The Naming of the Beasts

Nobody in the foyer or at the reception desk. Nobody to challenge or question her as she strode along the broad main corridor and through into the annexe where Rafi’s purpose-built cell had been installed. Probably just as well. She was in no mood to listen to reason, and anyone who’d got in her way long enough to ask her who she was visiting would probably have fallen under her stiletto heels a second later.

The cell door was closed but not locked. She turned the handle and wrenched it open. Doing that set off three canisters of OPG that Jenna-Jane’s suspiciously experienced munitions team had set immediately inside the door, all of them more or less at head height. Juliet got a lungful of the stuff before she even knew what it was.

OPG is a leaner, meaner version of the Tabun nerve gas invented by Gerhard Schrader back in the 1930s - the first of the ever-popular cyanophosphides. There’s a UN resolution specifically outlawing its use, but only in a battlefield context. Used therapeutically, in minuscule doses, it reverses some of the effects of senile dementia. That loophole allows institutions like the Charles Stanger and the MOU to stock it in industrial quantities and call it medicine.

Juliet suddenly found that her arms and legs didn’t want to do what they were told. Spastic tremors tore through her when she tried to move, and the muscles of her throat constricted as suddenly as a door slamming closed.

Demons are built differently from people though, for all that we come from the same stock. Juliet was fighting to bring her limbs back under her conscious control when the cell door immediately behind her also opened, and three men wearing masks and full hazmat suits cut loose at her with specially adapted automatic rifles firing silver-plated hollow-point ammunition.

The white metal ripped through Juliet like fistfuls of oblivion. She was probably already finished at that point, but she leaned into the impacts and managed to fall forward rather than back, her arms thrown out in a blind, flailing sweep. She barely connected, but then again she barely had to. Two of Jenna-Jane’s three sharpshooters died suddenly and messily as Juliet’s razor-sharp fingernails punctured the wire-weave plastic of their decontamination suits and the airborne poison touched their skin.

But the silver had done its work, finishing what the gas had started. Juliet was down, and she wasn’t moving. A second squad - including Gil himself - came up the corridor, no doubt with huge reluctance given what they’d just seen happen to their comrades, but once they ascertained that Juliet was out for the count, they bound her hands and feet with steel and silver bands, lifted her onto a stretcher trolley and wheeled her out. By the time they got her into the unmarked MOU acquisitions vehicle - a Bedford van fitted with soundproofing and top-of-the-rage restraint gear - the air filters were already being turned on inside the Stanger, kick-starting the laborious process of putting the neurotoxic genie back in its bottle.

They took Juliet back to the MOU, and down into the basement. The door had closed in Gil’s face. He’d done his job, and Jenna-Jane was keen to oversee the rest of the operation by herself. This was, after all, where she excelled: at the porous interface between scientific inquiry and legalised torture. It seems to be a happening place these days.

I sat and digested these facts in silence after Gil had finished speaking. Something in his face told me there was still some bad shit to come, but this was bad enough to be going on with. And in the meantime it was probably a good idea to clear the air by asking the obvious question.

‘Why are you doing this, McClennan?’ I demanded. ‘You hate my guts. It doesn’t make sense that you’d come riding to my rescue - or that you’d stab Jenna-Jane in the back, which would put you way out of position for kissing her arse.’

Gil’s mouth set in a tight line. ‘You’re right, Castor,’ he said. ‘I do hate your guts. But you saved my people down in that swimming pool, and you probably saved me too. I felt like I owed you something. And I also felt like maybe I’d enlisted in the wrong war. We’ve got two women out there, in the hands of that thing, and we’re not doing one damn thing about it.’

‘Nothing we can do,’ I pointed out, ‘until he shows his hand.’

Gil shook his head grimly. ‘Well, that was kind of the clinching argument,’ he muttered. ‘He already has, Castor. He left a note.’

The words didn’t sink in for a second. When they did, I still thought I must have misunderstood. ‘He what?’ I echoed stupidly.