“Right,” I say, leaning against the back of the chair and breathing deeply. “Boris, what the fuck is this about?”

“It is to be stopping her from killing you.” Boris glowers at me. He’s annoyed about something, which makes two of us. “And to be creating an untappable communication, for mission which you have not be briefed on because—” He gestures at the laptop and I realize why he’s so irritated: they weren’t joking when they said the briefing would self-destruct. “Here are your ticket for flight, is open for next available seat. Will continue the briefing in Saint Martin.” He shoves a booklet of flight vouchers at me.

“Where?” I nearly drop them.

“They’re sending us to the Caribbean!” It’s Pinky. He’s almost turning handstands. “Sun! Sand! And skullduggery! And we’ve got great toys to play with!” Brains is methodically packing up the entanglement rig, which breaks down into a big rolling suitcase. He seems amused by something.

I try to catch Boris’s eye: Boris is staring at Pinky in either deep fascination, pity, or something in between. “Where in the Caribbean?” I ask.

Boris shakes himself. “Is joint operation,” he explains. “Is European territory, joint Franco-Dutch government—they ask us to operate in there. But Caribbean is American sea. So Black Chamber send Ramona to be working with you.”

I wince. “Tell me you’re joking.”

Another voice interrupts, inaudible to everyone else: ★★Hey, Bob! I’m still stuck here. A girl could get bored waiting.★★ I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy-just-expired kind of way.

“Am not joking. This is joint operation. Lots of shit to spread all round.” He carefully picks up his dead laptop and drops it into an open briefcase. “Go to committee meeting tomorrow, take memos, then go to airport and fly out. Can file liaison report later, after save the universe.”

“Uh-huh. First I better go unlock Ramona from that containment you stuck her in.” ★★I’m coming,★★ I send her way. “How trustworthy is she, really?”

Boris smiles thinly. “How trustworthy is rattlesnake?”

I excuse myself and stagger out into the corridor, my head still throbbing and the world crinkling slightly at the edges. I guess I now know what that spike of entropy change was. I pause at the door to my room but the handle is no longer dewed with liquid nitrogen, and is merely cold to the touch.

Ramona is sitting in an armchair opposite the wall with the holes in it. She smiles at me, but the expression doesn’t reach her eyes. ★★Bob. Get me out of this.★★

This is the pentacle someone has stenciled on the carpet around her chair and plugged into a compact, blue, noise generator. It’s still running—Brains didn’t hook it up to his remote. ★★Give me a moment.★★ I sit down on the bed opposite her, kick off my trainers, and rub my head. ★★If I let you go, what are you going to do?★★

Her smile broadens. ★★Well, personally—★★ she glances at the door ★★—nothing much.★★ I get a momentary flicker of unpleasantness involving extremely sharp knives and gouts of arterial blood, then she clamps down on it, with an almost regretful edge, and I realize she’s just day-dreaming about someone else, someone a very long way away. ★★Honest.★★

★★Second question. Who’s your real target?★★

★★Are you going to let me go once we get through this game of twenty questions? Or do you have something else in mind?★★ She crosses her legs, watching me alertly. Every guy I’ve ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, I recall. ★★I wasn’t joking,★★ she adds, defensively.

★★I didn’t think you were. I just want to know who your real target is.★★

She sniffs. ★★Ellis Billington. What’s your problem?★★

★★I’m not sure. Bear with me for one last test?★★

★★What?★★ She half stands as I get off the bed, but the constraining field prohibits her from reaching me: ★★Hey! Ow! You bastard!★★

It brings tears to my eyes. I clutch my right foot and wait for the pain to subside from where I kicked the bed-base. Ramona is bent over, hugging her foot as well. ★★Okay,★★ I mumble, then kneel down and switch off the signal generator. I don’t particularly want to switch it off—I feel a hell of a lot safer with Ramona trapped inside a pentacle; the idea of setting her free makes my skin crawl—but the flip side of the entanglement is fairly clear: not only can we talk without being overheard, there are other (and drastically less pleasant) side effects.

★★You’re not a masochist, are you?★★ she asks tightly as she hobbles towards the bathroom.

★★No—★★

★★Good.★★ She slams the door shut. A few seconds later I clutch at my crotch in horror as I feel the unmistakable sensation of a full bladder emptying. It takes me seconds to realize it’s not mine. My fingers are dry.

★★Bitch!★★ Two can play at that game.

★★It’s your fault for keeping me waiting for ages.★★

I breathe deeply. ★★Look. I didn’t ask for this—★★

★★Me neither!★★

★★—so why don’t we call it a truce?★★

Silence, punctuated by a sharp sense of impatience. ★★Took you long enough, monkey-boy.★★

★★What’s with the monkey-boy business?★★ I complain.

