I’ve been working for the Laundry for about five years now, and periodically I become blasé in my cynicism, sure that I’ve seen it all—which is usually the signal for them to throw something at me that’s degrading, humiliating, or dangerous—if not all three at once.

“You want me to drive a what?” I squeak at the woman behind the car rental desk.

“Sir, your ticket has been issued by your employer, it says here und here—” She’s a brunette: tall, thin, helpful, and very German in that schoolmarmish way that makes you instinctively check to see if your fly’s undone. “The, ah, Smart Fortwo coupé. With the, the kompressor. It is a perfectly good car. Unless you would like for the upgrade to pay?”

Upgrade. To a Mercedes S190, for, oh, about two hundred euros a day. An absolute no-brainer—if it wasn’t at my own expense.

“How do I get to Darmstadt from here?” I ask, trying to salvage the situation. “Preferably alive?” (Bloody Facilities. Bloody budget airlines that never fly where you want to go. Bloody weather. Bloody liaison meetings in Germany. Bloody “cheapest hire” policy.)

She menaces me with her perfect dentistry again. “If it was me I’d take the ICE train. But your ticket—” she points at it helpfully “—is non-refundable. Now please to face the camera for the biometrics?”

Fifteen minutes later I’m hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you’d find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town; but I’m not nipping about town. I’m going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I’m stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I’ve got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that’s before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers, driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn’t been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder.

In between moments of blood-curdling terror I spend my time swearing under my breath. This is all Angleton’s fault. He’s the one who sent me to this stupid joint-liaison committee meeting, so he bears the brunt of it. His hypothetical and distinctly mythological ancestry is followed in descending order by the stupid weather, Mo’s stupid training schedule, and then anything else that I can think of to curse. It keeps the tiny corner of my mind that isn’t focused on my immediate survival occupied—and that’s a very tiny corner, because when you’re sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.

There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hair-dryer-sized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.

I twitch spasmodically, jerking my head up so hard I nearly dent the thin plastic roof. Behind me the eyes of Hell are open, two blinding beacons like the landing lights on an off-course 747. Whoever they are, they’re standing on their brakes so hard they must be smoking. There’s a roar, and then a squat, red Audi sports coupé pulls out and squeezes past my flank close enough to touch, its blonde female driver gesticulating angrily at me. At least I think she’s blonde and female. It’s hard to tell because everything is gray, my heart is trying to exit through my rib cage, and I’m frantically wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the roller skate from toppling over. A fraction of a second later she’s gone, pulling back into the slow lane ahead of me to light off her afterburners. I swear I see red sparks shooting out of her two huge exhaust tubes as she vanishes into the distance, taking about ten years of my life with her.

“You stupid fucking bitch!” I yell, thumping the steering wheel until the Smart wobbles alarmingly and, heart in mouth, I tentatively lift off the accelerator and let my speed drift back down to a mere 140 or so. “Stupid fucking Audidriving Barbie girl, brains of a chocolate mousse—”

I spot a road sign saying DARMSTADT 20KM just as something—a low-flying Luftwaffe Starfighter, maybe—makes a strafing run on my left. Ten infinitely long minutes later I arrive at the slip road for Darmstadt sandwiched between two eighteen-wheelers, my buttocks soaking in a puddle of cold sweat and all my hair standing on end. Next time, I resolve, I’m going to take the train and damn the expense.

Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it’s better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students. These days what’s left of the ’50s austerity concrete has a rusticated air and a patina of moss, and the worst excesses of ’60s Neo-Brutalism have been replaced by glass and brightly painted steel that clashes horribly with what’s left of the old Rhenish gingerbread. It could be Anytown EU, more modern and less decrepit than its US equivalent, but somehow it looks bashful and self-effacing. The one luxury Facilities did pay for is an in-car navigation system (the better to stop me wasting Laundry time by getting lost en route), so once I get off the Death Race track I drive on autopilot, sweaty and limp with animalistic relief at having survived. And then I find myself in a hotel parking bay between a Toyota and a bright red Audi TT.

