Good Omens

work. He's the Antichrist! He's got this ... sort of automatic defense, hasn't he? Even if he doesn't know it. It won't even let people suspect him. Not yet. Not till it's ready. Suspicion will slide off him like, like ... whatever it is water slides off of," he finished lamely.
    "Got any better ideas? Got one single better idea?" said Aziraphale.
    "No."
    "Right, then. It could work. Don't tell me you haven't got any front organizations you could use. I know I have. We could see if they can pick up the trail."
    "What could they do that we couldn't do?"
    "Well, for a start, they wouldn't get people to shoot one another, they wouldn't hypnotize respectable women, they.. "
    "Okay. Okay. But it hasn't got a snowball's chance in Hell. Believe me, I know. But I can't think of anything better." Crowley turned onto the motorway and headed for London.
    "I have a.. a certain network of agents," said Aziraphale, after a while. "Spread across the country. A disciplined force. I could set them searching."
    "I, er, have something similar," Crowley admitted. "You know how it is, you never know when they might come in handy ..."
    "We'd better alert them. Do you think they ought to work together?"
    Crowley shook his head.
    "I don't think that would be a good idea," he said. "They're not very sophisticated, politically speaking."
    "Then we'll each contact our own people and see what they can manage."
    "Got to be worth a try, I suppose," said Crowley. "It's not as if I haven't got lots of other work to do, God knows."
    His forehead creased for a moment, and then he slapped the steering wheel triumphantly.
    "Ducks!" he shouted.
    "What?"
    "That's what water slides off!"
    Aziraphale took a deep breath.
    "Just drive the car, please," he said wearily.
    They drove back through the dawn, while the cassette player played J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, vocals by F. Mercury.
    Crowley liked the city in the early morning. Its population consisted almost entirely of people who had proper jobs to do and real reasons for being there, as opposed to the unnecessary millions who trailed in after 8 A.M., and the streets were more or less quiet. There were double yellow no.. parking lines in the narrow road outside Aziraphale's bookshop, but they obediently rolled back on themselves when the Bentley pulled in to the curb.
    "Well, okay," he said, as Aziraphale got his coat from the back seat. "We'll keep in touch. Okay?"
    "What's this?" said Aziraphale, holding up a brown oblong.
    Crowley squinted at it. "A book?" he said. "Not mine."
    Aziraphale turned a few of the yellowed pages. Tiny bibliophilic bells rang in the back of his mind.
    "It must have belonged to that young lady," he said slowly. "We ought to have got her address."
    "Look, I'm in enough trouble as it is, I don't want it to get about that I go around returning people's property to them," said Crowley.
    Aziraphale reached the title page. It was probably a good job. Crowley couldn't see his expression.
    "I suppose you could always send it to the post office there," said Crowley, "if you really feel you must. Address it to the mad woman with the bicycle. Never trust a woman who gives funny names to means of transport.. "
    "Yes, yes, certainly," said the angel. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them on the pavement, picked them up, dropped them again, and hurried to the shop door.
    "We'll be in touch then, shall we?" Crowley called after him.
    Aziraphale paused in the act of turning the key.
    "What?" he said. "Oh. Oh. Yes. Fine. Jolly good." And he slammed the door.
    "Right," mumbled Crowley, suddenly feeling very alone.
    * * *

        Torchlight flicked in the lanes.
    The trouble with trying to find a brown.. covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of a ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn't.
    It wasn't there.
    Anathema tried every method of search she could think of. There was the methodical quartering of the ground. There was the slapdash poking at the bracken by the roadside. There was the nonchalant sidling up to it and looking out of the side of her eye. She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of