★★What’s with the abhuman-bloodsucking-demon-whore imagery?★★ she responds acidly. ★★Try to keep your gibbering religious bigotry out of my head and I’ll leave your bladder alone. Deal?★★

★★Deal—hey! How the hell am I a gibbering religious bigot? I’m an atheist!★★

★★Yeah, and the horse you rode in on is a member of the College of Cardinals.★★ I hear the toilet flush through the door, a sudden reminder that we’re not actually talking. ★★You may not believe in God but you still believe in Hell. And you think it’s where people like me belong.★★

★★But isn’t that where you come from ... ?★★

The door opens. Her glamour’s as strong as ever: she looks like she just stepped out of a cocktail party to powder her nose. ★★We can go over it some other time, Bob. You can just call room service if you want to eat; I have to make more elaborate arrangements. See you tomorrow.★★ With that, she picks up her evening bag from the bedside table and departs in a snit.

“Hi! Where are—hold on a moment—Bob? You still there? I was about to jump in the bath. How’s it going?”

Gulp. “About a ton of horse manure just landed on me. Have you seen Angleton this week?”

“No, they’ve billeted me in the Monkfish Motel again and it’s really dull—you know what the nightlife in Dunwich is like. So what’s Angleton up to now?”

“I, uh, well, I got here—Darmstadt—to find—” I double-check my phone to confirm we’re in secure mode “—new orders waiting for me, care of Boris and the two mad mice. Almost got run off the autobahn on the way in and, well—”

“Car accident?”

“Sort of. Anyway, I’m being shunted off on a side trip instead of coming home. So I won’t be back for the weekend.”

“Shit.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Where are they sending you?”

“To Saint Martin, in the Caribbean.”

“The—”

“And it gets worse.”

“Do I want to hear this, love?”

“Probably not.”

Pause. “Okay. I’m sitting down.”

“It’s a joint operation. They’ve inflicted a minder from the Black Chamber on me.”

“But—Bob! That’s crazy! It just doesn’t happen! Nobody even knows what the Black Chamber is really called! ‘No Such Agency’ meets ‘Destroy Before Reading.’ Are you telling me . . . ?”

“I haven’t been fully briefed. But I figure it’s going to be extremely ungood, for, like, Amsterdam values of ungood.” I shudder. Our little weekend trip to Amsterdam involved more trouble than you can shake a shitty stick at. “I guess you know the Chamber specializes in taking the HUM out of HUMINT? Golems and remote viewing and so forth, never send a human agent to do a job a zombie can do? Anyway, the minder they’ve sent me is, you know, existentially challenged. They’ve sicced a demon on me.”

“Jesus, Bob.”

“Yeah, well, He isn’t answering the phone.”

“I can’t believe it. The bastards.”

“Listen, I’ve got a feeling there’s more to this than meets the eye and I need someone watching my back who isn’t just looking for a good spot to sink their fangs into. Can you do some discreet digging when you get back to the office? Ask Andy, perhaps? This is under Angleton, by the way.”

“Angleton.” Mo’s voice goes flat and cold, and the hair on the back of my neck rises. She blames Angleton for a lot of things, and it could turn very ugly if she decides to let it all hang out. “I should have guessed. It’s about time that bastard faced the music.”

“Don’t go after him!” I say urgently. “You’re not meant to know this. Remember, all you know is I’ve been sent off somewhere to do a job.”

“But you want me to keep my ear to the ground and listen for oncoming train wrecks.”

“That’s about the size of it. I’m missing you.”

“Love you, too.” A pause. “What is it about this spook that’s got you so upset?”

Whoops. I’m no good at hiding things from her, am I? “For starters she’s crazier than a legful of ferrets. She’s seriously bad magic, wearing a perpetual glamour—level three, if I’m any judge of such things. The only thing keeping her on track is the geas that ate Montana. She’s not a free actor. Actress.”

“Uh-huh. What else?”

I lick my lips. “Boris, um, applied some sort of destiny-entanglement protocol to us. I didn’t run away fast enough.”

“Destiny—what? Entanglement? What’s that?”

I take a deep breath. “I’m not sure, but I’d appreciate it if you could find out and tell me. Because whatever it is, it’s scaring me.”

IT’S STILL EARLY IN THE EVENING, BUT MY ENCOUNTER with Ramona has shaken me, and I don’t much want to run into Pinky and Brains again (if they haven’t already packed up and left: there’s quite a lot of banging coming from next door). I decide to hole up in my room and lick my wounded dignity, so I order up a cardboard cheeseburger from room service, have a long soak under the shower, watch an infinitely forgettable movie on cable, and turn in for the night.

