Shadow of The Jaguar by Steven Savile

TWO

     The call came in at midnight, the voice on the other end of the line summoning James Lester to the Under-Secretary's residence. He knew better than to question the venue or the hour: the more powerful the man, the less he slept.

Lester dressed quickly, adjusting the lie of his bespoke waistcoat and teasing the knot of his plain silk tie. Appearance was everything. He shrugged into his jacket and then into his topcoat, and walked out to the waiting car.

Miles, his driver, nodded and opened the rear door for him. The interior was pleasantly warm against the chill of the night; Miles had obviously set the heater running while Lester had dressed again.

"Where to, sir?"

"The Under-Secretary's in Belgravia."

"Very good, sir."

London might not sleep, but it most certainly dozed, Lester thought as the car left the South Bank, swept over the Thames and turned onto the Strand. The quiet street was bathed in the yellow glow of the lights. The legal district was dead, though some of the usual tourist spots were still isolated hives of life.

Peering out into the night, he was sure some pseudo-scientist must at that very moment have been studying the social strata of the city, and drawing the same conclusions as the anthropologists studying the apes of deepest darkest Africa. Man was, after all, a beast. The city at night showed just how little the species had truly evolved. And of course, it boasted other denizens, populating the darkness that surrounded the pubs, clubs and restaurants.

It was a different breed that came out after dark. The street people, invisible during the day, could be seen huddled in their doorways wrapped in blankets and newspapers while the twenty-four-hour party people danced, drank and acted as though they owned the city. They had all the rituals of their jungle counterparts, banging their chests to attract a mate.

It was all quite pitiful, really.

The car negotiated the kinks around Charing Cross and took the turn onto Pall Mall. Here the street retained much of the dignity it must have known in the days of Gentlemen's Clubs and hansom cabs. Even this late at night the immaculately tailored doormen stood beside the gleaming porticoes, playing guardian to the last bastions of entitlement. Behind those doors lay other worlds of charm and old money. Those portals were, Lester thought wryly, every bit as paradoxical as any anomaly that opened into the Permian. Polite society had its own magical rifts that only a certain class of traveller was allowed to enter, where the hoi polloi were about as welcome as a plague of locusts.

They turned right on St James and entered the heart of Belgravia.

Sir Charles Bairstow's residence was a three-storey Edwardian townhouse in a narrow mews. Within a hundred yards it was as though they had driven into the land that time forgot. Everything was transformed, right down to the faux-gas street lamps and the planters dripping colourful lavender bougainvilleas, their petals like tissue-paper flowers.

Miles pulled up to the curb, and kept the car idling while Lester clambered out. Standing on the pavement, he looked both ways, not really sure what he expected to see.

The street was empty.

He walked up to the door and rapped on it, using the lion-headed brass knocker. The noise was shockingly loud in the quiet residential street, like the report of a gun, or a car backfiring. Lester winced, half-expecting a dozen curtains to twitch in response.

He heard someone fiddling with the security chain, and then the latch, before the door opened.

Bairstow's housekeeper peered myopically out into the dark street