Winter's Gifts

For Sabrina and Andreas, for always being there when I needed them. Contents Dedication Title Page Epigraph Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Technical Notes Acknowledgements Orion Credits By Ben Aaronovitch Copyright Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris. It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured. Publius Cornelius Tacitus 1 On the afternoon of September 11th 2001, my mama called me at my dorm and begged me not to join the Marines. Up until that phone call I had, like most of my dorm mates, spent the day staring at the TV in stunned disbelief. But my mama was already thinking ahead to the war she was sure was coming, and she didn’t want my brother, who was a high school freshman at the time, getting it into his head to enlist. I tell myself that no doubt Mama recognised that I was too sensible to get myself killed in a foreign war, and sometimes I even believe it. She made me swear on my Bible, which I hadn’t even unpacked yet. I prayed to Jesus for guidance that night and he must have comforted me, because I fell asleep in the early hours and the next week I went back to classes. Once the shock had worn off, I, like most other folk, went back to my life as normal. I think it might surprise a lot of people that the majority of FBI agents don’t graduate high school, or even college, planning to join the Bureau. That’s because the FBI likes its recruits to be what in modern management-speak is called ‘self-directed’, or what my mama calls ‘grown-ups’. They want you to have an education and life experience first and, best of all, they want you to have skills they can put to use. Right now if you want to join the FBI, try working in STEM first. They’ll eat that up. I majored in Healthcare Administration but minored in Criminal Justice. I’d taken Theories of Criminal Behaviour in my second semester because I’d wanted to know why a bunch of well-educated young men might want to fly a plane into the side of a building, and I guess that sparked my interest. I was recruited out of college by a health insurance company, which was my career plan, into their fraud investigation division, and from there, a hop, skip and a jump to running an investigation team for an agricultural insurance company. I had my own office and a reserved space in the company parking lot. But it all started to feel kind of petty. Also, my mama got it into her head that I was persecuting decent, honest hard-working folk on behalf of the liberal corporate elite. She hadn’t discovered the word ‘woke’ yet, and I’m never going to forgive my brother for bringing it to her attention. I should have let him join the Air Force like he threatened to. Now he’s a minister in Mama’s church and can do no wrong. My decision to apply to be a special agent crept up on me some time between the case of the spontaneously exploding tractor and the cows that ate Paris, Arkansas. I told my mama that Jesus led me to join the FBI, and when she asked why I told her I didn’t think it was right to question the Lord. She gave me a funny look – never think people like my mama are stupid – but she also cooked me a peach cobbler that couldn’t be beat and gave me her blessing. Who knows, Jesus might have spoken in my heart, in which case London, magic, the talking bears and everything else were also part of his design. After all, ever since I was a little girl my mama has told me that God is constantly sending us messages, only sometimes we let the noise of our everyday lives get in the way of hearing them. She says that we have to let Jesus be the switchboard operator of our souls and always be ready to take his call. But I believe even Jesus would have his work cut out dealing with the thousands of unsolicited calls that arrive at the Bureau’s main switchboard every day. Of these, a small but significant number ask to be put through to The X-Files. All these calls are logged, recorded and reviewed, even the ones from people who believe that the Federal Government is being run by space lizards. Perhaps especially those ones. Just in case the caller is the kind of crazy who’s sitting on two tons of fertiliser-based IED and looking for an excuse to use it. Still, winnowing the wheat from the chaff takes time. And so it wasn’t until Monday morning that the message from former agent Patrick Henderson arrived as an email on the secure terminal in my cubicle at the Critical Incident Response Group. The email was from Jan – who was PA to my boss Lane Harris, assistant director CIRG – inviting me to a meeting in his office at 9:30. A transcript of the telephone message was added as an attachment for reference. Given that the meeting was in fifteen minutes, the transcript was mercifully short. Having reached a human operator, the caller immediately identified himself as Patrick Henderson, resident of Eloise, Wisconsin and a former FBI agent. OPERATOR: How can I help you, Mr. Henderson? CALLER: I need you to pass a message to whoever is running the basement and tell them that we have a potential X-RAY SIERRA INDIA developing. I’ll advise in person when they get here. OPERATOR: I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not sure— CALLER: You won’t understand what any of this means, ma’am. Just pass it up the chain until somebody does.