I don’t usually remember my dreams because they’re mostly surreal and/or incomprehensible—two-headed camels stealing my hovercraft, bat-winged squid gods explaining why I ought to accept job offers from Microsoft, that sort of thing—so what makes this one stand out is its sheer gritty realism. Dreaming that I’m me is fine. So is dreaming that I’m an employee of a vast software multinational, damned and enslaved by an ancient evil. But dreaming that I’m an overweight fifty-something German sales executive from an engineering firm in Düsseldorf is so far off the map that if I wasn’t asleep I’d pinch myself.

I’m at a regional sales convention and I’ve been drinking and living large. I like these conferences: I can get away from Hilda and cut loose, party like a young thing again. The awards dinner is over and I split off with a couple of younger fellows I know vaguely, which is how we end up in the casino. I don’t usually gamble much but I’m on a winning streak at the wheel, and all the ladies love a winning streak; between the brandy, the Cohiba panatelas, and the babe who’s attached herself to my shoulder—a call girl, natürlich, but classy—I’m having the time of my life. She leans against me and suggests I might cash in my winnings, and this strikes me as a good idea. After all, if I keep gambling, my streak will end sooner or later, won’t it? Let it pay for her tonight.

We’re in the lift, heading up to my room on the fourteenth floor, and she’s nuzzling up against me. I haven’t felt smooth flesh like this in . . . too long. Hilda was never like that and since the kids the only side of her body she’s shown me is the sharp edge of her tongue: serves her right if I enjoy myself once in a while. The babe’s got her arms around me inside my jacket and I can feel her body through her dress. Wow. This has been a day to remember! We cuddle some more and I lead her to my room, tiptoeing—she’s giggling quietly, telling me not to make a noise, not to disturb the neighbors—and I get the door open and she tells me to go wait in the bathroom while she gets ready. How much does she want? I ask. She shakes her head and says, Two hundred but only if I’m happy. Well, how can I refuse an offer like that?

In the bathroom I take my shoes off, remove my jacket and tie—enough. She calls to say she’s ready, and I open the door. She’s lying on the bed, in a provocative position that still allows her to see me. She’s taken off her dress: smooth, stocking-clad thighs and a waterfall of pure corn-silk hair, blue eyes like ice diamonds that I can fall into and drown. My heart is pounding as if I’ve run a marathon, or I’m about to have a heart attack. She’s smiling at me, hungry, needy; I take a step forwards. My back is clammy with cold sweat and my crotch feels like a steel bar, painfully erect. I need her like I’ve never needed a woman before. Another step. Another. She smiles and kneels on the carpet in front of me, opening her mouth to take me in. I dread her touch, even though I blindly crave it. Tap-dancing on the third rail, I think fuzzily, trying to force my paralyzed ribs to take a racking breath of air as she reaches out to touch me.

“Uh—uh!”

I open my eyes. It’s dark in the hotel room, my heart’s hammering, and I’m lying in a puddle of cold sweat with an erection like a lump of wood and a ghastly sense of horror squatting on my chest. “Uh!” All I can do is grunt feebly. I flail for a bit, then shove the clammy sheet away from me. I’m erect—and it’s not like waking from an erotic dream, it’s more like someone’s using a farmyard device to milk me. “Ugh.” I begin to sit up, meaning to go to the bathroom and towel my back off, and right then I come.

It’s weird, and wonderful, like no orgasm I’ve ever had before. It seems to go on and on forever, scratching the unscratchable itch inside me with an intensity that rapidly becomes unbearable. There’s something about it that feels terminal—not repeatable, an endpoint in someone’s life. When it begins to subside I whimper slightly and reach for my crotch. Surprise: I’m still erect—and my skin is dry.

That wasn’t me, I realize, disturbed. That was Ramona—I clutch my prick protectively.

Distant laughter. ★★Go on, jerk yourself off.★★ There’s a warm glow of satisfaction in her stomach. ★★You know you really want to, don’t you?★★ she thinks, licking her lips and sending me the taste of semen. Then I feel her reach over and pull the sheets up over the dead businessman’s face.

I manage to reach the bathroom and lift the toilet lid before I throw up. My stomach knots and tries to climb my throat. Every guy I’ve ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, she said, and now I know why. She’s right about one thing: despite the sudden gag reflex I’m still sprouting a woody. Despite everything, despite the dread, despite the almost furtive guilt I feel, I really enjoyed whatever it is Ramona just did. And now I feel inexplicably guilty on account of Mo, because I wasn’t looking for an adventure on the side—and I feel really dirty as well, because I found it exciting.

