A tech support nightmare is waiting for me down in the garage. Pinky is goose-stepping around with a clipboard, trying to look officious while Brains is elbow-deep in the trunk with a circuit tester and a roll of gaffer tape.

“What. The. Fuck?” I manage to say, then lean against a concrete pillar.

“We’ve been modifying this Smart car for you!” Pinky says excitedly. “You need to know how to use all its special features.”

I rub my eyes in disbelief. “Listen guys, I’ve been attacked by brain-eating zombies and I’m due on a flight to Saint Martin tonight. This isn’t the right time to show me your toys. I just want to get home—”

“Impossible,” Brains mutters around a mouthful of oily bolts that look suspiciously as if they’ve just come out of the engine manifold.

“Angleton told us not to let you go until you’d finished your briefing!” Pinky exclaims.

There’s no escape. “Okay.” I yawn. “You just put those bolts back and I’ll be going.”

“Look in the boot, here. What our American friends would call the trunk. Careful, mind that pipe! Good. Now pay attention, Bob. We’ve added a Bluetooth host under the driver’s seat, and a repurposed personal video player running Linux. Peripheral screens at all five cardinal points, five grams of graveyard dust mixed with oil of Bergamot and tongue of newt in the cigarette lighter socket, and a fully connected Dee-Hamilton circuit glued to the underside of the body shell. As long as the ignition is running, you’re safe from possession attempts. If you need to dispose of a zombie in the passenger seat, just punch in the lighter button and wait for the magic smoke. You’ve got a mobile phone, yes? With Bluetooth and a Java sandbox? Great, I’ll e-mail you an applet—run it, pair your phone with the car’s hub, and all you have to do is dial 6-6-6 and the car will come to you, wherever you are. There’s another applet to remotely trigger all the car’s countermeasures, just in case someone’s sneaked a surprise into it.”

I shake my head, but it won’t stop spinning. “Zombie smoke in the lighter socket, Dee-Hamilton circuit in the body shell, and the car comes when I summon it. Okay. Hey, what’s—”

He slaps my hand as I reach for the boxy lump fastened to the gearshift with duct tape. “Don’t touch that button, Bob!”

“Why? What happens if I touch that button, Pinky?”

“The car ejects!”

“Don’t you mean, the passenger seat ejects?” I ask sarcastically. I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense.

“No, Bob, you’ve been watching too many movies. The car ejects.” He reaches across the back of my seat and pats the fat pipe occupying the center of the luggage area.

I swallow. “Isn’t that a little . . . dangerous?”

“Where you’re going you’ll need all the help you can get.” He frowns at me. “The tube contains a rocket motor and a cable spool bolted to the chassis. The airbags in the wheel hubs blow when the accelerometer figures you’ve hit apogee, if you haven’t already used them in amphibious pursuit mode. Whatever you do don’t push that button while you’re in a tunnel or under cover.” I glance up at the concrete roof of the car park and shudder. “The airbags are securely fastened, if you land on water you can just drive away.” He notices my fixed, skeptical stare and pats the rocket tube. “It’s perfectly safe—they’ve been using these on helicopter gunships for nearly five years!”

“Jesus.” I close my eyes and lean back. “It’s still a fucking Smart car. Range Rovers carry them as lifeboats. Couldn’t you get me an Aston Martin or something?”

“What makes you think we’d give you an Aston Martin, even if we could afford one? Anyway, Angleton says to remind you that it’s on lease from one of our private sector partners. Don’t bend it, or you’ll answer to the Chrysler Corporation. You’ve already exceeded our consumables budget, totaling that Compaq in the meeting—there’s a new one waiting for you in the case in the boot, by the way. This is serious business: you’re representing the Laundry in front of the Black Chamber and some very big defense contractors, old school tie and all that.”

“I went to North Harrow Comprehensive,” I say wearily, “they didn’t trust us with neckties, not after the upper fifth tried to lynch Brian the Spod.”

“Oh. Well.” Pinky pulls out a thick envelope. “Your itinerary, once you arrive at Juliana Airport. There’s a decent tailor in the Marina shopping center and we’ve faxed your measurements through. Um. Do you dress to the left, or . . . ?”

I open my eyes and stare at him until he wilts. “Eight dead.” I hold up the requisite number of fingers. “In twenty-four hours. And I have to drive up the fucking autobahn in this pile of shit—”

“No, you don’t,” says Brains, finally straightening up and wiping his hands on a rag. “We’ve got to crate up the Smart if we’re going to freight it to Maho Beach tomorrow—you’re riding with us.” He gestures at a shiny black Mercedes van parked opposite. “Feel better?”

Wow—I’m not going to be strafed with BMWs again. Miracles do sometimes happen, even in Laundry service. I nod. “Let’s get going.”

