Chapter 234 A Welcome Friend
POV: Alteroni | St. Thomas site, upper levels
I have been making the wrong choices in this story for long enough that I know what the right choice looks like when it arrives, which is that it looks like the thing you have been avoiding because it is costly and which you do anyway because the cost of not doing it is something you cannot carry.
I could not stop the execution. I sat in the emergency chamber and I made the argument and I played the card I did not have and I watched Mordaunt call the bluff and I chose the survivable option, and I have been sitting with that choice for twelve hours in the specific way you sit with choices that are survivable and wrong at the same time, which is badly.
The survivable option produced a survivor. The survivor is here now, at one in the morning, outside an abandoned building in Southwark with eleven Parliament guards who are loyal to me rather than to Mordaunt, which means loyal to me in the specific sense that they are loyal to the institution as it should function rather than as it has functioned, and who I have brought here because the facility that Parliament officially does not acknowledge is being raided by a coalition that Parliament officially does not recognize and which is going to produce a situation that requires someone with Parliamentary authority on the scene to determine what the situation becomes.
The guards I brought are the ones who did not leave the institution when the blackmail files dropped, which means they are either the ones whose files contained nothing, or the ones whose files contained something and who decided to stay anyway, and either way they are the ones who are here.
The upper facility has Hermetic mages when we arrive, which is the word I am using for the three men who are in the stairwell with the specific quality of people who have been told to hold a position and who are holding it without full understanding of why holding it has become more difficult than anticipated, because the twenty-six person coalition went in below them through the morgue passage and is currently operating on the sublevel while these three are watching the main entrance with the specific anxiety of people who can hear things happening below and who are not receiving communication from the person who should be communicating with them.
My guards address the mages efficiently, which is the word for what eleven trained Parliament security personnel do to three Order mages who are managing divided attention and failing communication, and the mages are in custody in four minutes, which is faster than I expected and which means the upper facility is clear.
I go to the sublevel access.
Callum's team has already moved through it and what remains in the holding area is Isla with seven children in various states of distress and recovery, and she looks at me when I come through the door with the expression she has when she is assessing whether a new arrival is help or complication, and whatever she finds in my face tells her help, because she points at the far wall.
"Deeper," she says. "There's another level. Callum went down twenty minutes ago."
I stand in the holding area with the children and Isla and eleven Parliament guards and I understand what my function is here, which is not to go down to the level where Callum Brennan is confronting the last piece of the thing that killed Valentina and destroyed the program's infrastructure, because that is not where I am useful. Where I am useful is here, holding the structure that makes what Callum is doing something other than a criminal act, the official Parliamentary presence that converts a Rookeries raid into a sanctioned operation, the political cover that allows what happens tonight to become part of the record rather than something the next Parliament uses to prosecute the coalition.
"I'll hold guards here," I say, to Isla and to the room and to the eleven people behind me. "Secure the facility. This is an official Parliament raid. Document everything." I look at the concealed panel in the far wall, open, the access to whatever level is below this one. "He's in the sub-basement."
I look at Isla.
"Go get his daughter," I say.
Isla has already handed the youngest child to one of my guards with the precise instructions of someone who knows exactly what she is asking and exactly what the person she is asking is capable of, and she is through the panel before I finish the sentence.
I watch the panel close behind her and I stand in the holding area of an underground facility that officially does not exist, managing a Parliamentary raid that officially sanctioned itself approximately twenty minutes ago when I decided it had, and I think about Valentina Corvino and the twelve hours since noon and the specific cost of the survivable choice.
This does not balance it. I understand that. But it is not nothing.