“The fuck.” I thump the steering wheel again, more angry than terrified now that I’m not in imminent danger of death. I peer at it—yup, it’s the same model car, and the same color. I can’t be certain it’s the same one (my nemesis was going so fast I couldn’t read her number plate because of the Doppler shift) but I wouldn’t bet against it: it’s a small world. I shake my head and squeeze out of the Smart, pick up my bags, and slouch towards reception.

Once you’ve seen one international hotel, you’ve seen them all. The romance of travel tends to fade fast after the first time you find yourself stranded at an airport with a suitcase full of dirty underwear two hours after the last train left. Ditto the luxury of the business hotel experience on your fourth overseas meeting of the month. I check in as fast and as painlessly as possible (aided by another of those frighteningly helpful German babes, albeit this time with slightly worse English) then beam myself up to the sixth floor of the Ramada Treff Page Hotel. Then I hunt through the endless and slightly claustrophobic maze of air-conditioned corridors until I find my room.

I dump my duffle bag, grab my toilet kit and a change of clothes, and duck into the bathroom to wash away the stink of terror. In the mirror, my reflection winks at me and points at a new white hair until I menace him with a tube of toothpaste. I’m only twenty-eight: I’m too young to die and too old to drive fast.

I blame Angleton. This is all his fault. He set me on this path exactly two days after the board approved my promotion to SSO, which is about the lowest grade to carry any significant managerial responsibilities. “Bob,” he said, fixing me with a terrifyingly avuncular smile, “I think it’s about time you got out of the office a bit more. Saw the world, got to grips with the more mundane aspects of the business, that sort of thing. So you can start by standing in for Andy Newstrom on a couple of low-priority, joint-liaison meetings. What do you say?”

“Great,” I said enthusiastically. “Where do I start?”

Well okay, I should really blame myself, but Angleton’s a more convenient target—he’s very hard to say no to, and more importantly, he’s eight hundred miles away. It’s easier to blame him than to kick the back of my own head.

Back in the bedroom I pull my tablet PC out of my luggage and plug it in, jack it into the broadband socket, poke my way through the tedious pay-to-register website, and bring up the VPN connection back to the office. Then I download an active ward and leave it running as a screen saver. It looks like a weird geometric pattern endlessly morphing and cycling through a color palette until it ends up in a retina-eating stereoisogram, and it’s perfectly safe to sneak a brief glance at it, but if an intruder looks at it for too long it’ll Pwnz0r their brain. I drape a pair of sweaty boxer shorts across it before I go out, just in case room service calls. When it comes to detecting burglars, hairs glued to door frames are passé.

Down at the concierge desk I check for messages. “Letter for Herr Howard? Please to sign here.” I spot the inevitable Starbucks stand in a corner so I amble over to it, inspecting the envelope as I go. It’s made of expensive cream paper, very thick and heavy, and when I stare at it closely I see fine gold threads woven into it. They’ve used an italic font and a laser printer to address it, which cheapens the effect. I slit it open with my Swiss Army cybertool as I wait for one of the overworked Turkish baristas to get round to serving me. The card inside is equally heavy, but handwritten:

“Um,” I mutter. What the fuck?

I’m here to take part in the monthly joint-liaison meeting with our EU partner agencies. It’s held under the auspices of the EU Joint Intergovernmental Framework on Cosmological Incursions, which is governed by the Common Defense provisions of the Second Treaty of Nice. (You haven’t heard of this particular EU treaty because it’s secret by mutual agreement, none of the signatories wanting to start a mass panic.) Despite the classified nature of the event it’s really pretty boring: we’re here to swap departmental gossip about our mutual areas of interest and what’s been going on lately, update each other on new procedural measures and paperwork hoops we need to jump through to requisition useful information from our respective front-desk operations, and generally make nice. With only a decade to go until the omega conjunction—the period of greatest risk during NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right—everyone in Europe is busy oiling the gears and wheels of our occult defense machinery. Nobody wants their neighbors to succumb to a flux of green, gibbering brain-eaters, after all: it tends to lower real estate values. After the meeting I’m supposed to take the minutes home and brief Angleton, Boris, Rutherford, and anyone else in my reporting chain, then circulate the minutes to other departments. Sic transit gloria spook.