One and a half hours and a VIP transfer later, I’m in business class aboard an Air France A300 bound for Princess Juliana International Airport. The compartment is half-empty. “Please fasten your seatbelts and pay attention to the preflight briefing.” I close my eyes while they close the doors behind me. Then someone shakes my shoulder: it’s a flight attendant. “Mr. Howard? I have a message to tell you that there’s WiFi access on this flight. You are to call your office as soon as we are airborne at cruising altitude and the seatbelt light goes off.”

I nod, speechless. WiFi? On a thirty-year-old tourist truck like this? “Bon voyage!” She stands up and marches to the back of the cabin. “Call if you need anything.”

I doze through the usual preflight, waking briefly as the engine note rises to a thunderous roar and we pile down the runway. I feel unnaturally tired, as if drained of life, and I’ve got a strange sense that somebody else is sleeping in the empty seat beside me, close enough to rest their head on my shoulder—but the next seat over is empty. Overspill from Ramona? Then my eyes close again.

It must be the cabin pressure, the stress of the last couple of days, or drugs in the after-takeoff champagne, because I find myself having the strangest dream. I’m back in the conference suite in Darmstadt, and the blinds are down, but instead of a roomful of zombies I’m sitting across the table from Angleton. He looks half-mummified at the best of times, until you see his eyes: they’re diamond-blue and as sharp as a dentist’s drill. Right now they’re the only part of him I can see at all, because he’s engulfed in the shadows cast by an old-fashioned slide projector lighting up the wall behind him. The overall effect is very sinister. I look over my shoulder, wondering where Ramona’s gotten to, but she’s not there.

“Pay attention, Bob. Since you had the bad grace to take so long during my previous briefing that it self-erased before you completed it, I’ve sent you another.” I open my mouth to tell him he’s full of shit, but the words won’t emerge. An Auditor ward, I think, choking on my tongue and beginning to panic, but right then my larynx relaxes and I’m able to close my jaw. Angleton smiles sepulchrally. “There’s a good fellow.”

I try to say Blow me, but it comes out as “Brief me” instead. It seems I’m allowed to speak, so long as I stay on topic.

“Certainly. I have explained the history of the Glomar Explorer , and Operations JENNIFER and AZORIAN. What I did not explain—this goes no further than your dreams, and the inside of your own eyeballs, especially when Ramona is awake—was that JENNIFER and AZORIAN were cover stories. Dry runs, practical experiments, if you like. To retrieve artifacts from the oceanic floor, in the zones ceded by humanity to BLUE HADES—the Deep Ones—in perpetuity under the terms of the Benthic Treaties and the Agreement of the Azores.”

Angleton pauses to take a drink from a glass of ice water beside his blotter. Then he flicks the slide advance button on the projector. Click-clack.

“This is a map of the world we live in,” Angleton explains. “And these pink zones are those that humans are allowed to roam in. Our reservation, if you like. The arid air-swept continents and the painfully bright low-pressure top waters of the oceans. About thirty-four percent of the Earth’s surface area. The rest, the territory of the Deep Ones, we are permitted to sail above, but that is all. Attempts to settle the deep ocean would be resisted in such a manner that our species would not survive long enough to regret them.”

I lick my lips. “How? I mean, do they have nuclear weapons or something?”

“Worse than that.” He doesn’t smile. “This—” click-clack “—is Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma. It is one of seventy-three volcanoes or mountains located in deep water—most of the others are submerged guyots rather than climbable peaks—that BLUE HADES have prepared. Three-quarters of humanity live within two hundred miles of a sea coast. If they ever lose their patience with us, the Deep Ones can trigger undersea landslides. Cumbre Vieja alone is poised to deposit five hundred billion tons of rock on the floor of the North Atlantic, generating a tsunami that will be twenty meters high by the time it makes landfall in New York. Make that more like fifty meters by the time it hits Southampton. If we provoke them they can wreak more destruction than an all-out nuclear war. And they have occupied this planet since long before our hominid ancestors discovered fire.”

“But we’ve got a deterrent, surely . . . ?”

“No.” Angleton’s expression is implacable. “Water absorbs the energy of a nuclear explosion far more effectively than air. You get a powerful pressure wave, but no significant heat or radiation damage: the shock wave is great for crushing submarines, but much less effective against undersea organisms at ambient pressure. We could hurt them, but nothing like as badly as they could hurt us. And as for the rest of it—” he gestures at the screen “—they could have wiped us out before we discovered them, if they were so inclined. They have access to technologies and tools we can barely begin to imagine. They are the Deep Ones, BLUE HADES, a branch of an ancient and powerful alien civilization. Some of us suspect the threat of the super-tsunami is a distraction. It’s like an infantryman pointing his bayonet-tipped assault rifle at a headhunter, who sees only a blade on a stick. Don’t even think about threatening them; we exist because they bear us no innate ill will, but we have at least the power to change that much if we act rashly.”

“Then what the hell was JENNIFER about?”

