Chapter 172 Mr. Greenwood's Dinner Party
POV: Lord Silvain Mordaunt | Kensington Mansion, Dining Room
The table had been set for fourteen, which was the number that Mordaunt's dining room accommodated without feeling either sparse or crowded, and the food had been prepared by his human staff with the attention to presentation that he required regardless of whether the guests would eat it, because presentation was a message about the host and the message Mordaunt intended to send tonight was that everything was under control.
He sat at the head of the table and watched his guests arrange themselves and read the room the way he read all rooms, which was completely and without appearing to.
The Parliament members were performing calm with varying degrees of success. Davorin was genuinely calm, which meant he had decided the incident was manageable and had moved on. Two others were performing calm over something more agitated, which meant they were worried about the Geneva question, about the European Covenant observers who had been in London for a week and who had been watching the dock events through sources Mordaunt was still identifying.
Fell was at the far end of the table, which was where Mordaunt had placed him deliberately. The Hermetic Order's presence at this dinner was an invitation, not a given, and Fell's seat at the end rather than the middle was a precise architectural message about the current distribution of liability.
"The incident," Davorin said, when the first course had been served and the staff had withdrawn. He said it with the verbal elegance of someone who had learned that choosing words carefully was more powerful than choosing loud ones.
"The incident," Mordaunt agreed. "Let's be precise about what happened. A Rookeries crew conducted a violent raid on a licensed research facility. They removed twelve experimental subjects without authorization, damaged facility infrastructure, assaulted Order security personnel, and resisted Parliamentary authority on the Thames." He lifted his glass. "We have a framing problem, not a security problem. The security problem has been addressed."
"The children," said one of the more agitated Parliament members. Lord Cassel, whose position on the hybrid program had always been more skeptical than Mordaunt preferred. "Twelve hybrid children removed from a facility by force. The Covenant observers saw the boats."
"The Covenant observers saw wolves conducting a violent operation on the Thames," Mordaunt said. "What they saw is a narrative question. We write the narrative."
He looked at Fell.
Fell understood the cue with the practiced attention of someone who had been in rooms like this before and knew when he was being invited to contribute and when he was being managed.
"The program is not compromised," Fell said. "One facility was accessed. The viable subjects were removed, which is a setback to that facility's data collection. The primary asset, the Lucia embryo, is secure." He said the last sentence with a precision that landed differently from the rest of it, the distinction between the twelve children and the embryo marked clearly in his inflection. "Five facilities continue operating at normal capacity."
The table absorbed that.
Mordaunt watched Cassel's expression do the calculation that Cassel's expression always did when numbers were presented, the weighing of cost against benefit, the assessment of whether the remaining benefit justified the current cost.
"The counternarrative," Mordaunt said. "Violent supernatural extremists attacking humanitarian research. We have documentation of the facility's licensed status. We have the assault on Order security personnel. We have the resistance to Parliamentary authority on the water." He set his glass down. "We do not have the children on camera being treated well, because they were not treated well, which is a problem Fell's program created and which Fell's program will not repeat."
He let that land as both reassurance and warning, which was the dual purpose it was intended to serve.
"The Rookeries crew will attempt to locate the other facilities," he continued. "They have Silas's records, which is unfortunate but not catastrophic. Silas's records are good, but they are not current, and facilities two through six have changed locations in the past eighteen months precisely against this contingency." He looked around the table. "They will find old addresses. They will waste time verifying. That time is ours."
He turned to Fell with the particular quality of attention that meant the conversation's real purpose had arrived.
"Accelerate the program," he said. "Before they find the other facilities. We need results now."
Fell nodded once, the nod of someone who had been waiting for permission to do what he had already been planning.
The dinner continued. The food was excellent and most of it went uneaten and the table talked about other things and the evening ended with the specific satisfaction of people who had looked at a problem and decided it was still manageable.
In the basement of the building three streets east, a thrall who had been there for four months and whose name had been Clara before the venom took that from her was crying in the way she cried most nights, which was quietly enough that the staff above could maintain the comfortable fiction of not hearing it.