Anyway, I’m expecting an agenda and directions to a meeting room, not a bar invite from a mysterious Ramona. I rack my brains: Who do I know who’s called Ramona? Wasn’t there a song . . . ? Joey Ramone . . . no. I fold the envelope and stuff it in my back pocket. Sounds like a porn spammer’s alias. I break out of the slowly shuffling coffee queue just in time to annoy the furiously mustachioed counter dude. Where the hell is the Laguna Bar?

I spot a number of dark, glass-partitioned areas clustered around the atrium in front of the check-in desk. They’re the usual hotel squeeze joints, overpriced restaurants, and 24-hour shops selling whatever you forgot to pack yesterday morning at four o’dark. I hunt around until I spot the word LAGUNA picked out in teensy gold Fraktur Gothic to one side of a darkened doorway, in an evident attempt to confuse the unwary.

I peek round the partition. It’s a bar, expensively tricked out in that retro-seventies style with too much polished Italian marble and sub-Bauhaus chrome furniture. At this time of evening it’s nearly empty (although maybe the fact that they charge six euros for a beer has something to do with it). I check my phone: it’s 6:15. Damn. I head for the bar, glancing around hopefully in case the mysterious Ramona’s wearing a cardboard sign saying: I’M RAMONA—TRY ME. So much for subtle spy-work.

“Ein Weissbier, bitte,” I ask, exhausting about 60 percent of my total German vocabulary.

“Sure thing, man.” The bartender turns to grab a bottle.

“I’m Ramona,” a female voice with a vaguely East Coast accent murmurs quietly in my left ear. “Don’t turn around.” And something hard pokes me in the ribs.

“Is that the aerial of your mobile phone, or are you displeased to see me?” It probably is a phone, but I do as she says: in this kind of situation it doesn’t do to take chances.

“Shut up, wise guy.” A slim hand reaches discreetly under my left arm and paws at my chest. The bartender is taking an awfully long time to find that bottle. “Hey, what is this Scheiss?”

“You found the shoulder holster? Careful, that’s my Bluetooth GPS receiver in there. And that pocket’s where I keep the noise-canceling headphones for my iPod—hey, watch out, they’re expensive!—and the spare batteries for my PDA, and—”

Ramona lets go of my fishing jacket and a moment later the stubby object disappears from the small of my back. The bartender swings round, beaming and clutching a weird-looking glass in one hand and a bottle with a culturally stereotyped label in the other. “Dude, will this do? It’s a really good Weizenbock . . .”

“Bob!” trills Ramona, stepping sideways until I can finally see her. “Make mine a dry gin and tonic, ice, but hold the fruit,” she tells the barman, smiling like sunrise over the Swiss Alps. I glance at her sidelong and try not to gape.

We’re in supermodel territory here—or maybe she’s Uma Thurman’s stunt double. She’s almost five centimeters taller than me, blonde, and she’s got cheekbones Mo would kill for. The rest of her isn’t bad, either. She has the kind of figure that most models dream about—if indeed that isn’t what she does for a living when she isn’t sticking guns in civil servants’ backs—and whatever the label on her strapless silk gown says, it probably costs more than I earn in a year, before you add in the jewelry dripping from her in incandescent waves. Real physical perfection isn’t something a guy like me gets to see up close and personal very often, and it’s something to marvel at—then run away from, before it hypnotizes you like a snake staring into the eyes of something small, furry, and edible.

