End of the Century (45 page)

The streets were surprisingly crowded for the lateness of the hour, filled with a strange cast of characters: aging hippies, men and women dressed up in medieval costumes, starry-eyed young people, men with shaved heads wearing the saffron robes of Buddhist monks, kids with acoustic guitars, women with wreaths of flowers over their heads and long flowing skirts. Alice walked a short ways up and down the street, looking at the names over the doors. The Isle of Avalon Foundation. The Library of Avalon. The Goddess Temple. The Maitreya Monastery.

Alice found a pamphlet in a rack outside a darkened shop front. It was all about Glastonbury but described it more like something out of
The Lord of the Rings
than the quaint English village she'd seen driving in that day, or even the crazed muddy mosh pit of the festival a few miles away. It described the town as a “temenos,” or energy field, not as a geographical place. It talked a lot about mystic vibrations and attunement. It mentioned an “Angel of Glastonbury.”

“You all right, love?”

Alice flapped the brochure like a flag. “What's all this about, anyway? Is this place some sort of weirdness magnet for crazies and smelly hippies?”

Stillman chuckled and cadged a cigarette from her. “Nah, nothing like that. Something odd
did
happen here, about a millennium and a half ago, but it went away, and no one ever knew quite what it was about. Or where it came from, come to that. All this”—he waved his hand, the smoke from the cigarette trailing, indicating the New Age shop fronts, the eclectic collection of pedestrians—“is just a cultural echo of that one event.”

Alice stuffed the brochure in her pocket and drew on her cigarette.

“Still, that's not to say there
aren't
weirdness magnets, here and there, of sorts. Glastonbury just isn't one of them. There's a few hot spots in the Big Smoke, a big one in Ireland, one in the Varadeaux canton of Switzerland, one in New England, and the Texas town of Denniston, and Recondito, California…” He trailed off. “Dozens of them, all over the place, spots where the walls between the worlds are thinner, you might say. Keeps those of us in my former line of work on our toes, as you might well imagine.” He dropped his cigarette to the pavement, only half smoked, and ground it underfoot. “Come on, love, let's to bed. I'm knackered.”

The next morning, bright and relatively early, they climbed back into the Corvette SS and headed back up the A361. The roads were jammed with traffic leaving the Glastonbury Festival, but once they got past Pilton things eased up considerably.

Stillman outlined his plan during the early hours of the drive. He was intrigued why a billionaire like Iain Temple would hire a professional cat burglar to steal a gem from the British Museum. Aria had told him only that Temple had been the client and that she had delivered the item to him in his corporate headquarters in Canary Warf, the Glasshouse. So far as Aria knew, Temple kept a private collection of oddities there, and in all likelihood the Vanishing Gem was among them.

Digging through the glove compartment, at Stillman's request, Alice found a dubbed cassette of Temple's early seventies release,
Phoenix Rising.
Stillman explained that this was the concept album that introduced Temple's hairless, sexless, opal-eyed “Visitor from a Broken Earth” persona. The album related the story, through song, of the Visitor, who came to Earth from another world to learn about humanity. The haunting “Circular Ruins,” inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges story of the same name, told how the Visitor had arrived in ages past in South America and been worshipped as a god by the natives there and how he had been forced to rebuild a new body when his old one became too worn and abused. “Wayfarer” told how the Visitor had wandered the nations of the Earth seeking out the secret of happiness and contentment, searching for the ultimate answer but finding only more questions. “Paragaea” was a haunting track about the strange, ancient world from which the Visitor came.

Stillman was dismissive of the album's musical qualities. It clearly borrowed
heavily on the sounds of Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, and the Velvet Underground, and while it was undeniably an influence on David Bowie's
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
, Bowie was clearly the more gifted musician of the two. Still,
Phoenix Rising
had been a considerable commercial success at the time, and the tours and subsequent albums in the years following were no less so. By the midseventies, Temple had “killed off” the Visitor persona, and taken the small fortune he'd garnered and invested it in technology concerns, especially telephony and the then-burgeoning computing industry. By the eighties, Temple had diversified his growing fortune even further, opening a retail electronics store in Piccadilly Circus followed by a chain across the UK and later Europe, the United States, and Asia. After that had come the airline, and the cable channel, and the frozen entrees and men's fragrances and designer clothing and music retail and so on. Now, Temple was said to be worth billions, though with the myriad of companies he owned, wholly or in part, it was difficult to estimate the precise value of his holdings.

The Glasshouse was the headquarters of Temple Enterprises and home of Temple himself. Built in the heart of Canary Warf, the London business development situated where the old West India Docks once stood, the Glasshouse was a veritable fortress of glass and steel, rising hundreds of feet in the air, some thirty-five stories tall. Temple's home was at the pinnacle of the Glasshouse, occupying the top four floors, probably the highest-dollar penthouse apartment in the world, protected by cutting-edge surveillance and alarm systems and a private army of security guards.

And this was the guy that Stillman intended to rob.

Great plan.

It was late afternoon, Monday. The Corvette SS was safely back in the inconspicuous garage above, and Stillman and Alice were down in the derelict Underground station, digging through antique electronics that hadn't been cutting edge since before Alice was born. And
this
was what Stillman wanted to use to help them break into Iain Temple's Glasshouse.

