Chapter 406 — A Nation on Edge II

Chapter 406: Chapter 406 — A Nation on Edge II

He found his mother in the kitchen before he left.

"Stay in today," he said quietly. "Both of you. Just today. Don’t go into town, don’t go anywhere you don’t have to, until somebody actually knows what’s going on."

She looked at him. She knew what that sentence meant. She had heard it before, the year the Bureau put people outside the house because of who wanted James, and her son had told her to keep the curtains closed.

"You think it’s about you."

"No. I don’t think it’s about me. I don’t know what it’s about. That’s why."

Nyra had followed him in. "I’m not a child," she said. "I can go to the shop without being blown up."

It did not have the usual force in it. It was a reflex. She said it while still looking at her phone, at the frozen frame of a girl in a yellow raincoat.

"I know you can," said James. "Do it tomorrow."

Nyra said nothing.

"I’m only going to the guild," he said to his mother. "I’ll ring you when I get there. I’ll ring you when I leave."

"You’d better."

He put his arms round her on the way past.

---

Guild Zero was full.

He had expected the staff to be in. He had not expected all of them. Every phone on the operations floor was ringing or being talked into. Three televisions on the walls were each on a different channel, RTé, Sky and CNN, and none of them were showing the Tower. The main display on the back wall usually had the frontier board on it, the international tracker and the Challenger reports. Today it had a live feed from the cordon at the square.

People were standing in front of it with their arms folded, not working, just watching.

Finn was by the security desk with two of the security team and a building plan spread out between them. Cillian was in a chair by the window with his phone, scrolling, his face set. Maeve was in the glass room off the operations floor, standing at a table with the head of medical and two of the operations leads.

James went straight in.

"What’s confirmed?" he said.

Maeve told him.

The festival explosion had caused a large number of civilian casualties. The official count was going up slowly as hospitals reported in, and nobody was willing to say a final number yet. People had been arriving at the Mater and St James’s and Beaumont all night. Some were still in theatre. Some were still missing.

The Minister for Defence was confirmed dead. He had been found in a hotel suite on St Stephen’s Green late last night. Gardaí were treating it as murder. Details of why he had been at the hotel and who he had been with were being withheld for the investigation.

"And the message," said Maeve. "Both places. The screen at the festival, and the hotel. It’s out. Someone at the hotel talked, or someone in the Gardaí. *For the King*, both times. It’s everywhere."

James took out his phone.

---

The internet had already decided.

**@DubLadDave:** for the king. FOR THE KING. are we seriously going to pretend we don’t know who that means

**@GalwayGoblin:** kids. there were KIDS there. i want to know what the government is going to do. not statements. DO

**@saoirse_k:** my sister was at that festival. she’s ok. her friend isn’t answering. please god

**@raidlead_hq:** its england. obviously its england. langford, ganner corp, all of it. how many times does this have to happen

**@tower_facts_daily:** a few words on a screen isn’t evidence of anything. anyone can type "for the king". that’s literally what you’d do if you wanted ireland to blame england

**@raidlead_hq:** ok mr bbc

**@tower_facts_daily:** i’m from cork

**@sligo_sean:** we’ve been ignoring this for YEARS. they tried to strong-arm a teenager off our tower and the government did a press release. now look

**@climbgod_99:** honestly this is what happens when you poke the bear. ireland clears 40 and kills one of the seven and suddenly we’re surprised someone’s scared of us? ganner made us a target

**@dub_zero_fan:** what has james ganner got to do with a FESTIVAL. he was at home. he buried his friend 3 weeks ago. get a grip

**@climbgod_99:** i’m just saying it’s connected

**@dub_zero_fan:** you’re just saying stupid things

**@kellyb_nyc:** sending love from new york. no one deserves this. no one

**@ShieldMainSiobhan:** i keep watching the video of the kids dancing. i can’t stop

**@GalwayGoblin:** expel the ambassador. today. right now

**@NotABot_Honest:** if it was england why would they sign it. genuinely asking. you don’t sign a bombing

**@DubLadDave:** because they WANT us to know. that’s the point

James scrolled until his thumb hurt.

Some of them were frightened. Some were so angry they could barely type. Some were passing things on as fact that had not been confirmed by anyone. There was a rumour that there had been a second bomb, and a rumour that the Minister had been shot. One account said a man with an English accent had been arrested, and another said the army was already on the border.

Not one of them had any more evidence than he did.

---

Finn came into the glass room with the building plan rolled under his arm.

He looked at the screen over James’s shoulder for a second, at the square, and his jaw went tight.

"For the King," he said. "Come on. We’ve been here before. Langford sat in the Bureau and tried to take you off our Tower, and they tried to bury it. Ganner Corp builds whatever England is paying for, and everybody knows what that is. And now somebody puts *for the King* over a bombed festival." He put the plan down on the table harder than he needed to. "We’re not stupid."

"Nobody’s saying we’re stupid," said Cillian.

He had come in behind Finn with his phone still in his hand.

"I’m saying if I wanted Ireland to blame England for something," said Cillian, "I’d write *for the King* on it. That’s exactly what I’d write. It’s the first thing you’d think of. It’s a bit too easy."

"So who, then?"

"I don’t know. That’s my point. Nobody knows." Cillian put his phone down on the table, face down. "Somebody wants every person in this country to be screaming *England* this morning. Fine. Maybe it is England. But maybe somebody wants us screaming it."