She’s beautiful but deadly, and right now she has one slim hand in her black patent-leather evening bag: judging from the slight tension at the corners of her eyes I’ll bet hard money she’s holding a small, pearl-handled automatic pistol just out of sight.

One of my wards bites me on the back of my wrist and I realize what’s come over me: it’s a glamour. I feel a sudden pang of something like homesickness for Mo, who at least comes from my own planet, even if she insists on practicing the violin at all hours.

“Fancy meeting you here like this, darling!” Ramona adds, almost as an afterthought.

“How unexpected,” I agree, taking a step sideways and reaching for the glass and bottle. The bartender, dazzled by her smile, is already reaching for a shot glass. I manage an experimental grin. Ramona reminds me of a certain ex-girlfriend (okay, she reminds me of Mhari: I admit it, try not to wince, and move on) done up to the nines and in full-on predator mode. As I get used to the impact of her glamour I begin to get an edgy feeling I’ve seen her before. “Is that your red Audi in the car park?”

She turns the full force of her smile on me. “What if it is?”

Glub glub . . . chink. Ice cubes sloshing into gin. “That’ll be sixteen euros, man.”

“Put it on my room tab,” I say automatically. I slide the card over. “If it is, you nearly rubbed me out on the A45.”

“I nearly—” She looks puzzled for a moment. Then even more puzzled. “Was it you in that ridiculous little tin can?”

“If my office would pay for an Audi TT I’d drive one, too.” I feel a stab of malicious glee at her visible disquiet. “Who do you think I am? And who are you, and what do you want?”

The bartender drifts away to the other end of the bar, still smiling blissfully under her influence. I blink back little warning flickers of migraine-like distortion as I look at her. That’s got to be at least a level three glamour she’s wearing, I tell myself, and shiver. My ward isn’t powerful enough to break through it so I can see her as she really is, but at least I can tell I’m being spoofed.

“I’m Ramona Random. You can call me Ramona.” She takes a chug of the G&T, then stares down her nose at me with those disquietingly clear eyes, like an aristocratic Eloi considering a shambling, half-blind Morlock who’s somehow made it to the surface. I take a preliminary sip of my beer, waiting for her to continue. “Do you want to fuck me?”

I spray beer through my nostrils. “You have got to be kidding!”

It’s more tactful than I’d rather bed a king snake and sounds less pathetic than my girlfriend would kill me, but the instant I come out with it I know it’s a gut reaction, and true: What’s under that glamour? Nothing I’d want to meet in bed, I’ll bet.

“Good,” says Ramona, closing the door very firmly on that line of speculation, much to my relief. She nods, a falling lock of flax-colored hair momentarily concealing her face: “Every guy I’ve ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later.” It must be my expression, because a moment later she adds, defensively: “It’s just a coincidence! I didn’t kill them. Well, most of them.”

I realize I’m trying to hide behind my beer glass, and force myself to straighten up. “I’m very glad to hear it,” I say, a little too rapidly.

“I was just checking because we’re supposed to be working together. And it would be real unfortunate if you slept with me and died, because then we couldn’t do that.”

“Really? How interesting. And what exactly is it you think I do?”

She puts her glass down and removes her hand from her bag. It’s déjà vu all over again: instead of a gun she’s holding a three-year-old Palm Pilot. It’s inferior tech, and I feel a momentary flash of smugness at knowing I’ve got the drop on her in at least one important department. She flips the protective cover open and glances at the screen. “I think you work for Capital Laundry Services,” she says matter-of-factly. “Nominally you’re a senior scientific officer in the Department of Internal Logistics. You’re tasked with representing your department in various joint committees and with setting policy on IT acquisitions. But you really work for Angleton, don’t you? So they must see something in you that I—” her suddenly jaundiced gaze takes in my jeans, somewhat elderly tee shirt, and fishing vest stuffed with geek toys “—don’t.”

I try not to wilt too visibly. Okay, she’s a player. That makes things easier—and harder, in a way. I swallow a mouthful of beer, successfully this time. “So why don’t you tell me who you are?”

