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Thus, just as Dess and the roadrunner were arguing the merits of Richard Harris’s version of “MacArthur Park” vis-à-vis Donna Summer’s, a veritable unkindness of nondescript black cars descended furiously onto the pavement outside. A flock of fists pummeled the door and rang the buzzer, a gaggle of angry men’s voices squawked out, “Danesh Jalo, Danesh Jalo, this is Insert Steely-Eyed Organization Here! It is imperative that we speak with you immediately!” A murder of identically loafered feet kicked the door down and marched up the rickety staircase, and by the time Decibel Jones thought to wonder where the Esca had gone all of a sudden, he was crowdsurfing back down the walk-up staircase on a chattering brood of government shoulders.
But the flight of the G-men broke apart when they hit their wall of parked cars. One after the other, square-jawed men born with surnames like Brown, Davies, Evans, Taylor, and Price and given names like Mister, Officer, Agent, Leftenant, and Specialist pecked and flapped at him. They took turns grabbing Decibel’s McQueen-sheathed elbow with extravagantly aggressive masculinity and attempting to assert their dominance using only biceps, baritones, and a genetic inability to remove their sunglasses.
“Watch the Swarovskis, boys,” Dess protested. “Damage this little number and I’ll drop a whole fucking tax bracket.”
“Mr. Jalo, I’m with MI5, and you’ll need to come with me at once.”
“MI6, Mr. Jalo, and this is my jurisdiction, Evans, so fuck off. Overseas intelligence. Very, very overseas, I should say.”
“The intelligence may be foreign, but Danesh here is quite domestic, Taylor, which is MI5’s territory, so it’s you who’ll be fucking off, I’m afraid. Better luck next invasion.”
“Now, Danny, my lad, don’t let these two confuse you. Metropolitan Police Antiterrorism Squad, at your service. Get in the car, there’s a good fellow.”
“Stand down, Davies, you’re relieved. You can all stand down. Downing Street calling, Mr. Jalo. The Prime Minister wants you.”
“Well, I can’t say I haven’t given it the occasional thought—the PM’s a bit of all right,” Dess managed to quip. If he lost everything else, pride, priapism, and producer credit, Decibel Jones would never, never give up his swagger.
“That’s enough of that, sir. Now, I’m to bring you to COBRA to meet with the emergency committee, of which the Prime Minister is chair, so there must be some manner of mix-up, but it’ll all sort out at Whitehall.”
“Son, I’m your liaison to the United Nations, it’s imperative that I take you into protective custody. This clearly isn’t a UK op, you asshats. Go have a cup of tea or whatever it is you all do while the big boys are talking.”
“The Foreign and Commonwealth Office kindly invites you to eat a shit, Yank. He’s ours and you know it. We’ll let you know if anybody descends from the heavens asking for Taylor Swift, won’t we, lads?”
The caws of the authoritarian brood started coming thicker and faster, until Decibel felt vomit rising again. He knew better than to struggle when in the grip of bureaucracy, but he couldn’t breathe. The smell of dry-cleaned blazers and recently-signed-in-triplicate forms was overpowering. Where was a bloody damned giant space flamingo when you needed one?
“SAS, Jalo, on your feet, look lively, fall in.”
“Home Office, Danesh, come along now.”
“UKSA, sir, you’ll want to follow me.”
“GCHQ, Mr. J, on you get.”
“OAA, Dan, let’s get a move on, shall we?”
“Wait, what the hell’s an OAA?” yelled the Prime Minister’s secretary from the back of the rookery.
“Office of Alien Affairs. We’re new.” The OAA agent checked his watch. “In . . . two and a half minutes, it’ll be the ninety-minute anniversary of our founding.”
“Daily Mail, Dess, let’s get you away from these jolly jackboots and down to the newsroom on the double-quick. The people have a right to know what kind of person is going to represent them! Now, be honest, mate, don’t you think the first UK ambassador to another world ought to be a bit more, I don’t know, English?”
Decibel yanked his overmistered arm out of the reporter’s skinny talons. “Oh, go eat an entire bucket of co—”
“Beg pardon, Mr. Jones—I’m a great fan of your work, by the way, really, I’ve set my employer’s ringtone to ‘Terms of Service’ for years. I’ve been charged by the Queen to convey you directly to Her Majesty’s Audience Room. I believe you’ll find that Head of State trumps these earnest chaps any way you look at it. Right this way, sir.”
Decibel Jones sighed and shook his head. Today was fired. Today was well and truly sacked. Today could, in point of fact, fuck all the way off. “Well, ‘Terms of Service’ is just about the only song on that album I didn’t write, so what a fantastic job you’ve done with your sucking up. Full marks.”
There were too many of them. Decibel pinballed through the parliament of men in black, from manful grip to manful grip, until he just toppled into a car the way he used to when his manager had to beat off a gauntlet of handsy fans to get him to his next gig. They were screeching down a side road in reverse before he even figured out what car had got him in the end.
The glitterpunk glamrock messiah peered across the shadowy expanse of the official vehicle of Decibel Jones’s Grand Tour of Government Agencies. It was a kind of munted limousine, with a cavernous rear arranged so that the two passenger benches faced each other. Four oversize, oddly insectoid sunglass lenses reflected the sunlight flitting through tinted windows.
“Afternoon, gents,” Dess said, and hoped to Christ his voice wasn’t actually shaking as much as it felt like it was.
Silence. Cool, unfeeling, taxpayer-funded silence.
“That arse from the Daily Mail had a point, Mr. Price,” one of the mystery men said finally.
“Indeed he did, Mr. Brown,” the other said with a nod. “It’s quite a little bit of egg on the face of the Commonwealth. Of the three of them, he’s the only one actually born here, and he’s what . . . Pakistani-Nigerian on his dad’s side and Welsh-Swedish on the matrilineal? How does that even get past the first date? The girl was some sort of Japanese/Franco-Jewish muddle from Dublin by way of sodding Warsaw, but I gather she’s out of the picture, and the other chap is a God-and-all-the-angels-save us refugee Turk. Of course, it’s unclear whether they actually want his backing band, but I can’t imagine they crossed the void of space on the strength of his solo album. Why our new friends couldn’t have opted for a nice English band instead of this porridge of regrettably issued work visas, I’ll never know.”