Stillman hooked up a computer the size of a car motor to an electrical outlet, and then balanced an ancient monitor on top, the white plastic of the casing gone sickly yellow with age. Fishing a loop of phone cabling from a filing cabinet drawer, he plugged one end into a modem the size of a typewriter and spliced the other into a thick bunch of cabling that snaked along the wall.

There was more than just antique electronics in the storage tunnel. While Stillman swore beneath his breath, trying to bring the ancient computer back to life, Alice picked around through the confusion of odds and ends piled haphazardly all around, idly.

There was what looked like a rifle, but at the end of the barrel was a kind of dish, like a satellite receiver, and from the stock hung a cord connected to a bulky metal box, with straps so it could be worn like a backpack.

“Enfield Sonica,” Stillman said, when Alice held it up for inspection. “Sound weapon. Fires concentrated bursts of sonic vibration.”

Alice returned the contraption to the pile. The next thing she picked up looked like a flare gun, a big bulky pistol, but had rammed into the barrel what looked to be a miniature collapsed umbrella with its fabric missing.

“Ah, harpoon pistol.” Stillman nodded. “Fix a line and it can be used for grappling. Hang on to that, will you, love? Might come in handy.”

Alice shrugged and tucked it into the pocket of her leather jacket, handle first. Next she picked up a silver disk. It was about two feet in diameter, a couple of inches thick, and surprisingly lightweight. It shone like silver, untarnished and unmarred. On the back was a loop of the same material, evidently a handle of some kind, though a bit wide for Alice to hold comfortably.

“Don't know what that one is, actually,” Stillman said, mopping beads of sweat from his brow. “Back in '67, they were rebuilding Mark Lane Station—they called it Tower Hill by then—and put about that they'd destroyed the last remains of the old Tower of London Station. Which, as you can see”—he waved his arm, indicating the tunnel—“wasn't exactly the case. More like the old station was more heavily fortified and wired up to the new communications grids.” He bashed the thick bunch of cables on the wall with a wrench. “The Tower of London itself stands on top of a hill, White Mount, and there's been people hereabouts for thousands of years, back to the Roman times and before.
Anyway, when they were doing the tunneling, they dug up some old bits of Roman pottery, some stuff that dated back to the time of Boudica, and that disk you're holding. The MI8 boffins never were able to work out who'd made it or when, out of what materials, or for what purpose. Their best guess was that it's some sort of data storage device with limited broadcast capabilities. Hard as bugger, though, and couldn't be cut by diamond or laser. Odd that, mmm?”

Alice shrugged and tossed the disk over her shoulder, to land clattering on the pile behind her. “You about finished with this stuff, yet, or what?”

Stillman grinned. “As a matter of fact…”

He stabbed a rocker switch on the front of the monitor, and the screen buzzed noisily to life, green letters dimly visible on the gray-black background.

“Now,” Stillman said, cracking his knuckles like a concert pianist. “Let's see what we can find out about this Glasshouse, shall we?”

Stillman had managed to gain access to secured government and commerical servers, using all sorts of cracks and hacks, displaying far more computer savvy than Alice'd figured a guy his age would have. Either the age he appeared to be, or the age he claimed to be. Even so, the proof was in the pudding, whatever that meant. Stillman was tabbing through the internal database of the architectural firm that had been employed by Temple Enterprises to construct Glasshouse. After a short search, he turned up a host of 2D and 3D CAD drawings of the structure, detailed blueprints, elevations, and architectural drawings. The results quickly outpaced the ability of the fat green phosphor dots to handle, and Stillman was forced to lug the color television in from the living room in the other tunnel, patching into the computer's video output.

“You're pretty good at this stuff, you know?” Alice lit a cigarette and nodded appreciatively.

“Why, thank you for noticing, love,” Stillman said, a sarcastic undercurrent in his words. “I've lived this long just waiting to hear your resounding approval.”

Alice stuck out her tongue, tilting her head to one side. “What
ever
.” She shrugged out of her leather jacket, only narrowly missing impaling herself on
the sharp point of the harpoon pistol's dart. “So why did you give all of this up, anyway? If you're so in love with it, I mean?”

Stillman had been jotting notes on a sheet of yellow paper and stopped, tucking the pencil behind his ear and leaning back in his creaking seat, regarding her in silence. “Again, there's a simple answer and a complicated answer.” He sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. “The simple answer is that I just stopped showing up to work one day. I stopped answering the phone, and eventually they stopped calling. See, after the end of the Cold War, MI8's focus changed a bit. We'd spent years keeping tabs on what the Reds were doing behind the Curtain, what sort of deals they were trying to make with powers on other planes, what sort of odd technology they'd laid hands on. And always keeping half an eye on the Yanks, as well, of course. The fellas in Bureau Zero were our brothers in arms and all, our partners in the special relationship, but that didn't mean that they always had Queen & Country's own best interest at heart. Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it all seemed to change, almost overnight. Suddenly, it wasn't a world with only two sides anymore, or at least allied interests on either side of a line. Now, it was every man for himself, and damn the hindmost. They used to talk about a ‘peace dividend,' about the bounty we'd all enjoy once the Cold War ended. But it never happened. It was just one more empire breaking up into little fiefdoms, with only one more big empire left to fall.” He paused and looked at Alice, meaningfully. “And, I'm sad to say, that one's bound to happen, sooner or later.”