The overspill from what Ramona was doing turned me on in my sleep, but the reason I’m throwing up now is that what she was doing wasn’t sex: she was feeding on the guy’s mind, and he died, and it gave her an orgasm, and I got off on it. I want to scrub my brains out with a wire brush, and I want to crawl into a deep hole in the ground, and I want to do it all over again . . . because I’m entangled with her, I hope, but the alternative is worse: there are some things I don’t want to find out about myself, and a secret taste for hot, kinky demon sex is one of them.

I really hope Mo finds out that this entanglement thing is reversible. Because if it isn’t, the next time she and I go to bed together—

Let’s not think about that right now.

I somehow manage to fumble my way into my suit—an uncomfortable imposition required for overseas junkets—then shamble downstairs to the dining room for breakfast. Coffee, I need coffee. And a copy of the Independent, imported from London on an overnight flight. The restaurant is a model of German efficiency, and the staff mostly leave me alone, for which I’m grateful.

I’m just about feeling human again by a quarter to nine; the meeting’s optimistically scheduled to start in another fifteen minutes, but at a guess half the delegates will still be working on their breakfasts. So I wander over to the lobby where there’s free WiFi, to see if there are any messages for me, and that’s when I run into Franz.

“Bob? Is that you?”

I blink stupidly. “Franz?”

“Bob!” We do the handshake thing, feinting around our centers of gravity with briefcases held out to either side, like a pair of nervous chickens sizing each other up in a farmyard. I haven’t seen Franz in a suit before, and he hasn’t seen me in one either. I met him on a training seminar about six months ago when he was over from Den Haag. He’s very tall and very Dutch, which means his accent is a lot more BBC-perfect than mine. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I guess you must be on the joint-session list?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he jokes. “I was just looking for a postcard before I go upstairs . . . will you wait?”

“Sure.” I relax slightly. “Have you done one of these before?”

“No.” He spins the rack idly, looking at the picturesque gingerbread castles one by one. “Have you?”

“I’ve done one, period. Shouldn’t talk about it outside class, but what the hell.”

Franz finds a postcard showing a beaming buxom German barmaid clutching a pair of highly suggestive jugs. “I’ll have this one.” He attracts the attention of the nearest sales clerk and rattles something off in what sounds to me like flawless German. My tablet finishes checking for mail, bins the spam, and dings at me to put it away. I rub my head and glance at Franz enviously. I bet he wouldn’t have any problems with Ramona: he’s scarily bright, good-natured, incisive, handsome, cultured, and all-round competent. Not to mention being able to out-drink me and charm the socks off everyone who meets him. He’s clearly on his way up the ladder of the AIVD’s occult counterintelligence division, and he’ll make deputy director while I’m still polishing Angleton’s filing cabinet.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Guess so.”

We head for the lift to the conference room. It’s on the fourth floor. Lest you think this is an altogether too casual approach to confidential business, the hotel is security certified and our hosts have block-booked the adjacent rooms and the suites immediately above and below. It’s not as if we’re going to be discussing matters of national security, either.

Franz and I are early. There’s a coffee urn and cups in place on the sideboard, an LCD projector and screen next to the boardroom table, and comfortable leather-lined swivel chairs to fall asleep in. I claim one corner of the table, opposite the windows with their daydream-friendly view of downtown Darmstadt, and plunk my tablet down on the leather place mat beside the hotel notepad. “Coffee?” asks Franz.

“Yes, please. Milk, no sugar.” I pick up the agenda and carry it over.

“What’s the routine?” he asks. He actually sounds interested.

“Well. We show each other our authorizations first. Then the chair orders the doors sealed.” I wave at the far end of the suite: “Restroom’s through there. Chair this time is—” I riffle the sheets “—Italy, which means Anna, unless she’s ill and they send a replacement. She’ll keep things tight, I think. Then we get down to business.”

“I see. And the minutes . . . ?”

“Everyone who’s got a presentation is supposed to bring copies on CD-ROM. The host organization⁶ provides a secretarial service, that’s the GSA’s job this time.”

Franz’s brow wrinkles. “Excuse me for saying, but this sounds as if the meeting itself is . . . unnecessary? We could take it to e-mail.”

I shrug. “Yup. But then we wouldn’t get to do the real business, over coffee and biscuits.”

His expression clears. “Ah, now I see—”

The door opens. “Ciao, guys!” It’s Anna, short and bubbly and (I suspect) a little hungover, judging from her eyes. “Oh, my head. Where is everybody? Let us keep this short, shall we?”

She makes a beeline for the coffee pot. “Tell Andrew he is a naughty, naughty man,” she chides me.

“What’s he done now?” I ask, steeling myself.