“I just did. I’m Ramona and I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“Fine, Ramona-and-I’m-not-going-to-sleep-with-you. What are you? I mean, are you human? I can’t tell, what with that glamour you’re wearing, and that kind of thing makes me nervous.”

Sapphire eyes stare at me. “Keep guessing, monkey-boy.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake—“Okay, I mean, who do you work for?”

“The Black Chamber. And I always wear this body on business. We’ve got a dress code, you know.”

The Black Chamber? My stomach lurches. I’ve had one run-in with those guys, near the outset of my professional career, and everything I’ve learned since has taught me I was damned lucky to survive. “Who are you here to kill?”

She makes a faint moue of distaste. “I’m supposed to be working with you. I wasn’t sent here to kill anyone.”

We’re going in circles again. “Fine. You’re going to work with me but you don’t want to sleep with me in case I drop dead, Curse of the Mummy and all that. You’re tooled up to vamp some poor bastard, but it’s not me, and you seem to know who I am. Why don’t you just cut the crap and explain what you’re doing here, why the hell you’re so jumpy, and what’s going on?”

“You really don’t know?” She stares at me. “I was told you’d been briefed.”

“Briefed?” I stare right back at her. “You’ve got to be kidding! I’m here for a committee meeting, not a live-action role-playing game.”

“Huh!” For a moment she looks puzzled. “You are here to attend the next session of the joint-liaison committee on cosmological incursions, aren’t you?”

I nod, very slightly. The Auditors don’t usually ask you what you didn’t say, they’re more interested in what you did say, and who you said it to.¹ “You’re not on my briefing sheet.”

“I see.” Ramona nods thoughtfully, then relaxes slightly. “Sounds like a regular fuck-up, then. Like I said, I was told we’re going to be working together on a joint activity, starting with this meeting. For the purposes of this session I’m an accredited delegate, by the way.”

“You—” I bite my tongue, trying to imagine her in a committee room going over the seventy-six-page agenda. “You’re a what?”

“I’ve got observer status. Tomorrow I’ll show you my ward,” she adds. (That clinches it. The wards are handed out to those of us who’re assigned to the joint committee.) “You can show me yours. I’m sure you’ll be briefed before that—afterwards we’ll have a lot more to talk about.”

“Just what—” I swallow “—are we supposed to be working on?”

She smiles. “Baccarat.” She finishes her G&T and stands up with a swish of silk: “I’ll be seeing you later, Robert. Until tonight . . .”

The superficial answer is that I’m here on Laundry business. That’s Capital Laundry Services to anyone who rings the front doorbell or cold-calls the switchboard, even though we haven’t operated out of the old offices above the Chinese laundry in Soho since the end of the Second World War. The Laundry has a long memory. I work for the Laundry because they gave me a choice between doing so . . . or not working for anyone, ever again. With 20/20 hindsight I can’t say I blame them. Some people you just do not want to leave outside the tent pissing in, and in my early twenties, self-confident and naïve, I was about as safe to leave lying around unsupervised as half a ton of sweating gelignite. These days I’m a trained computational demonologist, that species of occult practitioner who really can summon spirits from the vasty deep: or at least whatever corner of our local Calabi-Yau manifold they howl and gibber in, insane on the brane. And I’m a lot safer to have around these days—at least I know what precautions to use and what safety standards to obey: so call me a bunker full of smart bombs.

Most Laundry work consists of tediously bureaucratic form-filling and paper-pushing. About three years ago I got bored and asked if I could be assigned to active service. This was a mistake I’ve been regretting ever since, because it tends to go hand-in-hand with things like being rousted out of bed at four in the morning to go count the concrete cows in Milton Keynes, which sounds like a lot more fun than it actually is; especially when it leads to people shooting at you and lots more complicated forms to fill in and hearings in front of the Audit Committee. (About whom the less said the better.)

