Chapter 20

Alice

The Lanes,

Brighton, UK

She walked into the café, clutching her backpack. Dio said he would be there at 3.35 p.m., a pretty exact time. But from his text messages, she’d began to get the feeling he was a little anal about most things. His written word and punctuation were perfect: no short form or slang. Just beautiful perfect English. Although she had no idea what some of the words he used meant, she used a dictionary to look them up and learnt that ‘pulchritudinous’ meant beautiful, and ‘don’t absquatulate’ meant don’t do a runner. He was a little weird. She would have to be careful.

It was 3.28 p.m., and she had a few minutes to gather herself and work out what she would say to him. She wasn’t sure how she’d found herself in the situation of meeting a stranger; this wasn’t even her problem. She never could resist helping an underdog.

She scanned the cafe and settled on a corner table at the far side of the room. She placed her backpack on the chair beside her, her subtle way of forcing him to sit opposite her instead of directly next to her.

She ordered a coffee, took out a book, put on headphones, and positioned herself where she could clearly see the doorway and have the advantage of viewing the man before he joined her.

She would only have a few seconds to suss him out and decide whether she wanted to talk with him. If he looked dodgy, she would bury her head in the book, rock side to side to imaginary headset music, and pretend to be someone else. These days you had to be careful. Crazy people roamed everywhere out there.

At 3.35 p.m., the café door opened, issuing a blast of cold air against her ankles. She looked up to see who’d entered, but a waitress, shuffling towards her with a cup of steaming coffee, blocked her view. She rocked from side to side, trying to get a visual on the patron, but the waitress, a tad on the large side, took her time, balancing the full cup of brew, trying not to spill it as she travelled to Alice’s table.

Alice cussed under her breath and forced a smile of thanks as the lady placed it in front of her.

“There you go, dearie, one cappuccino. Do you need sugar with that?”

“No thank you… thank you,” she muttered, willing the waitress to get out of the way.

The waitress wandered on to the next table, collecting empty plates as she went. From behind her shadow, the man suddenly appeared directly in front of her. She had no time to calculate her next move.

She gauged him to be in his thirties, immaculately dressed in a navy pinstriped suite, white shirt, and coral silk tie. He pushed expensive sunglasses over his forehead onto a well-manicured mane of hair and beamed down at her with all the confidence of a wealthy, well-educated, spoilt rich kid.

“Hello. You must be Alice.” His voice rang with perfect upper crust English, what she would describe as posh. His handsome eyes sparkled at her, as if pleased to see her.

“Err, yes,” she replied, flummoxed, not expecting him to be so good-looking and feeling totalling unattractive in her cut-off jeans, baggy T-shirt, and travel-worn backpack “How do you do?”

What! Where did that come from? She never said, ‘How do you do.’ Urrgh! She was trying too hard. What an idiot.

“Do you mind if I join you?” he asked pulling out a chair opposite her, not giving her a chance to say no.

“No… err… go ahead.”

He raised his hand at the departing waitress, catching her attention. Giving her a winning smile, he asked for a black coffee. The waitress blushed and scurried off. He came across as a man used to getting his way.

Alice pulled her headphones out of her ears and placed them with her book in her backpack, biding her time whilst gathering her thoughts. She took a deep breath in through her nose, enjoying his smell. It reminded her of soapy sage and lemons, of a freshly cut summer garden. He was pulchritudinous. She smiled.

She couldn’t believe her luck.

Cloud 9

Jack and Amy landed in the office.

“Where’s the Boss Lady?” asked Jack.

“In the loo, having one of her heated calls.” Pyke poked his head out from behind a screen. “Not sure what’s been said, but she’s got that pink flush thing going on with her neck. You know…when she’s trying to be a level-headed lady but oozes her inner pissed-off bitch. Stay outta her way for a while. That’s my advice. How was Soho Sid? Did you upset his day?”

Pyke skipped over to the leather sofas and plonked himself down where Jack and Amy joined him. Amy sat beside him; Jack perched on the arm chair. All three stretched out their legs and propped their weary feet on the coffee table, enjoying a rare restful moment.

“Yep, he’s not going to be popular. His stock was stacked up, ready for collection. We rearranged the trigger mechanisms. Whoever uses them will have their faces blown off. We passed his buyers on the way out. They will not be happy.”

Pyke gave him a sideways look. “I just needed them to be out of action, not made lethal.” He shook his head with a sigh. “You keep stretching the rules, Jack. Boss Lady won’t like it.”

“I figured if you’re gonna buy a gun, you’re up to no good and you deserve to have your face rearranged a little. That’s 120 bad guys sorted for us in one hit…result.” Jack grinned.

“How many?” gasped Pyke.

“At least 120 guns. I lost count after a while. I think we can assume in a week or so, he’ll be out of business and on someone’s hit list.”

“I wanted him out of business, yes, but not with a pile of dead bodies.”