“He got my birthday wrong!” Flashing eyes, toothy grin. “A, what is it, a fencepost error.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, I’ll do that.” I shrug. I’m still uncomfortable in this type of situation. Most of the people here were grades above me until six months ago, and half of them still are; I’m very much the junior delegate and Andy—who used to be one of my managers—is the guy into whose boots I’ve stepped. “Last time I saw him he was kind of busy. Overworked dealing with fallout from—” I clear my throat.

“Oh, say no more.” She pats me on the arm and moves on to say hello to the other delegates who’re letting themselves in. We ought to have a full house of security management types from Spain, Brussels, and parts east within NATO, but for some reason attendance today looks unusually light.

Delegates are beginning to arrive, so I head back towards my seat. “Who’s that?” Franz asks me quietly, with a nod at the door. I glance round and do a double take: it’s Ramona. She’s almost unrecognizable in a business suit with her hair up, but being this close to her still makes the skin crawl in the small of my back.

“That’s, um, Ms. Random. An observer. We’re privileged to have her here.” My cheek twitches and Franz stares at me from behind his rimless spectacles.

“I see. I was unaware that we had that type of guest present.” I get the feeling he sees a whole lot more than I told him, but there’s not a lot I can say.

★★Hello, darling, slept well?★★ she asks. I start: then I realize she’s still on the other side of the room, coolly pouring herself a cup of coffee and smiling at Anna.

★★No thanks to you,★★ I think at her.

I hear a rude noise. ★★A girl’s got to eat sometime.★★

★★Yes, but midnight snacking—★★ Invisible pink elephants. Think of invisible pink elephants, Bob. Think of invisible pink, throbbing elephants in the night—no, cancel the throbbing—

I sit down, dizzily. “Is something wrong?” asks Franz.

“Supper disagreed with me,” I say weakly. Ramona’s supper, that is: pâté de gros ingénieur. “I’ll be okay if I sit down.” A hot flush is trying to follow the shivers up and down my spine, I glance at her across the room and she looks back at me, blank-faced.

People are heading towards the table, apparently following my lead. To my annoyance Ramona oozes into the chair next to me then stares sharply at Anna’s end of the table.

“Ciao everybody. I see a lot of vacant seats and new faces today! This meeting will now commence. Badges on the table, please.” Anna looks up and down the table pointedly as clusters of conversation die down.

I reach into my pocket and slide my Laundry warrant card onto the table. Everyone else is doing likewise with their own accreditation: the air twists and prickles with the bindings.

“Excuse moi.” François leans across the table towards Ramona: “You have credentials?”

Ramona just looks at him. “No. As a matter of policy my organization does not issue identification papers.” Heads turn and eyes narrow around the table.

I clear my throat. “I can vouch for her,” I hear myself saying. “Ramona Random—” words slide seamlessly into my mind “—Overseas Operations Directorate, based out of Arkham.” ★★Thanks,★★ I tell her silently, ★★now get out of my head.★★ “Here by direct invitation of my own department, full observer status under Clause Four of the Benthic Treaty.”

Ramona smiles thinly. There’s a low buzz of surprised conversation. “Quiet!” calls Anna. “I’d like to welcome our . . . today’s observer here.” She looks slightly flustered. “If you could contrive some form of identification in future, that would be helpful, but—” she looks at me hopefully “—I’m sure Robert’s superiors will cover this time.”

I manage to nod. I can’t cover it on my authority, but this is Angleton’s bloody fault, after all, and he actually gets to talk to Mahogany Row. Let them sort it out.

“Fine!” She claps her hands together. “Then, to business! First item, attendees, I believe we have taken care of. Let the doors be locked. Second item, travel expense claims in pursuit of joint-investigation warrants on overseas territory, at the request of non-issuing governments. Arbitration of expense allocation among participating member states—traditionally this has been carried out on an ad hoc basis, but since the Austrian civil service strike last year the urgency of formalizing arrangements has become apparent . . .”

The next hour passes uneventfully. It’s basically bureaucratic legwork, to ensure that none of the European partner agencies tread on each other’s toes when operating on each other’s soil. Proposals to allow agents of charter countries to claim expenses for mopping up after another member’s business are agreed upon and bounced up to the next level of management for approval. Suggestions for standardizing the various forms of ID we use are proposed, and eventually shot down because they serve very different purposes and some of them come with powers which are considered alarming, illegal, or immoral in different jurisdictions. I take notes on my tablet, briefly consider a game of Minesweeper before deciding it’s not worth the risk of exposure, and finally settle down to the grim business of not falling asleep and embarrassing myself in public.