Finn did not answer that straight away.

James thought they were both right, and that neither of them knew anything.

"We can’t decide anything off a screen," he said. "Not a thing. But I’m not saying it isn’t England either." He looked at Finn. "You remember what O’Shea had to go through with Langford, and that was with the documents in his hand. People who’d been caught. Signatures. And he still nearly couldn’t make it stick. This is three words. If it is England, they’re not going to make it easy."

Maeve had been waiting for them to finish.

"Then let’s talk about what we can actually do," she said. "Because standing here guessing isn’t one of them."

She went through it.

The medical department could put staff and supplies at the disposal of the hospitals, through the HSE’s own emergency arrangements, so nobody turned up uninvited and got in the way. Security could protect Guild Zero’s own buildings, its staff and their families if anybody needed an escort home. Operations could keep the phones going, and keep a list of every staff member and who they had not heard from.

"What we can’t do," she said, "is go into a crime scene. None of you. Nobody here is a detective. Nobody here is a Garda. We don’t go into that square and we don’t go looking for anyone."

James nodded.

"Do all of it," he said. "Medical, security, all of it. Through the proper channels." He looked at Finn, and at Cillian, and through the glass at the operations floor full of people who could, between them, have flattened a city block. "And nobody goes looking. That goes for every Challenger in this building. Nobody uses a single ability on anybody because they *think* they know who did it. If somebody gets it wrong, we’ve done their job for them."

Finn looked at him.

"You’ve changed," said Finn. It was not quite a complaint.

"When Langford came after me, I nearly lost my head." James looked at the screen. "I can raise one of the Seven. That doesn’t mean I know how to run a murder investigation. It means I can do a lot of damage to the wrong person very quickly."

Finn breathed out, and nodded.

---

His phone buzzed as they were breaking up.

**Ciara Keane:** Are you all ok? Everyone at Guild Zero?

**James:** We’re ok. Still hearing back from a few staff. You and Declan?

**Ciara Keane:** Both fine. We’ve been glued to it since 5.

**Ciara Keane:** The staff here are scared. A couple of them have asked me if this means there’s going to be a war.

James looked at that for a while.

**James:** I don’t know. I honestly don’t.

**Ciara Keane:** No. Nobody does.

**Ciara Keane:** Mind yourself.

**James:** You too.

Neither of them mentioned the restaurant, or what she had asked him, or what the founders had said about it. There was nowhere to put it today.

---

????

---

At the Tower Resource Bureau, it was worse.

O’Shea had been at his desk since twenty past two in the morning. He had not gone home. His jacket was on the back of his chair and his tie was in his pocket, and his coffee had been refilled so many times that it had stopped tasting of anything.

His office had become a corridor. Officials came in and out with secure tablets and went out again. On one wall the screens showed the square, the hotel on St Stephen’s Green, and the text of the government’s emergency security briefing, scrolling. Two phones on his desk were for lines that did not exist in the directory, and both of them had been ringing all night.

The Bureau did not investigate bombings. It did not investigate murders. Those belonged to the Gardaí, and to the people above the Gardaí whose job descriptions were not written down anywhere. What the Bureau had was the Tower. It had Challenger records, and intelligence on anyone with abilities who might be a threat. And it had an investigation into foreign interference that had never really closed, however many times somebody in Government Buildings had asked him to close it.

Niamh came in at half nine with a folder under her arm.

She had been one of the techs in the departure chamber once, years ago, on the night of the first world-first. Now she ran the Bureau’s intelligence desk, and she looked as if she had slept about as much as he had.

"Tell me what’s actually been established," said O’Shea. "Not what’s on the radio. What’s established."

She sat down and opened the folder.

"Two separate crime scenes," she said. "The festival, and the hotel. Gardaí are treating them as separate investigations, with separate teams. The festival was a device. They’re not saying any more than that publicly and they’ve not said much more to us. Multiple perpetrators, probably. There’s CCTV from round the square, but it’s a festival. There were thousands of people, and everyone had a bag."

"The hotel?"

"The Minister was there with a woman. That’s being kept very tight. He’d been seeing her for some time, apparently. The booking was made a fortnight ago." She turned a page. "So it was planned well before last night. It’s not a reaction to the festival. Whoever she is, she was already in place."

"Two operations."

"Two operations, possibly. They happened on the same night, with the same message. That suggests a political connection. But the actual relationship between them hasn’t been established. Nobody’s found anything that links the people at the festival to the woman at the hotel. Not yet."

"And who ordered it."

"Nobody knows." Niamh looked up. "There isn’t enough confirmed evidence on either scene to say who authorised anything. Not publicly. Not privately, either, as far as I can see."

O’Shea looked at the screen. The hotel was on it again, with police tape across the entrance and a crowd of cameras on the pavement.

"The message," he said.

"*For the King.* Both scenes. On the screen at the festival. On the wall of the suite." Niamh hesitated. "Sir, I’d be careful with it."

"Go on."

"It’s three words. Anybody can write them. It points at the Crown. But that’s not the same as the Crown having anything to do with it. If we treat it as proof of direct royal involvement and it turns out to be somebody else, someone who wanted us to make exactly that jump—"

"Then we’ve done their work for them."

"Yes."

O’Shea did not dismiss her. She was right.

He was also thinking about Langford.