“Dead criminal bodies…what’s your problem? It’s their choice to pull the trigger.”

Pyke jumped up and walked over to a screen.

“What are you doing?”

“Sourcing the vehicle used to collect them and setting a Police stop. Let the cops discover the guns and seize them. They’re safer in a property store than out on the streets.” Pyke tapped at a keyboard with more of a flare than usual.

Angry, Jack jumped up off the sofa and stood menacingly behind him.

“If you can’t stand the pace, you shouldn’t be doing this job. We’re dealing with bastards here…class A bastards. You can’t be politically correct when dealing with bastards. We’re doing the job because no one else will or can. Look, I’ll take the blame.” Jack slammed his fist on Pyke’s screen, wiping out the command line he’d just inserted.

“When an innocent gets killed because you saved one of these arseholes, you’re gonna feel like shit, Pyke.”

“Yeah, but what happens if an innocent picks up one of these guns to defend himself and gets blasted to smithereens?”

“What if the criminals you’re letting get away buy more guns and kill more innocents?”

“For fuck’s sake, boys, shut up,” Amy shouted over their voices. “You sound like a couple of school kids.”

Pyke and Jack stared each other out, teeth clenched tightly. Amy stood between them, and put an arm around each shoulder, pushing their heads together.

“Look, we can work this out. Aren’t we on the same side?” She cuddled into them.

Jack pulled away. Amy noticed his awkwardness at her touch.

“For fuck’s sake.” Jack ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “OK, OK. Compromise… track each gun and I’ll move in if needed, if one gets into the wrong hands.”

“Deal.” Pyke capitulated, punching Jack in the shoulder.

“We’ve just made a load more work for ourselves,” moaned Jack. “Morals! Who fucking needs them?”

“It’s why you’re here,” bellowed Maggie as she walked into the room, composed and regal, her episode in the washroom forgotten. “You were chosen because you wanted to do good, stop bad, help the underdog…commendable principles.” She ambled to her desk and sat on its edge.

“I need to talk to you, all of you. Come here.” She crossed her arms in front of her and waited for them to gather around her.

Jack, Amy, and Pyke silently obeyed and trudged over to her desk. They stood in a semi-circle in front of her, waiting nervously. She seemed tenser than normal, unnerving them. If she was worried about something, they seriously needed to worry about it. Not much fazed Maggie.

“I need you to trust me. I need you to stop asking questions about what we’re doing here. Know that you’re an important cog in a large wheel, that you’re only here for a short period of time, that your work saves lives and corrects wrongs. I need you to trust and just get on with the work we’re given. Stay within the rules. No going solo. No taking on jobs without authorisation.” She looked each one in the eye.

Amy, Jack, and Pyke shuffled on their feet. Jack looked to the ground and Pyke shrugged his shoulders. Maggie pushed.

“Can you do that for me?”

Amy and Jack looked at each other. Amy took a deep breath. Jack could detect she was about to talk and piped up with a question to stop her putting her foot in it.

“OK, so sometimes there are moments when we walk into things on our way to a scene, situations requiring assistance, and I want to understand this. Are you saying that we have to turn away and not help?”

“Granted, there are the odd few moments when, if you call it in, we can catch up with the authority straight away, but that is not to become the norm. You cannot be seen taking matters into your own hands.”

“That is not what I signed up for. If I waited for some unknown board of directors to give instruction, it may be too late.”

“We can’t all go around correcting life as we see fit. There has to be some order.”

“Why not? We are all only here for the good.”

“Not all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ying and yang. Where there is good, there is bad. Obviously, we try not to let it happen. We adhere to a pretty strict door policy, but we’re not perfect. The rules are there to protect against the odd bad apple that sneaks in.”

“So, if someone is in trouble, we have to walk on by and wait for paperwork…brilliant.”

“Unless the person asks us directly for our help, then their request overrides the ruling, and we can attend immediately without waiting for permission.”

“How the hell are they going to ask us? Being invisible, they don’t exactly know we’re standing right there to help. They don’t believe. They don’t know how to connect with us, and therefore, don’t know they have to ask.”

“Some do.”

“A few do. We communicate with them, but not many. If we push them to do something that they haven’t asked for, it is coercive behaviour.”

“So we let them walk into dangerous situations.”

“We have to be asked.”

“Nuns and Priests etc pray for Erthfolk all the time, surely their prayers blanket everyone, everything,” offered Amy.

“It helps, but the energy needs to be directed to a particular person or incident. We’re part of the physics they haven’t caught up with yet,” Maggie shrugged. “We need rules, otherwise everyone would be playing God up here. And if Witnesses start infiltrating, we’ll be in trouble.”

Shaking his head with frustration, Jack ran his hand across his forehead and through his mane of dark hair. Amy watched him, wishing she could just reach out and touch him. Maggie noticed her longing, but said nothing.