Glancing around the table I realize things are pretty much the same all round. Anyone who isn’t actively talking or jotting notes is twiddling their thumbs, gazing out the window, staring at the other delegates, or quietly drooling over their complimentary notepad. Ah, the joy of high-level negotiations. I glance at Ramona and see she’s one of the doodlers. She’s inscribing something black and scary on her notepad: geometric lines and arcs, repeated patterns that sink into one another in a self-similar way. Then she glances sidelong at me, and very deliberately slides a blank sheet of paper across her pad.

I shake myself; must stay focused. We’re up to item four on the agenda, drilling down into issues of software resource management and a proposal to jointly license an auditing and license management system being developed by a subsidiary of—TLA Systems GMbH?

I sit bolt upright. Sophie from Berlin is soporifically talking us through the procurement process Faust Force has come up with, a painfully politically correct concoction of open market tenders and sealed bidding processes intended to evaluate competing proposals and then roll out a best-of-breed system for common deployment. “Excuse me,” I say, when she pauses for breath, “this is all very well, but what can you tell us about the winning bid? I assume the process has already been approved,” I add hastily, before she can explain that this is all very important background detail.

“Ah, but this is necessary to understand the process-oriented quality infrastructure, Robert.” She looks down her nose at me over her bifocals and brandishes a scarily thick sheaf of papers. “I have here the fully documented procurement analysis for the system!” The only inflection in her voice is on the last word, making a sort of semantic hiccup out of it. She sounds like a badly programmed speech synthesizer.

“Yes, but what does it do?” Ramona butts in, leaning forwards. It’s the first thing she’s said since I introduced her, and suddenly she’s the focus of attention again. “I’m sorry if this is all understood by everybody present, but . . .” she trails off.

Sophie pauses for a few seconds, like a robot receiving new instructions. “If you will with me bear, I shall explain it. The contractors a presentation have prepared, to be played after lunch.” Oops, I think, visions of the usual postprandial siesta torture running through my head. Dim the lights, turn the heating up, then get some bastard in a suit to stand up and drone through a PowerPoint presentation—have I said how much I hate PowerPoint?—while you try to stay awake. Then I blink and notice Ramona’s sidelong glance. Oops again. What’s going on?

Lunch arrives mercifully soon, in the form of a trolley parked outside the conference suite door, laden with sandwiches and slices of ham. Sophie accepts the enforced pause with relatively good grace, and we all stand up and head for the buffet, except Ramona. While I’m stuffing my face on tuna and cucumber I catch Franz looking concerned. “Are you hungry?” he asks her quietly.

Ramona smiles at him, turning on the charm. “I’m on a special diet.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

She beams up at him: “That’s all right, I had a heavy meal last night.”

★★Don’t,★★ I warn her silently, and she flashes a scowl at me.

★★You’re no fun, monkey-boy.★★

Eventually we go back to the table. Anna fidgets with the remote control to the blinds until she figures out how to block off the early afternoon sunlight. “Very good!” she says approvingly. “Sophie, if you will continue?”

“Danke.” Sophie fidgets with her laptop and the projector cable. “Ah, gut. Here we go, very soon . . .”

There is something about PowerPoint presentations that sends people to sleep. It’s particularly effective after lunch, and Sophie doesn’t have the personal presence to get past the soothing wash of pastel colors and flashy dissolves and actually make us pay attention. I lean back and watch tiredly. TLA GmBH is a subsidiary of TLA Systems Corporation, of Ellis Billington. They’re the guys who do for the Black Chamber what QinetiQ does—or used to do—for the UK’s Ministry of Defense. This integrated system we’re watching a promo video for is basically just a tarted-up-for-export—meaning, it speaks Spanish, French, and German technobabble—version of a big custom program they wrote for Ramona’s faceless employers. So what’s Ramona doing here? I wonder. They must already know all this. Wake up, Bob! I’ve got a stomach full of tuna mayo and smoked salmon on rye, and it feels like it weighs a quarter of a ton. The sunlight slanting through the half-drawn blinds warms the back of my hands where they lie limply on the tabletop. Asset-management software is so not my favorite afternoon topic of conversation. Bob, pay attention at the back! Ramona shouldn’t be here, I think fuzzily. Why is she here? Is it something to do with Billington’s software?

★★Bob! Pay attention right now!★★

I jolt upright in my seat as if someone’s stuck a cattle prod up my rear. The sharp censorious voice in my head is Ramona’s. I glance along the table but everybody else is nodding or dozing or snoozing in tune to Sophie’s repetitive cadence—except Ramona, who catches my eye. She’s alert, ready and waiting for something.

★★What’s going on?★★ I ask her.