Click-clack. “A misplaced attempt to end the Cold War prematurely, by acquiring a weapon truly hellish in its potential. The precise nature of which you have no need to know right now, in case you were thinking of asking.”

I’m looking down on a gloomy gray scene. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s a deep-ocean mudscape. Scattered across the layered silt are small irregular objects, some of them round, some of them long. A couple more seconds and my brain acknowledges that what my eyes are seeing is a watery field of skulls and femurs and ribs. I’ve got an idea that not all of them are entirely human.

“The Caribbean sea hides many secrets. This field of silt covers a deep layer rich in methane hydrates. When some force destabilizes the deposits they bubble up from the depths—like the carbon dioxide discharge from the stagnant waters of Lake Nyos in the Cameroon. But unlike Lake Nyos, the gas isn’t confined by terrain so it dissipates after it surfaces. It’s not an asphyxiation threat, but if you’re on a ship that’s caught above a hydrate release, then the sea under your keel turns to gas and you’re going straight down to Davy Jones’s locker.” Angleton clears his throat. “BLUE HADES have some way of replenishing these deposits and triggering releases. They use them to keep us interfering hominids away from things that don’t concern us, such as the settlement at Witch’s Hole in the North Sea . . . and the depths of the Bermuda Triangle.”

I swallow. “What’s down there?”

“Some of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth. And some of the largest BLUE HADES installations we’re aware of.” Angleton looks as if he’s bitten into a lemon expecting an orange. “That isn’t saying much—most of their sites are known to us only from neutrino mapping and seismology. The portion of the biosphere we understand is limited to the surface waters and continental landmasses, boy. Below a thousand fathoms of water, let alone below the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, it’s a whole different ball game.”

“The Moho-what?”

“The underside of the continental plates we live on—below the discontinuity lies the upper mantle. Didn’t you study geography at school?”

“Uh . . .” I spent most of my school geography lessons snoozing, doodling imaginary continents in the backs of exercise books, or trying to work up the courage to pass a message to Lizzie Graham in the next row. Now it looks like those missed lessons are about to come back and bite me. “Moving swiftly on, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Ellis Billington has purchased a CIA spy ship designed for probing BLUE HADES territory. He’s got a high enough security clearance to be aware what it’s capable of, and his people are trying to suborn various intelligence organizations, like in Darmstadt. He’s playing some kind of endgame and you don’t like the smell and neither does the Black Chamber, which explains me and Ramona. Am I right so far?”

Angleton nods minutely. “I should remind you that Billington is extraordinarily rich and has fingers in a surprising number of pies. For example, by way of his current wife—his third—he owns a cosmetics and haute couture empire; in addition to IT corporations he owns shipping, aviation, and banking interests. Your assignment—and Ramona’s—is to get close to Billington. Ideally you should contrive to get yourself invited aboard his yacht, the Mabuse, while Ramona remains in touch with your backup team and the local head of station. Your technical backups are Pinky and Brains, your muscle backup is Boris, and you’re to liaise with our Caribbean station chief, Jack Griffin. Officially, he’s your superior officer and you’ll be under his orders when it comes to nonoperational matters, but you’re to report directly to me, not to him. Unofficially, Griffin is out to pasture—take anything he says with a pinch of salt. Your job is to get close to Billington, remain in touch with us, and be ready to act if and when we decide to take him down.”

I manage not to groan. “Why does it have to be me aboard the yacht—why not Ramona? I think she’d be a whole lot better at the field ops thing. Or the station chief guy? Come to think of it, why aren’t the AIVD doing this? It’s their territory—”

“They invited us in; all I can say for now is, we have specialist expertise in this area that they lack. And it has to be you, not Ramona. Firstly, you’re an autonome, a native of this continuum: they can’t trap you in a Dho-Nha curve or bind you to a summoning grid. And secondly, it’s got to be you because those are the rules of Billington’s game.” Angleton’s expression is frightening. “He’s a player, Bob. He knows exactly what he’s doing and how to work around our strengths. He stays away from continental landmasses, uses games of chance to determine his actions, sleeps inside a Faraday cage aboard a ship with a silver-plated keel. He’s playing us to a script. I’m not at liberty to tell you what it is, but it has to be you, not Ramona, not anyone else.”

“Do we have any idea what he’s planning? You said something about weapons—”

Angleton fixes me with a steely gaze. “Pay attention, Bob. The presentation is about to commence.” And this time I can’t stifle the groan, because it’s another of his bloody slideshows, and if you thought PowerPoint was pants, you haven’t suffered through an hour of Angleton monologuing over a hot slide projector.

“The one on the left is me: you don’t need to know who the other two are. This photograph was taken in 1974 while I was assigned to Operation AZORIAN as our liaison—officially from MI6 as an observer, but you know the drill. The building I’m standing in front of is . . .”

