Not at all. Once I settle deep enough into prayers, you can cram me into an overhead compartment, and I won’t notice. How are we getting around?”
Pearson waved me towards an exit. The sun was up, but I wouldn’t call it shining. Even though the sky was clear and blue, it was almost muted, as though someone had put a dimmer on the sun to make it feel overcast.
We headed out to a big black London cab, packed my bag in the back, and slid in. It was dark inside, but roomy. Pearson sat across from me. “The museum or your hotel?” he asked brightly.
“Museum,” I said. “Might as well get a start on this.”
On the other side of the clear partition, the cabbie nodded and pulled away from the curb as though I had instructed him directly. Pearson reached behind him and slid the partition closed. “Wouldn’t want too much eavesdropping, now would we?”
I nodded. Given what I had dealt with to audition for this job, I couldn’t imagine any conversation we’d have that wouldn’t have us reported to the nearest insane asylum. “No one told me what was happening here. You don’t even want to know what I noticed coming in.”
Pearson’s smile grew, knowing. “You mean the scent of evil so bad you want to cut your nose off? We know. Some of our people here have noticed the same thing. It’s so bad for some of them that they’ve taken to visiting friends in the country just to get away from the stench. Funny enough, once they cross the line for Greater London, the smell goes away.” He snapped his fingers. “Instantly.”
I frowned. It wasn’t unusual for the smell to be bound by a threshold. I always knew it had some limits. “In my experience, it’s usually dispelled in the open air. I can’t imagine how bad it is that it’s reaching me at twenty thousand feet. What’s going on here?”
Pearson shook his head. “More than you can imagine. How much do you know about our situation in London?”
I shrugged. “I hear things.”
“Knife attacks are up. Violent crime is up. The mayor wants to ban any and all knives in the city, but carry acid? That’s a-okay!” His bright, cheery tone faded and grew cynical. “But carrying around containers of acid? That’s just ducky. Nearly five hundred acid attacks a year, but why not?”
I cringed. New York City, the most anti-gun city in the United States outside of California, wasn’t that idiotic. Single-edged knives were perfectly legal. “What the Hell is wrong with your mayor? Worse, what’s wrong with your cops that they’re putting up with his crap?”
Pearson sighed, obviously wearied by even thinking about it. “The nanny state, or what we call our government, long ago decided that if national service can’t give it to you, you don’t require it. This is why there’s gun confiscation. Violent crimes are up, mind you, but why let reason enter into it. It doesn’t help that our mayor is a Muslim communist and most of the rising crime rates are attributed to our ‘refugees.’ We’re told that they ‘just can’t understand our culture,’ given a smack on the bum, and sent on their merry way. Sadly, you can’t talk to him as part of this investigation. Maybe you’d be able to talk sense into him.”
The laugh came unbidden from my throat. “The last two times I had direct contact with public officials, I sent them straight to Hell. Literally.”
Pearson’s grin flickered on and off. He knew he shouldn’t smile at the thought, but it was obviously coming through. “I had heard something about that.”
I looked out the window and watched the city go by. Much of it still looked like it could have easily featured in a Sherlock Holmes movie. Despite the amount of damage during two World Wars, late Victorian buildings were still de rigeur. There were the occasional LED or neon lights added, but it was like trying to dress up a concrete bunker with Christmas lights—they were colorful, but it didn’t change the nature of the structure. As we went deeper and deeper into the city, certain blocks had statues every twelve feet. There was the stupid giant Ferris wheel, tall spires of London Bridge and Big Ben, giant black taxis, huge, double-decker red buses. Also, I had no idea why they decide to drive in the wrong lane.
“A thousand monuments to past glories,” Pearson stated casually. “Most of whom the average man on the street couldn’t identify if you gave them a history book, in places they couldn’t find on a map if you stuck a pin in it.”
I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. New York had its skyline radically altered in 2001, and it felt like half the population had forgotten about it within five years. Almost everyone else had forgotten within ten. Being disappointed that the populace couldn’t remember things that happened two centuries ago was laughable.
“I’m almost surprised that there’s been little backlash against the stupid policies,” I said, getting back on track.
Pearson rolled his eyes. “Our esteemed mayor seems to think that there’s a racist backlash coming against the poor innocent refugees ... the ones who are doing it. We won’t even discuss Rotherham.”
I winced. I knew about Rotherham. It had nothing to do with the recent wave of Middle Eastern refugees. It was far, far worse than that. Rotherham was a place in Northern England that had an entire sex trafficking ring operating there for nearly thirty years without anyone stopping it, despite plenty of evidence. Girls would be kidnapped, disappear into the headquarters, and turned into sex slaves. Fathers of kidnapped children who protested had been arrested. Complaints were dismissed as racist. Cops either ignored reports because they were too lazy to care or on the take from the rapists. I couldn’t tell if it was political correctness gone amuck or organized crime to make Al Capone jealous.
The city continued to rush by. The streets seemed darker and shadier. The monuments seemed disapproving of the conversation, scandalized that it would be allowed to happen ... or that people would talk about it.
“Do you think that the smell of evil has to do with the crime rate spiking?” I asked.
Pearson hesitated before speaking. “Only partially. We think it’s more the museum than anything else.”
“What makes you think that there’s a connection between the museum heist and the smell?”
“Because no one really complained about it until the heist two weeks ago. And since the heist, crime has gone up.” Pearson frowned. “We are a city of converts, Detective Nolan.” He spread his hands in admission. “In fact, I’m one of them. I used to be an Anglican priest. I got better. And when half a million of my flock wanted to come home to Rome, I brought my entire parish over. But like many converts, they’re more intense than those born into the faith. Therefore, we have a lot of mystics. I won’t say that they’re on par with you. We don’t have many showing your level of ability. But they’re sensitive to things shifting below the surface of the world we can see. And ever since the British museum heist, there were a lot of people in London right now who have A Very Bad Feeling About This.”