The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley.— "To A Mouse", Robert Burns
Helophel is visited by a Dominican triad — Jordan, Shephiroth and Nalzach — who give her a hard time about the use of Numinous Corpus in a public place. After a certain amount of grilling through which Helophel is unrepentant, they leave, trusting that the situation will not recur. They will be watching.
Blakely is simulating sleep when his phone goes off at around 5:30am. It is Philomon from the Tower of London, with urgent orders for Blakely to get over to Heathrow. A sorceror is supposed to be arriving on flight 8081 from Miami, in possession of a dagger, an artifact of Secrets known as the Dagger of Bithynia. A snatch squad has set out from the Tower, but is sitting in gruesome traffic (at this hour?) in central London; from Crouch End, Blakely is actually more likely to make it to Heathrow on time than they are. If possible he should collect backup — he knows the local angels in the Chiswick area, doesn't he? Blakely is faxed details of the sorceror (a Puerto Rican named Roberto Raposo), the flight and the minimal details that the Tower has on the artifact as he dresses.
(Astute readers will have spotted the underlying scenario by now. Don't worry, these players can complicate anything.)
Atoziel meanwhile is doing some early morning deliveries despite the appalling snowy weather, and around this time arrives with a package at a printing firm. The door is opened by Yves, who smiles, signs for the packet, and informs Atoziel that he should call on Blakely. Blakely will explain.
Blakely phones Atoziel as his first point of contact, roughly as Atoziel pulls up outside his front door. The two of them plan how they will alert and pick up the others; essentially Blakely will drive round the North Circular, and Atoziel will use the shortcuts he knows to pick people up and dump them on appropriate street corners. Helophel is the first victim of this plotting; Blakely phones her as he drives, and she uses her ten minutes or so waiting time to unpack her new SMG from its hiding place under the floorboards and "hide" it in a supermarket plastic bag. Boriel is contacted next, and elects to drive himself in his unmarked van. This allows him to bring a fair amount of electronics kit without spending long packing it. Finally, Magariel is disturbed by telephone and, after pinging his resonances on Amanda and her son and reassuring himself that they won't come to any harm in the near future, agrees to come along if Blakely arranges some cover at the Wood household.
At this point Atoziel has a brainwave and changes plan, remembering to tell Blakely by phone. Instead of picking up Magariel, who can perfectly well walk to a rendezvous, he heads back to a convenient university computer department, wanders cheerfully past the security guards (it's youngish, in leathers and has long hair, it must be a student) and starts hacking. With surprising ease — well, not so surprising given his skills — he breaks in to the Customs computers and plants an alert flagging the sorceror as a known drugs runner. Since the files are copied from the police systems, he breaks in there and plants a similar alert, for verisimilitude. He then hurtles through the snow to Heathrow, arriving nearly a quarter of an hour after the others and finding them still planning.
Eventually it is decided that Helophel will sit outside watching the place where Raposo would be transferred to a police van, assuming they do arrest him. She is given a radio from Boriel's limited supply, and finds a good hiding place to cuddle her SMG. Boriel then dishes out a couple more radios and settles down to listen to his Walkman — which is tuned to the security walkie-talkies, naturally. The others wander around and plan just how they are going to extract Raposo from the police van, the most likely plan being to ram it with some other (stolen) vehicle and "let him get away" in the confusion.
In the general wandering, a number of things are noted. There are quite a lot of people in the Arrivals area, of a variety of extractions, including a number of Spanish-speakers (from the sound of it) and some South Americans of some sort or other. Boriel notices a pair of men who he believes are carrying guns, though Airport Security isn't bothering them. After some expressions of disbelief that a Malakite noticed anything without a guide dog, Atoziel manufactures an excuse to touch them, revealing their names to be Samuel Curtis and Christopher Keel. At this point (the players recognising the names), the characters unaccountably lose interest, possibly because Magariel notices a man wandering in the background whose behavior just strikes him as wrong. The man isn't carrying any obvious inobvious weaponry, Atoziel fails to contact, and Blakely's resonance reveals only that the man feels somewhat superior to those around him, so Magariel reverts to worrying.
Meanwhile, Blakely observes Excel also hanging around Arrivals, in the company of someone who answers the description of Andrew McKenzie. Excel gives Blakely a helpless shrug across the room.
Outside, the most interesting thing for yards around to Helophel's sight is the technician de-icing an aircraft at the terminal. She watches as someone (even with binoculars, she can't tell who through the snow-storm) carefully and quietly removes the mobile steps the tech had been using, and he consequently falls off the wing. As the someone sneaks off through the storm, Helophel radios in the situation. Clearly the technician isn't dead, because she didn't hear the Disturbance that would have caused. Yet. There is a certain amount of discussion inside the terminal as to what's going on here and who would want to sabotage that plane; a few minutes later Helophel points out that the technician still isn't moving, and would someone like to alert the authorities. Magariel duly peers out of the terminal windows, and points out the dark lump under the airplane wing to a passing airport official. It doesn't take them long for the emergency services to swing into action.
There is a short while of angels maneuvering themselves around the arrivals lounge, during which Atoziel buys a small rucksack and stuffs it with packets of crisps to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing dash ("What do you mean, this is Arrivals!?"), then Boriel picks up a security alert. A lot of airport security staff are being diverted to Arrivals for "support", something that would presumably make more sense if Boriel knew the codes being used. It is however something to do with Flight 8081 from Miami.
Less than a minute after this alert, the chatter in Arrivals dies away as a crowd begins to form around Andrew McKenzie and his little LCD television. Moving in, Blakely and Magariel hear the tail end of a live report of an airplane crash on a motorway. As the programme returns to the BBC Breakfast News studio, the insert pictures from a helicopter and headline graphics make it clear that this is Flight 8081 from Miami. As airline staff file in and start making what were intended as reassuring speeches (very hard when you're in need of reassurance yourself), people begin to react. McKenzie just sits there in shock, with Excel hovering around him looking worried. Curtis and Keel exchange one horrified look and sprint for the exit. The suspicious man observes this with interest, listens briefly to the officials and makes his own way out more slowly. A small man in an immaculate leather jacket next to Magariel bursts into laughter and is slapped by a large angry bearded man behind him. As Atoziel blunders into the group and pulls out the names Tiny (the small man), Huzrael (the bearded man), Baby (a pretty young woman) and Michael Jones (a young man in suit and tie), the picture on the TV shows a policewoman picking her way through wreckage. To Blakely's eyes she practically has the word DEMON tattooed on her forehead. Huzrael also reacts, muttering "That bitch!" under his breath and starting to herd Tiny, Baby and two others out.
The angels choose not to intervene, but call Helophel back in and make their various ways out to the crash site. Boriel hot-wires a motor bike for Magariel, who heads off down the flight-path to search for anyone (i.e. the sorceror) who might have baled out before the crash. Atoziel and Helophel head off on Atoziel's bike, taking all sorts of hairy short-cuts to worm their way onto the M4 quickly, where the airplane crashed on commuters returning for their first day's work of the new year. The scene is nothing short of carnage, and reminds Helophel strongly of some of the devastation she saw in World War I. The two of them attempt to offer help to the emergency services and are politely but hurriedly rebuffed. Boriel plots a good course to fields near the crash site, but is clobbered by the backed-up traffic and his own oath to obey the Highway Code. Blakely, under no such compunctions in his Aston Martin but with a less perfect grasp of the roads, is making similar progress when the expected call from the police arrives asking him to pitch in as an emergency medic.