SLIDE 2: A photograph taken looking aft along the deck of a huge seagoing vessel. To the left, there’s a gigantic structure like an oil drilling rig, with racks of pipes stacked in front of it. Directly ahead, at the stern, is the structure glimpsed in the previous slide—a mobile office, jacked up off the deck, its roofline bristling with antennae. Behind it, a satellite dish looms before the superstructure of the ship.

“We’re aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer on its unsuccessful voyage to raise the sunken Soviet Golf-II-class ballistic missile submarine K-129. Announced as Operation JENNIFER, this was leaked to the press by someone acting on unofficial orders from the director of ONI—the usual goddamn turf war—and Watergated to hell by mid-1975. I said Operation JENNIFER was unsuccessful. Officially, the CIA only retrieved the front ten meters or so of the sub because the rear section broke off. In reality . . .”

SLIDE 3: Grainy black-and-white photographs, evidently taken from TV screens: a long cylindrical structure grasped in the claws of an enormous grab. From below, thin streamers rise up towards it.

“BLUE HADES took exception to the intrusion into their territory and chose to exercise their salvage rights under Article Five, Clause Four of the Benthic Treaty. Hence the tentacles. Now . . .”

SLIDE 1 (Repeat): This time the man in the middle is circled with a red highlighter.

“This fellow in the middle is Ellis Billington, as he looked thirty years ago. Ellis was brilliant but not well socialized back then. He was attached to the ‘B’ team as an observer, tasked with examining the circuitry of the cipher machine they hoped to recover from the sub’s control room. I didn’t pay much attention to him at the time, which was a mistake. He already had his security clearance, and after the JENNIFER debacle he moved to San Jose and set up a small electronics and software business.”

SLIDE 4: A crude-looking circuit board. Rather than fiberglass, it appears to be made of plywood that has been exposed to seawater for too long, and has consequently warped. Sockets for vacuum tubes stud its surface, one of them occupied by the broken base of a component; numerous diodes and resistors connect it to an odd, stellate design in gold that covers most of the surface of the board.

“This board was taken from a GRU-issued Model 60 oneiromantic convolution engine found aboard the K-129. As you can see, it spent rather longer in the water than was good for it. Ellis reverse-engineered the basic schematic and pieced together the false vacuum topology that the valves disintermediated. Incidentally, these aren’t your normal vacuum tubes—isotope imbalances in the thorium-doped glass sleeves suggest that they were evacuated by exposure in a primitive wake-shield facility, possibly aboard a model-three Sputnik satellite similar to the one first orbited in 1960. That would have given them a starting pressure about six orders of magnitude cleaner than anything available on Earth at the time, at a price per tube of about two million rubles, which suggests that someone in the GRU’s scientific directorate really wanted a good signal, if that wasn’t already obvious. We now know that they’d clearly cracked the Dee-Turing Thesis by this point and were well into modified Enochian metagrammar analysis. Anyway, young Billington concluded that the Mod-60 OCE, NATO code ‘Gravedust,’ was intended to allow communication with the dead. Recently dead, anyway.”

SLIDE 5: An open coffin containing a long-dead body. The corpse is partially mummified, the eyelids sunken into the empty sockets and the jaw agape with lips retracted.

“We’re not sure exactly what a Gravedust system was doing aboard the K-129. According to one theory that was remarkably popular with our friends at ONI around the time, it had something to do with the former Soviet Union’s postmortem second strike command-and-control system, to allow the submarine’s political officer to ask for instructions from the Politburo after a successful decapitation stroke. They were very keen on maintaining the correct chain of command back then. There’s just one problem with that theory: it’s rubbish. According to our own analysis after the event—I should add, the Black Chamber was remarkably reluctant to part with the Gravedust schemata, we finally got it out of them by remote viewing—Billington underestimated the backreach of the Gravedust interrogator by a factor of at least a thousand. We were told that it would only allow callbacks to the recently dead, within the past million seconds. In actual fact, you could call up Tutankhamen himself on this rig. Our best guess is that the Soviets were planning on talking to something that had been dead for a very long time indeed, somewhere under the ocean.”

SLIDE 6: A Russian submarine, moored alongside a pier. In the distance, snow-capped mountains loom above the far shore of a waterway.

“The K-129 was rather an elderly boat at the time she sank. In fact, a few years later the Soviets retired the last of the Golf-II class—except for one of the K-129’s sister ships, which was retained for covert operations duty. As a ballistic missile boat it had a large hold that could be repurposed for other payloads, and as a diesel-electric it could run quietly in littoral waters. Diesel-electrics are still popular for that reason: when running on battery juice they’re even quieter than a nuke boat, which has to keep the reactor coolant pumps running at all times. Without the rear section—including the missile room—we could only theorize that K-129 had already been converted to infiltration duty. However . . .”