But on the other hand, if I hadn’t switched to active service status I wouldn’t have met Mo, Dr. Dominique O’Brien—except she hates the Dominique bit—and from this remove I can barely imagine what life would be like without her. At least, without her in principle. She’s been on one training course or another for months on end lately, doing something hush-hush that she can’t tell me about. This latest course has kept her down at the secure facility in Dunwich Village for four weeks now, and two weeks before that I had to go to the last liaison meeting, and frankly, I’m pining. I mentioned this to Pinky at the pub last week, and he snorted and accused me of carrying on like I was already married. I suppose he’s right: I’m not used to having somebody wonderful and sane in my life, and I guess I’m a bit clingy. Maybe I should talk about it with Mo, but the subject of marriage is a bit touchy and I’m reluctant to raise it—her previous matrimonial experience wasn’t a happy one.

“Bob.” Angleton’s voice is papery-thin and cold, and the data compression inflicted by the telephone network and the security tunnel adds a hollow echo to it. “I got your message. This Ramona person, I want you to describe her.”

“I can’t. She was wearing a glamour, level three at least— it nearly sent me cross-eyed. But she knows who I am and what I’m here for.”

“All right, Bob, that’s about what I expected. Now this is what I want you to do.” Angleton pauses. I lick my suddenly dry lips. “I want you to finish your drink and go back to your room. However, rather than entering, I want you to proceed down the corridor to the next room along on the same side, one number up. Your support team should be checked in there already. They’ll continue the briefing once you’re in the secure suite. Do not enter your room for the time being. Do you understand?”

“I think so.” I nod. “You’ve got a little surprise job lined up for me. Is that it?”

“Yes,” says Angleton, and hangs up abruptly.

I put my beer down, then stand up and glance round. I thought I was here for a routine committee meeting, but suddenly I find I’m standing on shifting sands, in possibly hostile territory. The middle-aged swingers glance disinterestedly at me, but my wards aren’t tingling: they’re just who they appear to be. Right. Go directly to bed, do not eat supper, do not collect . . . I shake my head and get moving.

To get to the elevator bank from the bar requires crossing an expanse of carpet overlooked by two levels of balconies—normally I wouldn’t even notice it but after Angleton’s little surprise the skin on the back of my neck crawls, and I clutch my Treo and my lucky charm bracelet twitchily as I sidle across it. There aren’t many people about, if you discount the queue of tired business travelers checking in at the desk, and I make it to the lift bank without the scent of violets or the tickling sense of recognition that usually prefigures a lethal manifestation. I hit the “up” button on the nearest elevator and the doors open to admit me.

There is a theory that all chain hotels are participants in a conspiracy to convince the international traveler that there is only one hotel on the planet, and it’s just like the one in their own hometown. Personally, I don’t believe it: it seems much more plausible that rather than actually going somewhere I have, in fact, been abducted and doped to the gills by aliens, implanted with false and bewildering memories of humiliating security probes and tedious travel, and checked in to a peculiarly expensive padded cell to recover. It’s certainly an equally consistent explanation for the sense of disorientation and malaise I suffer from in these places; besides which, malevolent aliens are easier to swallow than the idea that other people actually want to live that way.

Elevators are an integral part of the alien abduction experience. I figure the polished fake-marble floor and mirror-tiled ceiling with indirect lighting conspire to generate a hypnotic sense of security in the abductees, so I pinch myself and force myself to stay alert. The lift is just beginning to accelerate upwards when my phone vibrates, so I glance at the screen, read the warning message, and drop to the floor.