★★We’re at slide twenty-four,★★ she tells me. ★★What-ever happens next, it happens between numbers twenty-six and twenty-eight.★★

★★What ...?★★

★★We’re not omniscient, Bob. We just caught wind of—aha, twenty-five coming up.★★

I glance at the end of the table. Sophie stands next to the projector and her laptop, swaying slightly like a puppet in the grip of an invisible force. “. . . The four-year rolling balance of assets represents a best-of-breed optimization for control of procurement processes and the additional neural network intermediated Bayesian maintenance workload prediction module will allow you to control your inventory of hosts and project a stable cash flow . . .” My guts clench. A whole lot of things suddenly come clear: The bastards are trying to brainwash the committee!

It’s PowerPoint, of course. A hypnotic slide into a bulleted list of total cost of ownership savings and a pie chart with a neat lime-green slice taken out of it—ooh look, it’s three dimensional; it’s also a bar graph with the height of the slices denoting some other parameter—and a pale background of yellow lines on white that looks a little like the TLA logo we began the slide show with: an eye floating in a tetrahedral Escher paradox, and a diagram a little bit like whatever Ramona was sketching on her notepad—I grab my tablet PC and poke the power button, trying to keep my hands from shaking.

Screen saver. Screen saver. I eject the pen and hastily hit on the control panel to bring up the screen saver. The dream catcher routine I had running last night is all I can think of right now. I set it running then slide the tablet face-up, with the hypnotic blur of purple lines cycling across it, on the conference table so that it lies directly between me and the projection screen.

★★Good move, monkey-boy.★★

Franz is leaning back in his chair beside me. His eyes are closed and there’s a fine thread of spittle dangling from one side of his mouth. François is face down on the mat, snoring, and Anna is frozen, glassy-eyed, at the foot of the table, her open eyes fixed unseeing on the projector screen. I take care not to look at it directly.

★★What’s it meant to be doing?★★ I ask Ramona.

★★That’s what we’re here to find out. Nobody who’s been in one of these sales sessions before has come out in any state to tell us.★★

★★What? You mean they were killed?★★

★★No, they just insisted on buying TLA products. Oh, and they’d had their souls eaten.★★

★★What would you know about that?★★

★★They don’t taste the same. Shut up and get ready to yank the projector cable when I give the word, okay?★★

Sophie hits the mouse button again and the light in the room changes subtly, signaling a dissolve from one frame to another. Her voice mutates, morphs and deepens, taking on a vaguely familiar cadence. “Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of any contradictory and confusing truths . . .”

The dream catcher in front of me is going crazy. ★★I’ve seen that before. It’s the Apple 1984 ad, the one they commissioned Ridley Scott to direct for the launch of the Macintosh computer. The most expensive ad in the entire history of selling beige boxes to puzzled posers. What the hell are they doing with that?★★

★★Law of contagion.★★ Ramona sounds tense. ★★Very strong imagery of conformity versus mold-breaking, concealing conformity disguised as mold-breaking. Ever wondered why Mac users are so glassy-eyed about their boxes? This is slide twenty-six; okay, we’ve got about ten seconds to go ... ★★

I briefly debate standing up right there and yanking the power cable. I’ve seen the original ad so many times I don’t need to look at the screen to follow it; it’s famous throughout the computer industry. “Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

Seconds to go. The female runner races towards the huge screen in front of the arena, clutching a sledge hammer, poised to hurl it through Big Brother’s face—and I know exactly what’s going to happen, what those shards of glass are going to morph into with the next dissolve as I take my tablet by both sides (careful to keep my hands from touching the toughened glass screen cover) and pick it up, flipping it over as the crescendo builds towards what would be, in the real advertisement, the announcement of a revolutionary new type of computer—

★★Ready—★★

The light flickers and something that feels like an out-of-control truck punches into the screen of the tablet PC as I hold it between my face and the projection screen. It’s not a physical force, but it might as well be from the acrid smoke spewing from the vents under my fingertips and the way the battery compartment begins to glow.

★★Go!★★

I drop the PC, cover my eyes with one hand, and dive for where the back of the projector used to be. I flop on my belly halfway across the table, flailing around until I catch a bunch of wires and yank hard, pulling and tearing at them, too frightened to open my eyes and see which ones I’ve got hold of. Someone is screaming and someone else is crying behind me, emitting incoherent moans like an animal in pain. Then someone punches me in the ribs.