SLIDE 7: A blurry gray landscape photographed from above. A structure, clearly artificial, occupies the middle of the image: a cylindrical artifact not unlike a submarine, but missing a conning tower and equipped with a strange, roughly surfaced conical end-cap. Its hull is clearly damaged, not crumpled but burst open as if from some great internal pressure. Nevertheless, it is still recognizable as an artificial structure.

“We believe this was the real target of K-129’s abortive operation. It’s located on the floor of the Pacific, approximately six hundred nautical miles southwest of Hawaii and, by no coincidence at all, on the K-129’s course prior to the unfortunate onboard explosion that resulted in the submarine’s loss with all hands.”

SLIDE 8: Not a photograph but a false-color synthetic relief image of the floor of the Pacific basin, southwest of Hawaii. The image is contoured to represent depth, and colored to convey some other attribute. Virulent red spots dot the depths—except for a single, much shallower one.

“Graviweak neutrino imaging spectroscopes carried aboard the SPAN-2 Earth resources satellite are a good way of pin-pointing BLUE HADES colonies. For obvious reasons, BLUE HADES do not make extensive use of electricity for their domestic and presumed industrial processes; Monsieur Volt and Herr Ampère are not your friends when you live under five kilometers of saltwater. Instead, BLUE HADES appear to control inaccessible condensed matter states by varying the fine-structure constant and tunneling photinos—super-symmetrical photon analogs that possess mass—between nodes where they want to do things. One side effect of this is neutrino emissions at a very characteristic spectrum, unlike anything we get from the sun or from our own nuclear reactors. This is a density scan for the zone around the K-129 and Hawaii. As you can see, that isolated shallow point—near where the K-129 went down—is rather strong. There’s an active power source in there, and it’s not connected to the rest of the BLUE HADES grid as far as we can tell. The site is classified JENNIFER MORGUE, incidentally, and is known as Site One.”

SLIDE 9: A rock face, evidently inside a mine, is illuminated by spotlights. Workers in overalls and hard hats surround it, and are evidently working on something—possibly a fossil—with small hand-tools.

“As you can see, this is not a BLUE HADES specimen. It’s some other palaeosophont. This photograph was taken in 1985 in the deep mine at Longannet in Fife, right on our doorstep. Longannet—and indeed the rest of the British deep-mining industry—was shut down some time ago, officially for economic reasons. However, you would be right to conclude that the presence of nightmares like this was a contributing factor. This is in fact a DEEP SEVEN cadaver, and appears to have undergone some sort of postmortem vitrification process, or perhaps a hibernation from which it failed to emerge, approximately seven million years ago. We believe that DEEP SEVEN were responsible for the JENNIFER MORGUE machines and the neutrino anomaly in the previous slide. We know very little about DEEP SEVEN except that they appear to be polymorphous, occupy areas of the upper crust near the polar regions, and BLUE HADES are terrified of them.”

SLIDE 10: A close-up of the cylindrical structure from Slide 7. Intricate traceries of inlaid calligraphy—or perhaps circuit diagrams—cover the walls of the machine, disturbing in their non-linearity. At one edge of the picture the conical top is visible, and in close-up the details become apparent: a conical spike with a cutting edge spiraling around it.

“This is our closest photograph of JENNIFER MORGUE Site One. It presents a clear hazard to this day: K-129 was lost inspecting it, as were several ROVs sent by the US Office of Naval Intelligence. It was the secondary target for Operation AZORIAN/JENNIFER before that project was Watergated. It’s a rather recalcitrant target because there seems to be some sort of defense field around it, possibly acoustic—anything entering within a two-hundred-and-six-meter radius stops working. (If you look near the top right of this photograph you’ll see the wreckage of a previous visitor.) Our current theory is that it is either a DEEP SEVEN artifact or a BLUE HADES system designed to prevent incursions by DEEP SEVEN. We presume the Soviets were trying to make contact with DEEP SEVEN by way of the Gravedust system on the K-129—and failed, catastrophically.”

SLIDE 11: A similar-looking photograph of another machine, this time looking less badly damaged. The photograph is taken from much closer range, and though one curved side has a jagged hole in it, the hull is otherwise intact.

“This is a similar artifact, located near the north end of the Puerto Rico Trench, about four kilometers down on a limestone plateau. JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two appears to be damaged, but the same exclusion field is still in place and operational. Initial exploratory investigation with an ROV discovered . . .”

SLIDE 12: A very dim, grainy view through the jagged hole in the side of the artifact. There appears to be a rectangular structure within. Odd curved objects surround it, some of which recall the shape of internal organs.

