Dead Lies Dreaming

Gordon actually wore the company uniform as if he meant it, unlike Bill, who occupied his uniform like a hermit crab living in an abandoned Coke can.

As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor had a problem.

Imp froze as he rounded the corner onto Regent Street, and saw four elven warriors shackling a Santa to a stainless-steel cross outside Hamleys Toy Shop.

Oh, it’s perfectly safe to handle if somebody else has triggered the curse and you took it from their still-smoking body.” Eve paused. “Or if they sold it to you.” “You bought it, didn’t you?” Imp walked towards her. “Didn’t you?” “I think so. I may have screwed up that side of things,” Eve admitted. “It’s unclear.” “What’s unclear?” “It was up for auction: obvs, right? But it’s not clear that the person auctioning the location of the manuscript actually owned what they were selling, that’s the thing. Also, ancient death spells and intellectual property law don’t always play nice together. I, uh, my boss has a standard procedure he has me follow in cases of handling blackmail and extortion. We pay the ransom, then once we’ve destroyed the threat I repossess the payment from the blackmailer’s bank account. Via a Transnistrian mafiya underwriter—” This time it was Wendy who interrupted: “The Russian mafiya has underwriters?” “Transnistrian, please, and yes, criminal business models are inherently expensive because they have to pay for their own guard labor—there are no tax overheads, but no police protection for carrying out business, either—so of course they evolved parallel structures for risk management, mostly by embedding the risk in a concrete slab and dumping it in the harbor—anyway. At what stage does the book consider itself to have been legitimately acquired? And by whom? Is it safe for you to handle it, as my employee? What about as an independent freelance contractor not subject to the HMRC IR35 regulations? Am I an acceptable proxy for Bigge Enterprises, a Scottish Limited Liability Partnership domiciled in the Channel Islands, in the view of a particularly dim-witted nineteenth-century death spell attached to a codex bound in human skin by a mad inquisitor? It’s like digital rights management magic, only worse.

Books bound in human skin and written in a formal propositional calculus where each axiom was a closure wrapped around eternal damnation.

It’s like a tradition, or an old charter, or something.

if you leave a loaded handgun lying around the family home, you shouldn’t be surprised if a child finds it and pulls the trigger.

Explosions! Machine guns! Car chases! Not my cup of orange pekoe at all.

We were made, Eve, we nearly got caught! A bunch of thugs with guns hit the bank while we were in the back, they were clearly after the same thing, and there was an undercover cop waiting to arrest us. Explosions! Machine guns! Car chases! Not my cup of orange pekoe at all.” He gesticulated dramatically, nearly spilling his espresso.

I’m really sorry, sir, I was working on a final solution to the packing density problem in the sub-subbasement—” she glanced sideways at the dog-eared paperback lying facedown on her desk, copiously annotated: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach—“and I may have become slightly distracted.

Peter and Wendy was in perpetual copyright—a copyright granted by Act of Parliament to Great Ormond Street Hospital

Frankly, it had come as no surprise whatsoever to Eve to learn that her employer was an ecclesiast in the Cult of the Mute Poet—an esoteric religious order that, because of the sanguinary nature of its devotions, had a pronounced tendency towards secrecy.

Let me help you with that?” she offered, and slowly leaned in close. PROF. ARTHUR P. MACANDLESS, ST. BRIDE’S CATHOLIC CARE HOME, it read. CONTACT PHONE

Really?” Professor Skullface blinked at her in confusion. “Why ever not?

I had a polite disagreement with Chief Inspector Grabby Hands.” Chief Inspector Barrett. “It was him or me, and he had rank. Do you need me to draw you a diagram?” “No, that won’t be necessary.” Gibson nodded to himself, as if confirming a suspicion. He seemed indecently satisfied, but she was damned if she could see why.

11 Downing Street was the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the minister in charge of the British government’s finances. As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor has a problem. The New Management took a drastic approach to dealing with problems—they simply went away, as did the skeletons of the people who created them—so Rupert was always at pains to keep Number Eleven briefed, ideally well in advance, about his more adventurous money-making initiatives.

Even the furniture in the glass room was transparent—off-the-shelf Louis Ghost chairs and a matching transparent table.

Her father stood stiffly, as if his knees ached. Of a sudden Evie realized that he was, in fact, old: or at least middle-aged, which from a twenty-three-year-old perspective was the same thing. Hair thinning and graying to ashy silver, belly sagging over the waistband of the jeans he wore on his day off, a reminder that he’d met her mother after a rock concert in 1980.

Alexei and his crew stormed the library. There were defenders: at least one with a submachine gun, and a joker with a bow. They fucked up Boris but good. He was up on the roof with Yuri, scoping out the interior and positioning to drop stun grenades inside, when he took an arrow to the knee and fell off the roof.

She could ace the North Circular in a jacked Toyota Tercel faster than Sabine Schmitz could lap the Nürburgring in a Transit van, and the only times the plod had got on her tail she’d left them, well, plodding.