I open my eyes. The projector’s out and Ramona is sitting on top of Sophie from the Faust Force, or the thing that’s animating Sophie’s body, methodically whacking her head on the floor. Then I realize that the pain in my side is Ramona’s: Sophie is fighting back. I roll over and find myself facing Anna. Her face hangs like a loose mask and her eyes glow faintly in the twilight that the almost-closed blinds allow into the room. I scrabble desperately, grab the edge of the table, and pull myself over it into her lap. She grabs for my head, but whatever’s inside her isn’t very good at controlling a human body and I roll again, drop arse-first onto the floor (my coccyx will tell me about it tomorrow), and scramble to my feet.

The previously orderly meeting is dissolving into the kind of carnage that can only ensue when most of the members of an international joint-liaison committee turn into brain-eating zombies. Luckily they’re not Sam Raimi zombies, they’re just midlevel bureaucrats whose cerebral cortices have been abruptly wiped in the presence of a Dho-Na summoning geometry (in this case, embedded in the dissolve between two PowerPoint slides), allowing some random extradimensional gibberers to move in. Half of them can’t even stand up, and those who can aren’t very effective yet.

★★Have you got her?★★ I ask Ramona, working my way past Anna (who is currently keeping François occupied by chewing on his left hand) and nearly tripping over the wreckage of my tablet PC.

★★She’s fighting back!★★ A stray, booted foot lashes out at me and now I succeed in falling over, on top of Sophie as luck would have it. Sophie looks up at me with blank eyes and makes a keening noise like a cat that wants to break a furry critter’s neck.

★★Well fucking do something!★★ I yell.

★★Okay.★★ Sophie jerks underneath me and tries to sink her teeth into my arm. But Ramona’s ready with a springloaded syringe and nails her right through the shoulder. ★★You’ll need to open the wards so we can get out.★★

★★I’m going to—★★ Oh, right. Ramona’s a guest. I lurch upright and lunge for the blotter in front of Anna’s seat, grab at her gavel, and rap it on the table. “As the last quorate member standing I hereby unanimously promote myself to Chair and declare this session closed.” Five heads, their eyes swimming with luminous green worms, turn to face me. “School’s out.” I race for the door, piling into Ramona as I yank the handle open. ★★Got her?★★

★★Yes. Grab her other arm and move!★★

Sophie is kicking and writhing wordlessly but Ramona and I drag her through the doorway and I yank it shut behind us. The latch clicks, and Sophie goes limp.

★★Hey.★★ I look sideways. ★★What’s—★★

Ramona lets go of her other arm and I stagger. ★★Well isn’t that a surprise,★★ she comments, looking down at Sophie, who sprawls on the hotel carpet in front of the door. ★★She’s dead, Jim.★★

★★Bob,★★ I correct automatically. ★★What do you mean, she’s dead?★★

★★Poison-pill programming, I think.★★

I lean against the wall, dizzy and nauseated. ★★We’ve got to go back! The others are still in there. Can we break it? The control link, I mean. If it’s just a transient override—★★

Ramona winces and stares at me. ★★Will you stop that? It’s not a transient and there’s nothing we can do for them.★★

★★But she’s dead! We’ve got to do something! And they’re—★★

★★They’re dead, too.★★ Ramona stares at me in obvious concern. ★★Did you hit your head or something? No, I’d have felt that. You’re squeamish, aren’t you?★★

★★We could have saved them! You knew what was going to happen! You could have warned us! If you hadn’t been so fucking curious to know what was buried in the presentation—shit, why didn’t you just snarf a copy and edit it yourself? This isn’t the first time it’s happened, is it?★★

She lets me rant for a minute or so, until I run down. ★★Bob, Bob. This is the first time this has happened. At least, the first time anyone’s gotten out of one of these presentations alive.★★

★★Jesus. Then why do you keep having them?★★ I realize I’m waving my arms around but I’m too upset to stop. I have a terrible feeling that if I’d just given in to my first impulse to yank the cord on the projector—★★It’s murder! Letting it go ahead like that—★★

★★We don’t. My—department—doesn’t. TLA is selling hard outside the US, Bob. They sell in places like Malaysia or Kazakhstan or Peru, and in places that aren’t quite on the map, if you follow me. We’ve heard rumors about this. We’ve seen some of the . . . fallout. But this is the first time we’ve gotten in on the ground floor. Sophie Frank was fingered by your people, if you must know. Your Andy Newstrom raised the flag. She’s been behaving oddly for the past couple of months. You were sent because, unlike Newstrom, you’re trained for this category of operation. But nobody else took the warnings sufficiently seriously—except for your department, and mine.★★

★★But what about the others?★★

She stares at me grimly. ★★Blame Ellis Billington, Bob. Remember, if he wasn’t into the hard sell, this wouldn’t have happened.★★

Then she turns and stalks away, leaving me alone and shaking in the corridor, with a corpse and a locked conference room full of middle-management zombies to explain.