“This structure appears to contain—or even consist of—vitrified or otherwise preserved DEEP SEVEN remnants. You’ll note the similarity of this structure to some sort of cockpit: we believe it to be a deep-crustal or high-mantle boring machine, possibly making it the DEEP SEVEN equivalent of a tank or a space suit. We’re not sure quite what it’s doing here, but we are now extremely intrigued by Ellis Billington’s interest in it. He’s purchased the Explorer, heavily modified it, and, using it as a host, has been conducting sea trials with a remotely operated vehicle. Our intel on Billington’s activities is alarmingly deficient, but we believe he intends to raise and possibly activate the DEEP SEVEN artifact. His expertise in Gravedust systems suggests that he may try to retrieve information from the dead DEEP SEVEN aboard it, and the direction of his operation suggests that he has some idea of what it’s doing there.

“I do not intend, at this point, to get into a lengthy discussion of the consequences of annoying the Chthonians—excuse me, DEEP SEVEN—or of getting involved in a geopolitical pissing match between DEEP SEVEN and BLUE HADES. Suffice to say, preserving the collective neutrality of the human species is a high priority for this department, and you should take that as your primary point of reference in the days ahead.

“But in summary, your mission is to get close to Billington and find out what the hell he’s planning on doing with JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two. Then tell us, so we can work out what action we need to take to stop him pissing off BLUE HADES or DEEP SEVEN. If he wakes the ancient sleeping horrors I am going to have to brief the private secretary and the Joint Intelligence Oversight Committee so that they can explain CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to the COBRA Committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, and I expect that will make them extremely unhappy. Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things.”

Voice mail? Hell, yes—in this Brave New World there’s no escape from the internet, even at 40,000 feet. I yawn again and plug in my headset, trying to shake off the influence of Ramona’s distantly sensed repose. I glance at the screen. It’s Mo, and she’s on Skype, too, so I place a call.

“Bob?” Her voice crackles a little—the signal is being bounced via satellite to the plane and the latency is scary.

“Mo, I’m on a plane. Are you in the Village?”

“I’m in the Village, Bob—checking out tomorrow. Listen, you asked me a question yesterday. I’ve been doing some poking around and this destiny-entanglement stuff is really ugly. Have they already done it to you? If not, run like hell. You’ll start to share dreams, there’s telepathy going with it, but worse, there’s reality leakage, too. You end up taking up aspects of your entanglement partner, and vice versa. If they’re killed you’re likely to drop dead on the spot; if it lasts more than a couple of weeks it goes beyond sharing thoughts, you could end up merging with them permanently. The good news is, the entanglement can be broken by a fairly simple ritual. The bad news is, it takes both parties cooperating to do it. Do you have any way out of it?”

“Too late. They ran it yesterday—”

“Shit. Love, how long is it going to take you to realize that if they ask you to do them a special favor you need to run like—”

“Mo.”

“Bob?”

“I know—” My throat closes up and I stop talking for a moment. “I love you.”

“Yes.” Her voice is faint at the end of the internet connection. “I love you, too—”

This is too painful to hear. “She’s asleep.”

“She?”

“The demon.” I glance round, but there’s nobody in the row in front of me and I’m directly in front of the partition between business and cattle class. “Ramona. Black Chamber operative. I don’t—” This is too unpleasant: I start trying to figure out another way of approaching the subject.

“Has she hurt you?” Mo’s tone is chilly enough to freeze my ear.

“No.” Not yet. “I don’t want you to go near her, Mo. It’s not her fault. She’s as much a victim of this as—”

“Bullshit, love. I want you to tell her, from me, that if she even thinks about messing with you I’ll break every bone in her body—”

“Mo! Stop it!” I lower my tone of voice. “Don’t even think about it. You don’t want to get involved in this. Just don’t. Wait ’til it’s all over and we’ll go on holiday together and get away from it all.”

A pause. I tense up inside, desperately hoping for the best. Finally: “It’s your judgment call and I can’t stop you. But I’m warning you, don’t let them fuck with you. You know how they use people, what they did to me, right? Don’t let them do it to you, too.” A sigh. “So why did they send you?”

I swallow. “Angleton says he needs me to get inside an operation and I think he wants an unblockable communications channel back to the field controller. Did you ask him what it’s about—”

“Not yet I haven’t. Hang in there, love. I’m finishing up here and I’ve got to go back to London tomorrow: I’ll drag everything out of Angleton before sunset. Where is he sending you? Who’s your backup?”

“I’m on my way to the Princess Juliana Airport on Saint Martin, staying in the Sky Tower at Maho Bay. He’s sent Boris, Pinky, and Brains to look after—” I suddenly realize where this is leading. Quick on the uptake I ain’t. “Listen, don’t bother trying to—”

“I’ll be on the next flight out, I just have to touch base long enough to mug Harry the Holiday Piggy Bank. It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I’m trusting your skin to their—”

“Don’t!” I can see it already, horrible visions welling up out of the twisted depths of my subconscious. Does Mo realize what my being entangled with Ramona means? I hate to think what she’ll do if she figures it out and Ramona’s on the same continent. Mo is a very tactical person. Tactile, too—passionate, fiery, and capable of thinking outside the box—but if you show her an obstacle, she has a disturbing tendency to punch right through it. That’s how she ended up in the Laundry, after all: making an end run round the Black Chamber, straight into our organization’s lap. I love her dearly, but the thought of her turning up at my hotel room and me trying not to touch her while I’m in this embarrassing bind with Ramona scares the shit out of me. It’s not exactly your normal sordid extramarital affair, is it? It’s not as if I’m actually sleeping with Ramona and it’s not as if I’m married to Mo, either. But it’s got all the same potential to explode in my face—and that’s before you factor in the little extra details like Ramona being the corporeal manifestation of a demonic entity from beyond space-time and Mo being a powerful sorceress.