The lift rattles as it rises towards the sixth floor. My guts lighten: We’re slowing! The entropy detector wired into my phone’s aerial is lighting up the screen with a grisly red warning icon. Some really heavy shit is going on upstairs, and the closer we get to my floor the stronger it is. “Fuck fuck fuck,” I mumble, punching up a basic countermeasure screen. I’m not carrying: this is supposed to be friendly territory, and whatever’s lighting up the upper levels of the Ramada Treff Page Hotel is—I briefly flash back to another hotel in Amsterdam, a howling wind sucking into the void where a wall should be—

Clunk. The door slides open and I realize at the same instant that I should have leapt for the lift control panel and the emergency stop button. “Shit,” I add—the traditional last word—just as the flashing red dial on my phone screen whisks counterclockwise and turns green: green for safety, green for normal, green to show that the reality excursion has left the building.

“Zum Teufel!”

I glance up stupidly at a pair of feet encased in bulletproof-looking, brown leather hiking boots, then further up at the corduroy trousers and beige jacket of an elderly German tourist. “Trying to get a signal,” I mutter, and scramble out of the lift on all fours, feeling extremely stupid.

I tiptoe along the beige-carpeted corridor to my room, racking my brains for an explanation. This whole set-up stinks like a week-old haddock: what’s going on? Ramona, whoever the hell she is—I’d put hard money on her being mixed in with it. And that entropy blip was big. But it’s gone now. Someone gating in? I wonder. Or a proximal invocation? I pause in front of my door and hold my hand above the door handle for a few seconds.

The handle is cold. Not just metal-at-ambient cold, but frigid and smoking-liquid-nitrogen cold.

“Oops,” I say very quietly, and keep on walking down the corridor until I arrive at the next room door. Then I pull out my phone and speed-dial Angleton.

“Bob, Sitrep.”

I lick my lips. “I’m still alive. While I was in the elevator my tertiary proximity alarm redlined then dropped back. I got to my room and the door handle feels like it’s measuring room temperature in single-digit Kelvins. I’m now outside the adjacent door. I figure it’s a hit and unless you tell me otherwise I’m calling a Code Blue.”

“This isn’t the Code Blue you’re here to deal with.” Angleton sounds dryly amused, which is pretty much what I expect from him. “But you might want to make a note that your activation key is double-oh-seven. Just in case you need it later.”

“You what?” I glare at the phone in disbelief, then punch the number into the keypad. “Jesus, Angleton, someday let me explain this concept called password security to you. I’m not meant to be able to hack my own action locks and start shooting on a whim—”

“But you didn’t, did you?” He sounds even more amused as my phone beeps twice and makes a metallic clicking noise. “You may not have time to ask when the shit hits the fan. That’s why I kept it simple. Now give me a Sitrep,” he adds crisply.

“I’m going live.” I frantically punch a couple of buttons and invisible moths flutter up and down my spine; when they fade away the corridor looks darker, somehow, and more threatening. “Half-live. My terminal is active.” I fumble around in my pocket and pull out a small webcam, click it into place in the expansion slot on top of my phone. Now my phone has got two cameras. “Okay, SCORPION STARE loaded. I’m armed. What can I expect?”

There’s a buzzing noise from the door lock next to me and the green LED flashes. “Hopefully nothing right now, but . . . open the door and go inside. Your backup team should be in place to give you your briefing, unless something’s gone very wrong in the last five minutes.”

“Jesus, Angleton.”

“That is my name. You shouldn’t swear so much: the walls have ears.” He still sounds amused, the omniscient bastard. I don’t know how he does it—I’m not cleared for that shit—but I always have a feeling that he can see over my shoulder. “Go inside. That’s an order.”

I take a deep breath, raise my phone, and open the door.

“Hiya, Bob!” Pinky looks up from the battered instrument case, his hands hovering over a compact computer keyboard. He’s wearing a fetching batik sarong, a bushy handlebar moustache, and not much else: I’m not going to give him the pleasure of knowing just how much this disturbs me, or how relieved I am to see him.

“Where’s Brains?” I ask, closing the door behind me and exhaling slowly.

“In the closet. Don’t worry, he’ll be coming out soon enough.” Pinky points a digit at the row of storage doors fronting the wall adjacent to my room. “Angleton sent us. He said you’d need briefing.”

