The Annihilation Score Read Online Free Page B

in any case are sleeping in the accommodation deck of a former oil rig, which was presumably designed with soundproofing in mind)?
    I wrap my hand around his bridge and lift him gently, then raise his rigid body to my shoulder and rest my cheek against his rest. For an instant I have a disturbing hallucination, that I’m holding something that doesn’t resemble a violin so much as an unearthly bone-scaled lizard, f-hole shaped fistulae in its shell flashing me a glimpse of pulsing coils of blood-engorged viscera within—but it passes, and he is once again my instrument, almost an extension of my fingertips. I purse my lips and focus, lower the bow to touch his strings as delicately as
don’t think of that
, begin to draw it back, and feel for his pitch—
    Then my phone rings.
    ***Play me!*** Lecter snarls, but the moment has passed.
    My phone shrills again as I lower bow and body to the bed andrummage under my discarded dress for the evening clutch. I get to the phone by the fourth ring and answer it. It’s a blocked number, but that doesn’t mean anything. “Mo speaking. Who is it?”
    â€œDuty Officer, Agent Candid. Please confirm your ID?” He gives me a password and I respond. Then: “We have a Code Red, repeat, a Code Red, Code Red at Dansey House. The Major Incident Contingency Plan has been activated. You are on the B-list; a Coast Guard helicopter is on its way out from Stornoway and will transport you directly to London. Your fallback coordinator is Vikram Choudhury, secondary supervisor is Colonel Lockhart. Report to them upon your arrival. Over and out.”
    I drop the phone and stare at Lecter. “You knew about this, didn’t you?”
    But the violin remains stubbornly silent. And when I re-inter him in his velvet-lined coffin, he seems to throb with sullen, frustrated desire.
    *   *   *
    I don’t like helicopters.
    They are incredibly noisy, vibrate like a badly balanced tumble drier, and smell faintly of cat piss. (Actually, that latter is probably a function of my sense of smell being a little off—jet fuel smells odd to me—but even so, knowing what it is doesn’t help when you’re locked in one for the best part of four hours.) The worst thing about them, though, is that
they don’t make sense
. They hang from the sky by invisible hooks, and as if that’s not bad enough, when you look at a diagram of how they’re supposed to work, it turns out that the food processor up top is connected to the people shaker underneath using a component called the Jesus Nut. It’s called that because, if it breaks, that’s your last word. Bob rabbits on about single points of failure and coffin corners and whatnot, but for me the most undesirable aspect of helicopters can be encapsulated by their dependence on messiah testicles.
    This particular chopper is bright yellow, the size of a double-decker bus, and it’s older than I am. (And
I’m
old enough that if I’dgiven it the old school try in my late teens, I could be a grandmother by now.) I gather it’s an ancient RAF war horse, long since pensioned off to a life of rescuing lost yachtsmen and annoying trawler captains. It’s held together by layers of paint and about sixty thousand rivets, and it rattles the fillings loose from my teeth as it roars and claws its way southwest towards the coast somewhere north of Newcastle. I get about ten minutes’ respite when we land at a heliport, but there’s barely time to get my sense of balance back before they finish pouring
eau de tomcat
into the fuel tanks and it’s time to go juddering up and onwards towards the M25 and the skyscrapers beyond.
    By the time the Sea King bounces to a wheezing halt on a police helipad near Hendon, I’m vibrating with exhaustion and stress. Violin case in one hand and suitcase in the other, I clamber down from the chopper and duck-walk under its swinging