“You’re breaking up. Hang in there! See you the day after tomorrow!” She buzzes, then the connection drops.

I stare at the screen for a moment. Then I dry-swallow and press the SERVICE button for the flight attendant. “I need a drink,” I say, “vodka and orange on the rocks.” Then some instinct makes me add: “Shaken.” Just like me.

I wake up half an hour before landing with a throbbing forehead and a tongue that tastes like a mouse died on it. The huge gleaming expanse of Maho Beach is walled with hotels: the sea is improbably blue, like an accident in a chemistry lab. The heat beats down on me like a giant oven as I stagger down the steps onto the concrete next to the terminal building. Half the passengers are crumblies; the rest are surf Nazis and dive geeks, like extras auditioning for an episode of Baywatch. A strike force of hangover faeries is diving and weaving around me on pocket jet packs when they’re not practicing polo on my scalp with rubber mallets. It’s two in the afternoon here, about six o’clock in Darmstadt, and I’ve been in transit for nearly twelve hours: the business suit I’m wearing from the meeting in the Ramada feels oddly stiff, as if it’s hardening into an exoskeleton. I feel, not to put too fine a point on it, like shit; so when I come out of baggage claim I’m deeply relieved to see a crusty old buffer holding up a piece of cardboard upon which is scrawled: HOWARD—CAPITAL LAUNDRY SERVICES.

I head over towards him. “Hi. I’m Bob. You are . . . ?”

He looks me up and down like I’m something he’s just peeled off the underside of his shoe. I do a double take. He’s about fifty, very British in a late-imperial, gin-pickled kind of way—in his lightweight tropical suit, regimental tie, and waxwork mustache he looks like he’s just stepped out of a Merchant-Ivory movie. “Mr. Howard. Your warrant card, please.”

“Oh.” I fumble with my pocket for a while until I find the thing, then wave it vaguely in his direction. His cheek twitches.

“That’ll do. I’m Griffin. Follow me.” He turns and strides towards the exit. “You’re late.”

I’m late? But I only just got here! I hurry after him, trying not to lurch into any walls. “Where are we going?” I ask.

“To the hotel.” I follow him outside and he waves an arm peremptorily. An old but well-kept Jaguar XJ6 pulls up and the driver jumps out to open the door. “Get in.” I almost fall into the seat, but manage to cushion my briefcase just in time to save the laptop. Griffin shoves the door shut on me then gets into the front passenger seat and raps the dashboard: “To the Sky Tower! Chop-chop.”

I can’t help it: my eyes slide closed. It’s been a long day and my snatch of sleep aboard the airbus wasn’t exactly refreshing. My head’s spinning as the Jag pulls out onto a freshly resurfaced road. It’s oppressively hot, even with the air conditioning running flat-out, and I just can’t seem to stay awake. Seemingly seconds later we pull up in front of a large concrete box and someone opens the door for me. “Come on, get out, get out!” I blink, and force myself to stand up.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“The Sky Tower Hotel; I’ve booked you in and swept the room. Your team will be working out of a rented villa when they arrive—that’s in hand, too. Come on.” Griffin leads me past reception, past a stand staffed by Barbies giving away free cosmetic samples, into an elevator, and down another anonymous hotel-space passage decorated randomly with cane furniture. We end up in some corporate decorator’s vision of a tropical hotel room, all anonymous five-star furniture plus a French door opening onto a balcony exploding with potted greenery. A ceiling fan spins lazily, failing to make any impression on the heat. “Sit down. No, not there, here.” I sit, suppress a yawn, and try to force myself to look at him. Either he’s frowning or he’s worried. “When are they due, by the way?” he asks.

“Aren’t they here yet?” I ask. “Say, shouldn’t you show me your warrant card?”

“Bah.” His mustache twitches, but he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a thing that anyone who isn’t expecting a warrant card will see as a driving license or a passport. There’s a faint smell of sulfur in the air. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

He peers at me sharply, then apparently makes his mind up. “They’re late,” he mutters. “Bloody cock-up.” Louder: “Gin and tonic, or whisky soda?”

My head’s still throbbing. “Have you got a glass of water?” I ask hopefully.

“Bah,” he says again, then walks over to the minibar and opens it. He pulls out two bottles and two glasses. Into one of them he pours a double-finger of clear spirits; the other he puts down next to the tonic water. “Help yourself,” he says grudgingly.