“Am I the only person here who doesn’t know what’s going on?”

“Probably.” He grins. “Nothing to worry about, ol’ buddy.” He glances at my Treo. “Would you mind not pointing that thing at me?”

“Oh, sorry.” I lower it hastily and eject the second camera that turns it into a SCORPION STARE terminal, a basilisk device capable of blowing apart chunks of organic matter within visual range by convincing them that some of their carbon nuclei are made of silicon. “Are you going to tell me what’s happening?”

“Sure.” He sounds unconcerned. “You’re being destiny-entangled with a new partner, and we’re here to make sure she doesn’t accidentally kill and eat you before the ritual is complete.”

“I’m being what?” I hate it when I squeak.

“She’s from the Black Chamber. You’re supposed to be working together on something big, and the old man wants you to be able to draw on her abilities when you need help.”

“What do you mean draw on her? Like I’m a trainee tattooist now?” I’ve got a horrible feeling I know what he’s talking about, and I don’t like it one little bit: but it would explain why Angleton sent Pinky and Brains to be my backup team. They’re old housemates, and the bastard thinks they’ll make me feel more comfortable.

The closet door opens and Brains steps out. Unlike Pinky he’s decently dressed, for leather club values of decency. “Don’t get overexcited, Bob,” he says, winking at me: “I was just drilling holes in the walls.”

“Holes—”

“To observe her. She’s confined to the pentacle on your bedroom carpet; you don’t need to worry about her getting loose and stealing your soul before we complete the circuit. Hold still or this won’t work.”

“Who’s in what pentacle in my bedroom?” I take a step back towards the door but he’s approaching me, clutching a sterile needle.

“Your new partner. Here, hold out a hand, this won’t hurt a bit—”

“Ouch!” I step backwards and bounce off the wall, and Brains manages to get his drop of blood while I’m wincing.

“Great, that’ll let us complete the destiny lock. You know you’re a lucky man? At least, I suppose you’re lucky—if you’re that way inclined—”

“Who is she, dammit?”

“Your new partner? She’s a changeling sent by the Black Chamber. Name of Ramona. And she is stacked, if that sort of thing matters to you.” He pulls an amused face, oh so tolerant of my heterosexual ways.

“But I didn’t—”

A toilet flushes, then the bathroom door opens and Boris steps out. And that’s when I know I’m in deep shit, because Boris is not my normal line manager: Boris is the guy they send out when something has gone terribly wrong in the field and stuff needs to be cleaned up by any means necessary. Boris acts like a cut-rate extra in a Cold War spy thriller—right down to the hokey fake accent and the shaven bullet-head—although he’s about as English as I am. The speech thing is a leftover from a cerebral infarction, courtesy of a field invocation that went pear-shaped.

“Bob.” He doesn’t smile. “Welcome to Darmstadt. You come for joint-liaison framework. You are attending meeting tomorrow as planned: but are also being cleared for AZORIAN BLUE HADES as of now. Are here to brief, introduce you to support team, and make sure you bond with your, your, associate. Without to be eated.”

“Eaten?” I ask. I must look a trifle tense because even Boris manages to pull an apologetic expression from somewhere. “What is this job, exactly? I didn’t volunteer for a field mission—”

“Know you do not. We are truly sorry to put this on you,” says Boris, running a hand over his bald head in a gesture that gives the lie to the sentiment, “but not having time for histrionics.” He glances at Brains and gives a tiny nod. “First am giving briefing to you, then must complete destiny-entanglement protocol with entity next door. After that—” he checks his watch “—are being up to you, but estimating are only seven days to save Western civilization.”

“What?” I know what my ears just heard but I’m not sure I believe them.

He stares at me grimly, then nods. “If is up to me, are not be relying on you. But time running out and is short on alternatives.”

“Oh Jesus.” I sit down on the sole available chair. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Nyet. Pinky, the DVD please. It is being time to expand Robert’s horizons . . .”