This isn’t what I’m expecting from a station chief. To tell the truth, I’m not sure what I should be expecting: but antique Jaguars, regimental ties, and gin-tippling in mid-afternoon isn’t it. “Have you been told why I’m here?” I ask tentatively.

He roars so loudly I nearly jump out of my skin. “Of course I have, boy! What do you think I am, another of your goddamn paper-pushing Whitehall pen-pimps?” He glares at me ferociously. “God help you, and God help both of us because nobody back home is going to. Bloody hell, what a mess.”

“Mess?” I try to sound as if I know what he’s talking about, but there’s a quivery edge to my voice and I’m feeling fuzzy about the edges from jet lag.

“Look at you.” He looks me up and down with evident contempt—or mild disdain, which is worse—in his voice. “You’re a mess. You’re wearing trainers and a two-guinea suit, for God’s sake; you look like a hippie on a job interview, you don’t know where your fucking backup team has gotten to, and you’re supposed to get into Billington’s hip pocket!” He sounds like Angleton’s cynical kid brother. I know I mustn’t let him get to me, but this is just too much.

“Before you go on, you ought to know that I’ve been up for about thirty hours. I woke up in Germany and I’ve already crossed six time zones and had a roomful of flesh-eating zombies try to chow down on my brain.” I gulp the glass of water. “I’m not in the mood for this shit.”

“You’re not in the mood?” He laughs like a fox barking. “Then you can just go to bed without your dinner, boy. You’re not in London anymore and I’m not going to put up with temper tantrums from undisciplined wet-behind-the-ears amateurs.” He puts his glass down. “Listen, let’s get one thing absolutely clear: this is my turf. You do not fly in, shit all over the place, squawk loudly, and fly out again, leaving me to pick up the wreckage. While you’re here, you do exactly as I say. This isn’t a committee exercise, this is the Dutch Antilles and I’m not going to let you fuck up my station.”

“Eh?” I shake my head. “Who said anything about . . . ?”

“You didn’t have to,” he says with heavy and sarcastic emphasis. “You turn up six hours behind a FLASH notice from some dog-fucker in Islington who says you’re to have the run of the site facilities and I’m to render all necessary et cetera. If you get the opposition stirred up you’ll be dead in a gutter within six hours and I’ll get landed with the paperwork. This isn’t Camden Market and I’m not the bloody hotel concierge. I’m the Laundry point man for the Caribbean, and if you put a step wrong on my patch you can bring all the hounds of Hell down on our collective neck, boy, so you’re not going to do that. While you’re working on my station, if you want to fart you ask me for permission first. Otherwise I’ll rip you a new sphincter. For your own good. Got that?”

“I guess.” I do a double take. “What’s the opposition presence like, hereabouts?” I ask. Actually I want to say, What is this “opposition” you speak of, strange person?—but I figure it’ll just make him shout at me again.

Griffin stares at me in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me they haven’t briefed you about the opposition?”

I shake my head.

“What a mess. This is the Caribbean: Who do you think the opposition are? Tourists! Wander around, drop in on the casinos and clubs, and what do you see? You see tourists. Half of ’em are Yanks, and maybe half of those are plants. Okay, not half, maybe one in a hundred thousand. But you see, we’re about two hundred miles from Cuba here, which means they’re always trying to sneak assets into the generalissimo’s territory. And you wouldn’t want to mess with the smugglers, either. We’ve got money laundering, we’ve got the main drug pipeline into Miami via Cuba, and we’ve got police headaches coming out of our ears before we add the fucking opposition trying to use us as a staging post for their crazy-ass vodoun pranks.” He shakes his head then stares at me. “So you’ve got to keep one eye peeled for the tourists. If the oppo send an assassin to polish your button they’ll be disguised as a tourist, you mark my words. Are you sure they didn’t brief you?”

“Um.” I do my best to consider my next words carefully, but it’s difficult when your head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool: “You are talking about the Black Chamber when you use the term ‘opposition,’ aren’t you? I mean, you’re not really trying to tell me that the tourists are all part of some conspiracy—”

“Who the hell else would I be talking about?” He stares at me in disbelief, chugs the rest of his glass back, and thumps it down on the side table.

“Okay, then I’ve been briefed,” I say tiredly. “Listen, I really need to get settled in and catch up on my briefing papers. I don’t think they’re going to assassinate me, my boss has arranged an, uh, accommodation.” I manage to stand up without falling on the ceiling, but my feet aren’t responding too well to commands from mission control. “Can we continue this tomorrow?”

“Bloody hell.” He looks down his nose at me, his expression unreadable. “An accommodation. All right, we’ll continue this tomorrow. You’d better be right, kid, because if you guessed wrong they’ll eat your liver and lights while you’re still screaming.” He pauses in the doorway. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”